(2013) Collateral Damage (5 page)
Later, it was construed by the press that Gold, undeterred by
the three shots which had already penetrated his taxi, was off in hot pursuit of
the gunman. In fact, the very opposite was true. The turn was a desperate piece
of evasion by a man in a car who knew he was being shot at, but because his forward
vision was limited to a six-inch hole in his windscreen, had no idea where the shots
were coming from. By this time Koller had already rounded the corner into Sloane
Street and was weaving through the two hundred yards of late shoppers and liberated
office workers separating him from Sloane Square underground station.
He had slipped the heavy pistol back into the shoulderholster,
and fastened the top button of his jacket. Most people were looking towards the
sound of the explosion they had just heard. The observant were beginning to point
out the rising smoke that originated from somewhere behind the Peter Jones department
store. Nobody paid any attention to a youngishlooking man running in the opposite
direction, except an elderly flower-seller at the underground, who noticed that
his face was smudged. It reminded her of something; later she remembered it was
the way the firemen looked during the blitz.
Koller had decided from the start that the tube was to be his
getaway. He already had a ticket for Victoria station, one stop along the line from
Sloane Square. He waited a little under two minutes for a train, elbowing his way
well into the crowd, his left hand pulling his lapel over his gun. A middle-aged
woman, shopping-bags in both hands, objected to his shoving and tutted. 'Some people,'
she said.
He turned his back to her.
A man in a dark blue uniform came rushing on to the platform
and the terrorist watched, knowing that he had only three shots left and no escape;
perhaps he could take a hostage and force his way to the exit. The woman with the
shopping-bags might do. But as the man got closer he saw that his hair was lank
and long and that he was holding the flat cap of a private security company in his
right hand. When his train pulled out it was still a little under five minutes since
the bomb had gone off and the first police sirens were sounding in the streets above.
In Cadogan Gardens any further part Alfred Gold might have taken
in the proceedings came to an abrupt end when, coming out of his full turn, he collided
and dented the driving-side wing of a maroon Citroen crawling by the burning Jaguar.
At almost the same time Gold's radio link came to life. He picked up the mike, gave
his call sign and asked his control to tell the emergency services to come to Cadogan
Gardens where a man had been shooting at him, a car was burning, and somebody appeared
to be badly injured. When he had said it once he had to say it again because taxi
dispatchers are amused to receiving this type of message. This time he mentioned
the injured person first. He could now see through his left window that it was a
young woman. While he was saying all this the driver of the Citroen, a sixty-ish,
florid-faced man wearing an RAF tie, came to the driver's window. 'Do you mind telling
me what you think you're doing?' he snapped. Gold ignored him and repeated his message.
Slowly, the red-faced man began to comprehend that something very untoward indeed
had happened in which the traditional role of the outraged injured party would not
be at all appropriate.
When the cabbie had finished speaking they went together to examine
Emma, who was lying very white and still on the pavement. Her hair and clothing
were slightly singed. The plastic and foam components in the bombed car, particularly
the seat stuffing, continued to give off choking black smoke.
'We'd better get her out of here in case the tank hasn't gone,'
said the red-faced man. He was scared, but determined not to let the side down.
He wasn't to know the tank had already exploded.
Nor was Gold.
They picked her up, the red-faced man at her shoulders and Gold
holding her legs. They half-ran with her like that, the older man in his sheepskin
coat and brogues, trotting backwards, looking over his right shoulder and breathing
hard. The girl was very heavy. It reminded him of a rear gunner he had helped carry
out of a crashed Lancaster once a long time ago.
Deadweight.
When they had covered what they judged to be a safe distance
they put her down on the pavement as gently as two out-ofbreath men could. As they
did so her hair fell away from her face to reveal eyes blue and lifeless and a gaping
wound in her right temple. Blood trickled downwards over her cheekbone to her jaw.
They looked back and saw that their route from the burning car was blazed in little
drops of blood.
It was at that moment that Toby arrived on the scene. He was
an imaginative man. When he heard the explosion he didn't think there goes another
faulty gas main. He thought it was a bomb. When afterwards he heard the faint crackle
of gunfire he didn't think they were car backfires or that the residents of Belgravia
were rehearsing for the Chinese New Year. He thought they were shots. He turned
up gasping for breath in jeans, sweater and tennis shoes without socks, having sprinted
round the corner from Cadogan Square.
'Oh, Christ,' he said.
'Is she bad?'
'I think she's dead,' said the red-faced man bluntly, feeling
for her pulse. He was a doctor.
'Do you know her?' asked Gold. He sensed that this was something
more than just morbid curiosity.
'She's a very close friend of mine,' said Toby, leaving no doubt
as to his exact meaning. 'She's just left my place. I live round the corner. What
happened?'
In a couple of sentences Gold gave him his version of events.
The doctor vaguely took in the gold wedding-band on Emma's left hand, but didn't
take much notice. It could mean anything nowadays.
'My God,' said Toby when Gold had finished. He crouched down
beside Emma. Ht didn't know what to do. He had an idea he should kiss her, but the
lifeless eyes looked too reproachful. Then he saw for the first time the hole in
her head caused not, as he supposed, by a bullet but by a glass splinter from one
of the Jaguar's windows which had bored into her brain. He began to feel sick and
had to turn away and swallow hard several times.
Some time later, when Emma was being loaded into an ambulance,
her face covered by a grey blanket, he asked a policeman: 'I suppose I'd better
tell her parents?'
The policeman said that they would do it if he liked, but it
would be better coming from a friend. Toby was about to say he had never met them
when it occurred to him that it probably would be better coming from him, otherwise
there might be a lot of embarrassing questions asked about what Emma was doing in
Cadogan Gardens. Of course, all their friends would guess exactly what she had been
doing, and even if she had not they would never believe him, but the person he most
wanted to assure was that poor rugger-bugger husband with his fists like jam-jars.
His story would be that Emma had simply come round for a few minutes after shopping
to ensure that his flat would be available for them this weekend as promised. That
should do for Mister Dove, he thought. Once he had sorted this out he allowed himself
to grieve for the death of his friend and occasional lover.
The first police car was on the scene less than five minutes
after the explosion, which was not bad going through the rush-hour traffic. It was
a Q car, an unmarked police car crewed by uniformed,
unarmed
policemen who had received a radio message to go to Cadogan Gardens from where there
were reports of a bombing and a shooting. This was in response to a 999 call from
the publisher, who had staggered bleeding into his flat and called first the police
and then the ambulance before almost passing out with pain and shock.
As the Q car cut through Chesham Place they were advised to interview
a Mr
Alfred Gold, taxi driver, who claimed he had been
shot at, and that the Bomb Squad and Special Patrol Group had also been alerted.
The woman controller added that the gunman was still thought to be in the area and
they should proceed with caution. One of the policemen produced his truncheon and
examined it like a man who had just been given a booby prize.
By the time the Bomb Squad had arrived and it had been decided
between them and the Special Patrol Group - who, like the Squad, discreetly carried
arms on all occasions - how much of the area should be cordoned off, almost eight
minutes had elapsed. During this time the fire brigade arrived and started filling
what was left of the Jaguar full of foam. It took another two minutes to establish
from eyewitnesses that they were looking for a blond-haired man wearing a grey sports
jacket who was last seen heading in the general direction of Sloane Square underground.
London Transport's underground railway network has a total of
278 stations. There are entrances and exits from Wimbledon to Watford Junction,
from Ealing Broadway to Epping and Ongar. Approximately twelve minutes after the
explosion the London Transport police and the Metropolitan police who together patrol
these stations were asked, at the height of the rush-hour, to watch all stations
for a blond-haired man in a grey sports jacket. They were told not to approach him
because he was believed to be armed, but to radio for assistance on their personal
walkie-talkies. They were not told how to accomplish their task with a force that
any day of the week was one thousand men under strength.
And, in any case, it was much too late. Koller was leaving Victoria
station and bound for Bayswater in a taxi at least four minutes, and more like five,
before the police, who are always present at that station, were asked to try and
check the torrent bursting from the underground for this particularly dangerous
fish. Several blond gentlemen were netted and thrown back. One unfortunate Swedish
professor of
social sciences, who had left his hotel without his
passport and was
foolish enough to take offence about being questioned while
going about his lawful business, spent three hours in custody. The Metropolitan
police
has
its fair share of xenophobes.
Koller got the taxi to drop him off a few streets away from the
cabinet minister's daughter's flat. He walked to a pub around the corner and telephoned
her from there to come and pick him up. He didn't want to take the risk of walking
the streets on his own, not even short distances, before he had changed his appearance.
There was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. That was what amateurs did and it
was why they were caught.
As she drove to the pub in her mini Ruth heard a news flash over
the car radio about the bombing. When she arrived he was sitting in a corner of
the bar with his back to the wall, smoking a cigarette and sipping a cognac. She
noted with some satisfaction that he looked slightly dishevelled. His hair needed
combing, his face was a bit smudged and the top button of his jacket was done up
in a way that made it hang badly when seated on a bar stool.
'Had a busy day then, luv?' she said.
Dove was in Frenchie's in Dean Street and he was beginning to
feel drunk. He had started the evening on kir - it was Emma who had introduced him
to the syrupy mixture of white wine and blackcurrant cordial - but had long since
grown tired of it and gone on to beer. De Gaulle's proclamation, a copy of the one
some Free French officers had nailed behind the bar in the 1940s, swam in and out
of focus. The voices of the other customers seemed to be getting louder, like a
rising sea, but were totally indistinct. They were the usual mixture of journalists
who wrote for small but prestigious weekly publications: actors, songwriters and
poets obliged to review each other's poetry to make a living. Black and white photographs
of old stars from the boxing ring and the music-halls punched and weaved, smiled
and almost kept the whole world smiling too, tap-danced madly up and down the bar,
but could not disguise the fact that Emma was not there. And the worst thing about
it, said Dove to this friendly cast for the twentieth time, is that I've no bloody
idea where to start looking for her. No bloody idea at all. I don't know any of
her friends. His mood was mercurial. One moment he was anguished and the next enraged.
How could she have done this to him? Where was she?
(And with
whom?
No, mustn't think that. That's silly.) Was she all right? -
that
was the important thing.
'Oh for Christ's sake, where is she?'
People looked round. Conversations stopped for a second or two,
people looked knowingly at one another. Aghast, Dove realised he had spoken aloud.
He pushed his way through the throng to the lavatory, but came back again quickly
in case she arrived and left during his absence.
Ten minutes before closing time he went upstairs to the payphone
and dialled the vast number of digits that connects Soho with rural Kent. It was
his last resort. He really hadn't wanted to do it because he was sure they would
not know anything and he would only make a fool of himself. After this, he told
himself as he listened to the whirrs and clicks that preceded the ringing
sound,
I'll try the police and the hospitals.
Emma's mother answered. He knew there was something wrong right
away because she said: 'Is that Stephen?' Usually they avoided using his first name.
Death embarrasses us, Dove
thought,
we have forgotten how to pay homage to it. We simply tidy it away, the great unmentionable
of the age.
It was almost over. Emma's coffin was moving towards the red
velour curtain beyond which lay the cremation ovens manufactured by the local gas
board and exported all over the world. In India, the Hindu mourners gather around
the funeral pyre of sandalwood to see the body curl and burn when the ghee and camphor
is ignited. Here, thought Dove, the ovens that reduce coffin, shroud, hair, flesh
and most bone to ashes are hidden from us lest the horrid disposal should destroy
with it what shallow faith we may possess. As the coffin disappeared and the last
prayers were murmured, he remembered that he had once met a builder whose job it
was to reline the brickwork in the ovens: he had told him that sometimes his men
discovered the odd femur that had resisted the flames.
