Out of Bounds (15 page)

‘I don’t know. I was just curious.’

‘So have they reopened it, then?’

Karen stared at her hand stirring her coffee. ‘No, it’s only me seeing shadows in the back of the cave. One of the women who died in the crash, her son was murdered a few days ago. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was suicide. And it made me wonder, because murder doesn’t generally run in families.’

Sunny snorted sourly. ‘Unless you live in Syria,’ she said. ‘Or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or any one of a dozen places where life is cheap as chips and my anthropologist
colleagues get sent to excavate mass graves.’ She held up a hand to stave Karen off. ‘But, yes, I know what you mean. So, your workload isn’t enough for you? You have to go round inventing cases now?’

Karen pushed her hair back from her face in a gesture of impatience. ‘I don’t sleep much these days, Sunny. I need something to keep my head busy. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m going to find a different answer to a case like this, but anomalies are my bread and butter, and this is an anomaly that might have got lost in the background noise in 1994.’

Sunny patted Karen’s hand, sighing. ‘Sure. I’m not judging you, honey. You’re the one with the skills and the track record in this area. So, were you thinking I could ask a few questions and find you some food for thought?’

‘To be honest, I hadn’t got that far. It was just ticking away in the back of my mind. I probably wouldn’t have done anything about it if I hadn’t run into you today. Serendipity, the gift every cold case detective longs for.’

Sunny chewed on a mouthful of brownie and gave Karen a considering look. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But there’s a price.’

‘Of course there is. Can I afford it?’

‘I want you to come up to Dundee and talk to my final-year undergraduates about police work. In spite of our best efforts, they still think you guys operate like TV cops. One grumpy inspector and a sergeant like a sheep solving all the crimes two-handed.’

‘You mean, a bit like me and the Mint and the HCU?’ Karen couldn’t keep the wry out of her tone.

Sunny hooted with laughter. ‘Right enough, youse are the dynamic duo. But I was thinking more about you talking them through major incident procedure and how their work interlocks with the investigation. What do you say?’

‘It’s a deal. I’ll not bring the Mint, though. We don’t want them running for the hills too early.’

‘No, he’s not the greatest recruiting sergeant for law enforcement. So, you email me the details of your plane explosion and I’ll see what I can dig up. Like I said, if it’s the one I’m thinking of, there’s a horse’s mouth I can go straight to.’ Sunny knocked back the last of her coffee and smacked her lips. ‘Just what the doctor ordered. But I’m going to have to love you and leave you, I’ve got a train to catch.’

They hugged farewell and Karen watched her bustle out of the shop and hurry down the crowded pavement of South Bridge towards the station. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She could go back to the office and work on the schedule of interviews in the Tina McDonald case, but Jason was perfectly capable of doing that himself. She didn’t want him thinking she lacked confidence in his ability to do something so straightforward. While she considered her options, she decided to drop a text to Giorsal. Karen was well aware of her tendency to let things drift on a personal level. If she didn’t arrange something soon, it would slide off her agenda, and then it would get pushed aside by work, and before she knew it, months would have passed.

To her surprise, Giorsal seemed to be at as much of a loose end as she was, for she replied immediately. Within ten minutes, they had a firm arrangement to meet for dinner in a Thai restaurant near Waverley, convenient for Giorsal coming into the city by train. Cheered at the prospect, Karen decided to head back to the office after all. There had to be something she could do to push the case forward.

20

S
unny
took advantage of the uneven Wi-Fi on the train to access some of the background on the bee in Karen’s bonnet, as she’d dubbed it in her head. So, by the time she got back to her office in Dundee, she had a list of things to ask Dr David Longford, who was now Reader in Forensic Chemistry in Cambridge.

After work, she sat down and composed a lengthy email outlining what she hoped he could tell her. The case was an old one; if he could help, he’d have to dig out some pretty ancient files. That far back, the chances were that they were either on paper or on some obsolete form of digital storage. Sunny hoped he was intrigued enough by her interest to brave the IT guys and ask them to restore his old floppies.

When she logged on the following morning, she discovered she wasn’t the only one who answered work emails at midnight.

Hi Sunny. Good to hear from you. How are things in the frozen north? Are you going to the Lisbon conference? If
so, can I persuade you to give a short presentation in a session I’m doing about recent refinements in IEDs?

I must admit, I was fairly gobsmacked by your questions. I haven’t thought about the Cessna Skylane explosion for years. There was nothing problematic about it, as I recall, except that the incendiary device was pretty primitive. It didn’t have a recognisable signature and you’re right, nobody claimed it. But I should be able to access my files. We digitised all the historic archive material a couple of years ago – we got a lovely grant from an American demolition tycoon! – so, assuming it was all done correctly, it shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll see what I can find and maybe we can Skype? If you can make time on Thursday, my diary is clear apart from a supervision at 2pm. Look forward to talking to you.

Skype calls had become second nature to Sunny O’Brien. Her colleagues were scattered around the world, but these days, academics didn’t have to wait for the next big conference to share ideas. Nowadays, it was easy to form working relationships with colleagues who had similar research interests, regardless of where they were based. So David Longford’s suggestion was welcome. It was always better to see the whites of their eyes. Karen would be pleased. And given what her friend had been through lately, anything that would cheer her up had to be a bonus.

The days trickled past with nothing to show. Karen and Jason spoke to witnesses whose twenty-year-old memories added nothing new to their store of knowledge. They discussed the forensic evidence with the lab but there were no startling revelations as a result of advances in technology. They went through the motions of an inquiry that only one thing could affect.

Waiting
for Colin Semple’s call was killing Karen. How long did Sheriff Abercrombie need to figure out the right thing to do? If the advocate was right and Abercrombie was waiting to see whether Ross Garvie would die and save her the bother of making a difficult decision, how long would she leave it? Karen had phoned the hospital every day to check on Garvie’s condition. ‘Stable but critical,’ was the unchanging verdict. What did that even mean?

What it meant in real terms was that Sheriff Abercrombie was sitting on the fence. So Karen kept marking time. The weather was terrible too; incessant cold drizzle, the kind that insinuated its way into every gap in weatherproof clothing, leaving you cold and clammy in a matter of minutes. Night walking was purgatory when what the locals called ‘wee sma’ rain’ drifted down for hours on end. So Karen stayed home, wondering about the refugees. Did they brave the weather for the sake of conversation and company? Or were they, like her, stuck indoors, chafing at the inclement weather, wishing they were back where the rain was warm?

And then, late on Thursday evening, Sunny called. ‘I didn’t disturb you, did I?’

‘No, I was box-set bingeing on
Homicide: Life on the Streets.
I always rewatch it when I’m fed up with work. It reminds me how much worse it could be.’

Sunny laughed. ‘Funny, I never feel the same about
CSI
. So, I’ve just come off the Skype with David Longford. He did some work around the crash, analysing the bomb materials and such. And your instinct was right. It’s a bit outside the usual run of Irish Republican ordnance.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Boiling it down – it’s very simple. It’s not in the least bit sophisticated. And at that point in the IRA bombing campaign, their bomb-making was relatively high end. Between common-or-garden criminality, drug dealing and donations
from across the Pond, they were raking in enough cash to afford proper explosives. Semtex and so forth. Electronic timers. There was nothing like that going on here. This was about as kitchen sink as you can get, with a couple of very vicious twists. The accident investigators got some fragments of steel and distorted metal spheres from the wreckage. Which suggests something like a paint tin with ball-bearings added to your basic mixture to up the destructive element of the explosion.’

‘Nasty.’

‘But effective. As to the chemicals – there wasn’t much in the way of residue, but the little they got was enough to adduce that they were looking at good old sodium chlorate and sugar with sulphuric acid as the precipitating factor. With an extra dose of iron oxide and aluminium oxide.’

‘Humour me. How does that work?’

‘Sodium chlorate used to be quite easy to get – it’s banned now, but it was a common weedkiller back when you’re talking about. It was also used as a bleaching agent in recycled paper pulp. So, you mix that fifty-fifty with granulated sugar. Tip in the two metal oxides – aluminium’s dead easy to get hold of, it’s in everything from plastic filler to sunscreen, and iron oxide is your basic rust. Then you pour concentrated sulphuric acid into a condom – more than one, if you want to delay things – tie a double knot in it, set it on top of the chemical mix, put the lid on your tin and wait.’

‘I don’t get it. What’s the condom for?’

‘It’s a very primitive fuse. The acid slowly eats its way through the rubber then it ignites the chemical mixture. And boom, you’ve got thermite. It burns hot and fierce, the gases build up and the tin explodes into shrapnel. With added ball-bearings.’

It was that easy? ‘And you can buy sulphuric acid, no questions asked? Over the counter?’

‘You
can buy battery acid, which is weak sulphuric acid. You heat it in a ceramic pot till thick white smoke starts coming off it, and Bob’s your uncle. You need to be careful with it, mind. You know the old verse?’

‘What? You mean poetry?’

‘Doggerel, more like: “Alas, poor James is dead. / We see his face no more. / For what he thought was H
₂
O / Was H
₂
SO
₄
.” What passes for wit among chemists.’

‘And that would be enough to bring down a plane?’

‘Single-engine small plane? Sure. Two hundred and fifty grammes of each of the chemicals and a condom of acid and you’d be well away. It’d do terrible damage to your moving parts and the aviation fuel feeding the engine would catch fire. It’s simple, but it’s pretty fucking catastrophic. Look, I’ll email all the tech stuff I got from David, but your bottom line is, this doesn’t look like a mainstream Irish terrorist bomb of that vintage.’

‘OK,’ Karen said, puzzled. ‘So what does that say to you?’

Sunny sighed. ‘Ach, it’s hard to be definitive. There were so many Republican splinter groups around at that time, all trying to make their mark. It might be as simple as a wee cell without much in the way of resources but desperate to be noticed and taken seriously by the big boys.’

‘Or it might not.’ One of the reasons Karen was so good at cold case work was her ability to think in tangents. Thinking aloud, she spoke slowly: ‘Maybe it was nothing to do with the Irish connection.’

For a moment, Sunny was silent. Then she said, ‘I suppose it’s possible. But if it looks like a duck and it sounds like duck and it tastes like a duck, it’s generally a duck.’

Except when it’s not, Karen thought. What she said, with a laugh, was, ‘Aye, you’re right. I can’t help myself. Flights of fancy, that’s what keeps me going.’

Sunny’s warm laugh again. ‘You should be writing crime, not fighting it. OK, so this was a bit out of the usual run of Republican bombs, but the man on the business end of it was a former Northern Ireland minister. It stands to reason the motivation came from across the Irish Sea.’

Karen muttered agreement. But what she was thinking was that there were three other people on that plane. The obvious answer wasn’t always the right one. Especially when the son of one of the victims ended up murdered twenty-two years later. If indeed Gabriel Abbott had been murdered, the voice of reason at the back of her mind insisted.

‘Anyway.’ Sunny carried on regardless. ‘I’ll ping the details over to you, to satisfy that restless curiosity of yours.’

‘Cheers, Sunny, I owe you.’

‘You do. And I’m hoping to collect before too long. Now off you go and get some sleep.’

As if, thought Karen as she ended the call. She looked out at the night, wondering whether the rain had eased off. She opened her sliding glass door and stepped out on to her balcony. She raised her face to the sky and miraculously, it remained dry. The air was still soft and damp, but the precipitation had stopped just in time to prevent her becoming stir crazy.

Ten minutes later, she was heading out on the route to the Restalrig Railway Path. Walking briskly, she picked up the path at an earlier point than she had the last time she’d been. She exchanged nods with a middle-aged woman tugging a recalcitrant pug along the path. When she caught sight of the now-familiar glow on the stone wall of the bridge abutment, she was surprised by how pleased she was to see it.

The weather had taken its toll on the refugees. There were only three men standing round a more subdued fire than usual – Tarek, and the two who had seemed most hostile to her before. Tarek looked up and gave a dignified nod as she
joined them. ‘Miserable night,’ she said, warming her hands at the fire. She wasn’t cold but it was a useful ice-breaker.

‘We do not like Scottish rain,’ Tarek said.