The Curious Mind of Inspector Angel (16 page)

‘The man’s voice, I am certain, was that of David Schuster,’ Angel said when they were in the BMW and racing down to the old mill. ‘And the girl’s description of where she was being held perfectly matched the small cellar at the far end of the basement under his shop.’

Gawber’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I remember it. Shouldn’t we have withdrawn handguns from the armoury, sir? We don’t know what we might meet in the darkness of the place?’

‘He’s not known to carry arms. We don’t know what danger the girl might be in. It would have taken us valuable time filling in the applications.’

Gawber nodded. On reflection, he had to agree. ‘Who is the girl?’

‘No idea.’

Angel stopped the car outside the main door of the old stone mill building, which had experienced so much activity these past few days. He slammed the car door. Gawber brought the torches and handed one to him. They rushed up the three steps through the damaged door and inside the old mill. It was cold. Angel could have sworn it was colder inside than it was outside in the street. They switched on the powerful torches and began the descent to the cellar. Every step he took, Angel wondered what he might find. He was beginning to think that David Schuster had finally blown his top and was ready for the funny farm. He had seen it happen many times in his job. It was very sad. And it always seemed to happen to small people. Well, Schuster wasn’t actually small, he was medium sized, but small in comparison to the average in any gathering of policemen.

They reached the basement floor and flashed the lights along the big expanse. They looked ahead at the steel door in the wall at the far end. It was closed as before. The two men looked at each other. Everything was as quiet as ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece.

Angel licked his lips. He was beginning to have doubts. He wondered if he had properly deduced that this was the place where the phone call had come from.

Neither of the policemen saw a figure manoeuvre stealthily round a pillar to keep in the shadows as they made a beeline for the steel door at the far end.

They reached it and listened outside the little cell. Absolute silence. Angel grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. He waved to Gawber to go in. Gawber looked through the gap. He went inside and flashed the torch around. Angel pulled the heavy door open even further. There was nobody in the cell, but there was something else, something unexpected, lying flat on the stone-built table in the middle of the little room. Angel saw it also. It was a small suitcase. It was closed. It was old and well-used.

Angel came in and let the door close. It closed with a loud, disconcerting clang and echo. He crossed to the suitcase. As he did so, there was the squeak of a key turning in a rusty lock and then a metallic thud as the bolt sprang out. The sound was unmistakable.

The two men stared at each other for a second, realized what they had heard, then rushed at the steel door. They pushed hard at it. It didn’t move. They tried again, harder. It didn’t even shake. They knew they were well and truly imprisoned.

‘It’s Schuster,’ Angel said.

Gawber coughed. He dipped into his pocket, took out the bottle and took a sip from it.

Angel yelled, ‘Schuster! What are you doing? Why have you locked us in here? What do you want? What’s going on? It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the girl? If you’ve harmed her, you’ll pay for it.’

They waited. There was no reply.

‘Are you there, Schuster?’ Angel yelled again.

He was certain the man was out there, close to the other side of the door … listening. He could almost hear him breathing. Seconds later they heard footsteps as the man strode quickly away.

Angel rubbed his chin. He turned to Gawber. ‘Where is the girl? Who the hell is she? Has he murdered her?’

Gawber coughed, then he said, ‘Don’t know, sir.’

‘Get on your mobile and get somebody to let us out of here. And tell them to be on the lookout for David Schuster. Warn them that he’s still in the area.’

Gawber didn’t hesitate. With shaking hands, he dialled the station and spoke to Ahmed, who said he would notify uniform immediately.

Meanwhile, Angel flashed his torch around the little cell and then moved in on the suitcase. He slid the two catches sideways with his thumbs and the fasteners clicked up. He raised the suitcase lid and shone his torch inside.

Then he had the shock of his life.

He saw the dial of a big, old-fashioned alarm clock, fastened to four wires sticking out through Blu-Tack, the tops of two double AA batteries and six sticks that looked like candles covered in cream paper, wrapped together with adhesive tape, which on closer examination proved to be dynamite.

Angel’s pulse raced up to 200, his mouth went as dry as a box of feathers. He backed away from the suitcase. ‘Ron! It’s a bomb,’ he said quietly.

‘A bomb?’ Gawber yelled.

Angel looked anxiously round the small cell as his heart banged like a drum through his shirt. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

Gawber glanced across at the suitcase on the stone table. The lid was open. He took in the features of the primitive time bomb. Angel saw him and came back to look at it.

They could hear it ticking. Only just. It was a quiet, devious tick.

The alarm hand was set at six o’clock and the other hands were set at three minutes to six.

‘I suppose when the alarm bell rings, the circuit will be closed and the bomb will …’ Angel didn’t finish the sentence.

‘We’ve three minutes,’ Gawber stammered, ‘… to get out of here.’

Angel shook his head. ‘We
can’t
get out of here. Look at that door. The walls are two or three feet thick. And there are no windows. Hmm. We’ve got to disarm this thing.’

Gawber’s face went white. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know
how
,’ he snapped. ‘If we had some wire cutters or scissors.’

‘No. Nothing like that, sir.’

‘If we had a screwdriver, we could stick it in the clock works and hope to stop the works.’

‘We’ve no cutting tools. No screwdriver.’

Angel ran his hand through his hair, then quickly turned back. ‘Ron. Empty your pockets. Let’s see what we
do
have.’

Both of the men quickly put all their belongings on the stone table next to the suitcase. Wallet, ID, money, keys, handkerchief, ballpoint pen, notebook, wristwatches … Gawber, lastly, put the bottle of cough medicine on the pile.

He was looking for something to halt the clock mechanism. A pen wasn’t strong enough to pierce the dial front.

Angel glanced at the clock dial. It showed one minute and forty-five seconds to go. He didn’t remark on it. It was obvious, and he thought Ron Gawber had taken about as much pressure as he could bear. He was coughing more frequently. It was very worrying.

Then his eyes suddenly lit up. He shone his torch down to the floor. By the walls was a sprinkling of sand, grains that had fallen away over the years from the crumbling of the sandstone walls.

‘Quick, Ron. Collect up this sand dust. As much as you can.’

Gawber didn’t question why. He gathered up the small amount that there was, into the palm of his hand.

‘That’s enough. Is that clock still ticking?’

‘Yes.’

Gawber transferred his collection of sand into Angel’s hand. Angel reached out for the bottle of cough medicine. It was about a third full. He put all the sand and dust they had collected inside the bottle and shook it up. Then with trembling hands, he poured the gritty, sticky substance over the clock dial. He emptied the bottle and banged the base of it with his other hand to get out every last drop.

‘Clocks don’t like grit, Ron. Let’s hope they don’t like this?’

The clock continued to tick. The second hand had only one more 360 degree sweep of the dial to make before it would hit six o’clock.

They anxiously watched the runny mess make its way round the edges of the dial and then disappear underneath into the mechanics of the clock. It was a very long shot and Angel knew it.

‘There’s nothing more I can think of, Ron,’ he said, holding his hands out over the suitcase and shaking his head.

‘No,’ Gawber said, still staring at the clock dial and listening to the ominous tick of the clock.

‘Thirty seconds,’ Angel said. He put a hand on his chest and prayed.

‘We should get under the table, sir. It’s the best shelter there is,’ Gawber said crouching down and scrambling underneath.

Angel grunted, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the clock face. All the syrupy mud had now run off the dial into the workings of it. It simply needed one minuscule spec of grit to find its way between a cog and a sprocket, or between any two meshing gear wheels, and the clock would stop, the bomb wouldn’t detonate and he would have to wait for another time to find out whether his final destination was heaven or hell.

‘Come on.’ Gawber said from underneath the stone table. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

Angel thought that with a charge of six sticks of dynamite, it wouldn’t make much difference in that small cellar whether he was under the table or stood where he was.

There were now only ten seconds left. He watched the slim, black, second hand, edge jerkily round the dial. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven, and then it stopped.

Angel stared at it, hardly daring to believe his eyes. He held his breath. He listened for the ticking; that too, had stopped.

It had worked.

He gave a very heavy sigh. And then another. Then he bent down and looked under the table. He saw Gawber rolled into a ball, gripping his torch in one hand, the other hand over an ear and his eyes shut.

He nudged him. ‘Come on, Ron. I think we’re OK.’

Gawber opened his eyes and blinked. ‘Did it work?’

Angel grinned. ‘I always said I’d find a better use for that cough medicine of yours.’

Gawber unrolled himself, stood up and stretched his arms. Then he looked cautiously inside the open suitcase. ‘Wow! Only three seconds to go?’

Suddenly they heard several sets of footsteps outside and voices.

Angel squeezed Gawber’s arm and said, ‘Shh!’ He didn’t know if Schuster or some other villain had returned for some reason.

They listened at the steel door. They heard a familiar voice. ‘DI Angel are you there? It’s Ahmed, sir. Are you there?’

Angel and Gawber looked at each other and smiled.

‘The cavalry has arrived.’

Angel battered on the steel door. ‘In here, Ahmed. Behind this steel door. Can you unlock it? Is the key in the lock?’

‘No, sir.’

Gawber sighed.

Ahmed and a squad of uniformed worked quickly to release the two men. They had to get crow bars and a welder to release them. The whole operation took more than an hour.

Angel told Ahmed to phone the UXB unit in York and tell them that there really
was
a bomb this time, a homemade unexploded bomb!

Ahmed nodded. He was also told to organize a guard of the place until the army arrived. Then Angel and Gawber rushed out of the cellar and up the steps to discover that all four tyres of Angel’s car had been slashed. Angel got a patrol car to take them to the police station.

‘That was a near miss, sir. I’m glad to be away from that place.’

‘Schuster is nothing if he’s not thorough,’ Angel said as the driver pulled onto the main road.

Gawber looked very tired.

‘I suppose Schuster would be thinking that his plan had worked,’ Angel said. ‘That his bomb had gone off, and that we are dead.’

Gawber nodded.

‘So what would he be up to now?’

‘He would know he couldn’t stay any longer at the shop, sir. He’d be wanted by the police. He’d really want to get away from the place.’

‘
Right
away from the place. Well away from Bromersley too.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But he doesn’t have a car, and he doesn’t drive. That’s why he didn’t take mine.’

‘So he’d need transport. If he proposes a long journey, he’d need a taxi either to a train station, say Doncaster or Leeds, or to an airport, Leeds/Bradford or Robin Hood.’

‘Exactly. Shouldn’t be difficult. Crack on with it. Must catch him before he gets out of the country. Must find the taxi he took.’

‘Right, sir,’ Gawber said.

The patrol car drove up to the front of the station.

‘Wait here for us, lad,’ Angel called to the patrol-car driver as he opened the door.

The two men ran up the steps to reception and were waved through the security door. They dashed into Angel’s office. Angel pulled the local directory out of a drawer. There were six taxi firms in the town and four others in villages a few miles out. Angel decided initially to discount the ones out of town. Gawber noted the top three numbers and dashed off to the CID office to use the phone. Angel took the bottom three and began tapping in a number.

In four minutes, Gawber came running into Angel’s office all smiles. He had found Schuster. A driver at the third taxi firm he had phoned had picked up a man answering Schuster’s description with a young woman outside the old mill building about an hour ago and had taken them to Leeds/Bradford airport. In fact, the dispatcher had spoken to the driver by radio while Gawber was on the line. He had told him he thought they were a honeymoon couple. They had two suitcases with them.

Angel beamed and jumped up. ‘Great,’ he said, then frowned. ‘Bring your handcuffs,’ he said meaningfully and he reached into a drawer, took out his own pair and pushed them into his pocket.

‘Right, sir.’ Gawber went back to his desk to collect his and the two men dashed out of the offices and up the corridor. They jumped into the car, instructed the driver to take them to the airport as quickly as possible, then sat back in the seat to catch their breath.

‘Honeymoon couple, eh?’ Angel said thoughtfully.

‘That’s what he said, sir.’

A few miles later, Angel said, ‘You know, Ron. We’ve been had. The phone call from the desperate young woman was a good bit of acting, to get us into that cellar.’

‘Aye, to get shot of us,’ Gawber said.

‘Damn well nearly succeeded too.’

‘Who is the girl?’