The Bell Ringers (2 page)

‘However,' said the coroner, ‘the Colombian authorities believe that the delay was designed to allow maximum dispersal of the gas before detonation.' The clerk nodded agreement.

The film was started again. The field of the shot seemed to have changed, as though the camera had been loosened on its stand and the lens had drifted upwards a few degrees. There was an odd moment of stillness when nothing much happened. In the foreground the tourists stared about them without speaking. No vehicles passed. Then the detective sprang out of his chair and sprinted across the street waving frantically for the girl to get down. His shouts were picked up by the camera's microphone. The girl stepped back from the shop window with an appalled and strangely embarrassed expression and began to walk towards him, her arms held outwards interrogatively. The detective reached her, hooked his arm around her waist, lifting her off the ground in one clean movement, then ran three or four paces until they were out of shot. At this moment the cameraman bobbed up to see what was going on and blocked most of the view. A beat later he was surrounded by a halo of flame that expanded fifty yards away from him. Then a shock wave propelled his body to the left and rippled outwards. Even though the clerk had aimed the remote to turn down the volume, the roar that followed filled the courtroom. Astonishingly, the camera remained upright, possibly because its owner had shielded it from the main blast, and the film ran on for a few seconds until the camera was toppled by something falling from above. By this time there was very little to be seen except a ball of fire billowing outwards to touch everything in shot. The street vendors vanished. The people, the buildings, the parked cars, the sunlight and shadows – all were obliterated by the sudden cosmic flare of destruction.

The screens around the court went blank. One or two people murmured their shock but for the most part they were silent. Kate found herself staring vacantly at the courtroom's awful new royal-blue carpeting. There had been no time for Eyam to pass through that tunnel. He would have been killed instantly. It was as if she had just watched his death in real time and had been unable to shout a warning
to him. She looked up through the windows. Outside in the March morning some scaffolding was being erected. A man warmed his hand round a cup that steamed in the wind. Eyam had gone. People were oblivious. Life went on.

The coroner glanced down at the lawyer appointed by David Eyam's stepmother. ‘Would it suit you, Mr Richards, if we rose now and resumed at – say – two o'clock?'

‘By all means, sir,' said the man moving to his feet with his fingers tucked into the back of his waistband. ‘May I ask if you think it likely that the remains will be released for burial? My client would like to set the funeral arrangements in train as soon as possible. A provisional date of next Tuesday – the twelfth – has been suggested. There is much to organise.'

‘Yes, I think that can be taken as read. Please inform Lady Eyam that she may go ahead.' He paused. ‘We will leave evidence of identification and the interview with Detective Bautista until this afternoon.' He turned to reporters who were occupying the benches that would have been used by the jury had the coroner exercised his option to call one. ‘A copy of this film will be released after I deliver a verdict, which I expect to be at the end of the afternoon.' With this he rose and left through a door behind the chair.

Outside the court, Kate switched on her phone and worked her way back through the messages from colleagues all expressing disbelief at her sudden departure from the head office of Calvert-Mayne in Manhattan. There was a score of callers wondering why she had left one of the most important jobs in the law firm for an unspecified role in the backwater of the London office. At length she came to Eyam's call on the Saturday of his death. ‘Hello there, Sister – it's me. Eyam,' he started. He sounded relaxed. ‘I felt like having a chat, but it seems you're busy and I now realise it's not ideal this end either, because I'm sitting outside in a street bar and a bloody wedding party has just appeared so you wouldn't be able to hear much anyway. But, look, I miss you and I'd really love to see you when I get back. Perhaps we should meet in New York. We
will
see each other.' He paused. ‘You are in my thoughts, as always, and there's much I want to discuss with you, but now I'll just have to make
do with the charming policeman whom I am sitting here with. Speak to you soon – all my love.'

She held the phone to her ear for a few seconds, thinking that if she had answered the call she might have delayed him leaving his table in the bar. The tourists and the policeman escaped with their lives; only the people in the confined space of the alley were killed. She snapped the phone shut, lit a cigarette – one of a ration of five – and then opened it again to search the phone's memory for the time of the call. Five forty-five in the afternoon. She could probably work out exactly what she was doing at that precise moment, but what was the point? Eyam was dead. She just had to get used to the idea.

Part of her wanted to return to the Bailey Hotel rather than go back into the inquest, but then it occurred to her that Eyam needed a friendly face at his inquest. There was no family to speak of. His disabled brother had died while they were at Oxford, his mother succumbed to cancer soon afterwards and she had read that Eyam's father, Sir Colin, a holder of numerous engineering patents, a wily financier and discreet philanthropist, had died the previous year. So it was as an act of friendship as well as a witness that at one forty-five p.m. she worked her way along the bench to sit behind a flustered middle-aged woman and wait for the coroner to reappear. She wondered about the other people in the public benches, particularly a tall man with large glasses, stiff, wavy, dark hair and an expression of courteous disengagement. She had stood by him when filling in the register required of those attending the court – a new procedure presented as a survey – and read the name Kilmartin but not his address, which was illegible. From his clothes came the particular smell of a bonfire; the pockets of his coat were stuffed with rolled-up catalogues; and he held the
Financial Times
and a journal to his chest.

While they sat waiting in the benches, the woman in front of her turned round and, with her hand rising to pat the flushed skin at the top of her bosom, introduced herself as Diana Kidd. ‘Did you know David?' she asked.

Kate nodded, aware of a blousy old-fashioned scent reaching her nostrils.

‘Were you an
old
friend?'

‘I suppose you could say that. We met at college.' She could see that
the woman was trying to work her out: the traces of the East in her appearance – the looks of her father, Sonny Koh – the straight-backed Englishness of her mother, and the American accent which overlaid the voice of a public schoolgirl.

‘I began to know David really quite well, considering,' continued the woman.

‘Considering what?' said Kate.

The woman ignored the question. ‘He threw himself into the local arts scene here. He had one of the most formidable minds I've ever had the privilege to encounter, but you know he was never pushy or domineering.' With each statement her eyes darted about the court. ‘He never made people feel ill at ease with that great mind of his. And impeccable manners, of course. Unimpeachable! Kept himself to himself though: an invisible barrier around him, if you know what I mean.'

Kate did, though she wouldn't have put it like that. Eyam was capable of warmth and loyalty but he had no interest in explaining himself and was impatient when others expected him to. The woman asked if she was family, then if she had visited David since he had moved to High Castle. Kate shook her head to both questions and murmured that she hadn't seen him for some time. She did not mention the email from Russell, Spring & Co, a firm of local solicitors, which had been forwarded to her by her old assistant in New York and was how she had learned of his death nearly six weeks after it had occurred.

Once Diana Kidd had decided that Kate had not been a lover and possessed no greater claim on the memory of David Eyam than she did, her interest seemed to wane. However, she told Kate a bit more about Eyam's circumstances. He had bought and restored a black and white A-frame cottage on the edge of the woods overlooking the Dove Valley; he did not seem to have a job; he attended recitals and concerts, and joined the local film society and a reading group, the novelty of which was that books were discussed on rambles through the Marches of Wales.

What utter bloody hell, thought Kate, and not for the first time wondered what had driven Eyam to this provincial limbo on the English-Welsh border. The Eyam she knew was compelled by the
centre of things; it was unthinkable that he'd opt for life in the back of beyond nourished only by cultural chats with Diana Kidd.

‘Why was he in Colombia?' Kate asked. ‘Did he tell you he was going?'

Mrs Kidd shook her head as though this was an extremely stupid question. ‘No, he just vanished two or three weeks before Christmas. No one knew where he had gone or for how long. The next thing we heard was about this bomb, but that took several weeks to filter through because no one suspected that he was involved. I mean, how could they?' She hissed this last observation as the coroner entered and the clerk asked them to rise.

A filmed interview of Detective Bautista by a British consular official in Cartagena was shown. Bautista's English was reasonably good but every so often he struggled for a word and looked off-camera to ask for translation. He appeared in front of a white backcloth wearing a neck brace, with a bandage on his forearm and two small strips of plaster above his left eye. Kate put his age at about forty. He had Indian ancestry – an aquiline nose, narrowed eyes and full lips. He talked rapidly, often repeating a question on the in-breath then answering as he breathed out.

The diplomat timed and dated the interview – eleven a.m. Friday February 18th. An oath was taken then Bautista told the camera that he shouldn't have been at that restaurant when the bomb went off. In fact he had arranged to meet his girl, Mira, the night before at the Bolivar Creêperie, but there had been an incident down in the port – a murder. He was unable to keep the date and then he'd forgotten to phone her. She was mad with him. He blew out his cheeks and made a chopping motion with his right hand into his palm to underscore that this was a woman you would not want to anger too often.

So that was how he came to be sitting drinking bourbon outside the restaurant the following day. And of course she had been late just to make her point and he'd fallen into conversation with the man he now knew to be David Eyam and they talked about the book he was reading –
The Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor
by Gabriel García Márquez. It was incredible how much this Englishman knew about the book, about this shameful period in the history of Colombia and how the author had exposed the corruption of the dictator General Pinilla. He seemed to
have so much in his head about everything, this Englishman, and the gift of the book now meant a great deal to him. It was the last act of a true gentleman and he didn't mind saying that with the book some kind of good luck had passed from Eyam to him, which resulted in his and Mira's survival. He felt in his pocket, pulled out the book, looked at the cover and held it to the camera.

‘What was it that made you run to save your girlfriend, detective?'

‘It is the sound of detonator,' he replied, now holding an unlit cigarette. ‘You know at the back of my mind I thought there was something wrong about that vehicle. It was there in my head all the time but I was not thinking. Why would anyone park there and block the alley? That was the question in my mind. And then I heard the detonator and I knew what was going to happen. I know this sound well since I study at the Explosives Unit and Bomb Data Center.'

‘The Explosive Unit of the FBI – in the United States?' said the official.

‘Of the FBI, yes, that is correct, señor. And the Hazards Devices School at Huntsville, Alabama. I study in that place also.'

‘You attended training at these institutions last year?'

‘That is correct: the programme was six months.' He paused. ‘And so, señor, that is why I know the noise of a detonator. It lives in my mind and when I hear it on the street I know that another detonator will follow.'

‘Could you explain?'

Bautista put his hands together and began to talk fluently, as though being tested by an examination board. ‘This type of bomb need two detonations. The first detonation this blows the valves on the containers of liquefied gas and so the gas is spread. When it has mixed with the air the second explosion comes in a tiny little core of PETN.' He held up a finger and thumb pinched together.

‘That is explosive material?'

‘Yes, that is pentaerythritol tetranitrate,' he said with a flourish. ‘When the second explosion takes place the large volume of oxygenated gas is detonated. In the regular bomb, the energy comes from the tightly packed core and drive outwards like so.' He clasped his hands in a ball then threw them apart. ‘But in this devil, señor, in this devil the detonation ignites clouds of gas and there occurs an explosion with a
force that becomes greater and greater moving outwards and outwards gaining power all this time.' His hands mimed a billowing motion, then he picked up a glass of water and drank. ‘It was this type of bomb used to attack the party headquarters.'

‘The regional headquarters backs onto the alley where the van was parked? That was the target?'

‘Correct.'

‘From your expertise would you say that Mr Eyam had any chance of escaping the explosion?'

He pouted regretfully and shook his head. ‘The cloud of gas was too large. We believe there were many containers in that vehicle and there was much gas in the . . .'