‘The IRA use this stuff,’ said the portly male pathologist.
‘What stuff is that?’ asked DCI Hunter. He was trying not to look at the remains laid out on the table. Trying not to inhale, too. Smoke and pork, he thought. Hadn’t he read somewhere that cannibals said human flesh tasted like pig meat? Well, it probably did, and here was the proof. Shit, it was enough to turn a person vegetarian overnight.
‘Semtex. Traces of it all over the clothes.’ The pathologist plucked up a detached finger with his gloved hands. He could have plucked up any other part, easily. A toe, an ear, a fragment of a cock. Lumps of shattered blackened flesh draped in charred scraps of clothing. When you pieced all the bits together, laid them out like the pathology team had, then you could see that this had once been a living, breathing person. Otherwise, you’d be hard put to guess.
‘It’s clever stuff,’ said the pathologist, his eyes alight with interest.
‘How so?’ Hunter thought it was vile.
‘Sniff. See? Not much odour to it.’
All Hunter could smell was scorched flesh.
‘Semtex is easy to use. Very stable, unlike nitro. Gaddafi’s boys out in Libya have been shipping it to the IRA for years. The Irish boys have been using it for landmines, and as a “booster” for homemade bombs. And for little car jobs like this, too.’
‘Right,’ said Hunter.
‘What else can I tell you? He died instantly. Literally blown apart. Not a bad way to go, actually, despite appearances. Oblivion in an instant. You found a name for him yet?’
‘Frank Day,’ said Hunter. DI Duggan had filled him in on the departed.
Frank or ‘Frankie’ Day, as he was known, had been a small-time criminal feeding a voracious dope habit. He’d been trying car doors the day the bomb went off.
He’d tried the Merc.
Boom!
No more Frankie.
Interestingly, the car belonged to Annie Carter. Who apparently had no idea why someone would want to blow her arse to kingdom come. But no smoke without fire, right? He thought of Annie Carter and along with the thought came just one word: trouble. For years she’d been skirting around on the edges of criminal gangs. London overlords like her ex husband. She had connections to the Mafia, for Christ’s sake. But the woman was like Teflon. Nothing ever stuck to her.
So all they had to go on was the red-haired man the girl in the charity shop had mentioned. The one who’d been sitting in Annie Carter’s Merc just before Frankie had gone off to knock on the pearly gates.