Falling More Slowly by Peter Helton Page A

brisk, alert, not the half-dead, asleep-on-his-feet junior doctor you were meant to expect these days if you believed the papers. ‘She still hasn’t regained consciousness though all her vital signs are strong. We’re a bit baffled by this but for the time being we’re just monitoring the situation. She’s suffered two perforated eardrums, though miraculously hardly any shrapnel damage. From what I’ve been told she was on her way home when the blast knocked her off her feet. Have you any idea as to the kind of explosion? A bomb in the park, said the news … Who’d put a bomb in a place like that?’
    McLusky nodded his agreement. ‘That’s a damn good question. It’s early days yet. What kind of a person is Miss, Mrs … Howe?’
    ‘Ms Howe is a retired postmistress.’ The Ms, McLusky noticed, fell naturally from the doctor’s lips, while hehimself could never pronounce Ms without putting undue stress on it.
    ‘Bit young to be retired? How old would you say she was?’
    ‘She’s forty-nine. Unemployed postmistress, then. It’s the same thing. Post offices are closing and they’re not coming back. From what her sister told us she hasn’t been unemployed long but didn’t expect to find another job. Not at her age.’
    ‘You just mentioned a sister …’
    ‘We found identification among Ms Howe’s possessions and traced the sister through the hospital records. On a previous visit to the hospital she had named her as next of kin. She’s with her now.’
    ‘Do you think we could talk to her?’
    ‘That’s up to her. I can ask her. Wait here.’
    It turned out that Ms Howe’s sister had stepped out for a breath of fresh air, which in her case involved a packet of Superkings and a persistent little cough she didn’t know she had. They found her by the nearest entrance. She looked to be the older sister, with hair the colour of concrete and the deep crags of a lifetime’s smoking around her mouth. McLusky joined her and gratefully lit a cigarette himself. When he suggested her sister might have been the intended victim Mrs Henley scoffed at the idea. ‘That’s ridiculous. Who would want to kill my sister? Her? And with a bomb?’
    ‘Your sister isn’t married, does she have a partner?’
    She shook her head. ‘Liz finds it quite a lonely life since the post office closed. Turns out that was where she got most of her social contact. She lives by herself on Jacob’s Wells Road. She’d have been coming from the shops, she always comes up through the park. She probably sat down on one of those benches, we did it once when I went with her. Liz’d be dead for sure if she’d still been sitting there but I was told she had moved on already.’
    ‘That’s our understanding. We believe nobody was sitting on the benches when the bomb exploded.’
    ‘If only she’d got up a minute earlier. That would have been enough, wouldn’t it? A minute? She’d have been far enough away then.’
    ‘That’s very possible. When did you last visit your sister at home, Mrs Henley?’
    ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ She prised another cigarette from her packet and lit it. ‘We don’t see each other very often, that’s all. It’s not that we didn’t get on, we just lived our own lives, it’s just the way it was.’
    ‘I meant would you notice if there was anything different at your sister’s place, an indication that anything had changed in her life, besides her unfortunate unemployment.’
    ‘Oh that. I see what you mean. Well, I was there earlier to pick up some things for her, you know, toiletries and that. It was just like it always was, inspector, there was nothing different, not that I noticed.’ She didn’t think she ought to mention that the fridge had been empty and the cupboards almost bare. Liz didn’t do much shopping these days. The flat had felt cold and lifeless.
    Austin noted down addresses for both Mrs Henley and her sister before they left the woman to finish her angry