The Chinaman Read Free Page B

and opened it as he walked back into the lounge. He pulled one of the wooden chairs out from under the oval dining-table and sat astride it, resting his forearms on its back.
    â€˜What next?’ he asked, grinning.
    â€˜Yes,’ said the man who’d opened the door and who was now sitting on a flowery print sofa by a tall wooden bookcase. His name was McCormick. ‘What do we do next?’
    Fisher smiled. ‘You’re so bloody impatient,’ he laughed. He turned to look at the occupant of the chair by the window, the one they called The Bombmaker. ‘That depends on what MacDermott here comes up with.’ The Bombmaker grinned.
    The comedy show was interrupted for a news flash and a sombre man with movie-star looks reported that sixteen people had died in a bomb explosion and that the Provisional IRA had claimed responsibility. They then cut to a reporter in a white raincoat standing under a street-lamp in Knightsbridge, who said that police now believed that the bomb had been in the back carrier of a motorcycle and that it had been detonated by a timing device.
    O’Reilly punched the air again, and The Bombmaker’s grin widened.
    The police car drove slowly down Clapham Road. Constable Simon Edgington’s left hand was aching from the constant gear changing and he cursed the bumper-to-bumper traffic under his breath. It wasn’t even worth switching the siren on because there wasn’t enough room for the cars and buses to pull to the side.
    â€˜It’s getting worse,’ he groaned.
    â€˜Sorry?’ said his partner, a blonde WPC called Susan Griffin who had joined the Met on the graduate entry scheme. One of the high-flyers, a sergeant had told Edgington, closely followed by a warning not to try anything on because she’d reported the last constable whose hand had accidentally slipped on to her thigh during a hasty gear change.
    â€˜The traffic,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be all night at this rate.’
    She looked down at the sheaf of papers on her black clipboard. ‘This is the last one,’ she said. ‘Chinese or something. God, I don’t think I can pronounce their names. Noog-yen Guan Fong and Noog-yen Goy Trin. Does that sound right?’ The names on the sheet were written as Nguyen Xuan Phoung and Nguyen Kieu Trinh.
    He laughed. ‘Sounds like a disease,’ he said.
    She gave him a frosty look. ‘It’s not really a laughing matter is it, Simon?’
    Edgington flushed. Griffin was a year younger than him but she acted as if she already had her sergeant’s stripes. But his embarrassment came from the fact that he knew she was right, it wasn’t the sort of thing to joke about. He wanted to tell her that he was just nervous, that he was trying to relieve the tension that was knotting up his stomach, and that he’d never thought when he signed up three years earlier that he’d have to knock on the doors of complete strangers and tell them that their nearest and dearest had been scattered all over Knightsbridge by a terrorist bomb. He wanted to explain but knew he’d sound like a wimp so he concentrated on driving.
    They’d been given three addresses, all south of the river. The first had been a middle-aged couple in Lambeth, a schoolteacher and his wife. Their teenage son had been in the passenger seat of an old Mini that had been fifty feet or so from the motorcycle when the bomb had gone off. Several pieces of wire that had been wrapped around the explosive had burst through the windscreen and torn his face and throat apart. The couple had already seen a report of the bombing on the evening news and before Griffin had spoken the wife’s legs had given way and her husband had had to help her to a chair in their cramped kitchen. Edgington had been quite happy to let his partner do the talking, he didn’t think that he could have kept his voice steady. He’d joined the police to