by Dick Francis
With an effort, I took a few steps into the hall, listening. I had no weapon. I felt nakedly vulnerable. My heart thumped uncomfortably. The house was silent.
The heavy front door, locked and bolted like a fortress, had not been touched. I went over to the office, reached in with an arm, switched on the light and pushed the half-open door wider.
There was no one in there. Everything was as Malcolm had left it in the morning. The windows shone blackly, like threats. Taking a deep breath, I repeated the procedure with the sitting-room, but also checking the bolts on the french windows, and after that with the dining-room, and the downstairs cloakroom, and then with worse trepidation went down the passage beside the stairs to the big room that had been our playroom when we were children and a billiard room in times long past.
The door was shut. Telling myself to get on with it, I opened the door, switched on the light, pushed the door open.
There was no one there. It wasn’t really a relief, because I would have to go on looking. I checked the storeroom opposite, where there were stacks of garden furniture, and also the door at the end of the passage, which led out into the garden: securely bolted on the inside. I went back to the hall and stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking upward.
It was stupid to be so afraid, I thought. It was home, the house I’d been brought up in. One couldn’t be frightened by home.
One was.
I swallowed. I went up the stairs. There was no one in my bedroom. No one in five other bedrooms, nor in the boxroom, no one in the bathrooms, no one in the plum and pink lushness of Malcolm’s own suite. By the end, I was still as scared as I’d been at the beginning, and I hadn’t started on cellars or attics or small hiding places.
I hadn’t looked under the beds. Demons could be waiting anywhere to jump out on me, yelling. Giving in, I switched off all the upstairs lights and went cravenly back to the hall.
Everything was still quiet, mocking me.
I was a fool, I thought.
Leaving the hall and kitchen lights on, I went back to Malcolm who started to get out of the car when he saw me coming. I waved him back and slid in beside him, behind the driving wheel.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said.
‘Someone may be here.’
‘What do you mean?’
I explained about the doors.
‘You’re imagining things.’
‘No. Someone has used their key.’
We hadn’t yet been able to have the locks changed, although the carpenter was due to be bringing replacements the following morning. He’d had difficulty finding good new locks to fit into such old doors, he’d said, and had promised them for Thursday, but I’d put him off until Friday because of Cheltenham.
‘We can’t stay out here all night,’ Malcolm protested. ‘It’s bound to be the wind or something that moved the doors. Let’s go to bed, I’m whacked.’
I looked at my hands. They weren’t actually shaking. I thought for a while until Malcolm grew restless.
‘I’m getting cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in, for God’s sake.’
‘No… we’re not sleeping here.’
‘What? You can’t mean it.’
‘I’ll lock the house, and we’ll go and get a room somewhere else.’
‘At this time of night?’
‘Yes.’ I made to get out of the car and he put a hand on my arm to catch my attention.
‘Fetch some pyjamas, then, and washing things.’
I hesitated. ‘No, I don’t think it’s safe.’ I didn’t say I couldn’t face it, but I couldn’t.
‘Ian, all this is crazy.’
‘It would be crazier still to be murdered in our beds.’
‘But just because two doors …’
‘Yes. Because.’
He seemed to catch some of my own uneasiness because he made no more demur, but when I was headed again for the kitchen he called after me, ‘At least bring my briefcase from the office, will you?’
I made it through the hall again with only a minor tremble in the gut; switched on the office light, fetched his briefcase without incident and set the office door again at its usual precise angle. I did the same to the sitting-room door. Perhaps they would tell us in the morning, I thought, whether or not we had had a visitor who had hidden from my approach.
I went back through the hall, switched the lights off, shut the hall-to-kitchen door, let myself out, left the house dark and locked and put the briefcase on the car’s back seat.
On the basis that it would be easiest to find a room in London, particularly at midnight, for people without luggage, I drove up the M4 and on Malcolm’s instructions pulled up at the Ritz. We might be refugees, he said, but we would be staying in no camp, and he explained to the Ritz that he’d decided to stay overnight in London as he’d been delayed late on business.
‘Our name is Watson,’ I said impulsively, thinking suddenly of Norman West’s advice and picking out of the air the first name I could think of. ‘We will pay with travellers’ cheques.’
Malcolm opened his mouth, closed it again, and kept blessedly quiet. One could write whatever name one wanted onto travellers’ cheques.
The Ritz batted no eyelids, offered us connecting rooms (no double suites available) and promised razors, toothbrushes and a bottle of scotch.
Malcolm had been silent for most of the journey, and so had I, feeling with every heart-calming mile that I had probably overreacted, that maybe I hadn’t set the doors, that if any of the family had let themselves into the house while we were out, they’d been gone long before we returned. We had come back hours later than anyone could have expected, if they were judging the time it would take us to drive from Cheltenham.
I could have sat at the telephone in the house and methodically checked with all the family to make sure they were in their own homes. I hadn’t thought of it, and I doubted if I could have done it, feeling as I had.
Malcolm, who held that sleeping pills came a poor second to scotch, put his nightcap theory to the test and was soon softly snoring. I quietly closed the door between our two rooms and climbed between my own sheets, but for a long time lay awake. I was ashamed of my fear in the house which I now thought must have been empty. I had risked my neck without a qualm over big fences that afternoon: I’d been petrified in the house that someone would jump out on me from the dark. The two faces of courage, I thought mordantly: turn one face to the wall.
We went back to Berkshire in the morning and couldn’t reach Quantum by car because the whole village, it seemed, was out and blocking the road. Cars and people everywhere: cars parked along the roadsides, people walking in droves towards the house.
‘What on earth’s going on?’ Malcolm said.
‘Heaven knows.’
In the end I had to stop the car, and we finished the last bit of the journey on foot.
We had to push through crowds and were unpopular until people recognised Malcolm, and made way for him, and finally we reached the entrance to the drive… and there literally rocked to a stop.
To start with there was a rope stretched across it, barring our way, with a policeman guarding it. In front of the house, there were ambulances, police cars, fire-engines… swarms of people in uniform moving purposefully about.
Malcolm swayed with shock, and I felt unreal, disconnected from my feet. Our eyes told us: our brains couldn’t believe.
There was an immense jagged gaping hole in the centre of Quantum.
People standing near us in the gateway, round-eyed, said, ‘They say it was the gas.’
Ten
We were in front of the house, talking to policemen. I couldn’t remember walking up the drive.
Our appearance on the scene had been a shock to the assembled forces, but a welcome one. They had been searching for our remains in the rubble.
They told us that the explosion had happened at four-thirty in the morning, the wumph and reverberation of it waking half the village, the Shockwave
s breaking windows and setting dogs howling. Several people had called the police, but when the force had reached the village, everything had seemed quiet. No one knew where the explosion had occurred. The police drove round the extended neighbourhood until daylight, and it was only then that anyone saw what had happened to Quantum.
The front wall of the hall, the antique front door with it, had been blown out flat onto the drive, and the centre part of the upper storey had collapsed into the hall. The glass in all the windows had disappeared.
‘I’m afraid it’s worse at the back,’ a policeman said phlegmatically. ‘Perhaps you’d come round there, sir. We can at least tell everyone there are no bodies.’
Malcolm nodded mechanically and we followed the policeman round to the left, between the kitchen and garage, through to the garden and along past the dining-room wall. The shock when we rounded onto the terrace was, for all the warning, horrific and sickening.
Where the sitting-room had been, there was a mountain of jumbled dusty bricks, plaster, beams and smashed furniture spilling outwards onto the grass. Malcolm’s suite, which had been above the sitting-room, had vanished, had become part of the chaos. Those of the attic rooms that had been above his head had come down too. The roof, which had looked almost intact from the front, had at therear been stripped of tiles, the old sturdy rafters standing out against the sky like picked ribs.
My own bedroom had been on one side of Malcolm’s bedroom: all that remained of it were some shattered spikes of floorboards, a strip of plaster cornice and a drunken mantle clinging to a cracked wall overlooking a void.
Malcolm began to shake. I took off my jacket and put it round his shoulders.
‘We don’t have gas,’ he said to the policeman. ‘My mother had it disconnected sixty years ago because she was afraid of it.’
There was a slight spasmodic wind blowing, enough to lift Malcolm’s hair and leave it awry. He looked suddenly frail, as if the swirling air would knock him over.
‘He needs a chair,’ I said.
The policeman gestured helplessly to the mess. No chairs left.
‘I’ll get one from the kitchen. You look after him.’
‘I’m quite all right,’ Malcolm said faintly.
‘The outside kitchen door is locked, sir, and we can’t allow you to go in through the hall.’
I produced the key, showed it to him, and went along and in through the door before he could stop me. In the kitchen, the shiny yellow walls themselves were still standing, but the door from the hall had blown open, letting in a glacier tongue of bricks and dust. Dust everywhere, like a veil. Lumps of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Everything glass, everything china in the room had cracked apart. Moira’s geraniums, fallen from their shelves, lay in red farewell profusion over her all-electric domain.
I picked up Malcolm’s pine armchair, the one thing he had insisted on keeping through all the changes, and carried it out to where I’d left him. He sank into it without seeming to notice it and put his hand over his mouth.
There were firemen and other people tugging at movable parts of the ruins, but the tempo of their work had slowed since they’d seen we were alive. Several of them came over to Malcolm, offering sympathy, but mostly wanting information, such as were we certain there had been no one else in the house?
As certain as we could be.
Had we been storing any gas in the house? Bottled gas? Butane? Propane? Ether?
No.
Why ether?
It couid be used for making cocaine.
We looked at them blankly.
They had already discovered, it seemed, that there had been no mains gas connected. They were asking about other possibilities because it nevertheless looked like a gas explosion.
We’d had no gas of any sort.
Had we been storing any explosive substances whatsoever?
No.
Time seemed disjointed.
Women from the village, as in all disasters, had brought hot tea in thermos flasks for the men working. They gave some to Malcolm and me, and found a red blanket for Malcolm so that I could have my jacket back in the chill gusty air. There was grey sheet cloud overhead: the light was grey, like the dust.
A thick ring of people from the village stood in the garden round the edges of the lawn, with more arriving every minute across the fields and through the garden gate. No one chased them away. Many were taking photographs. Two of the photographers looked like Press.
A police car approached, its siren wailing ever louder as it made slow progress along the crowded road. It wailed right up the drive, and fell silent, and presently a senior-looking man not in uniform came round to the back of the house and took charge.
First, he stopped all work on the rubble. Then he made observations and wrote in a notebook. Then he talked to the chief of the firemen. Finally he came over to Malcolm and me.
Burly and black moustached, he said, as to an old acquaintance, ‘Mr Pembroke.’
Malcolm similarly said, ‘Superintendent,’ and everyone could hear the shake he couldn’t keep out of his voice. The wind died away for a while, though Malcolm’s shakes continued within the blanket.
‘And you, sir?’ the superintendent asked me.
‘Ian Pembroke.’
He pursed his mouth below the moustache, considering me. He was the man I’d spoken to on the telephone, I thought.
‘Where were you last night, sir?’
‘With my father in London,’ I said. ‘We’ve just… returned.’
I looked at him steadily. There were a great many things to be said, but I wasn’t going to rush into them.
He said noncommittally, ‘We will have to call in explosive experts as the damage here on preliminary inspection, and in the absence of any gas, seems to have been caused by an explosive device.’
Why didn’t he say bomb, I thought irritably. Why shy away from the word? If he’d expected any reaction from Malcolm or me, he probably got none as both of us had come to the same conclusion from the moment we’d walked up the drive.
If the house had merely been burning, Malcolm would have been dashing about, giving instructions, saving what he could, dismayed but full of vigour. It was the implications behind a bomb which had knocked him into shivering lassitude: the implications and the reality that if he’d slept in his own bed, he wouldn’t have risen to bath, read the Sporting Life, go to his bank for travellers’ cheques and eat breakfast at the Ritz.
And nor, for that matter, would I.
‘I can see you’re both shocked,’ the superintendent said unemotionally. ‘It’s clearly impossible to talk here, so I suggest you might come to the police station.’ He spoke carefully, giving us at least theoretically the freedom of refusing.
‘What about the house?’ I said. ‘It’s open to the four winds. Apart from this great hole, all the windows are broken everywhere else. There’s a lot of stuff still inside… silver… my father’s papers in his office… some of the furniture.’
‘We will keep a patrol here,’ he said, ‘If you’ll give the instructions, we’ll suggest someone to board up the windows, and we’ll contact a construction firm with a tarpaulin large enough for the roof.’
‘Send me the bill,’ Malcolm said limply.
‘The firms concerned will no doubt present their accounts.’
‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.
The superintendent nodded.
A funeral for Quantum, I thought. Coffin windows, pall roof. Lowering the remains into the ground would probably follow. Even if any of the fabric of the house should prove sound enough, would Malcolm have the stamina to rebuild, and live there, and remember?
He stood up, the blanket clutched around him, looking infinitely older than his years, a sag of defeat in the cheeks. Slowly, in deference to the shaky state of his legs, Malcolm, the superintendent and I made our way along past the kitchen and out into the front drive.
The ambulances had departed, also one of the fire-engines, but
therope across the gateway had been overwhelmed, and the front garden was full of people, one young constable still trying vainly to hold them back.
A bunch in front of the rest started running in our direction as soon as we appeared, and with a feeling of unreality I saw they were Ferdinand, Gervase, Alicia, Berenice, Vivien, Donald, Helen… I lost count.
‘Malcolm,’ Gervase said loudly, coming to a halt in front of us, so that we too had to stop. ‘You’re alive!’
A tiny flicker of humour appeared in Malcolm’s eyes at this most obvious of statements, but he had no chance of answering as the others set up a clamour of questions.
Vivien said, ‘I heard from the village that Quantum had blown up and you were both dead.’ Her strained voice held a complaint about having been given erroneous news.
‘So did I,’ Alicia said. ‘Three people telephoned… so I came at once, after I’d told Gervase and the others, of course.’ She looked deeply shocked, but then they all did, mirroring no doubt what they could see on my own face but also suffering from the double upset of misinformation.
‘Then when we all get here,’ Vivien said, ‘we find you aren’t dead.’ She sounded as if that too were wrong.
‘What did happen?’ Ferdinand asked. ‘Just look at Quantum.’
Berenice said, ‘Where were you both, then, when it exploded?’
‘We thought you were dead,’ Donald said, looking bewildered.
More figures pushed through the crowd, horror opening their mouths. Lucy, Edwin and Serena, running, stumbling, looking alternately from the wounded house to me and Malcolm.
Lucy was crying, ‘You’re alive, you’re alive!’ Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Vivien said you were dead.’
‘I was told they were dead,’ Vivien said defensively. Dim-witted… Joyce’s judgement came back.
Serena was swaying, pale as pale. Ferdinand put an arm round her and hugged her. ‘It’s all right, girl, they’re not dead after all. The old house’s a bit knocked about, eh?’ He squeezed her affectionately.
