by Dick Francis
‘I don’t feel well,’ she said faintly. ‘What happened?’
‘Too soon to say for certain,’ Gervase said assertively. ‘But I’d say one can’t rule out a bomb.’
They repudiated the word, shaking their heads, covering their ears. Bombs were for wars, for wicked schemes in aeroplanes, for busstations in far places, tor cold-hearted terrorists… for other people. Bombs weren’t for a family house outside a Berkshire village, a house surrounded by quiet green fields, lived in by an ordinary family.
Except that we weren’t an ordinary family. Ordinary families didn’t have fifth wives murdered while planting geraniums. I looked around at the familiar faces and couldn’t see on any of them either malice or dismay that Malcolm had escaped. They were all beginning to recover from the shock of the wrongly reported death and also beginning to realise how much damage had been done to the house.
Gervase grew angry. ‘Whoever did this shall pay for it!’ He sounded pompous more than effective.
‘Where’s Thomas?’ I asked.
Berenice shrugged waspishly. ‘Dear Thomas went out early on one of his useless job-hunting missions. I’ve no idea where he was going. Vivien telephoned after he’d left.’
Edwin said, ‘Is the house insured against bombs, Malcolm?’
Malcolm looked at him with dislike and didn’t answer.
Gervase said masterfully, ‘You’d better come home with me, Malcolm. Ursula will look after you.’
None of the others liked that. They all instantly made counterproposals. The superintendent, who had been listening with attentive eyes, said at this point that plans to take Malcolm home would have to be shelved for a few hours.
‘Oh, really?’ Gervase stared down his nose. ‘And who are you?’
‘Detective Superintendent Yale, sir.’
Gervase raised his eyebrows but didn’t back down. ‘Malcolm’s done nothing wrong.’
‘I want to talk to the superintendent myself,’ Malcolm said. ‘I want him to find out who tried to destroy my house.’
‘Surely it was an accident,’ Serena said, very upset.
Ferdinand still had his arm round her. ‘Face facts, girl.’ He hesitated, looking at me. ‘Vivien and Alicia told everyone you were both living here again… so how come you escaped being hurt?’
‘Yes,’ Berenice said. ‘That’s what I asked.’
‘We went to London for a night out and stayed there,’ I said.
‘Very lucky,’ Donald said heartily, and Helen, who stood at his elbow and hadn’t spoken so far at all, nodded a shade too enthusiastically and said, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘But if we’d been in the office,’ I said, ‘we would have been all right.’
They looked aiong the front of the house to the far corner where the office windows were broken but the walls still stood.
‘You wouldn’t be in the office at four-thirty in the morning,’ Alicia said crossly. ‘Why should you be?’
Malcolm was growing tired of them. Not one had hugged him, kissed him, or made warm gestures over his survival. Lucy’s tears, if they were genuine, had come nearest. The family obviously could have accommodated his death easily, murmuring regrets at his graveside, maybe even meaning them, but looking forward also with well-hidden pleasure to a safely affluent future. Malcolm dead could spend no more. Malcolm dead would free them to spend instead.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to the superintendent, ‘I’m cold.’
An unwelcome thought struck me. ‘Did any of you,’ I asked the family, ‘tell Joyce… about the house?’
Donald cleared his throat. ‘Yes, I… er… broke it to her.’
His meaning was clear. ‘You told her we were dead?’
‘Vivien said you were dead,’ he said, sounding as defensive as she had. ‘She said I should tell Joyce, so I did.’
‘My God,’ I said to the superintendent, ‘Joyce is my mother. I’ll have to phone her at once.’
I turned instinctively back to the house, but the superintendent stopped me, saying the telephones weren’t working.
He, I and Malcolm began to move towards the gate, but we had gone only halfway when Joyce herself pushed through the crowd and ran forward, frantically, fearfully distraught.
She stopped when she saw us. Her face went white and she swayed as Serena had done, and I sprinted three or four long strides and caught her upright before she fell.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, holding her. ‘It’s all right. We’re alive.’
‘Malcolm …’
‘Yes, we’re both fine.’
‘Oh, I thought… Donald said… I’ve been crying all the way here, I couldn’t see the road …’ She put her face against my jacket and cried again with a few deep gulps, then pushed herself off determinedly and began searching her tailored pockets for a handkerchief. She found a tissue and blew her nose. ‘Well, darling,’ she said, ‘as you’re alive, what the hell’s been going on?’
She looked behind Malcolm and me and her eyes widened.
‘The whole bloody tribe come to the wake?’ To Malcolm she said, ‘You’ve the luck of the devil, you old bugger.’
Malcolm grinned at her, a distinct sign of revival.
The three ex-wives eyed each other warily. Any mushy idea that the near-death of the man they’d all married and the near-destruction of the house they’d all managed might have brought them to sisterly sympathy was a total non-starter.
‘Malcolm can come and stay with me,’ Joyce said.
‘Certainly not,’ Alicia said instantly, clearly alarmed. ‘You can take your precious Ian. Malcolm can go with Gervase.’
‘I won’t have it,’ Vivien said sharply, if Malcolm’s going anywhere, ‘It’s fitting he should stay with Donald, his eldest son.’
Malcolm looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
‘He’s staying with me,’ I said. ‘If he wants to.’
‘In your flat?’ Ferdinand asked.
I had an appalling vision of my flat disintegrating like Quantum but, unlike Quantum, killing people above and below.
‘No, not there,’ I said.
‘Then where, darling?’ Joyce asked.
‘Wherever we happen to be.’
Lucy smiled. It was the sort of thing she was happy with. She pulled her big brown cloak closer round her large form and said that it sounded a thoroughly sensible proposal. The others looked at her as if she were retarded instead of the brains of the tribe.
‘I’ll go wherever I want to,’ Malcolm said flatly, ‘and with Ian.’
I collected a battery of baleful glares, all of them as ever afraid I would scoop their shares of the pool: all except Joyce, who wanted me to.
‘As that’s settled,’ she said with a hint of maternal smugness which infuriated all the others, ‘I want to see just how bad the damage is to the house.’ She looked at me briefly. ‘Come along, darling, you can show me.’
‘Run along, mummy’s boy,’ Gervase said spitefully, smarting from having been spurned by Malcolm.
‘Poor dear Ian, tied to mummy’s apron strings.’ Berenice’s effort came out thick with detestation. ‘Greedy little Ian.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ Serena said plaintively, ‘Ian gets everything, always. I think it’s beastly.’
‘Come on, darling,’ Joyce said, ‘I’m waiting.’
I felt rebellious, tried to smother it, and sought for a different solution.
‘You can all come,’ I said to them. ‘Come and see what really happened here.’
The superintendent had in no way tried to break up the family party but had listened quietly throughout. I happened to catch his eye at that point, and he nodded briefly and walked back beside Malcolm as everyone slowly moved round to the rear of the house.
The extent and violence of the damage there silenced even Gervase. All of the mouths gaped: in all eyes, horrified awe.
The chief fireman came over and with a certain professional relish began in a strong Berkshire accent
to point out the facts.
‘Blast travels along the lines of least resistance,’ he said. ‘This is a good strong old house, which I reckon is why so much of it is still standing. The blast, see, travelled outwards, front and back from a point somewhere near the centre of the main upper storey. Some of the blast went upwards into the roof, bringing down some of those little attic bedrooms, and a good bit of blast, I’d reckon, blew downwards, making a hole that the upper storey and part of the attic just collapsed into, see what I mean?’
Everyone saw.
‘There’s this wall here,’ he pointed to the one between what had been the sitting-room and what was still the dining-room, ‘this wall here, with the chimney built into it, this is one of the main load-bearing walls. It goes right up to the roof. Same the other side, more or less. Those two thick walls stopped the blast travelling sideways, except a bit through the doorways.’ He turned directly to Malcolm. ‘I’ve seen a lot of wrecked buildings, sir, mostly burned, it’s true, but some gas explosions, and I’d say, and mind you, you’d have to get a proper survey done, but I’d say, on looking at this house, that although it got a good shaking you could think of rebuilding it. Good solid Victorian house, otherwise it would have folded up like a pack of cards.’
‘Thank you,’ Malcolm said faintly.
The fireman nodded. ‘Don’t you let any fancy demolition man tell you different, sir. I don’t like people being taken advantage of when they’re overcome by disasters. I’ve seen too much of that, and it riles me. What I’m telling you is a straight opinion. I’ve nothing to gain one way or the other.’
‘We’re all grateful,’ I said.
He nodded, satisfied, and Gervase finally found his voice.
‘What sort of bomb was it?’ he asked.
‘As to that, sir, I wouldn’t know. You’d have to wait for the experts.’ The fireman turned to the superintendent. ‘We shut off the electricity at the meter switch in the garage when we got here, and likewise turned off the mains water under a man-hole cover out by the gate. The storage tank in the roof had emptied through the broken pipes upstairs and water was still running when we got here, and all that water’s now underneath the rubble. There’s nothing I can see can start a fire. If you want to go into the upper storey at the sides, you’ll need ladders, the staircase is blocked. I can’t vouch for the dividing walls up there, we looked through the windows but we haven’t been inside, you’d have to go carefully. We didn’t go up to the attic much, bar a quick look from up the ladder. But down here, you should be all right in the dining-room and in that big room the other side of this mess, and also in the kitchen and the front room on the far side.’
‘My office,’ Malcolm said.
The superintendent nodded, and I reflected that he already knew the layout of the house well from earlier repeated visits.
‘We’ve done as much as we can here,’ the fireman said. ‘All right if we shove off now?’
The superintendent, agreeing, went a few steps aside with him in private consultation and the family began to come back from suspended animation.
The Press photographers moved in closer, and took haphazard pictures of us, and a man and a woman from different papers approached with insistent questions. Only Gervase seemed to find those tolerable and did all the answering. Malcolm sat down again on the pine chair, which was still there, and gathered his blanket around him, retreating into it up to his eyes like a Red Indian.
Vivien, spotting him, went over and told him she was tired of standing and needed to sit down and it was typically selfish of him to take the only seat, and an insult to her, as she was the senior woman present. Glancing at her with distaste, Malcolm got to his feet and moved a good distance away, allowing her to take his place with a self-satisfied smirk. My dislike of Vivien rose as high as her cheekbones and felt as shrewish as her mouth.
Alicia, recovered, was doing her fluttery feminine act for the reporters, laying out charm thickly and eclipsing Serena’s little-girl ploy. Seeing them together, I thought that it must be hard for Serena to have a mother who refused to mature, who in her late fifties stilldressed and behaved like an eighteen-year-old, who for years had blocked her daughter’s natural road to adulthood. Girls needed a motherly mother, I’d been told, and Serena didn’t have one. Boys needed one too, and Joyce wasn’t one, but I’d had a father all the time and in the end I’d also had Coochie, and Serena hadn’t had either, and there lay all the difference in the world.
Edwin was having as hard a time as Donald in putting on a show of rejoicing over Malcolm’s deliverance.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said to me bitterly, catching my ironic look in his direction. ‘Malcolm despises me - and don’t bother to deny it, he makes it plain enough - and I don’t see why I should care much for him. Of course, I wouldn’t wish him dead …’
‘Of course not,’ I murmured.
‘… but, well, if it had happened …’ he stopped, not actually having the guts to say it straight out.
‘You’d have been glad?’ I said.
‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I could have faced it,’ he said.
I almost laughed. ‘Bully for you, Edwin,’ I said. ‘Hang in there, fellow.’
‘I could have faced your death, too,’ he said stuffily.
Oh well, I thought. I asked for that.
‘How much do you know about bombs?’ I asked.
‘That’s a ridiculous question,’ he said, and walked off, and I reflected that Norman West had reported Edwin as spending an hour most days in the public library, and I betted one could find out how to make bombs there, if one persevered.
Berenice said to me angrily, ‘It’s all your fault Thomas is out of work.’
I blinked. ‘How do you make that out?’
‘He’s been so worried about Malcolm’s behaviour that he couldn’t concentrate and he made mistakes. He says you could get Malcolm to help us, but of course I tell him you won’t, why should you, you’re Malcolm’s pet.’ She fairly spat the last word, the rage seething also in her eyes and tightening all the cords in her neck.
‘You told Thomas that?’ I said.
‘It’s true,’ she said furiously. ‘Vivien says you’ve always been Malcolm’s favourite and he’s never been fair to Thomas.’
‘He’s always been fair to all of us,’ I said positively, but of course she didn’t believe it.
She was older than Thomas by four or five years and had married him when she was well over thirty and (Joyce had said cattily) desperate for any husband that offered. Ten years ago, when I’d been to their wedding, she had been a thin, moderately attractive woman lit up by happiness. Thomas had been proud of himself and proprietary. They had looked, if not an exciting couple, stable and full of promise, embarking on a good adventure.
Ten years and two daughters later, Berenice had put on weight and outward sophistication and lost whatever illusions she’d had about marriage. I’d long supposed it was basic disappointment which had made her so destructive of Thomas, but hadn’t bothered to wonder about the cause of it. Time I did, I thought. Time I understood the whole lot of them, because perhaps in that way we might come to know who could and who couldn’t murder.
To search through character and history, not through alibis. To listen to what they said and didn’t say, to learn what they could control, and what they couldn’t.
I knew, as I stood there looking at the bunch of them, that only someone in the family itself could go that route, and that if I didn’t do it, no one else would.
Norman West and Superintendent Yale could dig into facts. I would dig into the people. And the problem with that, I thought, mocking my own pretension, was that the people would do anything to keep me out.
I had to recognise that what I was going to do could produce more trouble than results. Spotting the capability of murder could elude highly-trained psychiatrists, who had been known to advise freedom for reformed characters only to have them go straight out a
nd kill. A highly-trained psychiatrist I was not. Just someone who could remember how we had been, and could learn how we were now.
I looked at the monstrously gutted house and shivered. We had returned unexpectedly on Monday; today was Friday. The speed of planning and execution was itself alarming. Never again were we likely to be lucky. Malcolm had survived three attacks by sheer good fortune, but Ferdinand wouldn’t have produced healthy statistics about a fourth. The family looked peacefully normal talking to the reporters, and I was filled with a sense of urgency and foreboding.
Eleven
One of Malcolm’s dogs came bounding across the grass towards him, followed a few seconds later by the other. Malcolm put a hand out of his blanket and patted them, but with more absentmindedness than welcome. After them came Arthur Bellbrook with a face of consternation and concern which lightened considerably when he set eyes on Malcolm. In his grubby trousers and ancient tweed jacket, he came at a hobbling run in old army boots and fetched up very out of breath at Malcolm’s side.
‘Sir! You’re alive! I went to Twyford to fetch some weedkiller. When I got back, they told me in the village …’
‘Gross exaggeration,’ Malcolm said, nodding.
Arthur Bellbrook turned to me, panting. ‘They said you were both dead. I couldn’t get down the road… had to come across the fields. Look at the house!’
I explained about our going to London, and asked him what time he’d gone home the previous day.
‘Four o’clock, same as always. Say three-forty, then. About then.’ He was beginning to get his breath back, his eyes round with disbelief as he stared at the damage.
Nearer to three-thirty, I privately reckoned, if he was admitting to going home early at all.
‘Did you go in the house at any time during the day?’ I asked.
He switched his gaze from the ruins to me and sounded aggrieved. ‘No, I didn’t. You know I couldn’t have. You’ve been locking the place like it’s a fortress since you came back, and I didn’t have a key. Where could I have got a key from?’
