by Dick Francis
‘Do they propose to move all that by hand?’ I asked.
‘As much as is necessary,’ Yale said. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you.’ He waved to a man in beige overalls with a blue hard hat who came over to us and asked me my name.
‘Ian Pembroke,’ I said obligingly.
He unzipped the front of his overalls, put a hand inside and drew out a battered navy-blue object which he held out to me with a small satisfied smile. ‘You may need this,’ he said.
Never a truer word. It was my passport.
‘Where on earth did you find it?’ I said, delighted.
He shrugged and pointed to the mess. ‘We always come across a few things unharmed. We’re making a pile of them for you, but don’t get your hopes up.’
I zipped the passport into my new Simpson’s Barbour and thought gratefully that I wouldn’t have to trail around getting a new one.
‘Have you found any gold-and-silver-backed brushes?’ I asked.
‘Not so far.’
‘They’re my father’s favourite things.’
‘We’ll look out for them,’ he said. ‘Now, we’d like you to help us in return.’
‘Anything I can.’
He was a lean, highly professional sort of man, late forties I guessed, giving an impression of army. He said his name was Smith. He was an explosives expert.
‘When you first came here yesterday morning,’ he said, ‘did you smell anything?’
I was surprised. I thought back.
‘Brick dust,’ I said. ‘The wind was stirring it up. It was in my throat.’
He grunted. ‘This looks like a gas explosion, but you’re quite certain, aren’t you, that there was no gas in the house?’
‘Absolutely certain.’
‘Do you know what cordite smells like?’ he asked.
‘Cordite? Like after a gun’s been fired, do you mean?’
“That’s right.’
‘Well, yes, I know what it smells like.’
‘And you didn’t smell that here yesterday morning?’
I looked at him, puzzled. ‘No one was shot,’ I said.
He smiled briefly. ‘Do you know what cordite is?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’
‘It was used very commonly as a general explosive,’ he said, ‘before Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. It’s less fierce than dynamite. It’s sort of high-grade gunpowder, and it’s still used in some types of quarries. It explodes comparatively slowly, at about two thousand five hundred metres per second, or a little over. It explodes like a gas. It doesn’t punch small holes through walls like a battering ram. It’s rather like an expanding balloon that knocks them flat.’
I looked at the house.
‘Yes, like that,’ Smith said.
‘Cordite …’ I frowned. ‘It means nothing.’
‘Its strong smell lingers,’ he said.
‘Well… we didn’t get here until ten, and the explosion was at four-thirty in the morning, and it was fairly windy, though not as rough as today. I should think any smell had blown away.’ I paused. ‘What about all the people who were here before us? What do they say?’
‘They’re not here today,’ Smith said succinctly. ‘I haven’t asked them.’
‘No one said anything to me about a smell,’ I said.
Smith shrugged. ‘We’ll do microscopic tests. We would do, anyway. But it looks to me as if cordite is a strong possibility.’
‘Can you buy cordite?’ I asked vaguely. ‘Can anyone?’
‘No, they definitely can’t,’ Smith said with decision. ‘Twenty years or so ago, maybe, but not now. Since terrorism became a part of life, most sorts of explosives are highly regulated. It’s extremely difficult for the general public to get hold of them. There are a few explosive substances on the open market, but detonators to set them off are not.’
I found I was thinking of cordite in terms of the small quantities used in firearms, whereas to knock down half a house …
‘How much cordite would that have taken?’ I asked, gesturing to the results.
‘I haven’t yet worked it out. A good deal.’
‘What would it have been in?’
‘Anything.’
‘What does it look like? Is it like jelly?’
‘No, you’re thinking of high-explosive TNT. That’s liquid when it’s fed into bomb cases, then it gels inside. Bombs dropped from aircraft are that sort. Cordite is loose grains, like gunpowder. To get a useful result, you have to compress it. Confine it. Then you need heat to start off the chemical reaction, which proceeds at such a rate that the ingredients appear to explode.’
‘Appear!’ I said, and added hastily, ‘OK, I take your word for it, don’t explain.’
He gave me a slightly pitying look but let up on the lecture and went back to searching in the ruins. Superintendent Yale asked if any of the Pembrokes had ever had any connection whatever with quarries. None that I knew of, I said. It was most improbable.
‘Or had friends who had quarries, or who worked in quarries?’
I didn’t know. I’d never heard of any.
My gaze wandered away from Smith and his fellow diggers after truth, and I became more aware of the audience beyond the rope in the garden. There weren’t anything like as many as the day before, but clearly the work in progress was a draw in itself.
Arthur Bellbrook was there again, talking away. He must enjoy the celebrity, I thought. He’d been the one who’d found Moira, and now there was the house… Arthur was talking as if he owned the news, rocking back on his heels and sticking his stomach out. The dogs on their leads patiently waited. It didn’t matter to them, I supposed, that Arthur was into maybe the twentieth account of life and death with the Pembrokes.
A stray piece of memory connected Arthur to the smell of cordite, and I couldn’t think why that should be until I remembered him carrying his shotgun into the house on the day he’d thought I was a burglar.
I cast the stray thought out but it sauntered back, telling me it was nothing to do with Arthur and shotguns.
What then?
I frowned, trying to remember.
‘What’s the matter?’ Yale said, watching me.
‘Nothing, really.’
‘You’ve thought of something. One of your family does have a quarry connection, is that it?’
‘Oh no,’ I half laughed. ‘Not that. The smell of cordite …’
The smell of cordite on a misty morning, and the gardener… not Arthur, but old Fred before him… telling us children to keep out of the way, to go right back out of the field, he didn’t want our heads blown off…
I remembered abruptly, like a whole scene springing to life on a film screen. I walked across to where Smith in his hard blue hat bent to his task and said, without preamble, ‘Does cordite have another name?’
He straightened, with a piece of brick and plaster in his hand.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘It’s commonly called “black powder”.’
Black powder.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Well, we had some here once. But long ago, when we were children. Twenty years ago at least, probably more. But I suppose… some of the family could have remembered… as I just have.’
Yale, who had followed me to listen, said, ‘Remember what?’
‘There used to be four or five great old willow trees down by the stream, across the field.’ I pointed. ‘Those you can see now are only twenty years old or so. They grow very fast… they were planted after they took the old trees down. They were splendid old trees, huge, magnificent.’
Yale made hurrying-up motions with his hands, as if to say the state of long-gone willows, however patrician, was immaterial.
‘They were at the end of their lives,’ I said. ‘If there was a gale, huge branches would crack off. Old Fred, who was the gardener for years here before Arthur, told my father they weren’t safe and they’d have to come down, so he got some foresters to come and fell them.
It was dreadful seeing them come down …’ I didn’t think I’d tell Yale that half the family had been in tears. The trees had been friends, playground, climbing frames, deepest purple imaginary rain forests: and, afterwards, there was too much daylight and the dead bodies being sawn up for firewood and burned on bonfires. The stream hadn’t looked the same when open to bright sunshine; rather ordinary, not running through dappled mysterious shade.
‘Go on,’ Yale said with half-stifled impatience. ‘What’s all this about trees?’
‘The stumps,’ I said. ‘The tree men sawed the trees off close to the ground but left the stumps, and no one could get them out. A tractor came from a nearby farm and tried …’ We’d had a great time then, having rides all day. ‘Anyway, it failed. Nothing else would move the stumps, and Fred didn’t want to leave them there to rot, so he decided to blow them up… with black powder.’
‘Ah,’ Yale said.
Black powder had sounded, somehow, as if it ought to belong to pirates. We’d been most impressed. Fred had got his powder and he’d dug a hole down below the stubborn roots of the first stump, and filled it and set off one enormous explosion. It was just as well he’d cleared us out of the field first because the blast had knocked Fred himself flat although he’d been about a hundred feet away. The first tree stump had come popping out of the ground looking like a cross between an elephant and an octopus, but Malcolm, who came running in great alarm to see what had happened, forbade Fred to blow up the others. As I told the gist of this to Yale and Smith, the second reel of the film was already unrolling in my mind, and I stopped fairly abruptly when I realised what I was remembering.
‘Fred,’ I said, ‘carried the box of black powder back to the tool shed and told us never to touch it. We were pretty foolish but not that crazy. We left it strictly alone. And there the box stayed until it got covered over with other junk and we didn’t notice it or think of it any more …’ I paused, then said, ‘Wouldn’t any explosive be useless after all this time?’
‘Dynamite wouldn’t last much more than a year in a tool shed,’ Smith said. ‘One hot summer would ruin it. But black powder -cordite - is very stable, and twenty years is immaterial.’
‘What are we waiting for?’ Yale said, and walked towards the tool shed which lay behind the garage on the near side of the kitchen garden.
The tool shed was a place I hadn’t thought of looking into the day before: but even if 1 had, I doubted if I would have remembered the black powder. Its memory had been too deep.
‘Where is this box?’ Yale asked.
I looked at the contents of the tool shed in perplexity. 1 hadn’t been in there for years, and in that time it had passed from Fred to Arthur. Fred had had an upturned orange box to sit on while he waited through heavy showers: Arthur had an old fireside chair. Fred had had a tray with a cracked mug and a box of sugar cubes and had come indoors to fetch his tea: Arthur had an electric kettle. Fred had tended old tools lovingly: Arthur had shiny new ones with paint still on the handles.
Beyond the tools and the chair, in the centre section of the spacious shed, were things like mowers, chainsaws and hedgeciippers and, at the furthest shadowy end, the flotsam by-passed by time, like the stuff in the cellar, stood in forgotten untidy heaps.
It all looked unpromisingly undisturbed, but Yale called up a pair of young policemen and told them to take everything out of the tool shed and lay each object separately on the ground. Smith went back to the rubble, but Yale and I watched the policemen and so did Arthur Bellbrook, who came hurrying across the moment he saw what was happening.
‘What’s going on?’ he said suspiciously.
‘When did you last clean out the tool shed?’ Yale asked.
Arthur was put out and beginning to bridle.
‘Just say,’ I said to him. ‘We just want to know.’
‘I’ve been meaning to,’ he said defensively. ‘That’s Fred’s old rubbish, all that at the back.’
The superintendent nodded, and we all watched the outgoing procession of ancient, rusting, broken and neglected tat. Eventually one of the men came out with a dirty wooden box which I didn’t recognise at first because it was smaller than I’d seen in my memory. He put it on the ground beside other things, and I said doubtfully, i think that’s it.’
‘Mr Smith,’ Yale called.
Mr Smith came. Yale pointed at the box, which was about the size of crates used for soft drink bottles, and Smith squatted beside it.
The lid was nailed shut. With an old chisel, Smith prised it open and peeled back the yellowish paper which was revealed. Inside the paper, half-filling the box, there was indeed black powder.
Smith smelled it and poked it around. ‘It’s cordite, all right, and in good condition. But as it’s here, it obviously hasn’t been used. And anyway, there wouldn’t have been anything like enough in this box to have caused that much damage to the house.’
‘Well,’ I said weakly, ‘it was only an idea.’
‘Nothing wrong with the idea,’ Smith said. He looked around at the growing collection of discards. ‘Did you find any detonators?’
He had everyone open every single packet and tin: a lot of rusty staples and nails saw daylight, and old padlocks without keys and rotting batteries, but nothing he could identify as a substance likely to set off an explosion.
‘Inconclusive,’ he said, shrugging, and returned to his rubble.
Yale told Arthur to leave the cordite where it was and do what he liked with the rest, and Arthur began throwing the decaying rubbish into the skip.
I tried to apologise for all the waste of time, but the superintendent stopped me.
‘When you saw the tree stump blown up, which of your brothers and sisters were there?’
I sighed, but it had to be faced. ‘Gervase, Ferdinand and I were always together at that time, but some of the older ones were there too. They used to come for weekends still after they were grown up. Vivien used to make them, so that Malcolm wouldn’t cut them out. Alicia hated it. Anyway, I know Lucy was there, because she wrote a poem about roots shrieking blindly to the sky.’
Yale looked sceptical.
‘She’s a poet,’ I said lamely. ‘Published.’
‘The roots poem was published?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, then. She was there. Who else?’
‘Someone was carrying Serena on his shoulders when we had to leave the field for the explosion. I think it must have been Thomas. He used to make her laugh.’
‘How old were you all at that time?’ Yale asked.
‘I don’t know exactly.’ I thought back. Alicia had swept out not very long after. ‘Perhaps I was thirteen. Gervase is two years older, Ferdinand one year younger. Lucy would have been… um… twenty-two, about, and Thomas nineteen. Serena must have been six, at that rate, and Donald… I don’t know if he was there or not… he would have been twenty-four.’
Yale thoughtfully pulled out his notebook and asked me to repeat the ages, starting with Donald.
‘Donald twenty-four, Lucy twenty-two, Thomas nineteen, Gervase fifteen, myself thirteen, Ferdinand twelve, Serena six.’
‘Right,’ he said, putting a full-stop.
‘But what does it matter, if the cordite is still here?’ I said.
‘They all saw the force of the explosion,’ he said. ‘They all saw it knock the gardener over from a hundred feet away, isn’t that what you said?’
I looked at the shattered house and said forlornly, ‘None of them could have done it.’
Yale put his notebook away. ‘You might be right,’ he said.
Smith again came over to join us. ‘You’ve given me an idea,’ he said to me. ‘You and your tree roots. Can you draw me a plan of where the rooms were, exactly, especially those upstairs?’
I said I thought so, and the three of us went into the garage out of the wind, where I laid a piece of paper on the bonnet of Moira’s car and did my best.
‘The sitting-room stretch
ed all the way between the two thick walls, as you know,’ I said. ‘About thirty feet. Above that…’ I sketched, ‘there was my room, about eight feet wide, twelve deep, with a window on the short side looking out to the garden. Malcolm’s bedroom came next, I suppose about fifteen feet wide and much deeper than mine. The passage outside bent round it… and then his bathroom, also looking out to the garden, with a sort ofdressing-room at the back of it which also led out of the bedroom …’ I drew it. ‘Malcolm’s whole suite would have been about twenty-two feet wide facing the garden, by about seventeen or eighteen feet deep.’
Yale studied the drawing. ‘Your room and the suite together were more or less identical with the sitting-room, then?’
‘Yes, I should think so.’
‘A big house,’ he commented.
‘It used to be bigger. The kitchen was once a morning-room, and where the garage is now there were kitchens and servants’ halls. And on the other side, where the passage now goes out into the garden, there were gun-rooms and flower-rooms and music-rooms, a bit of a rabbit warren. I never actually saw the wings, only photographs of them. Malcolm had them pulled down when he inherited the house, to make it easier to deal with without the droves of servants his mother had.’
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘That explains why there are no sideways-facing windows on the ground floor.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
He borrowed my pen and did some calculations and frowned.
‘Where exactly was your father’s bed?’
I drew it in. ‘The bed was against the wall between his room and the large landing, which was a sort of upstairs place to sit in, over the hall.’
‘And your bed?’
‘Against the wall between my room and Malcolm’s.’
Smith considered the plan for some time and then said, ‘I think the charge here was placed centrally. Did your father by any chance have a chest, or anything, at the foot of his bed?’
