Strathling swung his arm, releasing a curl of flame, and threw the bottle at Keith’s head. It came straight at his face, roaring like a dragon and trailing smoke, and he felt its breath as he ducked and it went by.
Keith dived under it, rolled once and came up, still moving under his own momentum. He met Strathling, chest to chest, and they both went down, winded.
There was a crashing of glass behind him. The bottle fell short, shattering against the kerb. A roaring hedge of flame spread along the gutter and black smoke was borne up on the heat into the still air above the town. Flame ran and flared under Strathling’s car, which was parked askew outside Kechnie’s shop. Passers-by, baffled and curious, were approaching. When the heat forced vapour out of the fuel tank . . .
‘Get back!’ Keith yelled. ‘Stay clear!’ The message must have got across. He saw feet beginning to withdraw.
Keith realised that he was kneeling on the other’s chest and trembling with the effort of not smashing at him.
Strathling had gone limp but his face was working and his eyes were wild. He found a voice at last. ‘Why did you have to interfere?’ he asked querulously. ‘I was only trying to recoup my losses. It wasn’t as if I was harming anybody.’
The Jaguar’s fuel tank went up. The windows of Kechnie’s shop cracked and fell. Keith wondered whether the grocer had been insured through his obliging neighbour.
The Square was full of running feet.
*
When Keith next had leisure to look around he saw that Molly was beside him. A fire engine was blocking most of his view. ‘Where’s Deborah?’ he asked.
Molly smiled. She was always pleased when Keith remembered to be solicitous. ‘She’s all right. When we saw that you weren’t hurt, I thought it would be better if she didn’t hang around. I lent her a few pounds against her earnings. She’s gone to the hairdresser.’
A fireman and a policeman were competing for Keith’s attention but he shrugged them off. ‘You’d better go and get her back,’ he said.
‘Whatever she gets done, it’ll wash off or grow out,’ Molly said. ‘She wasn’t looking too bright and I thought it might cheer her up. Let’s not spoil her fun.’
‘Let’s spoil it straight away before she infects half the girls in the town, and all the preggies,’ Keith said. ‘I think she’s coming down with German measles.’
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The Worried Widow Page 22