by Tom Sharpe
In response the Major threaded his way through the gardens of Numbers 4 and 2, and accompanied by two privates carrying a theodolite and a striped pole, promptly set this up on the pavement and began to take sightings down Willington Road while carrying on a conversation with the officer in the hedge.
‘What do you mean you couldn’t stop them?’ demanded the Major when he learnt that the quads and an old lady had left the house next door and gone into the Wilts’. But before the officer could think of an answer they were interrupted by Professor Ball.
‘What’s the meaning of all this?’ he demanded, regarding the two long-haired privates and the theodolite with equal distaste.
‘Just making a survey for the new road extension,’ said the Major, improvising hastily.
‘Road extension? What road extension?’ said the Professor, transferring his disgust to the handbag the Major had over his shoulder.
‘The proposed road extension to the by-pass,’ said the Major.
Professor Ball’s voice rose. ‘By-pass? Did I hear you say there’s a proposal to put a road through here to the by-pass?’
‘Only doing my job, sir,’ said the Major, wishing to hell the old fool would get lost.
‘And what job is that?’ demanded the Professor, taking a notebook from his pocket.
‘Surveyor’s Department, Borough Engineering.’
‘Really? And your name?’ asked the Professor with a nasty glint in his eye. He wetted the end of his ballpen with his tongue while the Major hesitated.
‘Palliser, sir,’ said the Major. ‘And now, sir, if you don’t mind, we’ve got to get on.’
‘Don’t let me disturb you, Mr Palliser.’ The Professor turned and stalked into his house. He returned a moment later with a heavy stick.
‘It may interest you to know, Mr Palliser,’ he said, brandishing the stick, ‘that I happen to sit on the Highways and Planning Committee of the City Council. Note the word “city”, Mr Palliser. And we don’t have a Borough Engineering Department. We have a City one.’
‘Slip of the tongue, sir,’ said the Major, trying to keep one eye on the Wilts’ house while conscious of the threat of the stick.
‘And I suppose it was another slip of the tongue that you said that the City of Ipford was proposing to build an extension of this road to the by-pass …’
‘It’s just a vague idea, sir,’ said the Major.
Professor Ball laughed dryly. ‘It must indeed be vague considering we don’t yet have a by-pass and that as Chairman of the Highways and Planning Committee I would be the first to hear of any proposed alterations to the existing roads. What’s more, I happen to know a great deal about the use of theodolites and you don’t look through the wrong end. Now then, you will kindly remain where you are until the police arrive. My housekeeper has already phoned …’
‘If I could have a word with you in private,’ said the Major, fumbling frantically in his handbag for his credentials. But Professor Ball knew an imposter when he saw one and, as Wilt had predicted, his reaction to men who carried handbags was violent. With the descent of his stick the Major’s credentials tipped from his handbag and clattered on the ground. They included one walkie-talkie, two revolvers and a teargas grenade.
‘Fuck,’ said the Major, stooping to retrieve his armoury, but Professor Ball’s stick was in action again. This time it caught the Major on the back of the neck and sent him sprawling in the gutter. Behind him the private in charge of the theodolite moved swiftly. Throwing himself on the Professor he pinned his left arm behind his back and with a karate chop knocked the stick from his right hand.
‘If you’ll just come quietly, sir,’ he said, but that was the last thing Professor Ball intended to do. Safety, from men pretending to be surveyors who carried revolvers and grenades, lay in making as much noise as he could and Willington Road was aroused from its suburban torpor by yells of ‘Help! Murder! Call the police!’
‘For God’s sake gag the old bastard,’ shouted the Major, still scrabbling for his revolvers, but it was too late. Across the road a face appeared at the attic skylight, was followed by a second, and before the Professor could be removed in silence they had disappeared.
*
Squatting in the darkness beside the water tank Wilt was only dimly aware that something odd was happening in the street. Gudrun Schautz had decided to take a bath and the tank was rumbling and hissing but he could hear the reactions of her companions clearly enough.
‘Police!’ one of them yelled. ‘Gudrun, the police are here.’
Another voice shouted from the balcony room. ‘There are more in the garden with rifles.’
‘Downstairs quickly. We take them on the ground.’
Footsteps clattered down the wooden staircase while Gudrun Schautz from the bathroom shouted instructions in German and then remembered to bawl them in English.
‘The children,’ she shouted, ‘hold the children.’
It was too much for Wilt. Disregarding the bag and the machine gun he was holding he hurled himself at the door, fell through it into the kitchen and promptly sprayed the ceiling with bullets by accidentally pulling the trigger. The effect was quite remarkable. In the bathroom Gudrun Schautz screamed, downstairs the terrorists began firing into the back garden and at the little group including Professor Ball across the street, and from both the street and the back garden the SGS returned their fire fourfold, smashing windows, adding new holes in the leaves of Eva’s Swiss cheese plant and generally pock-marking the walls of the living-room where Mrs de Frackas and the quads were enjoying a Western on TV until the Mexican rug on the wall behind them was dislodged and covered their heads.
‘Now then, children,’ she said calmly, ‘there’s no need to be alarmed. We’ll just lie on the floor until whatever’s happening stops.’ But the quads were not in the least alarmed. Inured by continual gunfights on television, they were perfectly at home in the middle of a real one.
The same could hardly be said for Wilt. As the plaster from the perforated ceiling drifted down on to him he scrambled to his feet and was making for the stairs when a burst of small-arms fire heading through the back windows of the landing and out the front deterred him. Still clutching the sub-machine gun he stumbled back into the kitchen and then realized that the infernal Fräulein Schautz was behind him in the bathroom. She had stopped screaming and might at any moment emerge with a gun. ‘Lock the bitch in,’ was his first thought, but since the key was on the inside … Wilt looked round for an alternative and found it in a kitchen chair which he jammed under the door-handle. To make this doubly secure he tore the flex from a table-lamp in the main room and dragged it through before tying a loop to the handle and attaching the other end to the leg of the electric stove. Then having secured his rear he made another sortie to the stairs, but the battle below still raged. He was just about to risk going down when a head appeared on the landing, a head and shoulders carrying the same sort of weapon he had just used. Wilt didn’t hesitate. He slammed the door of the flat, pushed up the safety lock and then dragged a bed from the wall and lodged it against the door. Finally he picked up his own gun and waited. If anyone tried to come through the door he would pull the trigger. But then just as suddenly as the battle had begun it ceased.
Silence reigned in Willington Road, a short, blissful, healthy silence. Wilt stood in the attic and listened breathlessly, wondering what to do next. It was decided for him by Gudrun Schautz trying the door of the bathroom. He edged into the kitchen and pointed the gun at the door.
‘One more move in there and I fire,’ he said, and even to Wilt his voice had a strange and unnaturally menacing, almost unrecognizable sound to it. To Gudrun Schautz it held the authentic tone of a man behind a gun. The door handle stopped wriggling. On the other hand there was someone at the top of the stairs trying to get into the flat. With a facility that astonished him Wilt turned and pulled the trigger and once more the flat resounded to a burst of gunfire. None of the bullets hit the door.
They spattered the wall of the bedsitter while the sub-machine gun juddered in Wilt’s hands. The bloody thing seemed to have a will of its own and it was a horrified Wilt who finally took his finger off the trigger and put the gun gingerly down on the kitchen table. Outside someone descended the stairs with remarkable rapidity but there was no other sound.
Wilt sat down and wondered what the hell was going to happen next.
12
Much the same question was occupying Superintendent Misterson’s mind.
‘What’s the hell’s going on?’ he demanded of the dishevelled Major who arrived with Professor Ball and the two pseudo-surveyors at the corner of Willington Road and Farringdon Avenue. ‘I thought I told you nothing must be done until the children were safely out of the house.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said the Major. ‘This old fool had to poke his fucking nose in.’
He fingered the back of his neck and eyed the Professor with loathing.
‘And who might you be?’ Professor Ball asked the Superintendent.
‘A police officer.’
‘Then kindly do your duty and arrest these bandits. Come down the road with a damned theodolite and handbags filled with guns and tell me they’re from the Roads Department and indulge in gun battles …’
‘Anti-Terrorist Squad, sir,’ said the Superintendent and showed him his pass. Professor Ball regarded it bleakly.
‘A likely story. First I’m assaulted by …’
‘Oh, get the old bugger out of here,’ snarled the Major. ‘If he hadn’t interfered we’d have –’
‘Interfered? Interfered indeed! I was exercising my right to make a citizen’s arrest of these imposters when they start shooting into a perfectly ordinary house across the street and …’ Two uniformed constables arrived to escort the Professor, still protesting angrily, to a waiting police car.
‘You heard the damned man,’ said the Major in response to the Superintendent’s reiterated request for someone to please tell him what the hell had gone wrong. ‘We were waiting for the children to come out when he arrives on the scene and blows the gaff. That’s what happened. The next thing you know the sods were firing from the house, and by the sound of it using some damnably powerful weapons.’
‘Right, so what you are saying is that the children are still in the house, Mr Wilt is still there, and so are a number of terrorists. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ said the Major.
‘And all this in spite of your guarantee that you wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the lives of innocent civilians?’
‘I didn’t do a damned thing. I happened to be lying in the gutter when the balloon went up. And if you expect my men to sit quietly and let themselves be shot at by thugs using automatic weapons you’re asking too much of human nature.’
‘I suppose so,’ the Superintendent conceded. ‘Oh well, we’ll just have to go into the usual siege routine. Any idea how many terrorists were in there?’
‘Too bloody many for my liking,’ said the Major, looking to his men for confirmation.
‘One of them was firing through the roof, sir,’ said one of the privates. ‘A burst of fire came through the tiles right at the beginning.’
‘And I wouldn’t say they were short of ammo. Not the way they were loosing off.’
‘All right. First thing is to evacuate the street,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Don’t want any more people involved than we can help.’
‘Sounds as if someone else is already involved,’ said the Major as the muffled burst of Wilt’s second experiment with the machine gun echoed from Number 9. ‘What the hell are they doing firing inside the house?’
‘Probably started on the hostages,’ said the Superintendent gloomily.
‘Hardly likely, old chap. Not unless one of them tried to escape. Oh by the way I don’t know if I mentioned it but there’s a little old lady in there too. Went in with the four girls.’
‘Went in with the four –’ the Superintendent began lividly before being interrupted by his driver with the message that Inspector Flint had called from the bank to know if it was all right for him to leave now as it was closing time and the bank staff …
The Superintendent unleashed his fury on Flint via the driver, and the Major made good his escape. Presently little groups of refugees from Willington Road were making their way circuitously out of the area while more armed men moved in to take their place. An armoured car with the Major perched safely on its turret rumbled past.
‘HQ and Communications Centre are at Number 7,’ he shouted. ‘My signal chappies have rigged you up with a direct line in.’
He drove on before the Superintendent could think of a suitable retort. ‘Damned military getting in the way all the time,’ he grumbled and gave orders for parabolic listening devices to be brought up and for tape recorders and voiceprint analysers to be installed at the Communications Centre. In the meantime Farringdon Avenue was cordoned off by uniformed police at road blocks and a Press Briefing Room established at the police station.
‘Got to give the public their pound of vicarious flesh,’ he told his men, ‘but I don’t want any TV cameramen inside the area. The sods inside the house will be watching and frankly if I had my way there would be press and TV silence. These swine thrive on publicity.’
Only then did he make his way down Willington Road to Number 7 to begin the dialogue with the terrorists.
*
Eva drove home from Mavis Mottram’s in a bad temper. The Symposium on Alternative Painting in Thailand had been cancelled because the artist-cum-lecturer had been arrested and was awaiting extradition proceedings for drug smuggling, and instead Eva had had to sit through two hours of discussion on Alternative Childbirth about which, since she had given birth to four overweight infants in the course of forty minutes, she considered she knew more than the lecturer. To add to her irritation, several ardent advocates of abortion had used the occasion to promote their views and Eva had violent feelings about abortion.
‘It’s unnatural,’ she told Mavis afterwards in the Coffee House with that simplicity her friends found so infuriating. ‘If people don’t want children they shouldn’t have them.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Mavis, ‘but it’s not as easy as all that.’
‘It is. They can have their babies adopted by parents who can’t have any. There are thousands of couples like that.’
‘Yes, but in the case of teenage girls …’
‘Teenage girls shouldn’t have sex. I didn’t.’
Mavis looked at her thoughtfully. ‘No, but you’re the exception, Eva. The modern generation is much more demanding than we were. They’re physically more mature.’
‘Perhaps they are, but Henry says they’re mentally retarded.’
‘Of course, he would know,’ said Mavis, but Eva was impervious to such slights.
‘If they weren’t they would take precautions.’
‘But you’re the one who is always going on about the pill being unnatural.’
‘And so it is. I just meant they shouldn’t allow boys to go so far. After all, once they’re married they can have as much as they like.’
‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that, dear. You’re always complaining that Henry is too tired to bother.’
In the end Eva had had to riposte with a reference to Patrick Mottram and Mavis had seized the opportunity to catalogue his latest infidelities.
‘Anyone would think the whole world revolved round Patrick,’ Eva grumbled to herself as she drove away from Ms Mottram’s house. ‘And I don’t care what anyone thinks, I still say abortion is wrong.’ She turned into Farringdon Avenue and was immediately stopped by a policeman. A barrier had been erected across the road and several police cars were parked against the kerb.
‘Sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to go back. No one is allowed through,’ a uniformed constable told her.
‘But I live here,’ said Eva. ‘I’m only going as far as Willington Road.’
‘What trouble?’ asked Eva, her instincts suddenly alert. ‘Why have they got that barbed wire across the road?’
A sergeant walked across as Eva opened the door of the car and got out.
‘Now then, if you’ll kindly turn round and drive back the way you came,’ he said.
‘Says she lives in Willington Road,’ the constable told him. At that moment two SGS men armed with automatic weapons came round the corner and entered Mrs Granberry’s garden by way of her flowerbed of prize begonias. If anything was needed to confirm Eva’s worst fears this was it.
‘Those men have got guns,’ she said. ‘Oh my God, my children! Where are my children?’
‘You’ll find everyone from Willington Road in the Memorial Hall. Now what number do you live at?’
‘Number 9. I left the quads with Mrs de Frackas and –’
‘If you’ll just come this way, Mrs Wilt,’ said the sergeant gently and started to take her arm.
‘How did you know my name?’ Eva asked, staring at the sergeant with growing horror. ‘You called me Mrs Wilt.’
‘Now please keep calm. Everything is going to be all right.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ And Eva threw his hand aside and began running down the road before being stopped by four policemen and dragged back to a car.
‘Get the medic and a policewoman,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now you just sit in the back, Mrs Wilt.’ Eva was forced into a police car.
‘What’s happened to the children? Somebody tell me what’s happened.’
‘The Superintendent will explain. They’re quite safe so don’t worry.’
‘If they’re safe why can’t I go to them? Where’s Henry? I want my Henry.’
But instead of Wilt she got the Superintendent who arrived with two policemen and a doctor.
‘Now then, Mrs Wilt,’ said the Superintendent, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Not that it couldn’t be worse. Your children are alive and quite safe, but they’re in the hands of several armed men and we’re trying to get them out of the house safely.’