Chapter 42 – The Cauldron boils over. It’s the end for you and me. August 1973.
My sixty hours of life as a particularly confused young man were about to end. The last grains of sand were running out, and I had no way of stopping the flow. My adversary was in no hurry, finishing his tidying up without approaching. He wasn’t going to become dishevelled again tonight, not at my expense at least.
I was wearing fast shoes on slow feet and it was about time I got into gear and made a move. Pivoting, I launched myself back towards the pub, only to discover a wall of heat and flame. I could hear laughter moving closer in the corridor behind me. There were no weapons to grab in the corridor, no fire extinguishers, no spare brooms, or anything that would fall to hand in a Hollywood action movie. I was completely defenceless against a cosh wielding John Smith.
My only course of action was escape through the toilets. These were equipped with barred windows though not of very high quality. I thought I could prise them off. First of all I had to keep John out of the way until the fire took hold in the corridor. The intense heat would break his vigil. Then he would be waiting outside the windows! It was all very hopeless. I had no choice so I dived into the toilets, jamming the door with my foot, leaning hard against it with my shoulder. I was my own barricade against the firestorm approaching.
A minute passed. I remained tense against the door knowing he would sense me weakening. Time in a situation like this releases the tension, your strength ebbs away. I was determined to keep my weight on the door, to keep him outside until it got too hot in the corridor. I wondered if I could hack up through the roof of the toilets into the bedrooms above. It was all a fantasy. I had no tools to get through the substantial building’s fabric.
An enormous blow to the door stunned me awake from this fantasy. Also my shoulder hurt like hell. John Smith hadn’t rushed at the door with a shoulder. He’d brought the full weight of his cosh hard into the woodwork were he thought I’d be standing. Such was the vigour of John Smith’s violent single blow the low quality paper cored door had shattered. The contact point on the inside panel of the door was my shoulder. I thought it was broken for the first few seconds. Higher up and he might have managed to hit me in the head. My pressure on the door was beginning to ease. Another blow delivered at full force next to the door handle saw the door begin to disintegrate.
“Pete! I only want a few quiet words,” John said. He was using his best friendly voice with an inability to hide the honeyed malevolence in every word. I could hear behind his soft-toned voice the same inflection he’d used when he described how he’d suffocated Raymond Nice. The same voice he used moments before he killed Smiggy, worst of all I’ve heard hints of that voice somewhere else before, but I couldn’t place it. Perhaps I’d used a similar tone in my forgotten life.
I wasn’t considering letting him in. I was frantically searching the room for a weapon. I didn’t have any time left. A huge force pushed the door. It could have been a bear on the other side using all its cold power. It was off its hinges before I had time to think. He kept coming, pushing me backwards at speed while I was trapped behind the door. I nearly went down because I was unable to move my feet backwards. He just pushed me across the urine slick tiled floor. This movement only lasted a second until I was sandwiched between two doors, the one off its hinges driving me backwards and the other to a toilet cubicle. The cubicle door opened outwards and remained solid against my back. It wasn’t locked, it wasn’t occupied, which I suppose was lucky in the event.
I was winded. There wasn’t a single breath left in me. Gasping like a goldfish thrown from a broken bowl I slumped to the wet floor. My new clothes soaked up whatever it was making it so wet. Under normal circumstances this would have disgusted me. Out of breath and out of luck on this strange Monday night I didn’t care a toss. He smiled down at me, all the while tidying his suit. I’d managed to ruffle his princely feathers a little. The feeling that this would be the full extent of the damage he suffered sickened me.
Fighting for breath I was in no state to react when he dragged me along the floor using my hair. We came to a stop by the trough of the communal floor level urinal. The drain was half blocked with cigarette papers and those smelly little blocks of lavender that’s supposed to take the smell away. What they’d succeeded in doing was to make the trough two inches deep in a thick pungent yellow liquid. In one swift movement he pulled me into the gutter, my head bashing hard against the porcelain splash back of the urinal. The throbbing inside my head was ignored because he pushed on my neck with one foot forcing the side of my face and half my mouth down into the piss.
“Now, Peter, tell me where all the stuff is. If you’re good I might only cripple you, then again?” John said. Credit to the man. He was wearing his very best Nazi twin perfect smile. I was trying to breathe through my nose. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to drink any of that disgusting liquid. He kept the pressure on my neck until I gasped. Urine flooded into my mouth making me splutter. I was fighting for breath drowning in second-hand real ale. He eased his foot to let me breathe. I was coughing like a seventy-a-day smoker first thing in the morning, my lungs rebelling against the pungent liquid.
The respite was only a few seconds before he pushed down hard again. I was drowning this time, going down for good. My head was twisted round as he pushed his foot forwards towards the back of the urinal. This time both my mouth and nose were under what you could loosely describe as water.
“If you know where our stuff is… bang on the floor twice. If you don’t… don’t bother,” John said.
I banged on the floor twice. The pressure on my neck eased, but John didn’t help drag me out of the trough. If I’d not had the strength to push myself out of that hellish place he would have taken the pleasure of watching me drown in piss rather than have LSD and money.
“I got all the acid, and I got £1000 at least!” I spluttered, my voice pitching up. I could hear it and so could he.
“Not interested. You got yourself out of the piss and into the shit. Now I’m going to look in your eyes as I kill you.” John said this and his smile never moved. The man was some kind of LSD driven homicidal robot, insane with the joy of his own power. He raised his arm high, the cosh at least eight feet above my head. He was going to bring it down in one terrible crashing blow to shatter my skull. I didn’t know how long the pain would last as my head exploded beneath the impact. I could already see it breaking with the classic vision of a watermelon dropped from a roof. He brought the cosh down hard and I waited for the end. I waited for the last sands of my time to run out.
There was a huge shattering of porcelain as he took an enormous chunk out of one of the two heavy washbasins. The cosh went up again, and this time the target had changed. The second of the two washbasins exploded into a myriad of shards. These scattered across the wet floor in that dismal lavatory.
“Brutal isn’t it?” John was demonstrating his power over everything. There was a moment when I wondered if I could inflict any damage on this psychopath, and the moment didn’t pass. I summoned all my strength and made one last desperate effort. Before he could raise his cosh again to bring it down on his third target which I was certain was my head, I was up on my feet.
“Throw that fucking thing away and fight like a man!” I screamed. I sounded stupid to myself, as if I could believe for one second that he had some twisted honour. I knew there was nothing other than brutal thug in his soul.
“Okay! I’ll kill you with my bare hands!” John said. The bright smile had turned into a grotesque sneer. To my surprise he threw the cosh over the toilet door into the cubicle. I couldn’t make a dash for it because the door opened outwards. I hunkered and made myself ready, getting my balance just so, ready for the fight. John prepared himself by straightening the sleeves of his suit and adjusting his tie. He was looking down at his shoes in disapproval. In my low stance I swept my hand through the trough of urine throwing it directly into his eyes.
; “You little cunt. You’re dead!” John said. He continued to be concerned about his appearance not about a man-to-man fight to the death. This nonchalance was coldly disturbing because I wanted him angry and not cold with his calculation. I had time to scoop another handful this time containing several cigarette butts that were floating at one end. Some of these stuck to his face. His smile had slipped, and he charged at me like a wild bull. I’d achieved my aim of getting him angry, taking away the cold and calculating. Now he was going to rip me apart in three seconds rather than enjoy a leisurely two minutes for his own pleasure.
I was waiting for the impact which came with an enormous bang as John passed by inches away and continued straight through the cubicle door next to me. It shattered on impact sending John sprawling onto the lavatory. The porcelain which was full to the brim blocked with shit and toilet paper shattered. He was swimming in filth. Even in a situation like this I had a moment for just a fraction of a second to enjoy it, even though I couldn’t understand it.
The understanding came seconds later as Millicent entered the room wielded left-handed by Double-Barrelled Dave who’d suffered from bad eyesight before he’d been pissed on by John. He took one look at me before he fired. The pellets ripped past me and into the cubicle. John Smith was a hard man to kill. Without a second of hesitation he was on his feet and had pushed the remains of the door back to fill the space. The first shot that belched from Millicent’s dark eyes had ricocheting off the tiled wall digging at least a dozen lead pellets into John Smith’s left bicep.
The second barrel was aimed at the shattered bottom corner of the door. This barrel took its toll on John Smith’s right leg. This wasn’t a direct hit and some of the pellets were wide of their target. Others dug into the door but he’d sustained enough hits to make him cry out with pain. This didn’t stop him. He staggered bloodied from the cubicle straight towards the indestructible Dave Hartley Sparrow. This time the blows came from his fist, delivered with a vicious brutality to the side of Hartley Sparrow’s head. The already badly damaged gunman buckled under the first blow falling to the floor unconscious. My Nazi twin decided to kick him in the ribs as hard as he could just a couple of times. This delighted me because John, in his haze of pain, got it wrong. He used his football leg, his wounded right leg.
Doubled up in pain John slumped to the floor and I saw my opportunity lying in the excrement in the corner of the broken cubicle. The deadly cosh was clearly visible and waiting for my grasp. Only a handful of seconds later I was wielding it down towards my adversaries head. Contact was never made as John Smith saw me from the corner of his eye, pivoted, and pummelled me with a huge haymaker straight to the testicles. I folded up like a deckchair in a gale and went down.
The room was a shattered wet mess. One man was lying unconscious on his way towards death. The other was rubbing his right thigh and holding his left arm, injured far worse than it first appeared, but not enough to stop him killing me or getting away. Not enough injuries to cause permanent damage, only enough to slow him on this one occasion. Right now was my only chance.
I was in a sea of pain, and my one-time friend, if that’s what he ever was, climbed with great effort to his feet, every movement slow and deliberate. I was fighting my way upwards, breathless with the pain in my groin. In my hand I had a weapon. I didn’t have the cosh. This had flown from my grasp during the blow to my testicles. I wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough to retrieve it from the far corner, but I’d found something else. We staggered together like old prize fighters at the end of sixteen hard fought rounds. John, with only his right hand usable, took a swing. With the weight going onto his leg the agony was too much, and the limb gave just enough for his fist to whistle under my chin.
I swung with my weapon and missed his body. I missed his head. It was like a bloody comedy, a very bloody comedy. I feared stopping, so I pirouetted on the wet floor like a ballet dancer and made contact on the second pass. My weapon was a large triangular-shaped piece of shattered porcelain. To my horror, when it made contact the shard produced a strange, meaty squelch as it pierced John Smith’s jugular vein. Blood shot across the room, staining the mirrors, the walls and running dark across the floor. To my surprise I noticed it turned orange as it ran into the yellow of the urinal.
He didn’t move. His blue eyes concentrated on my blue eyes. John Smith, with blood squirting across the room, was refusing to die. Standing quite still he wasn’t moving a muscle, so I remained tense and ready for anything. In a final effort he did something that remains strange years later. He broke out into a big happy smile.
“Thank you,” he whispered. To this day I don’t know what he meant. Was he being sarcastic because I soiled his expensive suit, or was it for taking away his misery in life, for proving somebody could get one over on him, or for being at one time his best and only friend. I don’t know of any other friend he had. Nobody would go to his funeral.
He crumpled downwards like somebody had pulled the skewer from inside a kebab. One minute he was erect and smiling, the next a loose pile of dead meat.
The blood was spreading out across the floor all around him. He was now lying in a warm red lake covering most of the slick floor. It was more than horrible. It was ghastly in the extreme. Then I noticed the roof in the toilets was starting to bubble. It was blistering, making the yellow paint on the ceiling go darker and blow into bubbles. The fire started by the warring mushbies was taking the whole pub down.
The Cauldron was not boiling above the fire, but being consumed in the devilish inferno. The fire had spread quickly into the roof space and tongues of flame were probing for new fuel. The pub always smelt of old oil from the heating system mixed with the smell of stale beer, and this had proved even more helpful to the rampant fire. Once the flames reached the boiler room at the back of the bar the place went up like a tinderbox. The years of leaking oil leached into the floor exploded instantly into a fireball, shattering windows and sucking in more oxygen to fan the inferno.
Sirens could be heard in the distance. I had to act with speed. I’d killed the man, and he’d been a man without scruples who would have killed me. That, however, doesn’t stand up in court without evidence. We were Nazi twins with our perfect white teeth and no dental records. I swapped his wristwatch for my own Omega. This was inscribed with my name. I don’t know if I bought it or if it was a present. The watch might be returning to its original owner. I didn’t know if it was a gift from the late John Smith. It certainly wasn’t from my parents. I thought the fire might not consume everything, so I emptied my wallet of some money and put it in his jacket pocket. I took his wallet and at the last minute noticed his monogrammed cufflinks.
As I was pulling these from his shirt sleeves I noticed he was wearing a monogrammed gold ring. Was this man branded everywhere? The gold may have melted if the fire was hot enough, but I was taking no chances. It was very tight on his finger and I was running out of time. I hacked off his finger with a sharp-edged piece of the broken porcelain. I worked away for long seconds cracking the bone and cutting through flesh. During this time parts the ceiling started to fall into the room. Dave Hartley Sparrow was not dead. A loud groaning was coming from his mouth, and he was staring from one eye.
It took me a long grizzly minute to remove the gold ring. I placed the finger where it belonged next to his hand to give the impression falling debris had severed it. Pungent fumes were now filling the room coming down black and acrid from above. I grabbed Dave Hartley Sparrow by the feet, and holding him like a wheelbarrow dragged him along the corridor towards the back door. No human voices could be heard coming from the pub, only the sound of the Osmonds singing “Let Me In”, and the roaring of the inferno in the bar.
As I pulled him towards the fresh air the black fumes became lower and lower. The ceiling at the pub end of the corridor started to collapse. A huge piece of furniture came crashing through into the corridor only inches away from Dave’s head. It was a large Chatwood office safe.
This coming from upstairs and not behind the bar must have contained all of Billy’s fiddle money. There was a hysterical laugh coming from me at the thought of being crushed to death by the profit from all that water. Water was what we needed right now, and lots of it!
I pulled Dave into the middle of the back yard well away from the pub. I didn’t know what to do with him. He was conscious but not in any state to move. I went over to open the large back gate. It was locked with a padlock and two chains with more locks. If the pub collapsed it would fill that back yard with burning rubble. I didn’t like Dave Hartley Sparrow but I couldn’t leave him lying in the middle of that yard. I was pondering if I could put him in the farthest corner and cover him with something. It would be impossible to lift him over the eight foot high gate with steel spikes on the top.
“Look out, Peter, for God’s sake look out!” a voice shouted in the dark.
Numbed by the fumes from the fire, and the fierce battle I had just survived, this was an illusion, a hallucination coming from outside The Cauldron. This voice had come out of the cool beyond the inferno. Two seconds of numbness passed by. I could not imagine what I was hearing. A woman’s voice shouting for somebody called Peter to “look out”.
“For God’s sake, Peter, look behind you!” the female voice shouted.
I turned to see Hartley Sparrow still lying on his back. His fierce grip would never leave his beloved Millicent behind in the flames. He was pointing her at me, unwavering in his aim. It was sawn-off shotgun with a wide spread. He couldn’t miss in that small yard. Both barrels were fired at once. The noise was terrible and the pain must have been only for a second before death.
Over the top of the gate, to my surprise, I could see my mother’s pale, frightened face. I didn’t know it at the time but she was standing on the bonnet of the Land Rover. I could see two smoking barrels above the gate next to her horror stricken face. She hadn’t waited to see if Millicent was going to fire, she’d come to help after Jane’s frantic requests to save me. They had arrived during the evacuation to be informed by a local policeman who was the first man on the scene that everybody was out of the pub, and remarkably nobody was trapped in the inferno. My sister knew I was somewhere inside and insisted to my mother the showdown would be at the back out of sight in the pub’s yard. They were in the process of looking over the locked gates when I dragged the semi-conscious Double-Barrelled Dave out into that small enclosed area. My luck, for once in my life, was in.
Acid Bubbles Page 38