by Tom Sharpe
There wasn’t time to look for them. Behind him Maud had finally overcome the combined forces of grease and gravity and was coming down the passage promising to strangle him with her own bare hands. Sir Giles waited no longer. He galumphed off in his gumboots down the drive and across the lawn towards the pinetum. Behind him Lady Maud slithered into the downstairs lavatory and emerged with a shotgun. She went to the front door and opened it. Sir Giles was still visible across the lawn. Lady Maud raised the gun and fired. He was out of range but at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that he wouldn’t come near the house again in a hurry. She put the gun back and began to clean up the mess.
23
In the Lodge Blott heard the shot and leapt out of bed. Lady Maud’s telephone call had disturbed him. Why should she want to know if the gates were locked? And why had she whispered? Something was up. And with the sound of the shotgun Blott was certain. He dressed and went downstairs with his twelve-bore to the Land-Rover which he had parked just inside the archway. Before getting in he checked the lock on the gate. It was quite secure. Then he drove off up to the Hall and parked outside the front door and went inside.
‘It’s me, Blott,’ he called into the darkness. ‘Are you all right?’
From the kitchen there came the sound of someone sliding about and a muffled curse.
‘Don’t move!’ Lady Maud shouted. ‘There’s oil everywhere.’
‘Oil?’ said Blott. Now that he came to think of it there was a stench of oil in the house.
‘He’s tried to burn the house down.’
Blott stared into the darkness and promised that if he got the chance he would kill him. ‘The bastard,’ he muttered. Lady Maud slithered down the passage with a squeegee.
‘Now listen carefully, Blott,’ she said. ‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘Anything,’ said Blott gallantly.
‘He came in through the pinetum. I’ve locked the gate there so he can’t get out but his car must be up at Wilfrid’s Castle. I want you to drive round there and remove the dis … the thing that goes round.’
‘The rotor arm,’ said Blott.
‘Right,’ said Lady Maud. ‘And while you are about it you might as well put extra locks on both the gates. We must make quite sure that innocent people don’t get into the park. Do you understand?’
Blott smiled in the darkness. He understood.
‘I’ll take the rotor arm off the Land-Rover too,’ he said.
‘A wise precaution,’ Lady Maud agreed. ‘And when you have finished come back here. I don’t think he’ll return tonight but it might be as well to take precautions.’
Blott turned to the door.
‘There’s just one other thing,’ said Lady Maud. ‘I don’t think we’ll feed the lions in the morning. They’ll just have to fend for themselves for a day or two.’
‘I didn’t intend to,’ said Blott and went outside.
Lady Maud sighed happily. It was so nice to have a real man about the house.
*
At Finch Grove Ivy Bullett-Finch’s feelings were quite the reverse. What was left of the house seemed to be about the man and in any case what was left of Mr Bullett-Finch was real only in a material sense. He had died, as he had lived, concerned for the welfare of his lawn. Dundridge arrived with the Chief Constable in time to pay his last respects. As firemen carried her husband’s remains out of the cellar, Mrs Bullett-Finch, relieved of the burden of guilt about the oven, vented her feelings on the Controller Motorways Midlands.
‘You murderer,’ she screamed, ‘you killed him. You killed him with your awful ball.’ She was led away by a policewoman. Dundridge looked balefully at the ball and crane.
‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to do with it.’
‘We have been led to understand by your deputy, Mr Hoskins, that you gave orders for random sorties to be made by task forces of demolition experts,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘It would rather appear that they’ve carried out your instructions to the letter.’
‘My instructions?’ said Dundridge. ‘I gave no instructions for this house to be demolished. Why should I?’
‘We were rather hoping you would be able to tell us,’ said the Chief Constable.
‘But it’s not even scheduled for demolition.’
‘Quite. Nor to the best of my knowledge was the High Street. But since your equipment was used in both cases—’
‘It’s not my equipment,’ shouted Dundridge, ‘it belongs to the contractors. If anyone is fucking responsible—’
‘I’d be glad if you didn’t use offensive language,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘The situation is unpleasant enough as it is. Local feeling is running high. I think it would be best if you accompanied us to the station.’
‘The station? Do you mean the police station?’ said Dundridge.
‘It’s just for your own protection,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘We don’t want any more accidents tonight, now do we?’
‘This is monstrous,’ said Dundridge.
‘Quite so,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘And now if you’ll just step this way.’
As the police car wound its way slowly through the rubble that littered the High Street, Dundridge could see that Hoskins had been telling the truth when he called Guildstead Carbonell a disaster area. The transformer still smouldered in the grey dawn, the Primitive Methodist Chapel lived up to at least part of its name, while the horribly misshapen relics of a dozen cars crouched beside the glass-strewn pavement. What the iron ball hadn’t done with the aid of the telegraph pole to end Guildstead Carbonell’s reputation for old-world charm, the conflagration at Mr Dugdale’s garage had. Ignited by some unidentifiable public-spirited person who had brought out a paraffin lamp to warn passers-by to watch out for the debris, the blast from the petrol storage tanks had blown in what few windows remained unbroken after Blott’s passing and had set fire to the thatched roofs of several delightful cottages. The fire had spread to a row of almshouses. The simultaneous arrival of fire engines from Worford and Ottertown had added to the chaos. Working with high-pressure hoses in total darkness they had swept a number of inadequately clothed old-age pensioners who had escaped from the almshouses down the street before turning their attention to the Public Library which they had filled with foam. To Dundridge, staring miserably out of the window of the police car, the knowledge that he was held responsible for the catastrophe was intolerable. He wished now that he had never set eyes on South Worfordshire.
‘I must have been mad to have come up here,’ he thought.
The same thought had already occurred to Sir Giles though in his case the madness he had in mind was in no way metaphorical. As dawn broke over the Park, Sir Giles wrestled with the lock on the gate to the footbridge and tried to imagine how it had got there. It had not been on the gate when he arrived. He wouldn’t have been able to enter if it had. But if the existence of the lock was bad enough, that of the fence was worse and it certainly hadn’t been there when he had last been at the Hall. It was an extremely high fence with large metal brackets at the top and four strands of heavy barbed-wire overhanging the Park so that it was evidently designed to stop people getting out rather than trespassers getting in.
It was at this point that Sir Giles gave up the struggle with the lock and decided to look for some other way out. He followed the fence along the edge of the pinetum and was about to clamber over the iron railings when the sense of unreality that had come over him with the sudden appearance of a large lock where no lock had previously been took a decided turn for the worse. Against the grey dawn sky he saw a head, a small head with a long nose and knobs on it. Below the head there was a neck, a long neck, a very long neck indeed. Sir Giles shut his eyes and hoped to hell that when he opened them he wouldn’t see what he thought he had seen. He opened them but the giraffe was still there. ‘Oh my God,’ he murmured and was about to move away when his eye caught sight of something even more terrifying. In the long grass fifty yar
ds behind the giraffe there was another face, a large face with a mane and whiskers.
Sir Giles gave up all thought of looking for a way out in that direction. He turned and stumbled back into the pinetum. Either he had gone mad or he was in the middle of some fucking zoo. Giraffes? Lions? And what the hell was it that he had almost stumbled across during the night? An elephant? He got back to the gate and looked at the lock hopefully. But instead of one lock there were now two and the second was even larger than the first. He was just trying to think what this meant when he heard a noise on the path across the river. Sir Giles looked up. Blott was standing there with a shotgun, smiling down at him. It was a horrible smile, a smile of quiet satisfaction. Sir Giles turned and ran into the pinetum. He knew death when he saw it.
By the time Blott got back to the Hall Lady Maud was down and making breakfast in the kitchen.
‘What took you so long?’ she asked.
‘I moved the Bentley,’ Blott told her. ‘I brought it round and put it in the garage. I thought it would look more natural.’
Lady Maud nodded. ‘You are probably right,’ she said. ‘People might have started asking questions if they found it left up by the church. Besides if he did get out he might have telephoned the AA for assistance.’
‘He isn’t going to get out,’ said Blott, ‘I saw him. He’s in the pinetum.’
‘Well it’s his own fault. He came up here to burn the house down and whatever happens now he has only himself to blame.’ She handed Blott a plate of cereal. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you a cooked breakfast. The electricity has been cut off. I telephoned the electricity office in Worford but they say there has been a power failure.’
Blott ate his cereal in silence. There didn’t seem much point in telling her about his part in the power failure and besides she seemed in a talkative mood herself.
‘The trouble with Giles was,’ she said using the past tense in a way that Blott found most agreeable, ‘that he liked to think of himself as a self-made man. I have always thought it an extremely presumptuous phrase and in his case particularly inappropriate. I suppose he had some right to call himself a man, though from my experience of him I wouldn’t have said virility was his strong point, but as for being self-made, he was nothing of the kind. He made his money, and of course that’s what he meant by self, by speculating in property, by evicting people from their homes and by obtaining planning permission to put up office blocks. At least my family made its money selling beer, and very good beer at that. And it took them generations to do it. There’s nothing so splendid about that but at least they were honest men.’ She was still talking and doing the washing-up when Blott left to go out to the kitchen garden.
‘Is there anything else you want done about him?’ he asked as he left.
Lady Maud shook her head. ‘I think we can just leave nature to take its course,’ she told him. ‘He was a great believer in the law of the jungle.’
*
In Worford Police Station Dundridge was having difficulty with the law of the land. Hoskins had been no great help.
‘According to him,’ said the Superintendent in charge of the case, ‘you gave specific orders for random sorties to be made by bulldozers on various properties. Now you say you didn’t.’
‘I was speaking figuratively,’ Dundridge explained. ‘I certainly didn’t give any instructions that could lead anyone but a complete idiot to suppose that I wanted the late Mr Bullett-Finch’s house demolished.’
‘Nevertheless it was demolished.’
‘By some lunatic. You don’t seriously imagine I went out there and smashed the house up myself?’
‘If you’d just keep calm, sir,’ said the Superintendent, ‘all I am trying to do is to establish the chain of circumstances that led up to this murder.’
‘Murder?’ mumbled Dundridge.
‘You’re not claiming it was an accident, are you? A person or persons unknown deliberately take a large crane and use it to pulverize a house in which two innocent people are sleeping. You can call that all sorts of things but not an accident. No sir, we are treating this as a case of murder.’
Dundridge thought for a moment. ‘If that’s the case there must have been a motive. Have you given any thought to that?’
‘I’m glad you mentioned motive, sir,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Now I understand that Mr Bullett-Finch was an active member of the Save the Gorge Committee. Would you say that your relations with him were marked by an unusual degree of animosity?’
‘Relations?’ shouted Dundridge. ‘I didn’t have any relations with him. I never met the man in my life.’
‘But you did speak to him over the telephone on a number of occasions.’
‘I may have done,’ said Dundridge. ‘I seem to remember his phoning once to complain about something or other.’
‘Would that have been the occasion on which you told him that quote “If you don’t stop pestering me I’ll see to it that you’ll lose a bloody sight more than a quarter of an acre of your bleeding garden” unquote?’
‘Who told you that?’ snarled Dundridge.
‘The identity of our informant is irrelevant, sir. The question is did you or did you not say that?’
‘I may have done,’ Dundridge admitted, promising himself that he would make Hoskins’ life difficult for him in future.
‘And wouldn’t you agree that the late Mr Bullett-Finch has in fact lost more than a quarter of an acre of his bleeding garden?’
Dundridge had to admit that he had.
As the morning wore on the Controller Motorways Midlands had the definite impression that a trap was closing in around him.
*
In Sir Giles’ case there was the absolute conviction. His attempts to scale the wire fence had failed miserably. Oily gumboots were not ideal for the purpose and Sir Giles’ physical activities had been of too passive a nature to prepare him at all adequately for scrambling up wire mesh or coping with barbed-wire overhangs. What he needed was a ladder, but his only attempt to leave the pinetum to look for one had been foiled by the sight of a rhinoceros browsing in the rockery and of a lion sunning itself outside the kitchen door. Sir Giles stuck to the pinetum and waited for an opportunity. He waited a long time.
By three o’clock in the afternoon he was exceedingly hungry. So were the lions. From the lower branches of a tree overlooking the park Sir Giles watched as four lionesses stalked a giraffe, one moving upwind while the other three lay in the grass downwind. The giraffe moved off and a moment later was thrashing around in its death throes. From his eyrie Sir Giles watched in horror as the lionesses finished it off and were presently joined by the lions. Stifling his disgust and fear Sir Giles climbed down from the branch. This was his opportunity. Ignoring the rhinoceros which had its back to him he raced across the lawn towards the house as fast as his gumboots would allow. He reached the terrace and hurried round past the conservatory where Lady Maud was watering a castor-oil plant. As he ran past she looked up and for a moment he had an impulse to stop and beg her to let him in but the look on her face was enough to tell him he would be wasting his time. It expressed an indifference to his fate, almost an ignorance of his existence, which was in its way even more frightening than Blott’s terrible smile. As far as Maud was concerned he simply wasn’t there. She had married him to save the Hall and preserve the family. And now she was prepared to murder him by proxy for the same purpose. Sir Giles had no doubt about that. He ran on into the yard and opened the garage door. Inside stood the Bentley. He could get away at last. He pushed the doors back and got into the car. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned them and the starter whirred. He tried again but the car wouldn’t start.
In the kitchen garden Blott listened to the engine turning over. He was wasting his time. He could go on till Doomsday and the car wouldn’t start. Blott had no sympathy for him. ‘Nature must take its course,’ Lady Maud had said and Blott agreed. Sir Giles meant nothing to him. He was like the pests in th
e garden, the slugs or the greenfly. No that wasn’t true. He was worse. He was a traitor to the England that Blott revered, the old England, the upstanding England, the England that had carved an Empire by foolhardiness and accident, the England that had built this garden and planted the great oaks and elms not for its own immediate satisfaction but for the future. What had Sir Giles done for the future? Nothing. He had desecrated the past and betrayed the future. He deserved to die. Blott took his shotgun and went round to the garage.
Lady Maud in the conservatory was having second thoughts. The look on Sir Giles’ face as he hesitated outside had awakened a slight feeling of pity in her. The man was afraid, desperately afraid, and Lady Maud had no time for cruelty. It was one thing to talk in the abstract about the law of the jungle, but it was another to participate in it.
‘He’s learnt his lesson by now,’ she thought, ‘I had better let him go.’ And she was about to go out and look for him when the phone rang. It was General Burnett.
‘It’s about this business of poor old Bertie,’ said the General. ‘The committee would like to come over and have a chat with you.’