“She’s got her hand on an unexploded bomb,” the man yelled and Beck’s heart went into free fall.
Dina screamed. Matt and Ross reached for their mobile phones.
“No calls,” Beck snapped. “All of you go straight up to the house and stay there. Jane, you phone the emergency services. All of them.”
He started running toward Flick.
“What are you doing?” the guy called. “Man, we have to keep away from there. We need to get the army or something. I have to call my boss. I’m gonna be in so much trouble for letting her help. He’ll kill me.”
Beck jumped over the gate and sprinted across the field. He gulped for breath as he reached her side. “You okay?”
“Just dandy. I thought I’d give a worm a bit of a tickle.”
Beck crouched next to her. Flick’s body largely obscured the hole she’d dug.
“Tell me exactly what you saw and what you did.”
Flick repeated it all. Beck was torn. The likelihood of this being a grenade or a bomb was very small. As far as he knew, Ilkley had not been subject to any air raids but there remained the possibility stray ordinance had been lost or jettisoned from aircraft. Plus the grounds of the Hall could have been used for army maneuvers. Ilkley Moor had been. Beck needed to assume the worst, especially because this was Calamity Flick.
“Can you keep your finger where it is?” he asked.
“If the alternative is losing it and a chunk of my head then I think the answer to that is yes, absolutely, at the moment,” she snapped.
“I’m trying to help.”
“Sorry.” Flick rubbed her forehead in the dirt. “You don’t need to stay. There’s no point two of us losing limbs.”
Beck took hold of her free hand and squeezed her fingers. “I’m staying.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
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“Does trouble follow you or do you follow trouble?”
“Sorry about the pool,” she said. “It was an accident.”
“Jane said it wasn’t your fault, but that was all she’d tell me. What were you doing?”
“Don’t tell Jane I told you, but she and her costume were parting company. It was an emergency. She needed a towel, only Miss Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weenie had other ideas. You happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bit like now really. In fact, a bit like every time I’ve met you.”
Beck laughed. “I had noticed life is never boring when you’re around.”
“Oh God, I can hear it ticking.” Flick gasped. “You have to go. I think I’m destined to kill you. Maybe if you’re not here, I won’t die either.”
“Shhh.” Beck lowered his head to hers and he heard it, too. Faint but definitely ticking.
“I’m not going to leave you,” he said. “But if the ticking stops, forget about keeping your finger on anything. Just get up and run.”
“I really want you to leave.” Flick cast him a miserable glance. “You’re so gorgeous, I’d hate for anything to happen to you.”
“I— What?” Beck asked.
She hesitated then looked straight at him. “You take my breath away.”
Beck’s own breath caught in his throat. He wanted to give the right reply, but what was he supposed to say to that?
“What a pity you’re so hideous,” he said at last.
Flick gave a little laugh. “A guy with a sense of humor, just as I’m going to die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
Flick moaned.
“So have you got your breath back? I’m trained in CPR.” Beck smiled at her. She lifted her head and nodded. “My fingers are going numb because I’m pressing so hard. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’m actually pressing anything at all. Maybe I haven’t touched a button or a switch. Do bombs have buttons or switches? Or is that just in films?”
Several sirens began to sound and the noise grew louder by the second.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Beck said. “Don’t move. Keep your hand exactly where it is.”
“I bet that’s what you tell all the girls.”
“Usually I like some movement.”
Flick grinned.
* * * * *
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Henry couldn’t get into his drive for all the vehicles—several police cars, two fire engines, an ambulance, four army vehicles, a taxi that no one admitted calling and a guy on a moped delivering pizzas. Henry was relieved to see Hartington Hall still appeared to be in one piece. He abandoned his car and walked up the sweep of gravel to the house only to be stopped by a police constable who appeared to be just out of diapers.
“Sorry sir, you’re not allowed past this point.”
“I live here,” Henry said. “What on earth’s going on?”
“This is a potentially dangerous situation. A large unexploded bomb. The whole place could go up. I’ll have to ask you to keep behind the line.”
“What line?”
The policeman gestured in front of him. “Er…this imaginary line.”
“Bollocks,” Henry said. When he spotted more police heading toward him, he slipped to the back door.
Gertrude stood at the window of the drawing room with binoculars around her neck.
“What’s happened?” he shouted in her ear.
“Flick is trapped under a bomb.”
Henry grabbed the binoculars and almost strangled Gertrude he tried to focus on the field.
Although Beck protested, the men from the bomb disposal squad forcibly removed him to a safe distance. Flick watched them dragging him away, wondering if she’d ever see him again. If she did, she’d be embarrassed by what she’d said. If she didn’t, it would be because she was dead. Embarrassed or dead? What a dilemma. Body armor had been draped around her though saving her liver and stomach wasn’t much use if she didn’t have arms and legs. Or a head. She had a feeling the helmet and face guard they’d put on her were unlikely to offer much protection when she lay directly over the bomb. And it was a bomb, Flick decided, because that was just her luck. How could she think it could be anything else?
Only one man remained with her. A sergeant named George and every few minutes he asked her if she was all right and she always said fine.
“You all right?” George asked.
“Fine,” Flick said.
It reminded her of the time she’d spent in hospital after she’d been knocked down by the local vicar speeding to evensong on his bike. The men and women in the ward spent their time competing over how ill they were, but the moment the doctors appeared and asked how they were, they always said “fine” and it had made Flick laugh. She’d been covered in bruises from head to foot and both shoulders had been 82
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dislocated because she’d tried to grab the handlebars as the bike hit her, but when the doctors had come to the foot of her bed, she’d said the same thing. “I’m fine.”
George was encased in protective gear but could move freely. For the last fifteen minutes he’d carefully dug a hole nowhere near her. Flick hadn’t liked to say anything. She wondered if perhaps he was very short-sighted or if there might be some more worrying reason why he wasn’t actually trying to get to the thing she had her finger on.
“Still all right?” George asked.
“Still fine,” Flick said.
As the hole he was making suddenly merged with the one she’d dug, Flick realized what he’d done. He couldn’t get at the bomb without moving her and moving her might be the last thing he ever did. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing for her. No trial. No going to prison for theft. No proving her innocence.
“I want to live,” she blurted.
George’s fingers touched her arm and he gave her a little squeeze.
“All right?” he asked.
“Fine,” Flick answered.
Slowly he began to move soil away from around her hand. Flick wondered if she could ask him to hu
rry because she needed to pee.
* * * * *
“What was Flick doing down there?” Henry asked.
“Some chap came and wanted to know where the marquee was going to go,”
Gertrude said.
“Did she take the monitor with her?”
“Yes. She always wears it when she’s watching me. Can’t even open my bowels in private.”
Henry groaned. If he talked like this when he was her age he wanted Giles to shoot him. He quite liked the Inuit idea of sending their old folks out on ice floes. He wondered if Fewston reservoir ever froze over.
“So why aren’t you wearing your monitor?” Henry asked.
“It was annoying me. It’s over there.”
Henry went over to the fireplace and picked it up from next to the clock.
“Are you all right?” he said into it.
“Fine,” said a man’s voice. “Oh no, the ticking’s stopped.”
“Is there anybody there?” Henry tried.
“You said that without moving your lips and your voice has gone deep.”
“Is there anybody there?” Henry repeated.
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* * * * *
George’s eyes were wide open.
“It’s the monitor round my neck,” Flick said.
George fumbled for a moment and then switched it off. The ticking stopped. Flick’s eyes met his. He turned it back on and the ticking started once more.
“I think that’s one mystery solved,” George said. “But don’t move yet.”
They lay face down, helmet to helmet. Flick realized she could hear a different sound now. As he shifted more soil, the sound became clearer. The strains of a rather tinny rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” rose out of the ground. Flick closed her eyes. Fuck, shit and bollocks.
“You can take your finger away,” George said.
“Are you sure?” Please let it be a bomb. Just not a live one.
“Quite sure.”
Flick moved her hand and sat up. Her arm shook and she pulled it to her chest, massaging her fingers. The sergeant carried on digging until he’d revealed what Flick had been glued to for the last hour.
“Have you defused it?” she asked. “Maybe it’s a bomb in disguise.”
“Not really necessary to defuse a singing reindeer.”
Flick stared in horror at a grubby plastic wall plaque featuring Rudolph’s face and a bulbous red nose. The strains of the Christmas song were now clearly audible.
“Can we pretend it was a bomb?” She glanced toward the house and the hoards of people standing behind yellow tape. It looked as if the whole of Ilkley was there.
“Haven’t you got something you could use to blow it up? Just a little explosion? Even firework-sized? Could we scream and fall on the floor?”
“Too late.” George motioned with his head toward the monitor, which was transmitting the song back to its mate. “Don’t feel too bad. Better safe than sorry. Come on, let’s get you checked out.”
“I’m fine,” she muttered for the hundredth time.
What terrible luck, Flick thought. If only it had been a bomb.
* * * * *
Beck paced up and down, his stomach churning, his heart pounding. He heard Henry laughing behind him and spun round.
“What’s so funny?” Beck demanded.
“Willow bought Giles a present last Christmas, one we couldn’t shut up.”
Henry held up the monitor and Beck heard the strains of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.
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“It drove us all mad. Anything set it off—movement, sound, light. Couldn’t get the bloody batteries out. Giles got rid of it. I think we just found out what he did with it.”
Henry chortled.
One by one those around them started to laugh until a collective roar of merriment rose into the air. Beck’s mouth was still dry. Sweat soaked his shirt. He wanted to laugh with everyone else but couldn’t.
“Where’s she off to?” Henry asked, his gaze following Flick.
“Can we leave now?” Dina whined at Beck’s side.
“Go back and tidy the site first,” Beck said.
He set off after Flick who had stamped her way into the woods. Beck found her sitting on a fallen tree.
“Hiding?” he asked.
“Oh God, can you see me? I’m as thick as a plank so I thought I was well camouflaged.”
She was filthy, her face and arms covered with dirt. Beck sat down next to her.
“Christmas is cancelled,” she said. “I never want to hear ’Rudolph the bloody RedNosed Reindeer’ again.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“Feeling embarrassed, humiliated and a little stupid?” he asked.
“You don’t need to be,” Flick said. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”
Beck laughed. “So, do you remember what you said?”
Her head dropped. “I was desperate. I didn’t want to die without someone wishing I hadn’t.”
Beck edged a little closer. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
He wanted to kiss her. He was going to kiss her. Just—
“Beck, Beck,” Dina called, rushing up.
“What?” Beck snapped and turned to face her.
“Matt won’t come out of the tent. He’s having a panic attack. He’s breathing all funny.”
When Beck turned to Flick, she’d gone.
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Chapter Thirteen
Beck heard the throaty purr of Isobel’s car pulling onto the drive just as he finished eating. Matt and Ross sprang up from the table, tripping over each other in their haste to get to the door. Beck wandered into the hall in time to see them fighting for the honor of carrying her luggage. Isobel Marshall was petite and perfectly formed with large breasts, tiny waist, dancing eyes and long, thick flaxen hair tinted with auburn.
“Hello, gorgeous. Good journey?” Beck asked.
She kissed him on the cheek. “Hello, handsome. No, completely shitty. From Leeds to here was an absolute nightmare. Stop-start all the way, and more bloody speed cameras than lampposts.” She tossed her handbag onto the hall table. “What is there to drink?”
“I’ve…”
“Do you…”
Neither Matt nor Ross finished what they were saying but clattered upstairs to their stash of alcohol.
Isobel handed her car keys to Beck. “Don’t go above eighty. The windscreen wipers have a rhythm of their own and the clutch is temperamental. Don’t shove it down too hard.”
“Isobel, you’re an angel.”
“How’s the dig?”
“Fabulous,” Beck lied.
“Like pig-shite then, I take it?”
“The troops are disillusioned, demoralized and depressed. Now you’re here, that will all change.”
“Is the site really a washout?”
“Today I had to stop them cataloguing gravel. Plus we had the armed forces out this afternoon after a singing Christmas decoration was mistaken for a bomb.”
“Which one of our idiots did that?”
“Fortunately, not one of ours.”
“Ah, lovely boys. What shall we open first?” Isobel beamed at Ross and Matt who’d slid most of the way downstairs, clutching bottles, twin gazes hovering between her face and chest. Dina stood watching, her eyes narrowed. Jane hovered by the kitchen door.
“We’ll stay in, order pizza, get pissed and you can tell me what’s been happening,”
Isobel said.
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Matt and Ross bounced like puppies. Beck expected to see tongues hanging out any second. Dina, on the other hand, stood tapping her feet, coming up to the boil.
“Come on, get some glasses, Jane. I want to know everything. Who’ve we upset so far?”
While Isobel took control, Beck nipped up to get his ba
g. Dina caught him on the way out.
“Where are you going?”
“To stay with a friend.”
“It’s because of me, isn’t it?” She sniffled.
“No,” Beck said. “I need to be somewhere quiet in the evenings to work on my book.”
“Don’t you find me attractive?” Her face crumpled.
Shit. “You’re very attractive.” But not when she pulled her face into that shape.
“You don’t think my nose is too big?”
Yes. “No.” Beck backed toward the door.
“We were all so close to death. I realized I shouldn’t be afraid of expressing my feelings.” She took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. Beck found himself holding his breath.
“I really, really like you, Beck. I feel we have a connection.”
Was it a girl thing, Beck wondered? If he was faced with possible death, he wanted to eat his favorite meal and watch Manchester United slaughter Chelsea, not talk about feelings. Only he was glad Flick had told him he took her breath away and now he wished he’d said the same thing, instead of making that pathetic crack about her being ugly. She’d laughed, but what if she was insulted? God, what an idiot.
“Dina, I’m flattered that you fancy me,” he said. “But it’s not going to go anywhere. You’re my student. I’m responsible for your education. I’m not going to have a relationship with you.” He felt relieved and very mature when he’d said it. If he’d really been mature he’d have said it a week ago.
* * * * *
When Josh and Kirsten walked in humming “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, Flick groaned.
“How do you know?” she demanded.
“Bush telegram, otherwise known as local radio. Haven’t you had a call from the TV yet?” Josh asked
“Don’t tell me they know my name,” Flick said in horror.
“You’re an unidentified local woman,” Kirsten said.
“No nice adjectives with that?”
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“Such as?” Kirsten asked.
“Beautiful, attractive, witty, intelligent. Or did they actually say stupid, half-soaked and idiotic?”
Then the phone rang.
“I’m not in. I don’t live here,” Flick said.
Kirsten picked up the receiver and shook her head. “Sorry, could you say that again? Er…could you say that again?”
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