The shock of touching something warm almost raised a scream, until I realized it was no rat, but a human hand.
By now I had few doubts. I put my face to the hole. ‘Jo?’ It was the merest breath of sound.
‘Who are you?’
‘Dorothy. Dorothy Martin. And you’re Jo Carter. You can’t imagine how glad I am to . . . well, see you isn’t exactly the word, is it?’
‘Oh, don’t make me laugh,’ came the agonized whisper out of the darkness. A stifled cough or two followed.
‘You have your medicine, don’t you?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Yes. Wait a moment.’ An interval. Then a clearer whisper. ‘How did you know about the medicine?’
‘Oh, we know quite a lot, Alan and I. And I’ll tell you all about it when we get out of here. I don’t want to talk too much now, because . . .’ I trailed off as we heard the bang of a door. ‘Quiet! He’s back!’
‘Well, ladies,’ came the hated voice, full of geniality now. ‘I do apologize for the primitive conditions. I expect you’ve been a bit cold, so I propose to take care of that.’ There was a sound as of splashing water. What was he . . .?
Then my nose told me. Above all the other repellent smells rose, strong and penetrating, the smell of gasoline.
I heard a gasp. ‘Petrol! He’s going to . . .’
‘Not if I can stop him, he’s not,’ I whispered back.
Too loudly. Footsteps neared the door. ‘Oh, you think you can stop me, do you? One of those superwomen, are you? Think if you talk tough enough, you’re going to grow balls? Sorry, bitch, it doesn’t work that way. I’m told the smoke puts you out almost at once, and you never know another thing. I’d prefer a more painful death for both of you, but this has gone on long enough. Have to destroy the evidence. Oh, and never fear. I’ll find that bitch Sarah and her bastard son, if it’s the last thing I do. So you’ll both have died for nothing. Night-night, sweethearts!’
I heard the click of a lighter, then another, and another.
The language this time surpassed all his earlier efforts. He finally stomped off, and I heard the nasty sound of a hard slap. ‘Wake up, you useless turd! Matches! Give me your matches!’
Fred. Poor Fred, dragged into this mess simply by doing me a favour. ‘Leave him alone!’ I shouted. ‘He isn’t involved in this at all. Leave him alone!’ I shoved desperately, with my bed slat, at where I assumed the door to be.
The door was of the same cheap construction as the wall. It splintered, than gave way completely, shoving the chest aside, and I was standing in the front room.
Ben turned to me with a roar of pure rage, matches in his hand. I screamed, and then several things seemed to happen at once. Ben slipped in a pool of gasoline and fell, hard. The chair where Fred was tied up fell over, and Fred was somehow out of it and at Ben’s throat. And from outside came the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, the loud, frenzied barking of a dog. Watson! Watson, somehow escaped from whatever fate Ben had planned for him, and come to find his people.
I should let him in. I should help Fred disable Ben. I was too confused to know what to do first, but a cry from Jo roused me. ‘What’s happening? Help! Somebody get me out of here!’
Jo! She was the first order of business. I screamed back at her. ‘I’m going to try to break down your door! I don’t know where the key is!’ And at the sound of my voice Watson solved one problem himself. He found the open shutter and leaped into the house.
Barking and jumping, alternately licking my hand and growling at the fight now raging on the floor, he added considerably to the confusion. I tried to look for something to use as a battering ram. Jo’s door was old and solid; my bed slat wasn’t going to make much headway against that.
Besides, I noted with despair, the hinges were on this side. The door opened out. What I needed was a lever of some kind, a good stout piece of metal to force between the door and the jamb . . .
A tyre iron!
Fred’s car would have one. Someplace. What a frustrating thought! It would take too many precious minutes to get there, find it, and get back. Meanwhile Fred was losing his battle. He was older than Ben, and injured, and Ben was fighting, I saw with despair, with the strength born of madness.
The reek of gasoline, and the noise, was making me dizzy. I stumbled to the door for some air. I could get away, easily. But I couldn’t leave Fred and Jo and my valiant dog to be vaporized when the house went up.
And then I opened the door and saw the car. Ben’s car? It didn’t matter. A car, with the boot open. That was where the gasoline came from. That was where I would find my crowbar.
I rummaged, tore another couple of nails, swore (forgetting all my good resolutions), and finally laid my hands on the tool kit and a small but serviceable tyre iron. I was back in the house with it in seconds and working at the door, tears streaming down my face from stress and the ever-stronger gasoline fumes. I didn’t dare spare any attention for Fred and Ben. Get us out! The refrain pounded in my brain. Get us out!
The door began to give. ‘Push!’ I screamed. ‘Jo, push on the door.’
She pushed, I pried, and she fell into the room just as Ben got to his feet, matches in hand. He shouted in triumph, and I gave Jo a shove. ‘Run! I’ve got to help Fred!’
She didn’t run. She bent over, grabbed Fred by one arm as I reached the other. Watson got a good grip of his foot, and we had dragged him nearly to the door when Ben managed to strike flame from his match.
Inferno. Flames, choking smoke. Screams. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, could react only with instinct. Somewhere there was freedom, air I could breathe, escape from this hell. Someone was nudging me. There was pain, sharper than the pain from the flames. I moved away from it, but it came again.
Dragging a weight with me, for an eternity of moments, I emerged into the sunlight and was struck to the ground by something heavy. Then came a blessed coolness on my face, and then welcome oblivion.
THIRTY-THREE
Hours later, I was half-lying on a couch in the lounge of the Holly Tree, Alan next to me with my hand firmly clasped in his. Ranged around the small room were Jo, Inspector Owen, Superintendent Davids, Paul Jones and his mother, Fred, and, of course, Watson. The dog was sound asleep after having devoured most of a steak. The rest of us were sipping the tipple of our choice and trying to sort things out. Gathered around the edges were our hostess, Pam, the two Irish ladies, who couldn’t bear to miss anything, Penny Brannigan, the manicurist, and a woman I vaguely recognized, but couldn’t put a name to.
The only thing that spoiled the party atmosphere was our appearance, four of us looking like The Spirit of ’76. Jo, Fred, and I had superficial burns, in addition to the wounds Ben had inflicted. Watson had been burned a little, too, and had scratches on his nose, another little present from the villain of the piece. And the three humans, at least, were a bit dazed with the relief of still being alive.
‘How did you find Paul and Sarah?’ had been my first question when I was more or less sitting up and taking notice.
‘I was stupid about that. It took far too long for me to think of ringing up Rose and Co. for Paul’s mobile number, and then I had to leave several messages before Paul rang back. He’d forgotten to turn it on, which is, I suppose, why the police couldn’t reach him.’
‘And why did they leave the Ritz?’
Alan had shrugged. ‘Couldn’t bear the inactivity any more, from what I could gather. Had to be up and doing.’
Cabin fever, I’d thought. But in such a luxurious cabin!
‘But how did you find me?’ I asked now, taking a steadying gulp of my bourbon. ‘I never got a chance to give you the coordinates. And I wasn’t there any more, anyway.’
‘You’d given me a rough idea, so I cruised around and looked for the car. Of course when you didn’t answer the second time I called, I knew something had gone badly wrong. I was beginning to be feel a trifle panicky when my mobile rang.’ He smiled at the woman I couldn’t
quite place. ‘That’s when Helen, here, came to the rescue.’
Helen Hoster, of course! ‘But how . . . !’
‘You gave me your mobile number, remember?’ she said. ‘And I heard from one of Gillie’s therapists that she’d seen a car around the old Blanchard place, and wondered about it. So I phoned you, only your husband answered, and he thought it was worth investigating, since the farm was near where you had said you were.’
Alan took up the tale. ‘And when I found the car, and your phone and bag, and blood all over the place, with you nowhere in sight . . .’ He in turn tilted his glass.
‘Did you follow the dog biscuits?’
‘Did I do what?’
‘I left a trail . . . never mind. It seemed a good idea at the time. So how did you find me, then?’
‘It seemed logical that you might be at the old farm. It was the only habitation in sight, after all. And when I neared and heard a dog barking its head off, at a place that was supposed to be deserted, I got out and ran.’
He had already told me the rest of the story. How he found three of us lying just outside the burning farmhouse, Watson lying on top of me. How he found an old water butt in the yard and managed somehow to drench us all with its contents.
‘Though in fact Watson had already managed to douse most of the flames, rolling on all of you,’ he had said. ‘That dog has more sense than many a human.’
‘Well, you certainly turned up in the nick of time,’ I said now. ‘That house was due to explode any minute, and we were awfully close to the doorway.’
‘But what I can’t understand is how you found the place, Dorothy,’ said Jo. She was enjoying an abstemious glass of tonic water. We’d offered gin to go with it, but she said she’d seen enough families destroyed by drink to put her off alcohol for a lifetime. ‘It was out in the middle of nowhere,’ she went on, ‘and you don’t know the country around here.’
‘Ah, but Fred does. He was the one who found it really. I just came along for the ride.’
A chorus of voices lauded Fred, who buried his red face in his beer. ‘What I meant,’ Jo’s voice rose above the rest, ‘was, how did you even have any idea where to begin looking?’
‘I followed Brother Cadfael,’ I said, and then snickered at the look on everyone’s face. ‘There’s a wonderful book by Ellis Peters where Cadfael – he’s a twelfth-century monk – anyway, he figures out what happened on the strength of a strand of hair from a horse’s mane. And I found some blond hair at the shed where you ended up when you tried to run away, and decided it was from a palomino horse, and then . . .’
‘Then she worked out where she would be if she were a horse, and went there, and there it was,’ put in my loving husband.
‘So you knew I’d escaped on a horse. Remarkable! More like Sherlock Holmes, I’d say. I nearly made it, too. I’d nicked that dreadful man’s mobile—’
‘Oh, so I was wrong there! I thought you’d probably found one somebody had lost.’
‘Well, in a way I did. The beast dropped his and didn’t notice; he was too busy abusing me. So when he left me to go for my asthma inhaler, I stole the phone and one of his horses, got away as best I could, and made the nine-nine-nine call as soon as I thought I was far enough away. Unfortunately I hadn’t got quite far enough.’
There was a depressed little silence. Alan cleared his throat. ‘More of anything, anyone?’ He gestured at a rather impressive array of bottles and at the remains of pizza, fish, chips, and Indian takeout that littered the room.
‘However you did it, Mrs Martin . . .’ Sarah began.
‘Please. Dorothy.’
‘However you did it, Dorothy, you’ve freed Jo. And us.’ She raised her wine glass in a rather sober toast, and we responded in the same way.
For Ben would never abuse anyone again. Even if Alan had known that anyone was still inside the burning house, entering it had been out of the question. Part of me hoped that Ben had been right in his description of death by fire, that smoke inhalation induced a coma and there was no pain. Part of me doubted it. That fire had been so intense, and certainly I had experienced pain (though much of it was from the nips Watson had administered to get me moving). There was so little left of the man that his true identity might never be known, but I wasn’t sure that mattered any more. And the worst part of me whispered that Ben deserved to die horribly. I had another sip of bourbon to drown that unworthy thought.
‘There was good in him once,’ said Sarah.
‘No, there wasn’t, Mum.’ Paul had been silent until then, his arm around his mother. ‘You only thought there was. He was a right sh— a right prat, all along.’
‘Have you worked out, Mrs Martin, why poor old Symonds was killed?’ asked Inspector Owen.
‘I think so, and I think you have too.’
I looked at Jo, who was nodding in her chair. Her short grey hair had been combed in Casualty, but there had been no attempt at styling. Her dark pants and top were clean and neat, but had never been fashionable. Fashion wouldn’t suit her sturdy, blocky body. And the scarf around her neck was purely for comfort.
‘Yes,’ said the inspector quietly, ‘I agree. Mistaken identity. Ben thought he was Jo. Remember, Paul was pretty sure Ben had overheard Jo saying she was going up to see the Tower. He wanted to capture her, not kill her, but when she – as he thought – didn’t answer him, that hair-trigger temper of his got the better of him and he gave Symonds a shove. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know whether he meant to push him over the edge, or just grab him, but we know the result.’
‘And the poor man wouldn’t have answered, of course. Ben was shouting for Jo, not Bill, and in any case, Symonds was nearly stone deaf.’
There was a little silence in respectful memory of a good man, undeservedly dead, a silence broken by one of the Irish ladies. ‘Well,’ she said, her voice full of self-satisfaction, ‘we were the ones who called the police, weren’t we, Barbara?’
‘Indeed they did,’ Pam agreed with a little sideways glance at Alan and me. ‘When you all came in looking like the wrath of God, Barbara and Eileen thought some reinforcements would be a good idea.’
I was sure they had thought we were all dastardly criminals, and from the expression on his face, Alan did, too. ‘They meant well,’ I whispered to him, and he clasped my hand a little harder.
‘But the real hero of the day,’ I said, to change the subject, ‘is Watson here. If he hadn’t managed to get away when Ben caught Fred, and raised such an unholy ruckus later, Alan might not have been in time.’
The dog raised his head at the sound of his name, smiled at us, burped gently, and went back to sleep.
‘It’s going to break my heart to give him back now, if we ever do find out who his real owner is.’
‘I can tell you that,’ said Fred unexpectedly.
We all turned to him.
‘Didn’t want to say before. Wanted to be sure you’d be good to him.’
‘Fred! He isn’t yours, is he?’
‘Nah. I’ve never had but Alsatians, and after old Bess died, I’d not got the heart for another dog. No, this dog belonged to Bill Symonds. He ran away when his master didn’t come home. I reckernized him the minute I saw him. Reckon he was running over the hills, looking for a home. Reckon he’s found one now.’
Alan and I looked at each other. ‘I don’t know what Sam and Emmy are going to say,’ I said.
Alan smiled fondly at Watson. ‘Sam and Emmy,’ he said firmly, ‘are going to have to lump it. Watson’s a member of the family now.’
That seemed to be the last word. The party broke up, and Alan and I didn’t try to detain them. We all needed a good, long night’s sleep. The last one out the door was Penny. ‘How long are you going to be in town, Dorothy?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we probably won’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. I want to sleep late.’
‘Good. I’m stopping by around noon, and I’ll have a kit with me. You really need that manicure now!’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers who know the lovely Cotswold village of Broadway will recognize the liberties I have taken with some of its geography. In general, the pleasant places and beautiful views I have described are real; the unpleasant ones are the product of my disordered imagination. The Holly Tree, though modelled very closely on an actual, charming guest house in Broadway, has been fictionalized to spare the delightful proprietors any embarrassment at the behaviour of some of their guests. The Arts Festival, on the other hand, is (except in timing and certain details) very much like the inaugural event I was fortunate enough to happen across some time ago.
The town of Upper Pinnock is entirely fictional. There was, in medieval times, a village called Pinnock, a few miles south of Broadway, but almost nothing now remains of it. My Upper Pinnock is in a slightly different location and endowed with a river, a large church, and a railway station, among other amenities.
I have anticipated, by months or years, the rebuilding of the Broadway railway station. The GWR is indeed planning to extend the Honeybourne line to Broadway, but the effort requires an enormous amount of money. If you are a steam train enthusiast and would like to contribute to the appeal, visit the line’s website at www.gwsr.com.
Table of Contents
Cover
The Dorothy Martin Mysteries from Jeanne M. Dams
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
The Evil that Men Do Page 24