Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Keep back, you kids,’ the young policeman muttered again, but he did not look round, so Carrie and Lester crawled to a place where they could see through a space between the rotting boards of the barn.

  They held their breath. The black wet night waited. Suddenly everything happened. Spotlights in the bushes flooded the farmhouse with light, and the Scottish voice of an officer behind the car boomed out through a loud hailer.

  ‘This is the police. The building is surrounded. We are armed. We have tear gas and dogs. They will not be used if ye’ll free the people ye’re holding, and surrender quietly.’

  He had a strong Scots accent, magnified by the loud hailer. ‘Come out and surr-rrender.’

  It was incredibly dramatic. Carrie gripped Lester’s arm so tightly that she was gripping the bone.

  ‘We have ye surr-rrounded, ye know. Ye canna ge’ away.’

  For answer, a single shot pinged against the metal of the car door.

  ‘We’re not here fer shoot’n,’ the officer called back. ‘We’re here to save these people’s lives. And yours. Will ye talk to an officer? If ye will, he’ll come forward unarmed.’

  For answer, another shot. It cracked into the car window splintering the glass.

  The officer was silent. After the violence of the shot and the shattered glass, the stillness was intense.

  As if he could not stand it, the man who had fired called out in a nervous, rasping voice, ‘That’s what anyone will get who moves. If you attack, we’ll kill the man and the woman.’

  Val was still alive. Rodge was alive. There was no sound from them, but they were alive. With nerves strung tight as telephone wires, Carrie tried to send thought messages to the house: Hang on. Be brave. Dear Rodge, be brave. Aunt Val, hang on…

  She jumped as Lester jumped, at a slight disturbance in the bushes by the car, and the shot which answered it, splintering another window.

  ‘Will you talk to me?’ Not the officer’s Scots voice. A very familiar voice, high and breaking with strain and distress.

  ‘This is Rudolf Fielding. I’m begging you. Don’t harm my dear - my dear—’

  Carrie had never heard a man sob. How strange that it should be cold, controlled Rudolf, who seemed too dried up for tears.

  ‘Don’t hurt my dear wife!’ he begged like a child.

  ‘Then call off the cops, you-’ The man in the house swore back at him.

  ‘Yes, if you will only let her go. You can have the money. It’s where you said - all of it. Keep your bargain. I’ve kept mine.’

  ‘By bringing the bogies,’ the man sneered. ‘You done it now, old fool.’

  ‘We’ll wait.’ The Scots officer had taken the loud hailer. His voice was impassive. ‘We’ll wait until ye’re rr-rready to come out.’

  No one spoke any more. No one moved. In the hay loft, the young policeman lay on his stomach with his gun in the crack of the door, and his eye along his gun. Outside, the front of the house was floodlit like a stage set. The rain fell silently and steadily in the widening shafts of light.

  The Scots officer kept on talking. He waited for answers, but none came. There were no more shots. Occasionally, sounds from inside the house, thuds, steps, a muffled curse, and once, something that sounded like the strong nails of a dog’s paw scrabbling at floor boards.

  Wendy.

  Carrie thought she had only whispered it inside her head, but the young policeman said, ‘Shut up!’ so fiercely that she thought he might be as scared as she was.

  At last, after what seemed a whole night time, or a whole life time, there was a lot of noise behind the front door of the farmhouse, and the man’s hoarse voice called, ‘We’re coming out. Get away from the car. If you shoot, you’ll shoot the man and the woman.’

  ‘We’ll no’ shoot. Come out unarmed.’

  The door was dragged open with a wail of rusted hinges. Into the pathway of stabbing light, blindfolded, gagged, their hands tied behind them, Val and Rodge staggered. Two men were at their backs. Stocking masks over their heads made them look like walking dead. One hand pushed a hostage. The other held a gun.

  Wendy walked beside Rodge, without her harness, but in her correct Guide Dog place, by his left leg and just in front. Her head was low, and she was limping. As the spotlight moved down to keep the group in the light, Carrie saw that one ear hung torn and bleeding.

  ‘Val!’ Uncle Rudolf cried out.

  The men swung their guns round, and Rodge stumbled and almost fell.

  ‘Get up, you—’ The man behind him jerked him up roughly, and hit the side of his head with the hand that held the gun.

  Wendy turned and sprang. She knocked the man to the ground. The gun went off, and the man screamed hoarsely as she stood on his chest, growling like a lion. Policemen dashed from their cover on all sides. The other man let go of Val and ran ducking back between the house and the car into a net of police.

  As they dragged the men away, Rodge sat on the ground holding his head. Val sat on a big stone in the glare of the spotlight. Rudolf knelt to unfasten her wrists and the gag and blindfold. She did not cry or scream. When Carrie and Lester dropped down the ladder and ran out of the barn and across the grass, she was just sitting there like a doll, her hands hanging, her eyes dull and her mouth open, her face with no blood behind it.

  ‘Val, Val - oh my poor Val.’ Uncle Rudolf threw his arms round her as if she were his child. Aunt Valentina dropped her tangled head of bedraggled hair and cried like a child on his bony shoulder.

  Rodge was incredibly calm. When he was untied, he lifted his head and laughed feebly.

  ‘Bit of a joke,’ he said, ‘blindfolding a bl- a bl- a blind man.’

  Feeling that Wendy was bleeding, he put the cloth blindfold round her head, and tied it under her chin. She sat jammed up against him, like an old lady with toothache.

  ‘They didn’t believe I was blind,’ he said. ‘They thought I was faking.’

  ‘Head all right?’ The Scots officer bent down to look at him.

  Rodge nodded, then winced, and put up his hand again.

  ‘Ye’re a brave man,’ the officer said.

  ‘Not brave,’ Rodge said, ‘just stupid. I was going to the church.’ He turned his head to Carrie and Lester. ‘Crossing that bit of waste ground, there was something on the path.’

  ‘Gregory Ferris’s elephant trap,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Good thing Wendy stopped. She took me round it. But then she must have gone the wrong way. She didn’t go back to the path. I was confused. So was she. We got lost. We went through a gap in the hedge, and I thought we were on the road to the village, but we went on and on. A car passed us, and it turned off the road and stopped. I went after it - through a jung-jung-jungle or something, nearly tore my beard off. I ran into a house. I mean, I fell over the door step, so I knocked to ask where I was, and before I could say - say - say - Wendy and I were grabbed and chucked inside.’

  ‘I heard her bark,’ Lester said.

  ‘I told her to. While they were gagging me, I told her again, and they hit her. I thought we-we’d had-had-had it. Then I heard you at the door.’

  Valentina had stopped crying. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, ran a hand through her wild hair, and stood up. Leaning on Rudolf, she tottered in her town boots over the rough grass to face Rodge.

  She looked at him for a moment, and he looked innocently up at her, not knowing who was there.

  ‘I think you saved my life,’ she said.

  ‘Oh rot.’ Rodge looked down, embarrassed. ‘It was because Wendy went the- went the—’

  ‘Wrong way?’ Val smiled with her bruised, pale mouth that had lost all its harsh lipstick.

  ‘Remember I said, on the floor in your house,’ Rodge looked up again, ‘she’s not a machine, she’s a dog?’

  ‘Thank God she is.’ Aunt Val, who hated dogs, bent to lay her hand gently on Wendy’s bandaged head. ‘She went the right way.’

  Thirty-Two

  While Val a
nd Rudolf and Rodge were being taken out to the cars, Carrie and Lester ran through the bushes, and across the road where the police car radios chattered incessantly, to get John and Peter out of the cattle shed.

  The rain had stopped. As they rode back towards the village, the sky was already lightening behind the church spire and the chimneys. No one was up yet. They clattered through the empty streets and out on to the Wake road, where the abandoned garage stood at the cross roads, with the petrol pumps pulled out, and bits of rusty iron sticking out of the broken concrete.

  From behind the garage, the gaunt hairy shape of Gilbert sauntered out, yawning. On the scrap heap, they found Michael curled up asleep inside a rusted mudguard. Near him, Em slept on a pile of inner tubes, her hair in spirals, like a wet retriever.

  In the call box, where the telephone had long ago been yanked from the wall, and the coin box smashed in, the envelope with Uncle Rudolf’s money was under a stone on the floor.

  ‘Blood money.’ Lester picked it up and held it out to Carrie. She backed away. ‘You take it.’ Somehow the money seemed contaminated with the violence and horror of this night.

  Michael took the envelope. ‘It’s my responserability.’

  Carrie and Lester put Michael and Em on the horses -in front of them, so they wouldn’t fall off if they went to sleep again - and took them home.

  Tom was there, and Liza. Liza had put Val to bed, and Tom had poured the last of the brandy Mr Mismo kept for emergencies and birthdays. They were talking about colleges. Colleges? Had Rudolf’s mind been so unhinged by the crisis that he was going to help Tom to study to be a vet after all? Tom kept looking towards the sofa, where Liza and Rodge held hands across Wendy, who lay between them.

  ‘Are you in love?’ Em asked them curiously.

  ‘Knock it off,’ Liza said. ‘You don’t catch me falling for a bloke who can’t even see me beautiful face.’

  ‘Might be a good thing,’ Em said. ‘He’d never know.’

  When Michael gave Uncle Rudolf the envelope of money, he took out the notes and counted them suspiciously.

  Same old Rudolf, they were thinking, but then Rudolf, without changing the niggardly expression his face always wore when he handled money, held out one of the notes to Michael, one to Em, one to Carrie, one to Lester. Hundred pound notes. One by one, they climbed on the kitchen table, and put the money in the hanging red crock.

  ‘Saving World’s End.’ Uncle Rudolf squinted up at the label. ‘You can cut that down for a start. You’re too late.’

  They stared. The heroic excitement of the night ran out into their feet, a burden of misery, weighing them down for ever.

  No one spoke. Finally Carrie heard herself say in a tiny voice like a whispered croak, ‘You-you sold this place?’

  ‘I’ve given it away.’ Uncle Rudolf paused for an eternity. ‘To you. Not to that feckless father of yours. He’d gamble it away, or set fire to it, or let it get dry rot.’

  ‘It’s got dried rot,’ Michael said.

  ‘I’m giving it to all of you - Tom, Carrie, Em, Michael -because of what you did tonight. I’m giving you World’s End.’

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © Monica Dickens 1973

  First published 1973 by William Heinemann Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this

  publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation

  electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise),

  without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any

  unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution

  and civil claims for damages

  ISBN: 9781448203123

  eISBN: 9781448202799

  Visit www.bloomsburyreader.com to find out more about our authors and their books

  You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for

  newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers