Craddock (30 page)

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Authors: Paul Finch,Neil Jackson

BOOK: Craddock
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Bewildered, their attention still fixed on the broken corpse, the two constables shuffled forwards. Munro followed the major. Though he was lamed by his wounds, his shoulders see-sawing with pain, Craddock moved swiftly across the brow and through the gutted buildings, until he reached the pithead forecourt, where Krueger lay sprawled, his chest shattered by a single pistol-ball. Of Pettigrew there was no trace.
“
I don’t understand it,” Munro said. “He was here … he was out cold.”
Craddock set off walking again. “We’ll try his house. Whatever that abomination was, Pettigrew knew about it. And he’s not getting away from us.”
“
He more than knew about it,” Munro replied, hurrying to catch up.
“He sired it.”
Craddock shot him an astonished glance; they froze where they stood. In a faltering, breathless tone, Munro explained what he’d been told about the reverend’s ill-fated mission to Bechuanaland, about the loss of his son, about Krueger’s hair-raising discovery of the child. Craddock listened intently, his face too bloodied and drawn to show the true horror he felt. In standard police fashion, he fought to suppress the more lurid detail, to put aside the disturbing actuality. All the same, when they set off walking again, it was with urgent haste, and, by the time they breasted a low spoil-heap and saw the squat, red-brick outline of the reverend’s vicarage, they were practically running. The sight of flames in the ground-floor windows, and churning, black smoke from the roof and chimney served to alarm them more, but when they reached the front gate it was clear that they were too late.
Martha Pettigrew, besmirched all over and coughing throatily, was staggering back and forth at the front of the building, screaming for help, her eyes red with tears. An inferno already roared behind the shattered windows: the brickwork was visibly cracking; joists snapped like gunshots. The woman shrieked that her husband was still inside; that he’d come rushing in, raging with anger; that he’d started the fire himself, heaping his hymnals and books of psalms into his study grate; that he’d refused to come out when the blaze spread to the curtains and furniture.
It was all Munro could do to restrain her from dashing back in through the open front door, and even then she fought him every inch of the way. Craddock got as close as he could, but, before he reached the steps, the heat and sparks beat him back. He had to shield his eyes just to look inside – and was amazed to see the tall figure of Pettigrew come forwards through the conflagration. The reverend’s dark suit of office was already smouldering, his face twisted and blackened with char. Still, however, he grinned from ear to ear, a light of insane triumph in his bright but streaming eyes. Then he turned, and as casually as any man could, strode away into the depths of the fire, which folded behind him like the closing curtains of Hell.

 

ADDENDUM. The danger to humans from poisonous spiders is still relatively slight. Last year, in the whole of British East Africa, there were only 26 fatalities attributable directly to spider bites. In the same period of time, in the Metropolitan Police area alone, there were three times as many murders and seven times as many life-threatening attacks by one person upon another. As always, the fiercest killers in Nature are but Mankind’s apprentices.

 

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