Gordon Williams (17 page)

“You got more cartridges?” he asked.

“Aye, some,” said Tom Hedden.

“You’d better get a couple in then. You could blow that door down, eh?”

He and Voizey and Phil Riddaway stood back to watch what Tom Hedden would do next. Chris Cawsey slipped along the front of the house. Tom Hedden wasn’t going to get all the fun.

It was as if the blast of the gun had changed everything. Louise stood limp, her chest shaking with sobs. George kept swallowing until his ears cleared. That shell would have blasted the head off his body!

“Where’s that cord you had?” he said. They’d killed Bill Knapman and they didn’t care if they killed anybody else. Those were the
wolves he’d been going to throw Niles to! For a moment he felt ashamed. Then angry. He’d been weak. He’d let Louise talk him into opening the door, ready to hand over Niles. They would have shot Niles as soon as he was through the door.

“Where is it?” he demanded.

She went on sobbing. It was his fault, for letting her dominate him. That thought made him even angrier. He shook her.

“The cord! And the knife!”

She sniffed.

“I think – I – it was beside the telephone, I’m scared, George, what’ll they do to us?”

“Stand there. Don’t move an inch!”

He ducked and ran past the front door, raising his arm to feel about on the small window ledge. He touched the knife blade and then the thin washing line. Still crouching he ducked back.

“Get into the sitting-room,” he hissed. In the soft red light from the fire he took the hank of plastic flex and began cutting it into two-foot lengths, jerking the knife edge through the thin line.

“I’m going to tie up the windows,” he said, controlling a note of hysteria which threatened to turn his words into a babble. “You wait right here. Understand?”

“Don’t leave me alone, George,” she moaned.

This time, when the shotgun went off, he had been subconsciously expecting it. Mingled with the boom was the sound of wood splintering. Louise jumped with shock, letting out a thin scream.

“Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “They can’t shoot their way through the door, it’s solid. You know what’ll happen if they get in now, they’ll shoot us all. They’ve gone too far to back down now. Do you understand that?”

She began to sob again. Acting calmly, his left hand feeling for a grip in the hair at the back of her neck, he put the flex and the knife on the coffee table. Then he hit her across the face, two meaty slaps which made his palm tingle. She was about to scream, but he tightened his grip on her hair and pulled her face close to his.

“Shut up, Louise!” he said. “I don’t care about
you.
They’ll kill Karen, too, that’s all I care about. Do you want that, Louise?”

She breathed with sharp, shallow gulps.

“Do what I tell you or I’ll smack you silly,” he said. “Stay here. I’m going to the study.”

Again he ran doubled up past the front door, moving on his toes so that the man with the gun wouldn’t hear him and try another blast. As he ran he remembered Knapman jumping about in the snow. Reaching the study door, he thumbed the catch as quietly as he could. Once he had this window tied up he would do the kitchen.

The door opened. He stayed in his crouch, looking at the billowing curtain. He heard voices. The knife and flex in his right hand, he moved along like an ape, the knuckle of his left hand acting as a third foot, his shoulder brushing the wall. He stopped just before he reached the window. The voices were only a foot or two away.

“You get in this time?”

“Aye, I know the catch now.”

“They’ll be hiding from the gun. Get in and slip along and open the door.”

“Tell that bloody Hedden not to fire at me. It’s them us want to get.”

“I’ll be there. And Chris –”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t do nothin’ to them till we’re all in. Like Soldier’s Field,
right? We’re all in it together and we’re all right. Bert’s kind of panicky, give him half a chance and he’s off out of it. We don’t want that. He does his turn like the rest of us, he won’t say nothin’ all right?”

“Yeh.”

Soldier’s Field? George heard the other man moving along on the other side of the wall. Soldier’s Field? Gregory Allsopp had told them about that. Some guy, years ago, they’d found him murdered in a field, supposed to have raped a village girl or something. Real local colour, Gregory had called it, what was that he’d said, making a joke out of it, something silly about primeval passions and dark blood, some nonsense? What did it mean? Above his head he heard the movements of the man, scrabbling of a body against the wall, then something inside the room, heavy breathing.

He waited until the panting breath seemed to be just above his head, then he stood up.

“Don’t move,” he said, “don’t say anything.”

In the light from the upstairs window he could see it was the same guy he’d already caught half through the window. He caught hold of the wrist that was feeling for the catch. He pulled until the arm was fully extended across the window ledge.

“See that?” he said, holding the carving knife close to the man’s face. “Make one move and I’ll shove it down your throat.”

He didn’t know where the idea came from. It was just something he found himself doing, as though from habit. He made a loop of flex round the wrist, the knife still in the palm of his right hand, the blade waving about at the guy’s face. Tying a knot he jerked the arm up against the centre post and slipped the flex round the swan’s neck catch.

They were battering at the front door again. That was all right, even if they burst the lock and the bolt the chain would hold them. They’d need a bazooka to shoot a hole in that heavy wood.

He tied the wrist tight to the catch, the guy grunting with pain as his arm was twisted above his head.

“Shove your other hand in the window – and don’t make any noise!”

“You’m cut him on the glass,” Chris Cawsey moaned as George grabbed the other hand and dragged it through the jagged hole.

“Too bad – I told you to keep quiet, didn’t I?”

Then he had both hands trussed together, the thin plastic line cutting into the guy’s wrists.

“That hurting you?” he asked.

“My neck’s on glass.”

“Good. I hope you slit your throat.”

“It won’t be
my
throat’s cut,” Cawsey said. George remembered he was carrying a knife. He wondered if he would have been able to use it.

Now for the kitchen. He could hear them outside as he ducked by the front door. How many blasts of buckshot would it take?

Now that his mind was concentrating on the need to keep them out of the house he found he was able to think of it as a place to defend. The kitchen, with its big window, was an obvious weak spot.

“You’d better get upstairs and watch Karen,” he said to Louise. “Make sure all the lights are switched on, I’ve got to be able to see them – they won’t see me. I’m going to tie the kitchen window up, they can still climb in but it won’t be so easy. Is the outside kitchen door locked?”

“The door to the porch is locked, I bolted it,” she said. Her voice seemed to have lost all trace of hysteria.

“Stand on the stairs there till I come back. If they try these windows shout!”

As his fingers looped the flex round the two catches, tying as many knots as the length of line would allow, he listened for footsteps. None came. They still thought the front door was their best bet. What did that mean – about Soldier’s Field?
Like Soldier’s Field...
?

There. It would take them time to untie those knots. To get in they’d have to smash the glass and squeeze through. That wouldn’t be too difficult, but at least he’d have warning. The guy he’d tied up would block the study window, they couldn’t get past him to untie his hands.

He listened. Still no sounds outside. He decided it was a chance worth taking. He opened the inside kitchen door, holding the bolt with both hands so that it wouldn’t rattle. Ready to jump back inside at the slightest sound, he eased the porch door to. It had a big, old bolt and a mortice lock. He slid the bolt home and then turned the mortice key.

Then he had the inside door bolted and locked. That was one way they’d never get into the house. Time – if he could hold them up long enough
somebody
would come. Where the hell were the police? Surely
they
had ways of beating the snow? Where was Gregory Allsopp for Chrissake?

He remembered something else. From Branksheer’s account of a farm-workers’ riot in Lincolnshire. Branksheer had been staying overnight in the local inn when the rioters had tried to set fire to it, because they thought he was the landlord’s new agent. It had seemed a jolly, bucolic comedy – to read about, Branksheer in
his nightgown, people yelling out of upstairs windows... and the serving people, throwing pots of boiling water over the arsonists!

He didn’t have a gun. He remembered a phrase from the army, make your defences credible. Establish positions – then talk. Not that he could ever throw boiling water over a man. But it would be credible enough, something these maniac yokels would understand.

Under the sink there was a sliding wooden door and behind that four or five pots and pans of various sizes. He pulled out three and filled them with hot water from the sink tap. He put them on the
Aga
hot-plates. A balance of terror, that was it. They had a gun, he had boiling water. A balance of force. They’d go away when they realised the house wasn’t defenceless. They didn’t know he could not cross that dividing line.

When he got back into the sitting-room, Louise was still at the foot of the stairs, crouching down on the second step.

He quickly tied up the dining-room window. It was probably just large enough for a man to crawl through, but it wouldn’t be a quick job.

“Did I put that poker thing down in here?” he asked Louise as he went to the sitting-room window. Like the others at the front of the house it was set in the thick cob wall, four panes of glass on two frames opening outwards from a centre post. Once he had the two frames tied securely to the centre post they could enter only through one of the broken panes – about eighteen inches square. Unless, of course, they got hold of an axe and smashed the wooden framework. Then they’d be able to more or less walk in, the windows being only three feet at the most from the ground.

“Didn’t you have it when you were phoning?”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t much, just a thin steel affair with a kind of fork at the end for lifting off the ash door of the
Esse
. But it was something to hold in his hand. Reassuring. Man’s age-old impulse to hold a stick.

“Right then,” he said. “Let’s see what they –”

Glass smashed in the kitchen.

“Wait here,” he said. “Watch those windows.”

He moved quietly into the kitchen doorway. He felt confident now. In the light thrown from the upstairs lavatory window he could see a man standing sideways on to the window, his arm and shoulder pushing through the broken pane to get at the catches.

He moved along the wall. There was just a chance the guy with the gun was out there. He reached the corner, his chest pressed against the wall. He lifted the thin poker and smacked it down, hard, on the man’s hand. It was like admonishing an unruly child, a blow that would warn, not hurt.

The man cursed.

“You won’t get in that way,” George called out. The arm was pulled back. George dropped to a crouch and listened. Nothing.

He felt much better. It was a bizarre situation – one that would seem unbelievable tomorrow morning, when daylight came – yet he’d handled it as well as anybody could have hoped. Soon they’d go away...

When she heard the terrible boom of the shotgun Karen Magruder had shoved her head deep down under the blankets and put her hands over her ears and pressed her face into the sheet and screamed and screamed and screamed. Neither Mother nor Daddy came to see her. Eventually she screamed herself to a state of exhaustion.

Then she had found she needed the toilet. She called for her mother, but she didn’t come. When she’d been about five she’d gone through a spell of bed-wetting and she still remembered how nasty that had been, Mother and Daddy talking about it, taking her to see doctors and other men who’d asked her lots and lots of
awful
questions.

Frightened as she was with all the noise and shouting downstairs, she was even more frightened of wetting the bed. At last, when she could hold herself no longer, even with her legs crossed and her knees shaking violently, she slipped out of bed. Downstairs she heard her father’s voice. It sounded normal. Perhaps it was some kind of horrid
English
game – she couldn’t understand why grownups would make so much noise.

Pushing her feet into her slippers she went to the door. The last time Mother had been upstairs she hadn’t locked the door. And she hadn’t said she wasn’t to go to the toilet. If she went
very
quickly, on tip-toe, they wouldn’t know.

When her slippers went clop-clop on the wooden floor of the upstairs corridor she took them off and went on in her bare feet. The light was on. Downstairs she heard Daddy say something, and Mother say something back.

She reached the landing and waited for a moment. She tip-toed across the landing. Nobody came up the stairs. She climbed the two steps up to the bathroom level one by one, waiting each time to hear if there was anybody coming.

Then she tip-toed past the bathroom door and put her fingers on the handle of the lavatory door. She turned it slowly. The door wouldn’t open. Looking down she saw that it was bolted. Why had Mummy done that?

She slipped the bolt very carefully, shivering with cold, her knees pressed together, trying to control herself.

“You’ve not to keep me in here,” said a man’s voice.

It was the horrible man they’d brought home! He had no trousers on. He pulled the door away from her. His face was
awful
. His eyes were staring right into her.

This time, when she screamed, there was no mattress to deaden the sound.

Karen’s scream went through George’s body like ten thousand volts. It hit his brain like a searing blast of white-hot light. He had seen Knapman shot, windows broken, men attacking his house, men climbing in his windows – but he had seen all these things with the eyes of the man he thought he was. The civilised man who stood on this side of the threshold, seen them as though they were a part of a ridiculous dream. Everything he had done until now had been done consciously, almost in spite of his instinctive disbelief that such things
could
happen.