The Throwback (17 page)

‘I ha’ the gift of second sight,’ he told a gibbering Mrs Wilson. ‘’Twas given me as ma birthright. ’Tis death I smell and not the drain, aye, not one death but e’en the twain.’

‘Twain? Don’t you mean two?’ shuddered Mrs Wilson.

Lockhart nodded grimly. ‘Aye, twain it is depart this life, with blude-red throats and bludier knife, so runs the rune my heart espied, ’tis murder first then suicide.’

‘Murder first? Then suicide?’ said Mrs Wilson in the grip of a terrible curiosity.

Lockhart glanced significantly at a carving knife hanging from a magnetic board. ‘A woman screams without a tongue, and then from rafter man is hung. I see it all as I ha’ said, ye both mun leave ere both be dead. The hoose it is that has the curse, I smell your death and soomat worse.’

His eyes lost their glazed look and he busied himself about the drains. Upstairs Mrs Wilson was packing frantically and when Mr Wilson returned she had already left. On the kitchen table there was a hardly legible note in her shaking hand to say that she had gone to her
sister’s and that if he was wise he’d leave at once too. Mr Wilson cursed his wife, the ouija board and the smell, but being of a more insensitive nature refused to be daunted.

‘I’m damned if I’ll be driven out of my own house,’ he muttered, ‘ghost or no ghost,’ and went up to have a bath, only to find a rope with a noose on it hanging from the rafter in the mock-Tudor ceiling in the bedroom. Mr Wilson stared at it in horror and recalled his wife’s message. The smell in the bedroom was equally alarming. Lockhart had retrieved portions of the putrefying Willie and distributed them in the wardrobe, and as Mr Wilson stood sickened by the bed the voice he had heard before spoke again, and this time closer and more convincingly. ‘Hanged by your neck till ye be dead, the grave tonight shall be your bed.’

‘It bloody well won’t,’ quavered Mr Wilson but he too packed and left the house, stopping briefly at Number 12 to hand Jessica the key and his notice. ‘We’re going and we’re never coming back,’ he said, ‘that bloody house is haunted.’

‘Oh surely not, Mr Wilson,’ said Jessica, ‘it’s just got a nasty smell, but if you are leaving would you mind saying so in writing?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Mr Wilson who didn’t want to dally.

‘Now,’ said Lockhart, emerging from the hall with a form.

Mr Wilson put down his suitcase and signed a formal statement to the effect that he renounced his tenant-right
to Number 11 Sandicott Crescent immediately and without condition.

‘But that’s marvellous,’ said Jessica when he had gone. ‘Now we can sell the house and have some money.’

But Lockhart shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘When we sell we sell them all. There’s such a thing as Capital Gains Tax.’

‘Oh dear, why are things always so complicated,’ said Jessica, ‘why can’t they be simple?’

‘They are, darling, they are,’ said Lockhart. ‘Now don’t worry your sweet little head about anything.’ And he crossed to the Wilsons’ house and began to work again. His work involved the hosepipe, the drains and the gas system, and that night when he slipped down the manhole entrance to the sewer in his wet-suit with a large lump of putty in one hand and his torch in the other there was murder in Lockhart’s heart. Mr O’Brain was about to rue the day he ignored the threat of the Pursley Brigade of the IRA. Dragging the hosepipe behind him he crawled down to the outlet from Mr O’Brain’s lavatories. There was one on the ground floor and one in the bathroom upstairs. Working swiftly Lockhart fed the pipe up the outlet and then cemented it in place with the putty. Then he crawled back, emerged from the manhole, replaced the cover and entered the Wilsons’ empty house. There he switched on the gas main to which he had connected the pipe and waited. Outside all was quiet. The police car at the entrance to the Crescent burbled occasionally with radio
messages but there was no criminal activity in East Pursley to warrant their attention, only a slight burbling, bubbling sound in the U bend of Mr O’Brain’s downstairs toilet. Upstairs Mr O’Brain slept soundly, secure in the knowledge that he had police protection. Once during the night he got up for a pee and thought he smelt gas but, since he didn’t use it himself but relied on electricity, imagined sleepily that he must be mistaken and went back to bed. Mr O’Brain slept more soundly still, but when he awoke in the morning and went downstairs the smell was overpowering. Mr O’Brain groped for the telephone and less wisely for a cigarette and, while dialling Emergency Services, struck a match.

The resulting explosion dwarfed all Sandicott Crescent’s previous catastrophes. A ball of fire enveloped Mr O’Brain, billowed through the kitchen, blew out both front and back doors and every downstairs window, destroyed the conservatory, ripped plaster from the ceiling and turned to shrapnel the thick glazed porcelain of the downstairs lavatory pan which hurtled through the door and embedded itself in the wall of the hall outside. In an instant Number 9 was turned from British Bauhaus into Berlin bunker by a series of sequential explosions that ripped cupboards from walls, Mr O’Brain from the telephone, the telephone from its connection box, books on gynaecology from their shelves and finally, sweeping upstairs, lifted the flat roof off its moorings and deposited fragments of concrete in the road at the front and the garden at the back. By some extraordinary
miracle Mr O’Brain survived the blast and was catapulted, still clutching the receiver, through the drawing-room window on to the gravel of his drive as naked as ever Mr Simpson had been but blackened beyond belief and with his moustache and fringe of hair scorched to a tinder. He was found there raving about the IRA and the ineffectuality of the British police force by Colonel Finch-Potter and his bull-terrier.

It was an unfortunate rendezvous. Colonel Finch-Potter held the firmest views about the Irish and had always regarded Mr O’Brain as a pussy-prying Paddy on account of the consultant’s profession. Assuming, with some slight justification, that Mr O’Brain had brought this holocaust on himself by making bombs, Colonel Finch-Potter exercised his right as a citizen to make a citizen’s arrest and Mr O’Brain’s demented resistance only exacerbated matters. The bull-terrier, resenting his resistance and particularly the punch Colonel Finch-Potter had just received on the nose, turned from the amiable beast it had previously been into a ferocious one and sank its implacable teeth in Mr O’Brain’s thigh. By the time the police car arrived, a matter of two minutes, Mr O’Brain had escaped the clutches of the Colonel and was climbing the lattice-work of his magnolia with an agility that was surprising for a man of his age and sedentary profession, but was to be explained by the bull terrier’s adherence to his backside. His screams, like those of Mr Raceme, Mrs Truster and Mrs Grabble, could be heard beyond the bird sanctuary and below the
surface of the road where Lockhart was busily removing the putty from the outlet and dragging the hosepipe back to the Wilsons’ house. Ten minutes later, while more police cars sealed off the entrance to Sandicott Crescent and only allowed the ambulance through, Lockhart emerged from the sewer, and crossing the Wilsons’ back garden went home for a bath. Jessica met him in her dressing-gown.

‘What was that awful bang?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lockhart. ‘I thought it might have been the Wilsons’ drains.’ And having explained his noisome odour he shut the bathroom door and undressed. He came out twenty minutes later and went down the street with Jessica to survey his handiwork. Mr O’Brain had still to be coaxed from the lattice-work, a process that required the cooperation of the bull-terrier, but which, having at long last got its teeth into something juicy, the dog seemed disinclined to give. Colonel Finch-Potter was likewise uncooperative. His loathing for Mr O’Brain and his admiration for his bull-terrier’s British tenacity plus the punch he had received on the nose all combined to add weight to his opinion that the bloody Irishman had got what was coming to him and that if swine like him chose to make bombs they deserved to be hoist with their own petards. In the end it was the latticework which gave way. Mr O’Brain and the bull-terrier flaked off the wall and landed on the drive where the police tried to prise them apart. They failed. The bull-terrier seemed to have developed lock-jaw and Mr
O’Brain rabies. He foamed at the mouth and shouted expletives with a fluency and particularity that came presumably from his professional interest in women’s anatomy. By the time he had abused all ten policemen, who between them were holding his shoulders and the dog’s hind legs, they were in no mood to exercise their renowned moderation.

‘Put them both in the ambulance,’ ordered the Sergeant, ignoring the Colonel’s claim to his pet, and Mr O’Brain and the bull-terrier were bundled into the ambulance and driven off at high speed. As they went, forensic experts moved cautiously through the rubble of the house and sought the cause of the explosion.

‘The IRA have been threatening him,’ the Sergeant told them. ‘It looks as if they got him too.’ But when the experts finally left they were still puzzled. No sign of explosives had been found and yet the house was a shambles.

‘Must have been using something entirely new,’ they told the Special Branch officers at the police station. ‘See if you can get something out of the man himself.’

But Mr O’Brain was in no mood to be helpful. The vet who had been called to sedate the bull-terrier into relaxing his grip had found his job made all the more difficult by Mr O’Brain’s refusal to lie still, and having twice tried to inject the dog, the vet had finally lost his nerve and short-sightedly given Mr O’Brain a jab sufficient to placate a rhinoceros. In the event it was the gynaecologist who relaxed first and passed into a coma.
The bull-terrier, convinced that his victim was dead, let go and was led away with a self-satisfied look on its muzzle.

At Number 12 Sandicott Crescent Lockhart had much the same look on his face.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he told Jessica, who was worried that one of her houses had been largely destroyed. ‘It’s in the lease that the occupier has to make good any damage done during his tenancy. I’ve checked that out.’

‘But whatever can have caused it to blow up like that? I mean, it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb.’

Lockhart supported Colonel Finch-Potter’s argument that Mr O’Brain had been making bombs and left it at that.

He also left his activities at that for the time being. The Crescent was swarming with police who had even invaded the bird sanctuary in search of hidden caches of IRA arms, and besides, he had other things to think about. A telegram had arrived from Mr Dodd. It said quite simply and with that economy of expression that was typical of the man, ‘COME DODD’. Lockhart went, leaving a tearful Jessica with the promise that he would be back soon. He caught the train to Newcastle and on to Hexham and then took a bus to Wark. From there he walked in a straight line across the fells to Flawse Hall with the long stride of a shepherd, climbing the dry-stone walls nimbly and leaping across the boggy patches
from one hard turf to another. And all the while his mind was busy pondering the urgency of Mr Dodd’s message while at the same time he was glad of the excuse to be back in the land of his heart. It was not an idle expression. The isolation of his boyhood had bred in Lockhart a need for space and a love of the empty moorlands of his happy hunting. The havoc he was wreaking in Sandicott Crescent was as much an expression of his hatred for its closeness, its little snobberies and its stifling social atmosphere, as it was for the recovery of Jessica’s right to sell her own property. The south was all hypocrisy and smiles that hid a sneer. Lockhart and the Flawses seldom smiled and when they did it was with due cause, either at some inner joke or at the absurdity of man and nature. For the rest they had long faces and hard eyes that measured man or the range of a target with an exactitude that was unerring. And when they spoke, as opposed to making speeches or arguing disputatiously at dinner, they used few words. Hence Mr Dodd’s message was all the more urgent by its brevity and Lockhart came. He swung over the final wall, across the dam and down the path to the Hall. And, by that instinct that told him Mr Dodd had bad news, he knew better than to approach the Hall by the front door. He slipped round the back and through the gate into the garden shed where Dodd kept his tools and himself to himself. Mr Dodd was there whittling a stick and whistling softly some ancient tune.

‘Well, Mr Dodd, I’m here,’ said Lockhart.

Mr Dodd looked up and motioned to a three-legged milking stool. ‘It’s the auld bitch,’ he said, not bothering with preliminaries, ‘she’s set hersel’ to kill the man.’

‘Kill Grandfather?’ said Lockhart, recognizing the man for what he was. Mr Dodd always called Mr Flawse ‘the man’.

‘Aye, first she overfeeds him. Then she waters his drink with brandy and now she’s taken to wetting his bed.’

Lockhart said nothing. Mr Dodd would explain.

‘I was in the whisky wall the other night,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘and the auld bitch comes in with a pitcher of water and sprinkles it on his sheets afore he gan to bed.’

‘Are you sure it was water?’ said Lockhart who knew the cavity in the bedroom that Mr Dodd called the whisky wall. It was behind the panelling and Mr Dodd stored his privately distilled whisky there.

‘It smelt like water. It touched like water and it tasted like water. It was water.’

‘But why should she want to kill him?’ said Lockhart.

‘So she’ll inherit afore ye find your father,’ said Mr Dodd.

‘But what good will that do her? Even after Grandfather dies I’ve only to find my father and she loses her inheritance.’

‘True,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘but who’s to say ye’ll find him, and even then she’ll have possession and nine points of the law. You will have the devil’s own job getting her out the place once the man dies and you’ve no father to
your name. She’ll gan to litigation and you’ve no money to fight her with.’

‘I will have,’ said Lockhart grimly. ‘I’ll have it by then.’

‘By then’s too late, man,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘you mun do something now.’

They sat in silence and considered possibilities. They were none of them nice.