Gordon Williams (15 page)

Chris Cawsey giggled. Ever since he’d been a boy he’d wanted to see what people looked like when they were dead.

George Magruder couldn’t move. At the back of his mouth he was choking. His insides had gone all cold. His jaw hung slack. He could feel a heavy pulse beat hammering in his brain. His eyes saw the four men standing in the snow, but his brain stood still. It was as if a flash bulb had gone off in darkness, a brilliant moment of blinding light.

Had he seen Bill Knapman catapult to the ground? Was that Knapman, that dark shape in the snow? Who were these men?
Why?

“I want that Niles, do you hear me?”

He saw the man with the gun come forward. Still he couldn’t move. His tongue seemed to swell and fill his mouth. His throat heaved. A thick spurt of vomit sprung from his stomach and poured out of his mouth. He gasped for breath.

“I WANT THAT HENRY NILES!”

He shuddered. The sight of death, real death, had shocked his whole body. There was nothing he could do. They moved towards him.

“George!”

Louise’s scream cut into the paralysis which had blanketed his brain.

He turned and grabbed for the door. He slammed the door shut and fumbled for the chain. His fingers couldn’t make the catch fit into its slide. Leaning his whole weight against the door he fought to get the brass fitting into its hole. Then it was home. The door was held by a Yale lock and a heavy latch and the chain.

As they started kicking it, he grabbed Louise’s elbow and pushed her into the sitting-room.

“Quick, the light,” he said. She didn’t move. He banged against her as he jumped for the light switch. Then they stood in the red glow of the
Esse
, listening to the din of the men at the door.

“They shot Knapman,” he said to her, whispering. “A shotgun. If it’s dark they can’t see us. Get upstairs.”

“Oh my God, what’s going to happen to us?”

“HENRY NILES!”

“They can’t get in the door,” he said. “They’ll try the windows. You get upstairs. I’ll –”

Something heavy crashed against the front door. He pulled her away from the sitting-room door.

“Snap out of it, Louise, those men are serious! They’ll do anything to get Niles.”

“They’ll kill us! Let them have Niles! They’ll kill us!”

“No! Get upstairs before I hit you, Louise.”

“You wouldn’t –”

“Get upstairs, you stupid bitch!”

His fingers sank into the firm flesh of her upper arm. He forced her across the darkened room and gave her a shove. She stumbled on the first stair. He slammed the door behind her.

Then he moved along the wall to the window. Keeping his body against the side wall he reached his arm across and pulled the curtains open. With the room in darkness he could see them outside but he didn’t think they’d be able to see him. The sittingroom window had four panes, possibly just big enough for a man to squeeze through – unless they got an axe and smashed away the wooden framework.

Where else was there? He had a flashing image of women loading rifles, of men crouching beneath small windows in log walls, of Indians...

“Look, George, this is madness!” She was back in the sittingroom, her panic seemingly gone. “If you think I’m going to stay in here and let these men smash the windows in – Karen’s scared to death. I want you to shove Niles out of the door. Let them do what they want to him!”

Why save Niles? It would be easy, open the door six inches and shove him out in the snow. Let them kill him if they were that crazy. They’d go away. Who cared whether Niles lived or died? What was his life compared to theirs?

“No,” he said. “They’ll kill him.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do. We’d just be buying peace for ourselves. Look, it won’t be that bad. I can keep them out of the house. They’ll go away. Bill Knapman was an accident. I don’t think they meant to kill him.”

“How can you keep them out? They’ve got a gun, haven’t they?
I’m telling you to get Niles out of this house, George, right now. If you don’t I will.”

That would be even easier. Let Louise give them Niles. Nobody would blame him. He could say he was fighting them off in another room. Nobody would blame them.

“No! We said hanging Niles would be a crime, didn’t we?”

That was just
talk.
”

“Maybe it was. It’s real now. We just give up – the first time anything real happens?”

“Don’t be silly. This isn’t a bloody film!”

They hammered on the door again.

He felt angry. Who did they think they were, crashing into his
home
?

“We give them Niles now, they’ll kill him. We hold on for a little while and the police will be here. It’ll all be forgotten. You want to give up that easy?”

They heard something in the kitchen. He ran to the diningroom door. To reach the light switch he crouched, moving across the room in the shelter of the table. He switched off the light. He tried to remember where the light switch was in the kitchen. It had been an ordinary house before this, a house he hadn’t even liked very much. Now it was their refuge. It suddenly seemed very important to keep them out. Niles was only part of it. They’d lived in these rooms and now a pack of wild men wanted to break in. They were not going to, not if he could keep them out. It was as simple as that. If you let men smash their way into your
home
you were a nothing.

Where was the switch? The kitchen curtains were still drawn, stiffish bamboo slats on a brass rail. Standing against the wall he
peered round the corner of the kitchen door. The switch was about four feet along the wall.

Above the
Aga
cooker, hanging on a hook in the wall recess, he saw the thin poker he used each morning to rake ashes from the bottom of the fire. His hands needed something like that.

There was a scraping noise behind the curtains. They were trying to force the catch again.

He had to take a chance that the man at the big window wasn’t the one with the shotgun. Treading softly on linoleum, he moved round the corner of the wall and reached his left hand for the switch. When the light went out the noise stopped. He moved quietly to the cooker and felt for the poker. Then he groped his way along the sink until he was beside the window. Was it better to have the curtains closed or open? Open, with the lights off. He could make out their shapes but to them the room would be in pitch darkness.

He eased the bamboo curtain along its rail, holding himself tightly against the wall. He saw somebody on the other side of the glass. The stainless steel poker felt very light. He tried to imagine what it would be like to hit a man with it.

He didn’t want to hit anybody. If he could make the windows secure they’d probably get tired and go away. Right now, when they were at their craziest, was the vital time. He wondered how he could secure the two window catches. If the catches could be tied together across the post neither half of the window could be opened without smashing the glass. And that noise would give him time to stop them.

Taking a chance that it wasn’t the man with the gun, he went to the window and rapped the glass with his knuckles. He thought he saw the figure move away. He went back through the dining-room.

“Louise?”

“Where
are
you?”

She sounded very angry. Whenever she spoke he felt foolish, as though she thought he was playing some kid’s game, He moved across the sitting-room.

“Louise?”

Then he saw her, a darker shape against the faint whiteness of the wall. That gave him an idea. If they switched on the upstairs lights, all of them, they’d throw a good light down on the ground all round the house. That way he could see them but they wouldn’t be able to see him.

“Listen,” he said, standing beside her, “you go upstairs and switch on all the lights, bathroom, lavatory – Christ! Niles! Is he still in there?”

“Karen!”

They bumped into an armchair as they crossed the sitting-room floor. He ran up the stairs. The lavatory door was still bolted.

“You still in there?”

“I’m cold,” Niles said, a whine in his voice.

“You’ll be colder if you come out.”

He went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Normally they didn’t bother to pull any of the upstairs curtains. What was the point when your nearest neighbour was a mile away?

“Have we any kind of rope?” he asked Louise.

“Rope! Are you going mad?”

He stared at her, their faces only a foot apart. He felt a wave of rage coming over him. This wasn’t how those wives behaved, those pioneering women. They stood by their men, through thick and thin.

“I’ll show you who’s mad,” he said, his mouth tight with anger. He grabbed her by the shoulder, consciously digging his fingers into the bone, hoping it would hurt. “Come here to the window, come on, these are your friends, stand at the window. See anybody? See the guy with the gun? Open the window and shout to him, go on, you think it’s just a game. See what he does.”

She tried to pull back. He held her close to the window.

“What’s wrong, Louise, not frightened, are you? They wouldn’t shoot at you, would they?”

“Of course they wouldn’t...” but still she pulled to free herself and move away from the window.

“If we can keep them out they’ll go away,” he said. “They’ve worked themselves up, that’s what it is. Drink and hysteria. You saw what happened to Knapman, for Chrissake. He got killed trying to talk to them.”

“It must have been an accident. You said it was an accident.”

“Yeah, well we don’t want any more accidents. Is there any rope, I want to tie up the window catches.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think!”

“There was a washing line, it was somewhere,” she said.

“Where?”

“Oh I can’t remember now, it was just a washing line!”

“Think! It’ll make all the difference.”

“It might be in the kitchen, I had it before the snow, I can’t remember where I put it –”

This time the noise came from the other end of the house.

“The study,” he said.

Glass broke. At the same time there was more kicking at the
front door. He went down the stairs two at a time, the thin poker in his right hand. The study door had an old-fashioned latch. As he flicked it up with his thumb he wondered how long it would hold out against a man’s weight. Not long. In the darkness of the room the curtain still blew in long, billowing folds, like a woman’s diaphanous scarf.

A man’s head was inside the broken window, an arm trying to twist round so that a hand could reach the catch. The breaking glass they’d heard was the man clearing the jagged pieces from the framework.

“Get out of my house,” he snarled at the man’s head. The arm stopped moving. George knew he had all the advantages. The man was helpless, his shoulder and neck pressed tightly through a collar of broken glass.

It would be easy to grab his collar, pull him farther into the trap, hit him on the head. Hit him so hard he would never – he felt disgusted.

“Go away,” he said. All his life he’d fought against violence, signed petitions, written letters, taken unpopular lines in discussions. Violence was an obscenity.

He was glad to find that even now the thought of crossing the threshold from anger to violence made him shudder. He was a civilised man.

The young man caught in the window struggled to free himself, pulling backwards, his face twisted in apprehension. It was a boy’s face, narrow, soft-skinned. There was a smell of bad liquor.

“You tell your friends, go away now,” George said, looking down. “Nobody’s getting inside this house. That clear?”

Ridiculously, he felt sorry for the boy-man who twisted to
escape. He knew how simple people could work themselves into situations they couldn’t control or understand. He knew how they must have felt, when the girl went missing and then Niles turned up in the village.

If it had been Karen...

There was nothing he could do to this twisting head. He was a civilised man, refined to a point where physical violence was impossible, even in self-defence. If defending himself meant breaking this kid’s skull then he couldn’t defend himself. He was a modern man, he needed locks and doors and bolted windows and policemen. Objects defended him. He had lost the ability to stand alone and fight.

Almost wearily, he pushed the boy-man’s arm.

“Leave us alone, for Christ’s sake,” he said, and felt a surge of relief when the boy pulled his head back.

“Here’s the washing line, George,” said Louise, standing in the gloom of the hall. “It’s some kind of flex, you could cut it with this.”

She held out the carving knife, handle first. The blade gleamed in the weak light. Some men could use a thing like that.

“There isn’t much point,” he said. “It’s hopeless. If they really want to get in we can’t stop them. You might as well open the front door and ask them to step inside and help themselves to Niles.”

“But you said –”

“
I
said! Don’t tell me you actually listened to anything
I
said!”

“But they shot Bill Knapman!”

“It was his own fault. It’s only Niles they want. If we try to fight them we’ll only get hurt, you and Karen.”

Louise had been almost at a point where she felt guilty, ashamed
at her own bitchiness in the face of George’s determination. Now he seemed to have given up.

“Do you think they’ll – they’ll harm Niles?”

“What else? You think they want him to play snowballs? They’re crazy! We don’t have a chance. If they get Niles they’ll leave us alone. At least none of us will get hurt.”

They both realised that there was no noise outside. They listened.

“Maybe they’ve gone away,” she said.

“Maybe. I know, we’ll phone the Inn. Why didn’t I think of it before. Surely there’s somebody in this goddam place who hasn’t gone mad.”

But when he picked up the phone it was dead...

Norman Scutt, Chris Cawsey, Phillip Riddaway, Bert Voizey and Tom Hedden stood together in the rickety old shed across the lane.

“We’ve got to get in,” Norman Scutt said, biting hard on his thumb.

He knew the others – apart from Tom Hedden – were beginning to collapse. They’d never been in prison, they couldn’t imagine it would happen to them. He knew, though. Ten years for manslaughter.