Ladies From Hell (17 page)

There was a siren. She thought it was police. But it was an ambulance. It came very fast down the middle of the Quad, swerved out of sight beneath the windows. She didn’t see it go back off. She supposed it must have taken another way.

There was a buzzing noise. In the store room. It had been going on a long time. There was a phone she hadn’t noticed, on a shelf at the back. She picked it up. It said, “Listen, my girl, this is Doctor Brewster. You’re in a lot of trouble already. You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

She supposed she ought to Play a Part. She said, “Go and suck your cock.” She put the phone down, unhappily.
The words had hurt her to say. She thought, ‘How strange. That it should be me.’ The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.

There was a noise outside. Scrapings, and a bump. So they were trying the fire escape. She threw the other bottle at the windows. This time it sailed right through. Splinters of glass flew outward. The noise stopped.

There seemed to be a lot of people now at the far end of the Quad; but the windows of the Blocks, that had been white with faces when the ambulance came, were empty. Bells were ringing somewhere, and a loudhailer was working. She saw lines of children in the distance, moving away. Like a fire drill. They were evacuating all the Blocks that faced Main Quad. She couldn’t understand why.

The phone was buzzing again. This time she answered. Dr. Brewster said, “Look, you really are being very silly. The police are here. We want you to come down, slowly. You won’t be hurt.”

It seemed a great deal was crystallizing in her mind. She said, “I want to think. Tell them to keep away. Which button do I press to speak to you?”

The phone said, “Any of them.”

She put the handset back. She could see the police cars now. Two in the Quad, facing her way, and another arriving. She thought, ‘What a lot of fuss. Just for me.’ She wondered what they would do to get her out. She didn’t think they would shoot at her. She supposed they might have gas. But they wouldn’t use that either. Far too bad for the Image. They must be really worried.

Her wrist was throbbing now, where it had been burned. She ran cold water on it from the tap. It helped a little. Later she washed her face. She thought it might clear her head.

People in situations like this usually Made a Request. She supposed she might send for Pamela. But that wouldn’t be much use. She could see the headlines already. ‘
Schoolgirl in acid siege.’ ‘Desperate Liz—a mother’s bravery
.’ It had to be better than that.

She picked the phone up, pressed. She
said, “I want the Minister of Children.”

Dr. Brewster said, “We’re trying to contact him.”

It was probably on the news already. There’d be cameras arriving soon. She said, “I don’t want to contact him. I want him to come.”

The phone began to squawk.

She said, “I know what happened in the machine shop. I know who hurt Ian Cameron. I know who’s making the bombs. I won’t tell anybody. Only him.”

The phone said, “You must see you’re being unreasonable …”

She said, “Tell him. Tell him to come. Say Liz.”

The phone spluttered. It said, “What if he won’t?”

She said,
“Then I’ll say how he broke his word.”

She put the handset down. Her chest was heaving. And she was miserable now about Super Kat. She wondered why she had ever thought she hated anybody. Or been jealous. You couldn’t, not when you saw them like that. Doubled up in the silly mask, and the stuff all running on her back and neck.

She’d realized of course why they had emptied the School. It really was too silly for words. They thought she’d got the gun.

The loudhailer was working again down in the Quad. She couldn’t hear what it was saying, the echoes from all the buildings mussed up the words. There were crowds of people now, a long way back. She saw another ambulance drive up and stop.

The phone was buzzing. She wished they’d leave her alone. She picked it up. She said, “How’s Jane?”

Dr. Brewster said, “She’s very, very badly hurt indeed. Lizabeth, your mother’s here. She wants to talk to you.”

She said, “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it.”

The phone said, “We know what happened now. Everything. You silly girl, we’re all on your side. We know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

She swallowed. The phone said, “You won’t even have to answer any questions. Not tonight. Won’t you come down?”

She nearly wavered. Then she set her lip. She said,
“I’ve told you what I want.”

She walked back into the lab. It had all gone really silent now. The loudspeaker had stopped, and nobody was moving. She thought, ‘He’s down there somewhere. The Duke.’ She tried to imagine what he might be thinking. But it was impossible. She had never been able to imagine what anybody was thinking. She wondered about Mr. Hughes. She thought, ‘I expect he got in terrible trouble too.’

The phone was still buzzing. When she could stand it no longer she answered it. It said, “Bunny, darling …”

She said, “Keep away. Or I’ll … pour it on myself. Is the Minister coming?”

Pamela said, “We’re doing everything we can.” She sounded as if she was crying.

She was shaken by a sudden gust of rage. Damn Pamela, let her go to Hell; the Hell she helped to make with her pissarsed theories and her lousy rotten books. Later, she wanted to cry again herself.

The shadows had lengthened. They had reached the side of D Block Annexe now. She couldn’t believe it was nearly five o’clock. School had emptied long ago; but they wouldn’t have gone home. She could imagine all of them out there. Watching, and waiting.

Nothing to do any more, really, but wait. She stood remembering the conversation he had had with Pam. She could remember it all now, nearly every word. Strange how it had ever slipped her mind. She thought, ‘Whatever happens now, he’s got his Fact. He said he only wanted one.’ Later she fell nearly into a drowse. She thought about the day they wrecked the stables; how he had taken her in the car, and let her see the hills. She thought, ‘That’s where I’d like to ride. On and on, for ever.’

There was a droning. It rose to a roar. All the windows shook; and a shadow flicked overhead.

She ran to stare up. The helicopter moved on slowly,
over the roof of D Block. It looked huge. She saw the sun on the cabin windows, the big RAF markings on the sides. It swung and settled, out of sight beyond the cars.

The phone buzzed. She picked it up. Her heart was hammering. Dr. Brewster said, “It’s all right now, Lizabeth. You can come down. The Minister’s here.”

She said, “Let me speak to him.”

A pause; then the phone said, “No. He says it’s your turn now to keep your word.”

Her knuckles whitened on the handset. She said, “You’re trying to trick me. I don’t believe you. He isn’t really there.”

More waiting. She heard voices speaking urgently. Then Dr. Brewster came back on. He sounded puzzled. He said, “He wants you to put Gaylord back on the shelf.”

Her knees felt wobbly, suddenly. She had to hang on to the edge of the door. She wondered how she had held out all that time. She said, “Tell him to keep away. It isn’t safe. Tell him he mustn’t come inside the Quad. Do you understand?”

The phone said, “Yes.”

She said, “I’m coming down. You’re not to try and catch me. Remember I’ve still got acid.”

She walked to the door that opened on the fire escape. She unlocked it, pushed it open. She half expected something to happen. Nothing did. The breeze on her face felt cool.

She looked down. It seemed a long way to the ground. She started down the metal steps, still clutching one of the silly bottles. She knew where the Duke was now. Where he would be. She thought, ‘There’s only one way he can stop me. And he won’t do that. Not even him.’

She reached the ground. It was still all quiet. She saw they’d put rope barriers, to keep the people back. The Quad looked funny somehow now. Empty. And the towering Blocks to either side, the lines on lines of windows.

She thought, ‘Why not? There has to be a first time, after all.’ She started to walk, holding the bottle. She thought, ‘It wouldn’t matter anyway, all that much. It would just be another Fact.’ It was just as well, really, that it was her. She thought,
‘I wasn’t good for much else anyway.’

Somehow she couldn’t help increasing her speed. She was halfway to the cars now, nearly running. She tried to make out David, if he was there; but her sight seemed blurred, she could only see the crowd. Her breath had started to tighten. She was wondering if the Duke was actually mad.

There was a bang from somewhere. Hollow-sounding, like a car backfire. Then another; and a window behind her shattered and fell in. She felt like nearly laughing. Ian had told her, so many times, how difficult it was to hit a target with a pistol. Even if the target was standing still.

There seemed to be banging and popping everywhere now. Men were running, blue-shirtsleeved, firing up at D Block. They held the pistols in both hands, like on the films. She was wondering what it would feel like to be hit. She’d read somewhere it was like a great big hammer. Her breath was rasping; but she couldn’t slow down now.

She was almost at the ropes.

I
HADN’T SEEN
my old friend
Alec Boulter for some years, though we had kept in touch by the usual amiable conventions; Christmas cards and the like. I was accordingly surprised to receive an invitation from him, couched in what were for Boulter terms of some urgency, to go down to Dorset the following weekend and spend a few days in the village of Coombe Hasset.

I was living, or existing, in West London at the time, eking out a perilous income as a writer with what part-time work I could find. My first impulse, looking down the usual list of deadlines, was to refuse; but the Portobello isn’t the ideal area for an August heatwave and anyway I could work as well, or as badly, in Dorset as anywhere else. So I wrote an acceptance, and a couple of days later packed a suitcase and typewriter into the elderly Midget I owned and got on the road.

The Midge had seen better days, and was no longer the car for sustained high-speed running; and having anyway an ingrained dislike of motorways I left the M4 as soon as was decently possible and began a process of cross-country dawdling, heading more or less toward my objective but in no particular hurry. I stopped for beer and a Ploughman’s at a pleasantish pub in Wiltshire, and finally entered Dorset a few miles above Shaftesbury. I pulled in to check the map and set off again, now with persistent visions of, among other things, tall, frosted glasses of lager. Though that was rapidly to be driven from my mind.

I suppose on account of what finally happened there Coombe Hasset is a byword to most English-speaking people. It wasn’t quite so notorious then, though it was by no means unknown. That was for two main reasons. The first was Professor Sammy Farnham; or to be more exact the hill
figure he had found, or claimed to have found, there. ‘Farnham’s Folly’, the popular press had dubbed it; and numerous representations had been made concerning it in places both high and low. The local Vicar had led the attack, pushed on I suspected by his churchwardens, while the uninhibited nature of Sammy’s discovery had even elicited a Question in the House. Sammy, equally noted for lack of inhibition, had retorted heatedly that such affronts to popular morality already existed, one not far from Coombe itself, and that opponents of free expression might more profitably occupy themselves with beams than motes. I followed the row with some interest as I’d been fortunate enough to meet Sammy, through Boulter’s good offices, some years before. I remembered him chiefly for a fund of good stories and a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for well-racked ale.

Coombe Hasset’s second claim to fame was more recent. The area had been selected as the site for a radically new experiment in the generation of electricity by wind power. Five turbines had been built in all, in a straggling line across the high chalk downs in which the village lay; and again the arguments had waxed hot. Though I for one couldn’t see that the conservationists, who had put up the shrillest wail, had much of a case. Anything seemed better than the mushroom-like proliferation of reactors with which we had previously been threatened; while the new units, it was claimed, would be noiseless, non-contaminating and virtually foolproof.

The conservationists might have made the biggest noise; but that wasn’t the direction from which the real trouble was to come, at least if the media were to be believed. All the major unions, from the miners and power workers to the dockers, were up in arms; all foresaw redundancies on a massive scale if the new system caught on, pit after pit closing down, power station after power station going off line as the country drank its fill from a host of silver windmills. And as ever, the hour had brought the man; one Jimmy Hebden, ex coalface worker, now the self-appointed Leader of the People. In under six months, he had succeeded in making himself certainly the most hated and probably the most feared figure in the country.
His tactics were victimisation and coercion, his methods the bludgeon and the boot. To which he added, unfortunately, an alarming organisational skill and an unerring grasp of the weaker points of Western democracy. There had been protest marches in London and elsewhere, in all of which Hebden’s bands of bully boys had figured prominently. A massive, violent affair the week before had resulted in two deaths, while it was claimed plans were afoot to disrupt the official opening of the new system, scheduled for early September. There had been wild talk on both sides, ending in a threat by the Government to garrison the entire area with troops. After that things had fallen quiet, though there was a general feeling that the fires were banked rather than extinguished.

It was with thoughts like these that I rounded the last bend of the road and saw Coombe Hasset ahead of me, the grey stone houses and the grey stone church nestling in a fold of downs. To my left the land climbed steeply, becoming a bulging, grassy hill; I glanced up, and instinctively pulled the car on to the low, wide verge. I killed the engine and got out, staring; and I think it was then the curious excitement that pervaded the place first gripped me, so that the emotion I felt all but brought in its wake the sting of tears.