The Throwback (21 page)

The Ogilvies didn’t share their opinion. The blast of the shotgun that had smashed every pane of glass in their greenhouse had given them a sense of grievance they voiced to the Superintendent. ‘What’s the world coming to when peaceful citizens can’t rest easy in their beds, that’s what I want to know,’ said Mr Ogilvie indignantly. ‘I shall complain to my MP, sir. The country is going to the dogs.’

‘So it would appear,’ said the Superintendent soothingly,
‘but you’re not suggesting that a dog destroyed your greenhouse?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Ogilvie, ‘some damned swine with a shotgun did.’

The Superintendent breathed a sigh of relief. He was getting sick of hearing all the blame put on dogs. Mrs Simplon wasn’t. Cowering beneath the wooden beams in the inspection pit under her car her nerves, like Mrs Pettigrew’s undies, were in tatters. She fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, found one and was in the process of striking a match to light it when the Superintendent, thanking the Ogilvies for their cooperation and being trounced by Mr Ogilvie for the lack of police protection, made his way past the garage door.

In fact the garage door made its way past him. Mrs Simplon had discovered to her cost that inspection pits filled with oil waste and petrol fumes were not the best place to light cigarettes. With several explosions, first of the fume-laden air in the pit, second of the petrol tank of the car above, and third of the half-empty oil tanks that had served to provide Number 5 Sandicott Crescent with hot water and central heating, Mrs Simplon’s hopes of calming her nerves succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She was no longer conscious after the first explosion and by the time the oil tanks exploded she had passed into the great beyond. With her went portions of the garage, the car and the oil tanks. A ball of flame containing elements of all three billowed out where the garage door had been and hurtled round the head of the
Superintendent before pocking still more the Pettigrews’ already-acned façade. In the middle of this holocaust the Superintendent kept his head. He kept little else. What the blast hadn’t stripped from his little authority the flames did. His moustache crinkled and turned black under his nose. His eyebrows streaked, flaming, past the top of his ears, themselves sufficiently hot to suggest that several million people were thinking about him at the same time, and he was left standing in his boots and leather belt, a blackened, scorched and thoroughly disenchanted copper.

Once again the sirens sounded on the approaches to Sandicott Crescent but this time it was the fire brigade. As they worked frantically to extinguish the flames, which flames had already extinguished Mrs Simplon so thoroughly that she was in no need of a more ceremonial cremation, the bull-terrier made its last sortie. The flames that had flickered in its head had been dying down when the Simplons’ garage revived them. With blood-red eyes and lolling tongue it lumbered out of the bird sanctuary, through the Misses Musgrove’s herb garden, and having whetted its appetite on the calf of a fireman, proceeded to engage one of the fire brigade’s hosepipes in mortal combat in the belief that it was wrestling with an anaconda in the ancestral forest of its dreams. The hosepipe fought back. Punctured in a dozen places, it shot water into the air with enormous pressure, and carried the bull-terrier several feet off the ground, where it hung a moment, snarling ravenously. By the time the
dog hit the ground again the Superintendent no longer disbelieved the Pettigrews. He had seen it with his own two scorched eyes, a dog that wailed, snarled, slobbered and snapped like a crocodile with St Vitus’ dance. Convinced that the animal had rabies the Superintendent stood still according to instructions. He would have been better advised to move. Baffled by the liquid resistance of the writhing hosepipe the bull-terrier sank its teeth into the Superintendent’s leg, let go momentarily to re-engage the hose which it savaged in several more places and then hurled itself at the Superintendent’s throat. This time the Superintendent moved and his juniors, twenty firemen, the Ogilvies and Mr and Mrs Rickenshaw were privileged to see a naked (and badly scorched) policeman in boots and belt cover one hundred metres in under ten seconds from a standing start. Behind him with starting eyes and scrabbling paws came, bullet-like, the bull-terrier. The Superintendent hurdled the Grabbles’ gate, clobbered across their lawn and into the bird sanctuary. And presently in harmony with the dog he too could be heard howling for help.

‘Well, at least he knows we were telling the truth,’ said Mr Pettigrew and told his wife to shut up wailing like some woman for her demon lover, a remark hardly calculated to restore domestic peace to their sufficiently demented lives.

From their bedroom at the end of the street Lockhart and Jessica watched the chaotic scene. The Simplons’ garage still blazed, largely thanks to the intervention of
the dog, the hosepipe still writhed and spouted water from a score of holes high into the air like a lawn sprinkler with megalomania, firemen huddled on their engines and policemen in their cars. Only the armed men, brought in to deal with whoever had fired from the house, were still abroad. Convinced that the blazing garage was a diversion to allow the gunmen inside the house, who had eluded their search, to make good their escape under cover of the smoke, they lurked in the adjacent gardens and the foliage of the bushes by the golf course. It was in consequence of this and of the smoke that obscured their view and that of an early foursome, one of whom had an incurable slice, that a ball hit an armed constable on the head.

‘They’re coming at us from the rear,’ he yelled, and emptied his revolver into the drifting smoke, hitting the man with the now terminal slice and the Club House. He was followed by several other policemen who fired in the general direction of the screams. As the bullets ricocheted round the East Pursley Golf Course and punctured the windows of the bar, the Secretary lay on the floor and dialled the police.

‘We’re under attack,’ he screamed, ‘bullets are coming from every direction.’ So were other golfers. As they dashed through the smoke they were met by a hail of bullets from the Simplons’ back garden. Four fell on the eighteenth, two on the first, while on the ninth a number of women clustered together in a bunker they had previously done their best to avoid. And with each fresh
volley, the police, unable to observe who was firing from where, engaged in warfare among themselves. Even the Rickenshaws at Number 1 who only an hour before had been congratulating themselves on the presence of police protection came to regret their premature gratitude. The contingent of police who arrived at the Club House armed now with rifles as well as revolvers and stationed themselves in the bar, the Secretary’s office and the changing-room, answered their comrades’ desultory fire with a positive barrage of their own. A hail of bullets screamed across the heads of the women cowering in the sandtrap on the ninth and through the smoke into the Rickenshaws’ sitting-room. In the sandtrap the women screamed, in the sitting-room Mrs Rickenshaw shot through the thigh screamed and the fire engine driver, mindless of his extended ladder, decided the time had come to get out while the going was good. The going was not good.

‘Never mind that fucking fire,’ he yelled at the men huddled on the back, ‘it’s gunfire we’ve got now.’ At the top of the ladder a fireman didn’t share his point of view. Clutching his dribbling hose he suddenly found himself moving backwards. ‘Stop,’ he yelled, ‘for God’s sake stop!’ But the roar of the flames and the rifles drowned his protest and the next moment the fire engine was off at top speed down Sandicott Crescent. Fifty feet above it the fireman clung to the ladder. He was still clinging when having cut a swathe through half a dozen telephone wires and an overhead electric cable the fire
engine, travelling at seventy miles an hour, shot under the main railway line to London. The fireman on the ladder didn’t. He shot over and landed in the path of an oncoming petrol tanker, missing the London to Brighton express by inches on the way. The tanker driver, already unnerved by the careering fire engine, now ladder-less, swerved to avoid the catapulting fireman, and the tanker ploughed into the railway embankment and exploded in time to shower flaming petrol over the last five coaches of the express above. In the guard’s van, now engulfed in flames, the guard did his duty. He applied the emergency brake and the express’s wheels locked at eighty miles an hour. The subsequent screech of scored metal drowned even the sound of gunfire and the Superintendent’s howls in the bird sanctuary. Inside every compartment passengers sitting with their fronts to the engine shot into the laps of those with their backs to it and in the dining-car, where breakfast was being served, coffee and waiters mingled with diners to shoot everywhere. Meanwhile the last five coaches blazed away.

So did the police in the golf club. The sight of the burning train emerging from what appeared to be a napalm bomb exploded in the centre of East Pursley only lent weight to their conviction that they were dealing with an outbreak of urban and golf-course terrorism unprecedented in the annals of British history. They radioed for army help and explained that they were pinned down in the East Pursley Club House by sub-urban
guerrillas firing from the houses in Sandicott Crescent who had just exploded a bomb under the London to Brighton express. Five minutes later helicopter gunships were hovering over the golf course searching for the enemy. But the policemen in the Simplons’ garden had had their fill. Three lay wounded, one was dead and the rest were out of ammunition. Dragging their wounded they wormed their way across the lawn and round the side of the house and ran for the police cars.

‘Get the hell out of here,’ they yelled as they scrambled in, ‘there’s a fucking army out there.’ A minute later, their sirens receding into the distance, the patrol cars had left the Crescent and were heading towards the police station. They didn’t reach it. The tanker that had exploded on to the express had doused the road beneath and the tunnel was an inferno. Behind them Sandicott Crescent was in little better shape. The fire in the Simplons’ garage had spread to the fence and from the fence to the Ogilvies’ potting shed. It was well named. Riddled with bullet holes it added its flames and smoke to the general pall that hung over Jessica’s inheritance and lent a grisly light to the scene. The Ogilvies clung to one another in the cellar, listening to the whine of bullets ricocheting round their kitchen, and at Number 1 Mr Rickenshaw, tightening a tourniquet round his wife’s leg, promised her that if they ever got out of this alive they’d get out of the house.

It was the same at the Pettigrews’. ‘Promise me we’ll move,’ whined Mrs Pettigrew. ‘Another night in this awful house and I’ll go mad.’

Mr Pettigrew needed no urging. The series of events that had swept through Sandicott Crescent, and in particular their house, like the plagues that had affected Egypt, inclined him to renounce his rationalism and return to religion. His social conscience had certainly deserted him and when Mr Rickenshaw, unable to phone for medical assistance thanks to the scythe-like activities of the fire engine’s ladder, crawled across the street to ring the Pettigrews’ doorbell to ask for help, Mr Pettigrew refused to open the door on the reasonable grounds that the last time anyone had asked for medical help, namely the ambulancemen, of all people, they had introduced a mad dog into the house and that as far as he was concerned Mrs Rickenshaw could bleed to death before he opened his door again.

‘You can think yourself lucky,’ he shouted, ‘your fucking wife’s only got a hole in her leg, mine’s got one in her head.’ Mr Rickenshaw cursed him for his bad neighbourliness and, wholly unaware that Colonel Finch-Potter, having been relieved of his penis-grater, was now in intensive care at the Pursley Hospital, tried to knock him up. It was Jessica who finally came to his aid, and, braving the slackening gun-fire from the Club House, went down to Number 1 and applied her knowledge of first aid to Mrs Rickenshaw’s wound. Lockhart took advantage of her absence to make a last sally into the
sewer. Donning his wet-suit, he crawled along to the outlet of Mr Grabble’s house with a bucket and a Second World War stirrup pump that Mr Sandicott had kept in his workshop for watering plants. Lockhart had another purpose in mind, and having introduced the nozzle into the discharge pipe and cemented it there with putty, filled the bucket from the sewer and began to pump vigorously. He worked steadily for an hour and then undid his apparatus and crawled home. By that time Mr Grabble’s ground floor was awash with the effluent from every other house in the street and all his attempts to get his ground-floor lavatory to behave in the normal manner and discharge excreta out of the house rather than pump it in had failed disastrously. Driven to desperate measures and wading through sewage with his trousers rolled up, Mr Grabble had seized on the idea of using caustic soda. It was not a good idea. Instead of going down the pipe to unblock whatever infernal thing was blocking it, the caustic soda erupted from the pan in an extremely vindictive fashion. Fortunately Mr Grabble had had the good sense to foresee this possibility and was out of the tiny room when it happened. He was less sensible in resorting to an ordinary lavatory cleanser and, when that failed, adding to it a liquid bleach. The two combined to produce chlorine and Mr Grabble was driven from his house by the poisonous gas. Standing on the back lawn he watched his living-room carpet lap up the foul liquid and the caustic soda eat into his best armchair. Mr Grabble took the unwise step of trying to dam the flood
and the caustic soda dissuaded him. He sat on the edge of the fishpond bathing his feet and cursing.

In the bird sanctuary the Superintendent was still shouting for help, though less loudly, and at the far end the bull-terrier was sleeping it off on the mat outside his master’s back door.

Lockhart, divesting himself of the wet-suit, ran himself a bath and lay in it contentedly. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. There could be no doubting now that Jessica would be in full possession of her inheritance and with the right to sell every house whenever she chose. He lay thinking about the tax problem. His experience at Sandicott & Partner had told him that Capital Gains Tax was levied on every extra house an individual owned. There had to be some way round it. The tax on twelve houses would be enormous. By the time he got out of the bath he had found a simple solution.