Going It Alone (8 page)

But now Gilbert Averell was entirely collected, and very well able to decide that his dream – or at least his awakening from it – had been controlled by some actual event in the external world. And he could do one of two things: either stick his head under the bedclothes and endeavour to go to sleep again, or proceed to investigate forthwith. Finding that he was decidedly for the latter course, he switched on the bedroom light. The first object his eye fell upon was Tim Barcroft’s shotgun. It had quite a reassuring look.

But, of course, he wouldn’t have a notion of how to fire the thing. Were he to attempt to do so, no pepperings, no howlings would result. Realizing this – and realizing, too, that whatever had happened afforded some colour to the disturbing notions in Tim’s head – Averell picked up the gun, opened his door, and went quietly along the corridor to Tim’s room. The moment had come when he and his nephew must tackle something together.

‘Oh, bother!’ Tim said, when given a good shake. ‘I was having a marvellous dream.’ He sat up in bed. ‘What’s the matter, Uncle Gilbert? Are you ill?’

‘Be quiet, Tim.’ Averell found that he was whispering. ‘And listen.’ And he gave an account of his disconcerting experience. Tim listened intently, scrambling into his dressing gown and a pair of shoes the while.

‘We’ll take a look,’ Tim said decidedly. ‘Go on the offensive. It’s the only thing.’

‘Very well.’

‘And give me that gun, for goodness sake. You look like a Yeoman of the Guard with his halberd or something. There are a couple of electric torches in the hall.’

They crept downstairs, leaving Ruth and her daughters apparently undisturbed. Each armed with a torch, they went out through the front door, which Tim locked behind him. There was a clear sky, with all the proper constellations available for study had they been disposed to it. Nevertheless it was extremely dark, and Averell rapidly developed a sense that their foray could only be of a random and unconsidered sort. If there was no intruder around any longer, there was nothing to be done – except, of course, ring up the police and report the matter, which Tim was unwilling to do. But, if, on the other hand, Tim’s belief in the probability of some violent attack had any basis at all, mucking around with torches in the dark was simply to create sitting (or almost sitting) targets in the most foolhardy manner. Messrs Barcroft and Averell, in fact, would have to improve their technique considerably if they were to keep their end up against mysterious adversaries while going it alone.

They turned a corner of the house, much as Averell had done during his earlier adventure that afternoon. And at once drama confronted them.

Drama confronted them in the light of Tim’s torch, which was shining full upon a man out of a newspaper. It was thus that Averell instantly and not very accurately conceived the matter, since it is rather in TV playlets that one is being glared at through a stocking or similar filmy integument. The man now doing this ought perhaps to have been pointing a revolver or brandishing a bludgeon. Oddly enough, his immediate impulse upon being thus suddenly bathed in light appeared to be defensive or evasive. He took a blundering sideways step which landed him rather heavily against the wall of the house. Something painful must have resulted, since he gave a yelp of mingled agony, indignation, and alarm. He then dodged first to one side and then to the other, much in the manner of a three-quarter proposing to evade a couple of lumbering forwards bearing down on him. Tim dropped his torch, stepped back, and unslung his shotgun. Averell found himself disliking this action very much, since he knew that the intruder, be his intentions ever so nefarious, ought not to be despatched out of hand. Averell, the beam of his own torch waving wildly in air, even tried to push the weapon away. A moment of deepened confusion resulted, and of this the ruffian took instant advantage. Turning tough, he punched Averell on the nose. Averell, who had not been entertained in any such fashion since leaving his private school, was much surprised and cried out in an undignified manner; he was also, for the moment, blinded by a watery suffusion of the eyes accompanied as by an effect of suddenly ignited fireworks. The ruffian then got in a sufficiently well-directed hack at Tim’s shins to send him sprawling. And then he just disappeared. By the time the discomfited investigators had recovered themselves and their torches there was simply no chance of catching up with him.

They made a sober return to the front door. But, just before reaching it, Tim stopped and pointed upwards.

‘There’s your window, Uncle Gilbert,’ he said. ‘There’s still a light in it. But no other lights. So they haven’t woken up.’

‘Which is at least something,’ Averell said. His nose was still hurting a good deal. ‘And I’ve come round to your view, Tim. We’d better get them all away.’

‘And look! That’s what he used to get up to your window.’ Tim’s torch had circled, and revealed a ladder that lay slanted on the lawn. ‘You heard it tumble, didn’t you? He pulled it down after him when he heard you coming at the window. He probably felt you might shin down it behind him.’

‘I’d only have got it on the nose a few minutes earlier if I had, I suppose.’ Averell felt that this was a sadly feeble philosophical reflection. ‘Why should he want to climb up to my window, anyway?’ he asked. ‘There’s no sense in it.’

‘Because he thought it was my window, of course.’ Tim spoke impatiently and as if asserting something self-evident. ‘The flash you saw was the chap turning on a torch and scanning the room through that chink at the bottom. You’d left it open, hadn’t you? When he saw he’d got the wrong man he began to retreat. And that was when you jumped out of bed and made after him. Or in a fashion, you did.’

‘In a fashion, yes.’ Averell knew that he was unconvinced by this interpretation of the affair, but didn’t quite know why. ‘That wasn’t quite the effect,’ he said. ‘Of the turning on of a torch, I mean. Of course I’d woken up on the instant. But it was much more like lightning. As I told you.’

For a moment Tim made no reply. He might even not have been listening. Then he pointed again at the ladder.

‘I’d better tell you,’ he said quietly. ‘Two attempts on my life. And now this.’

They went back into the house. Tim locked the door and shot a couple of heavy bolts.

‘Go to bed again, Uncle Gilbert,’ he said with authority. ‘I’ll keep watch. And in the morning we’ll do as we said. And we’ll get the bastards – by God, we will!’

Averell heard a faint click – and was now so unnerved that he jumped at the sound.

‘Always think of the safety-catch,’ Tim said with a certain air of humour, ‘before you walk upstairs with a gun. That’s in the book of rules.’

It might well be true that Ruth Barcroft, like her daughters, adored last-moment plans. But there was nothing feather-headed about her, and her brother thought poorly of the chances of getting her abruptly out of Boxes and off to Rome. This would be particularly so if it had to be represented to her that the idea sprang from the notion of removing her from some obscure danger which her son and his uncle would be remaining to confront. Any such project was a non-starter of the most obvious sort.

On the other hand – Averell thought as he lay sleepless in bed – any other way of going about the thing would be disingenuous. He revolted strongly against anything of the kind – perhaps for the not very logical (but psychologically comprehensible) reason that he was himself involved in a petty deception which he now acknowledged to be of the most humiliating order. Certainly he didn’t look forward a bit to the family’s breakfast table conversation. He couldn’t criticize Tim for urging him to bring to bear what Tim had called his ‘authority’ as titular head of the family, since the boy believed himself to be facing a situation so grim that he must seize any weapon he could. But he didn’t at all know how decently to back him up.

But when morning came the thing went pat. Tim said no more than, ‘Why don’t you go too, Mrs B? I’d adore running Boxes for a fortnight all on my own – and running Uncle Gilbert too.’ And before his mother could reply, both Kate and Gillian were urging the plan like mad. It wasn’t, Averell could see, that Tim had been confiding in them at daybreak, or even propounding the idea while giving no particular reasons at all. It was simply that the twins had been feeling it mean to leave their mother behind, and had apparently been saying so already; this and the fact that Ruth’s friend in Rome had been imploring her to join the party. In face of all this Ruth allowed herself to be swept agreeably off her feet. In no time Tim was masterfully on the telephone to the airline, booking her flight and arranging that she should pick up traveller’s cheques at her bank’s branch at Heathrow, and making sundry other practical arrangements of the most irrevocable sort. By ten o’clock mother and daughters had disappeared in a hired car down the drive.

‘And now,’ Tim said briskly, ‘we’re off ourselves. It’s just a matter of finding somebody to look after all that damned livestock, beginning with the confounded pony and ending with the bird-table for the finches and all that rubbish they keep hanging up for the tits.’

‘Is this going to be quite fair?’ Averell asked feebly. ‘We didn’t give them a hint we weren’t going to stay put.’ He was quite upset by this rapid revelation of his nephew’s masculine disregard for some of the cherished interests of his womenfolk.

‘To hell with all gentlemanlike feeling,’ Tim said brutally. His spirits were rising in an irresistible way. ‘I never believed that all’s fair in love, but it damned well is in war. Old Totterdel will do. He’s quite half-witted, of course, but he won’t muck up those simple chores. And if he does manage to throttle Smoky Joe, so much the better. Those kids ought to be through with pony madness by now. It ceases to be decent when a girl ought to be turning her thoughts in the direction of eligible bipeds. And if Kate and Gillian weren’t my sisters I’d be having a go at them by this time myself.’

‘My dear Tim –’

‘Okay, okay, Uncle Gilbert. I’m a bit off-balance, no doubt. And if I don’t adore the brute creation, I admit I ought to. Think of that cat.’

‘What cat?’

‘Hat.’

‘Hat?’

‘Well, this cat was called Hat. Somebody’s joke, I suppose.’ Tim looked round the empty garden of Boxes with a wariness now habitual with him. ‘I owe my life to Hat. Come inside and I’ll tell you.’

They went into the drawing-room, which seemed instantly to have taken on an untenanted look. Tim threw himself into a chair and began to speak with the air of a man intent upon lucid narrative.

‘For some time, you see, I’ve been sharing some rooms in London with some other people. A
pied à terre
, as they used to say.’

‘Just other young men?’

‘No, not just other young men. A kind of commune thing, in a small way. You know what I mean.’

Averell didn’t know that he did know. He was a poor authority, he told himself, on the ways of the more or less alienated young.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I happened to be all alone there – just for a couple of days. Except for this Hat. On the second morning the postman delivered a small parcel for me, and I was a bit surprised. The place wasn’t a secret hideout, or anything of the kind, but I didn’t reckon to get any mail there. It looked as if somebody had sent me a book. People are always sending people books that they think they ought to read. I took it into the living-room and put in on a table in the window. Hat was on the table too – and glowering at me in a hostile way he had with him. Fair enough. I don’t much dig cats. But it occurred to me the brute was hungry, so I went into the little kitchen and opened a tin of some nasty stuff cats are supposed to eat. Hat must have got the smell of it at once, because I was just back in the doorway when he jumped off the table and knocked this parcel to the floor. It’s not a thing cats often do, so perhaps he was really very hungry indeed. Anyway, that triggered the thing off, and there was one hell of an explosion.’

‘An explosion, Tim!’

‘It was what they call a letter-bomb, although it was a bit bigger than that. There was a lot of rough and ready tidying up to do, not to speak of a very promising young fire to put out. Hat had been blown to shreds and was very messy. And there wasn’t even a patch of garden to bury him in. So I scraped him into a bucket, and prowled around until I found a rubbish bin in the basement and nobody looking.
Requiescat in pace
Hat.’

Tim had gone very pale during the latter part of this fantastic recital, and his uncle wondered whether he himself had been doing so too. To have a domestic pet stand in for one, as it were, upon so naked a lethal occasion was a very unpleasant circumstance indeed. And it was no longer possible to suspect Tim of being a little wrong in the head. He had told the simple truth of the incident – or at least the simple truth as he saw it.

‘And what did you do then?’ Averell asked. He had to make an effort to steady his voice.

‘I sat down and gave the matter some thought.’ Tim seemed to manage this cool reply without difficulty and with no attempt at bravado. ‘It certainly required it.’

‘But surely you ought to have–’ But Averell checked himself; it was just no good talking to his nephew about the police. The boy wasn’t fanatical about the police; he called them the fuzz and not the pigs; but they were wholly out of court with him, all the same. ‘Surely you ought to have had some idea,’ Averell emended, ‘of why this ghastly thing had happened. And mightn’t it have been aimed at somebody else?’

‘It was addressed to me, wasn’t it?’ Very commendably, Tim was patient before this lapse into futility on his uncle’s part. ‘Of course, it might have
got
somebody else. The fact that it was badly made or something, and exploded just because it fell on the floor, means that lots of people must have been at risk from the moment it was posted. As it was, it just killed a pampered cat. I suppose if it had got its intended victim people might have said it had just killed a pampered undergraduate. Everything’s falling to bits, isn’t it? With me and my like doing very nicely in the middle of it.’