The Case of the Missing Bronte (21 page)

I delicately put my right foot in his path.

He went crashing forwards towards the foot of the stairs, and there was a terrific bonk as his head made contact with the woodwork. I was meditating going after him and rescuing the manuscript when the sounds of megalithic struggle lessened to a series of whimpers and grunts of concentration. Then, with the sound of a final kick and a groan of pain, one of the thugs came charging out. His torch cast momentary light on the scene. Macklehose was dazedly getting himself up, but was still holding tight to the manuscript with the dogged intensity of a Victorian Methodist clinging to his faith. He saw he could not get to the door and out before he was taken, and with a look of desperation and fear he started, stumbling, up the stairs.

Ratikainen got him before he was halfway up. The frayed carpet tripped him, and Ratikainen threw himself at the scampering legs. The paunchy body of the man of God was stretched upwards towards the bend in the stairs, and the appalling Amos held the manuscript above him and away from his attacker, looking as if he were making an offering to some unwholesome pagan god.

It was a futile gesture. Ratikainen clambered over him, putting in the boot with relish, his torch trained on the bundle of paper. From the doorway of the front room I meditated intervention, but the thought that the odds would turn out to be one against five discouraged me. My main concern was the manuscript, and I flinched as Ratikainen, ending his journey upwards and over the body of Amos Macklehose, arrived at the hands clutching the frail old paper and started tearing it out of Macklehose's grasp. But greed made Amos strong. His grip was frenzied. The Finn put his boot on to Amos's back, heaved and tugged and stamped, but still he couldn't remove it from his grasp. Suddenly there was a horrible rending sound, and I heard the flutter of paper down the stairs.

Any thought I had of emerging and retrieving the pages was stifled by the sound of a howl of pain from the study.

The Macklehose sprigs together had clearly got the upper hand over Rolf Tingvold. The howl had scarcely faded before they were out into the hall and along the stairs. As they trundled up to the aid of their revered pa I saw, horrified, their heavy boots trundling over the pages of the novel that had detached themselves from the bundle. The boys trampled enthusiastically over the two struggling bodies, and while one threw himself at the shoulders of the Finn, the other charged at the disputed manuscript, clutched it in his two hands, and began stamping like a maniac on the wrist of Knut Ratikainen.

But Ratikainen was clearly not the man to be beaten by force of numbers. With a tremendous heave of the body, grunting, but then emitting a strange exultant cry, the Finn heaved off the Macklehose on top of him, and then butted him in the stomach. The boy did a spectacular backwards fall, and only by clutching desperately to the banisters did he stop himself falling head first down the whole flight of stairs. Now Ratikainen turned his attention to the one who was disputing the manuscript, and aimed a karate chop at his neck with his left hand. The blow misfired, but the boy was stopped in his tracks, and howled with pain. Macklehose, though, had wormed his body up into a sitting position, and now got a grip of Ratikainen's leg. It was a pretty sturdy leg, but he now gave it an almighty heave. The three of them collapsed into a mass of flailing limbs, and it was a wonder that any of them heard the voice of Rolf Tingvold, emerging from the study.

‘Right. That's it. Any more of that and I shoot.'

He'd been seeing too many old films, that boy. But it worked. Once more there was that comic opera effect of sudden, stunned silence. He came out of the study, and leaned against the doorpost. He had sounded perfectly confident, but in fact he still seemed in pain from a boot placed somewhere vital. The torch in his left hand illuminated the gun in his right, but both of them shook a little. How, even at his best, he could have shot the confused mass of limbs on the stairs and been sure to hit a bit of Macklehose rather than a bit of Ratikainen wasn't quite clear to me, but I thought that perhaps he didn't care. I expect that thought occurred to the people on the stairs too. In any case, one of the Macklehose sprigs was still draped over the banisters, breathing heavily, an obvious target. Above him there was a tangle of limbs that resembled nothing so much as a piece of Hindu artwork. Amos Macklehose's face was poked out from
between a confusion of crotches and ankles, and he was looking at his son. Clearly he was weighing up whether it was worth sacrificing an heir to continue the struggle. Reluctantly he seemed to decide that his chances of keeping the manuscript were small either way. But he kept his hold on.

‘Right,' said Rolf Tingvold, with a slight quaver in his voice. ‘Now, you three get up, and stand against the wall.'

He came further down the hall, more confidently now, as if the pain was easing. Now, at last, there was a chance for the Bruce Lee stuff. I stood once more in the darkness of the front room, and when the torchlight had gone past me I took a step forward. As he came level with the front room I aimed a lethal kick at the wrist holding the gun.

‘Oh Christ!' howled Tingvold, and a clatter told me that my aim had been successful. From the stairs there came the tally-ho of resumed conflict as the whole comic-opera business started up again. By the dim light from the landing I could see that all three Macklehoses were bringing their combined weights to bear on Ratikainen. The grunts were tremendous, and the kicks and the moans — it was all like professional wrestling that was suddenly for real. At the bottom of the stairs Tingvold had got his torch on again, and was scrambling round at the bottom of the coat-stand looking for his gun. He kept looking around him, bewildered, as if to discover how he'd been kicked. Suddenly he spotted his gun and made a grab for it, but the moment he had it in his hand there was a whoop of triumph from the stairs.

‘Got it, Dad!' yelled one of the Macklehose young hopefuls, and there was a scampering of feet up the remaining stretch of stairs, on to the level plains of the landing.

The chase was up again. Ratikainen made a grab at the feet of those following the manuscript up to the second floor, but he missed, and, scrambling upright,
had to lumber after them. Tingvold was last up, clumping with his Scandinavian boots up the manuscript-strewn stairs. I flinched with pain, and as he gained the top crept out to see the crumpled mess of paper dimly visible in the half light. The two Scandinavians gained the landing together, and as they did so I heard a bolt being slotted triumphantly across: the Macklehoses must have shut themselves into the bathroom.

‘Come out of there!' bellowed Tingvold. ‘Come on out!'

There was silence. I imagined the Macklehoses inspecting the windows, seeing if the shrubs were climbable.

‘Come on out,' Tingvold repeated, ‘or I'll shoot the bolt off.'

Standing towards the bottom of the stairs I heard what I took to be some muttered Norwegian. Probably Ratikainen was warning him it would be too noisy (though, heaven knows, they had hardly been behaving like sugar-plum fairies for the last ten minutes). The next thing I heard was the two heavies hurling themselves at the door. It sounded tremendous — like the fall of the temple of Dagon. Once . . . Twice . . .

I slipped back into the front room and switched on the light briefly to locate the telephone.

Three times . . . a great splintering crunch. The door had given way.

I was just about to put my finger on the dial when, through the mayhem that followed, a shot rang out. There was a howl like a rutting wolf which rang through the house, and then total pandemonium reigned upstairs.

I banged down the phone and darted silently up to the landing. In the shadowy half light at the top I looked towards the bathroom. It was brilliantly lighted. Discretion had been cast to the winds, and though the blind had flown up, nobody seemed to care anymore. The whole room was a heaving, grunting mass of bodies,
with one young Macklehose tangling with Knut Ratikainen over the washbasin, while the other was down on the floor with Rolf Tingvold, fighting against the splintered ruins of the door. Between these two tableaux of agonized, intertwined figures there was one whose posture was non-combatant and decidedly non-heroic. Clutching the disintegrating mass of manuscript, now spluttered with red, was the Reverend Macklehose, sitting on the bath, and with his other hand glued to his buttock, from which deep red was flowing into the bathwater. He had been shot in the bum.

I edged closer to the scene of conflict, unable to imagine what I could do, but agonized over the fate of the manuscript. I made it to the door of the nearest bedroom, and as I did so there was a crash of glass. Ratikainen had delivered the
coup de grâce
by pushing the head of the young Macklehose through the window over the basin. With a grunt of triumph such as saga heroes must have emitted when they cleaved somebody from the nave to the chaps he grabbed at the manuscript in the weakening hand of Amos Macklehose. Amos brought his bloodstained left hand to bear on the struggle, but victory was easy. Ratikainen pushed him contemptuously backwards into the bath and held high the bloody pages. Then he began a dash for the touchline.

That was his big mistake. The floor of the bathroom was awash with bathwater, and with a spectacular slide he landed on top of the spluttering, slithering mass that was Amos Macklehose. As I watched, almost weeping, I could see page after page of the manuscript slip out of his grasp into the reddening water of the bath.

The air was filled with repeated, monotonous Scandinavian obscenities.

At least the professional thugs were the swifter at retrieving disaster. Rolf Tingvold directed the sort of sledge-hammer blow that comic-strip illustrators delight
in at his opponent's chin, and left him dazed and groggy on the floor. He pulled massively at the Finn's arm and hauled him out of the bath. Together they began pulling the sodden, pink, disintegrating pages out of the bathwater. When the Reverend Amos raised his head above the water they pushed him under with gusto, so I suppose they got the fun they had been denied with me.

Me, I was just deciding to tiptoe off downstairs to the phone again when an unfortunate development occurred. The young Macklehose who had had his head pushed through the window had now scrambled back and, sobbing and groaning, was dabbing his handkerchief over a great gash that extended from his forehead to his chin. He sank down from his position sprawled over the basin to sit weeping noisily on the loo. Ratikainen looked at him, as if meditating further violence. But before he could decide which of the jolly japes in his madly amusing repertoire to employ, a thought forced its way painfully through his thick skull.

‘Where's the cop?'

There was silence. Even the sobbing stopped.

‘What did you say?' said Tingvold.

‘Where's the cop? We left him here.'

‘What cop?' gurgled Macklehose, scrambling upright in the bath and looking very little like Venus rising from the waves.

‘That cop — the big one — that's been on this thing. We left him here. Tied up.'

‘Someone tripped me, down in the hall,' gargled Macklehose.

‘Someone kicked the gun out of my hand,' said Tingvold. ‘The bugger's escaped.'

I withdrew into the depths of the bedroom as they stood there, looking at each other.

‘Grab what you can,' I heard Ratikainen yell.

From the window of the bedroom I caught sight
suddenly of a dark shape behind a privet hedge. Then another. Then I saw a helmet. And some way down the road I saw what I was sure was a police car, its identifying lights turned off. Someone must have phoned. The cavalry had arrived!

‘Right. I'm getting out of here,' shouted Rolf Tingvold from the bathroom. Definitely too many gangster films, that boy.

He was the first past me, along the landing, clutching a great unwieldy mass of dripping manuscript. He was followed by Ratikainen, similarly burdened, dripping pools of water and casting backwards longing, vengeful looks at the other three. The Macklehose boys bore only a page or two each, snatched in flight. And bringing up the rear, and clutching his bum, came the Reverend Macklehose, squelching and sobbing, and hugging the little bunch of pages he had managed to retain. He flopped downstairs like a suction rubber on a wet draining-board, and was the last out through the front door of No. 45, Jubilee Parade.

Oh, the joy of standing in that darkened window and watching them as, one after another, they hared down the front path into the arms of the waiting police!

And a pretty spectacle we all made! As I came down the path to the little front gate I paused to survey them in the light of the street-lamp. Amos Macklehose so sodden and bloody that he had made a whole pink pool on the dry summer pavement. One of his sons blue with bruises, and with a tooth missing; the other with a great gash down the
side of his face and blood dripping down on to his shirt. Rolf Tingvold was comparatively unscathed, but Knut Ratikainen was soaking and battered, though in the lamplight his wet face still contrived to look impassively menacing.

And there was me, my shirt bloodsoaked and torn from neck to waist, and a bloody hand-towel stuffed into the waist of my trousers. As I came out of the gate one of the constables came out with handcuffs and made to arrest me. I really could see his point. Luckily the inspector in charge was one of the men I'd talked to at the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police HQ. In spite of everything he recognized me.

‘Real little Falklands conflict in there,' he said.

‘Have you got the manuscript?' I asked.

‘Manuscript? Was that the paper they were all clutching? Oh yes — that constable over there's got it.'

I went over to a police van, where a young constable was throwing the dripping sheets any old how into the back.

‘Here, give that to me,' I said. ‘It's valuable.'