Although it had been what she wanted, to let the men outside have Niles and leave them in peace, George’s apparent change of mind didn’t make Louise feel any less irritated. Whatever the real reason for her discontent – and she didn’t really know herself – she felt as though she was swamped by a deep sense of grudge. It showed no signs of evaporating even now that he’d seemingly come to see things as they really were. Everything about him now irritated her. He was so damned artificial. Just for a moment she’d thought he was going to belt her and funnily enough she’d felt a sense of relief, but then he’d taken hold of himself. That was part of it, he was so damned anxious to keep control of himself. He acted the role of a reasonable, steady, dependable husband. In her general state of unreasonable resentment she saw this as an insult; if he was sincere he wouldn’t need to act, to keep such tight control of himself.
She left him trying to get some life on the telephone and went upstairs to Karen’s bedroom. She looked at her daughter with the wary eyes of a woman who had betrayal in mind and she could see herself for the bitch she was and she could find nothing loving to say.
“What’s happening, Mother?”
“Why don’t you go to sleep, Karen!”
“They keep shouting that man’s name, is he a bad man? What’s happened to Janice Hedden, hasn’t she come back yet? I’m frightened.”
“Don’t be silly now. They won’t be here much longer, they’ve probably gone away already, they were just worried about Janice, that’s all.”
“Did that man do something horrible to Janice? I didn’t like him, he had a funny face, Mother.”
“For God’s sake, Karen! Go to sleep will you? I’ve told you there’s nothing wrong, that’s all I –”
The whole house seemed to be hit by one big bang. Somebody kicked the front door. At the same time there was a dull thudding noise from the other side of the house. Somewhere in the din she heard glass breaking.
“I’m scared,” Karen sobbed.
Good God, she thought, what’s George doing now? Why the hell isn’t he speaking to them, telling them they could take Niles away?
“Stay here and don’t cry,” she snapped at Karen as she left the bedroom, slamming the door behind her, but forgetting to lock it.
As she crossed the upstairs landing she heard Niles moaning in the lavatory. It served him damn well right, she thought. It was the best place for him if he had to be in the house at all. She felt her temper rising.
“George! What the hell are you doing?”
“Christ, they’re all over the place,” he said, standing in the gloom of the sitting-room, a dark shape in the red glow from the fire.
“Damn you, George, I’m sick of it!”
She knew it was up to her. George was hopeless. She cursed as she caught her shin on the edge of the coffee table. She found the handle of the door into the hall.
“Where are you going, Louise?”
“I’m coming,” she shouted.
George realised she was going to open the front door. He strode towards the hall, forgetting about the armchair. He lost his balance as he bumped into it and fell forward, crashing with the chair to the floor.
“Louise!”
“Stop kicking the door, damn you,” she was shouting. “It’s this damned chain.”
George scrambled to his feet and moved towards her, his hands up to protect his face in case he ran into the open hall door.
He got to her just as she was slipping the chain catch along its slide. He caught hold of her wrists and pulled her away from the door.
“Let me go!”
“What are you doing? Those guys are crazy!”
Her voice was grimly controlled.
“George, if you don’t open that door right now I’m going to leave you. I’m not joking. Open that door and let them take that man out of this house or I’m going.”
“But they’ll –”
“Did you hear me? It’s him they want, that thing upstairs. Make up your mind, George, he goes or I go.”
He knew she was right. He was a civilised man and there was nothing he could do but open the door and let them drag Niles out of the house. Tomorrow they’d pay, he’d make sure of that. But tonight, now, they were like a pack of wolves and there was nothing he could do.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”
He shot the bolt and turned the Yale handle. The door opened about four inches until the chain went tight.
“Tell them to stop it,” he said, putting his face to the gap. “You can have Niles. But if you harm him I’m going to make sure the police know exactly who you are, you and your pals.”
Tom Hedden had his hand against the door, shoving at it.
“Did you hear what I said?” George asked. He knew they would harm Niles, he knew exactly what they’d do to him, but nobody would blame him.
“Let me in the door.” Tom Hedden’s voice was a snarl of hate.
“I said you aren’t going to do anything to him.”
Tom Hedden was maddened by rage and drink and frustration. He rammed his shoulder against the door. George let go of his hold. The door pulled hard on the chain and then rebounded, the Yale lock clicking as it slammed shut. Tom Hedden hit it again with his shoulder.
“I’ show you, dirty Yank bastard,” he roared,
“FOR GOD’S SAKE, GEORGE, OPEN THE DOOR!”
Before he could reach the lock handle he was deafened by a noise that hit him and Louise like a blow on the face. For a second they stood still, the deafening boom pounding in their heads. Then, acting instinctively, he grabbed at Louise and pushed her towards the sitting-room. Like a dream in which nameless horrors are instantly recognisable, he knew that the man outside had fired his shotgun. Louise said something but his ears were full of a dull roar. He tried to speak but he couldn’t hear his own words.
They clung together in the shelter of the wall...
When they heard the boom of the shotgun the others came running round to the front of the house.
“Open the bloody door!” Hedden kept shouting. When Norman Scutt realised what had happened he knew the answer to one thing that had bothered him. Tom Hedden’s shotgun would do any killing they had to do. Hedden was out of his mind, mad enough to shoot the lot of them. The thought made him happier. You had to think of Number One. He knew what they had to do if they weren’t going to be locked up for ten years, but he hadn’t reckoned on killing them himself. Better for Tom – and Cawsey – to do it. That way, even if they were caught, he could get out of it. He’d say Hedden had the gun and he’d been trying to stop him.
“You got more cartridges?” he asked.
“Aye, some,” said Tom Hedden.
“You’d better get a couple in then. You could blow that door down, eh?”
He and Voizey and Phil Riddaway stood back to watch what Tom Hedden would do next. Chris Cawsey slipped along the front of the house. Tom Hedden wasn’t going to get all the fun.
It was as if the blast of the gun had changed everything. Louise stood limp, her chest shaking with sobs. George kept swallowing until his ears cleared. That shell would have blasted the head off his body!
“Where’s that cord you had?” he said. They’d killed Bill Knapman and they didn’t care if they killed anybody else. Those were the wolves he’d been going to throw Niles to! For a moment he felt ashamed. Then angry. He’d been weak. He’d let Louise talk him into opening the door, ready to hand over Niles. They would have shot Niles as soon as he was through the door.
“Where is it?” he demanded.
She went on sobbing. It was his fault, for letting her dominate him. That thought made him even angrier. He shook her.
“The cord! And the knife!”
She sniffed.
“I think – I – it was beside the telephone, I’m scared, George, what’ll they do to us?”
“Stand there. Don’t move an inch!”
He ducked and ran past the front door, raising his arm to feel about on the small window ledge. He touched the knife blade and then the thin washing line. Still crouching he ducked back.
“Get into the sitting-room,” he hissed. In the soft red light from the fire he took the hank of plastic flex and began cutting it into two-foot lengths, jerking the knife edge through the thin line.
“I’m going to tie up the windows,” he said, controlling a note of hysteria which threatened to turn his words into a babble. “You wait right here. Understand?”
“Don’t leave me alone, George,” she moaned.
This time, when the shotgun went off, he had been subconsciously expecting it. Mingled with the boom was the sound of wood splintering. Louise jumped with shock, letting out a thin scream.
“Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “They can’t shoot their way through the door, it’s solid. You know what’ll happen if they get in now, they’ll shoot us all. They’ve gone too far to back down now. Do you understand that?”
She began to sob again. Acting calmly, his left hand feeling for a grip in the hair at the back of her neck, he put the flex and the knife on the coffee table. Then he hit her across the face, two meaty slaps which made his palm tingle. She was about to scream, but he tightened his grip on her hair and pulled her face close to his.
“Shut up, Louise!” he said. “I don’t care about you. They’ll kill Karen, too, that’s all I care about. Do you want that, Louise?”
She breathed with sharp, shallow gulps.
“Do what I tell you or I’ll smack you silly,” he said. “Stay here. I’m going to the study.”
Again he ran doubled up past the front door, moving on his toes so that the man with the gun wouldn’t hear him and try another blast. As he ran he remembered Knapman jumping about in the snow. Reaching the study door, he thumbed the catch as quietly as he could. Once he had this window tied up he would do the kitchen.
The door opened. He stayed in his crouch, looking at the billowing curtain. He heard voices. The knife and flex in his right hand, he moved along like an ape, the knuckle of his left hand acting as a third foot, his shoulder brushing the wall. He stopped just before he reached the window. The voices were only a foot or two away.
“You get in this time?”
“Aye, I know the catch now.”
“They’ll be hiding from the gun. Get in and slip along and open the door.”
“Tell that bloody Hedden not to fire at me. It’s them us want to get.”
“I’ll be there. And Chris –”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t do nothin’ to them till we’re all in. Like Soldier’s Field, right? We’re all in it together and we’re all right. Bert’s kind of panicky, give him half a chance and he’s off out of it. We don’t want that. He does his turn like the rest of us, he won’t say nothin’ all right?”
“Yeh.”
Soldier’s Field? George heard the other man moving along on the other side of the wall. Soldier’s Field? Gregory Allsopp had told them about that. Some guy, years ago, they’d found him murdered in a field, supposed to have raped a village girl or something. Real local colour, Gregory had called it, what was that he’d said, making a joke out of it, something silly about primeval passions and dark blood, some nonsense? What did it mean? Above his head he heard the movements of the man, scrabbling of a body against the wall, then something inside the room, heavy breathing.
He waited until the panting breath seemed to be just above his head, then he stood up.
“Don’t move,” he said, “don’t say anything.”
In the light from the upstairs window he could see it was the same guy he’d already caught half through the window. He caught hold of the wrist that was feeling for the catch. He pulled until the arm was fully extended across the window ledge.
“See that?” he said, holding the carving knife close to the man’s face. “Make one move and I’ll shove it down your throat.”
He didn’t know where the idea came from. It was just something he found himself doing, as though from habit. He made a loop of flex round the wrist, the knife still in the palm of his right hand, the blade waving about at the guy’s face. Tying a knot he jerked the arm up against the centre post and slipped the flex round the swan’s neck catch.
They were battering at the front door again. That was all right, even if they burst the lock and the bolt the chain would hold them. They’d need a bazooka to shoot a hole in that heavy wood.
He tied the wrist tight to the catch, the guy grunting with pain as his arm was twisted above his head.
“Shove your other hand in the window – and don’t make any noise!”
“You’m cut him on the glass,” Chris Cawsey moaned as George grabbed the other hand and dragged it through the jagged hole.
“Too bad – I told you to keep quiet, didn’t I?”
Then he had both hands trussed together, the thin plastic line cutting into the guy’s wrists.
“That hurting you?” he asked.
“My neck’s on glass.”
“Good. I hope you slit your throat.”
“It won’t be my throat’s cut,” Cawsey said. George remembered he was carrying a knife. He wondered if he would have been able to use it.
Now for the kitchen. He could hear them outside as he ducked by the front door. How many blasts of buckshot would it take?
Now that his mind was concentrating on the need to keep them out of the house he found he was able to think of it as a place to defend. The kitchen, with its big window, was an obvious weak spot.
“You’d better get upstairs and watch Karen,” he said to Louise. “Make sure all the lights are switched on, I’ve got to be able to see them – they won’t see me. I’m going to tie the kitchen window up, they can still climb in but it won’t be so easy. Is the outside kitchen door locked?”
“The door to the porch is locked, I bolted it,” she said. Her voice seemed to have lost all trace of hysteria.
“Stand on the stairs there till I come back. If they try these windows shout!”
As his fingers looped the flex round the two catches, tying as many knots as the length of line would allow, he listened for footsteps. None came. They still thought the front door was their best bet. What did that mean – about Soldier’s Field? Like Soldier’s Field...?
There. It would take them time to untie those knots. To get in they’d have to smash the glass and squeeze through. That wouldn’t be too difficult, but at least he’d have warning. The guy he’d tied up would block the study window, they couldn’t get past him to untie his hands.
He listened. Still no sounds outside. He decided it was a chance worth taking. He opened the inside kitchen door, holding the bolt with both hands so that it wouldn’t rattle. Ready to jump back inside at the slightest sound, he eased the porch door to. It had a big, old bolt and a mortice lock. He slid the bolt home and then turned the mortice key.
Then he had the inside door bolted and locked. That was one way they’d never get into the house. Time – if he could hold them up long enough somebody would come. Where the hell were the police? Surely they had ways of beating the snow? Where was Gregory Allsopp for Chrissake?
He remembered something else. From Branksheer’s account of a farm-workers’ riot in Lincolnshire. Branksheer had been staying overnight in the local inn when the rioters had tried to set fire to it, because they thought he was the landlord’s new agent. It had seemed a jolly, bucolic comedy – to read about, Branksheer in his nightgown, people yelling out of upstairs windows... and the serving people, throwing pots of boiling water over the arsonists!
He didn’t have a gun. He remembered a phrase from the army, make your defences credible. Establish positions – then talk. Not that he could ever throw boiling water over a man. But it would be credible enough, something these maniac yokels would understand.
Under the sink there was a sliding wooden door and behind that four or five pots and pans of various sizes. He pulled out three and filled them with hot water from the sink tap. He put them on the Aga hot-plates. A balance of terror, that was it. They had a gun, he had boiling water. A balance of force. They’d go away when they realised the house wasn’t defenceless. They didn’t know he could not cross that dividing line.
When he got back into the sitting-room, Louise was still at the foot of the stairs, crouching down on the second step.
He quickly tied up the dining-room window. It was probably just large enough for a man to crawl through, but it wouldn’t be a quick job.
“Did I put that poker thing down in here?” he asked Louise as he went to the sitting-room window. Like the others at the front of the house it was set in the thick cob wall, four panes of glass on two frames opening outwards from a centre post. Once he had the two frames tied securely to the centre post they could enter only through one of the broken panes – about eighteen inches square. Unless, of course, they got hold of an axe and smashed the wooden framework. Then they’d be able to more or less walk in, the windows being only three feet at the most from the ground.
“Didn’t you have it when you were phoning?”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t much, just a thin steel affair with a kind of fork at the end for lifting off the ash door of the Esse. But it was something to hold in his hand. Reassuring. Man’s age-old impulse to hold a stick.
“Right then,” he said. “Let’s see what they –”
Glass smashed in the kitchen.
“Wait here,” he said. “Watch those windows.”
He moved quietly into the kitchen doorway. He felt confident now. In the light thrown from the upstairs lavatory window he could see a man standing sideways on to the window, his arm and shoulder pushing through the broken pane to get at the catches.
He moved along the wall. There was just a chance the guy with the gun was out there. He reached the corner, his chest pressed against the wall. He lifted the thin poker and smacked it down, hard, on the man’s hand. It was like admonishing an unruly child, a blow that would warn, not hurt.
The man cursed.
“You won’t get in that way,” George called out. The arm was pulled back. George dropped to a crouch and listened. Nothing.
He felt much better. It was a bizarre situation – one that would seem unbelievable tomorrow morning, when daylight came – yet he’d handled it as well as anybody could have hoped. Soon they’d go away...
When she heard the terrible boom of the shotgun Karen Magruder had shoved her head deep down under the blankets and put her hands over her ears and pressed her face into the sheet and screamed and screamed and screamed. Neither Mother nor Daddy came to see her. Eventually she screamed herself to a state of exhaustion.
Then she had found she needed the toilet. She called for her mother, but she didn’t come. When she’d been about five she’d gone through a spell of bed-wetting and she still remembered how nasty that had been, Mother and Daddy talking about it, taking her to see doctors and other men who’d asked her lots and lots of awful questions.
Frightened as she was with all the noise and shouting downstairs, she was even more frightened of wetting the bed. At last, when she could hold herself no longer, even with her legs crossed and her knees shaking violently, she slipped out of bed. Downstairs she heard her father’s voice. It sounded normal. Perhaps it was some kind of horrid English game – she couldn’t understand why grownups would make so much noise.
Pushing her feet into her slippers she went to the door. The last time Mother had been upstairs she hadn’t locked the door. And she hadn’t said she wasn’t to go to the toilet. If she went very quickly, on tip-toe, they wouldn’t know.
When her slippers went clop-clop on the wooden floor of the upstairs corridor she took them off and went on in her bare feet. The light was on. Downstairs she heard Daddy say something, and Mother say something back.
She reached the landing and waited for a moment. She tip-toed across the landing. Nobody came up the stairs. She climbed the two steps up to the bathroom level one by one, waiting each time to hear if there was anybody coming.
Then she tip-toed past the bathroom door and put her fingers on the handle of the lavatory door. She turned it slowly. The door wouldn’t open. Looking down she saw that it was bolted. Why had Mummy done that?
She slipped the bolt very carefully, shivering with cold, her knees pressed together, trying to control herself.
“You’ve not to keep me in here,” said a man’s voice.
It was the horrible man they’d brought home! He had no trousers on. He pulled the door away from her. His face was awful. His eyes were staring right into her.
This time, when she screamed, there was no mattress to deaden the sound.