As they raced for the door Colin snatched up the torch that he had carried out when he went out earlier in the evening. But there was no need for it. The garden was lit up by a leaping red light of the flames from a blazing car in the lane. It was a little beyond the Deardens’ gate. Most of the car had been blown to fragments, though the main body of it was intact and was the heart of the fire. A figure, or what might once have been a figure, was curved horribly over what might once have been the steering wheel. But lumps of metal, shreds of glass and a tyre had been flung up into the hedge and scattered on the ground.
“Jonathan!” Dorothea shrieked as the three of them ran on till the heat from the blazing wreck stopped them.
Colin was in the lead, and he spread out his arms so that she could not pass him.
“It isn’t Jonathan’s car,” he shouted above the roaring of the flames.
She only cried out again in terror, “Jonathan!”
“No!” Colin shouted back.
Other figures were running out from the Deardens’ house. As the fierce illumination of the fire fell upon them Andrew recognized Nicholas Dearden and his wife Gwen. There was a third figure a little behind them, a woman, but Andrew did not pay much attention to her. It was no one he knew. Nicholas was the first to reach the gate, but only just outside it he stood still, raising an arm to shield his face from the heat.
“It’s Dad!” he shouted.
His wife came to his side, her face looking strangely white in spite of the red light that fell on it.
“He’s in London!” she yelled.
“It’s Dad!” Nicholas repeated. “It’s his car. We want the fire brigade!”
He turned and raced for the house.
“Water! The hose—we’ve got a garden hose!” Gwen cried.
“It won’t help,” Colin said. He went to her side and put an arm round her shoulders. “It’s too late to do anything. By the time the fire brigade gets here it’ll have burnt itself out.”
“But look!” she called out wildly. “Our windows! It was a bomb—a bomb here in Stillmore Lane. Look, it’s smashed all our windows!”
Andrew looked at the house—a dignified, peaceful-looking Georgian house—and saw that indeed several of the windows had been shattered.
Dorothea was crying, less for the sake of the man who had been hideously blasted to death than from relief that he was not Jonathan.
“The police,” Colin said. “They’ll be wanted as well as the fire brigade.”
He turned and ran after Nicholas into the house.
The woman who had come out of the house behind Nicholas and Gwen moved up to Gwen’s side.
“We can’t do anything here,” she said. “Come inside.”
But she must have known, as Andrew did, that Gwen would not respond. Though it was true that there was nothing that any of them could do near to the blazing car and its slaughtered occupant, to turn and go away and leave it was impossible. He himself felt rooted to where he stood by some powerful though obviously irrational sense of responsibility.
The spell was broken by Nicholas and Colin re-emerging from the house.
“You’d better go in,” Nicholas said. “I’ll wait here till the fire brigade arrives.”
He was a small man of about thirty-five with a shock of fair hair and features that were not unlike his handsome father’s, though a softened, blurred version of them. His nose was less sharp, his mouth wider and less finely formed, his eyebrows shaggier. He was dressed in corduroy trousers and a cardigan. For the moment his voice was shaky, and there was an indecisiveness in his movements, though he was trying hard to assume an air of authority.
“Yes, go on, go in,” Colin said. “I’ll wait here with Nicholas.”
“But Jonathan!” Dorothea wailed. “He’ll be along any minute now. He won’t be able to get past.”
“I should think he’ll have the sense to back into one of the passing-bays,” Colin said.
It struck Andrew that Colin was the calmest person there, except perhaps for the woman who was standing next to Gwen. Because of the horror inside him he was not aware of how calm he looked himself.
“Yes, come in,” the woman said.
Gwen allowed herself to be led slowly towards the house. She kept glancing back over her shoulder at the fire. She was about the same height as her husband, but about five years younger. She wore jeans and a sweater, and her dark hair was long and hung in a thick plait down her back. Her face was small and pointed and, as Andrew remembered from earlier meetings with her, was always pale, though when it was not distorted by shock, as it was now, it had a delicate kind of charm.
Andrew hesitated, not sure if he should follow her into the house or if he should stay in the lane with the two men, but then Dorothea took his arm and drew him after Gwen. The unknown woman followed them.
In the light that was on in the hall he saw that she was taller than either of the Deardens, slender and probably about thirty, which meant that she was about the same age as Gwen. She had soft fair hair, cut short and curling loosely about a small, well-shaped head. Her eyes were grey and full of concentration. She was wearing a very plain grey dress which might have looked severe if it had not been for a necklace of mixed chains of gold and silver round her neck. But even it had a certain look of restraint about it.
Gwen led the way into the drawing room, a high room which would have been splendid if the furniture in it had looked as if it belonged there. But most of it looked as if it had arrived from Scandinavia not very long ago. It was all pale and angular. The easy chairs had arms of stainless steel and were covered in some black plastic material. Some alarming abstract paintings hung on the walls. Andrew, who had been in the room before, tried to convince himself that the uneasiness he felt in it was merely the result of old-fashioned prejudice and should not be yielded to; yet he still felt that its cool, sharp-edged neatness was somehow hostile to someone like himself. But at least its windows, which looked out onto the garden behind the house, had not been blown in by the bomb blast like those in the front of the house.
Dorothea immediately became busy in one of her silent, mouselike bouts of activity, going from cupboard to cupboard, obviously searching for something, though it had not been suggested that she should do this. Gwen dropped into a chair, and hid her face in her hands. Her whole body was shaking.
The unknown woman turned to Andrew and said, “I’m Lyn Goddard, an old friend of Gwen’s. I arrived this morning. I’m staying for Christmas.”
“I’m Andrew Basnett,” he replied. “I arrived yesterday and I’m also staying for Christmas.”
“Ah, the professor,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.”
Gwen suddenly jerked upright in her chair, dropping her hands from her face, and shrieked, “For God’s sake, what are you looking for, Dorothea?”
“Brandy,” Dorothea answered.
“It’s in the dining room,” Lyn Goddard said. She had a soft yet deep-voiced way of speaking. “I know where it is. I’ll get it.”
“I don’t want any brandy,” Gwen said. “You have it, if you want it.”
“You may find it’ll help,” Lyn Goddard said. She went out of the room.
“It can’t be Dad in that car,” Gwen stated on a high, hysterical note. “He’s in London. He’s spending Christmas with Erica and Henry.”
“Was it his car?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know. How could anyone tell? A wreck like that—it could have been anybody’s.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“No, I tell you! How could I be?”
“And you weren’t expecting him home?”
“No, definitely not. He isn’t coming home till next Monday.”
“Yet your husband seemed sure.”
“Perhaps he’s right then. Perhaps it’s Dad. But it doesn’t make sense.”
Lyn Goddard returned to the room, carrying a tray with a bottle and glasses on it. Without asking anyone if they wanted the brandy, she filled four glasses and gave one to each of the people there.
Dorothea took hers, found a couch on which she could sit with her feet up, and said, “Was it a bomb?”
“Unless the car exploded of its own accord,” Lyn said. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“A bomb that someone attached to Lucas’s car in London,” Dorothea said, “knowing that he was coming home. No, that can’t be right, because if it had had a timing device it surely wouldn’t have been set for so long ahead. I mean, he almost got home, didn’t he? If it had been a time bomb they’d have set it to go off almost as soon as he got into the car. Or perhaps it would have gone off as soon as he started the engine.”
“People sometimes make mistakes,” Andrew said.
“What a lot you all seem to know about bombs,” Gwen said bitterly.
“How can you help it if you watch the television news?” Dorothea sipped some brandy, which produced a sudden sharp shudder in her. “It’s fearful for you, Gwen, I know that it is, because for a moment I thought, I really thought it was Jonathan. And I can’t help feeling an awful callous sort of thankfulness that it isn’t. I’m terribly sorry.”
“It’s Nicholas I’m really sorry for,” Gwen said. Now that she had her glass of brandy, she was gulping rapidly and it seemed to steady her. “His mother died when he was so young that his father meant everything to him. That was why we had to live with him. Well, I don’t mean we had to, but Nicholas always felt it was his duty—no, I don’t mean duty, that sounds so cold—but anyway he felt it was up to him to look after him when he got old. Erica never did anything much for him. I was surprised when he decided to go and spend Christmas with her and Henry. And if it really is Dad…” She stopped.
“You were going to say, someone will have to tell them,” Lyn said. “I’d leave that to Nicholas.”
“Yes, of course. I wonder if there was a quarrel and that’s why he suddenly came home.”
“Is that likely?” Lyn asked.
“Perhaps—no—How can I know about a thing like that?” Gwen said feverishly. “Dad sometimes got furious with people for no special reason, but it always blew over quite quickly, especially if they said they were sorry, and Henry always did that, even if Erica didn’t. Henry’s always gone for a quiet life.”
Andrew was beginning to feel that Gwen’s affection for her father-in-law did not go very deep, and that what was really upsetting her, leaving her white-faced and slightly shaking, was the outrage of a bomb going off in Stillmore Lane. It upset him too, considerably. He shrank from his memory of the dark curved form that might have been a man hanging helplessly over the steering wheel of the blazing car. It seemed to be only a few minutes later that they heard the wailing of the fire brigade siren. Andrew finished his brandy, refused the refill that Lyn immediately offered him and went out of the house towards the gate. In the garden it had become what felt very dark and quiet, though the flames in the lane had not quite died down. But their roaring had ceased.
He saw Nicholas and Colin standing just outside the gate. Men in helmets and overalls, holding what Andrew supposed were fire extinguishers, squirted foam over what was left of the fire, moving rapidly about in its flickering light. He could see clearly now the blackened figure of a man in the car.
In the distance the wailing of another siren had just become audible.
“That’ll be the police,” Colin said.
“Is it—” Andrew began hesitatingly.
“Is it Lucas?” Colin said. “It’s his car.”
“Yes, it’s my father,” Nicholas said.
“You can’t be sure, can you?” To Andrew the figure at the wheel seemed unidentifiable.
“Yes, it’s him.” Nicholas did not look at Andrew when he spoke, but kept a hard, bright gaze fixed on the car. His pleasant, sensitive face looked strangely empty. “But he was dead already when we came out, wasn’t he? We couldn’t have done anything to help him.”
“No, you certainly couldn’t have,” Colin said. He had not lost his composed, faintly cherubic look even when gazing at the corpse. It might have been thought that he had spent his life looking at such scenes.
“If we’d come out faster…” Nicholas’s voice faded. “No, if it was a bomb he’d have been killed instantaneously.”
“Have the fire brigade men said it was a bomb?” Andrew asked.
“No, I think they’re leaving that to the police, but it couldn’t have been anything else.” A look of extreme weariness had come over Nicholas. His shoulders had slumped and all of a sudden he turned his back on the car, as if he could not bear to go on looking at it. “I’ll have to tell Erica. Why don’t you two go in? I’ll stay here till the police arrive, but there’s no need for you to stay.”
“It’s all right, we’ll stay here,” Colin said. “But how will the police get along the lane?”
The burning car filled it. No car could have passed. The fire brigade men had managed to reach the wreck by forcing their way into the hedgerows on either side of it. The fire engine was a little way down the lane beyond it.
“The same way as these men did,” Nicholas said, “but they’ll have to leave their car some way back. Thank God at least we’re spared sightseers.”
That, Andrew was ready to admit, was one advantage of living in as isolated a spot as this. Virtually no traffic came along the lane except to the two houses.
The wailing of the police siren grew louder. A moment later, as a white and blue car appeared beyond the fire engine, the sound stopped. There was a pause, then four men came scrambling along, fighting their way through the charred hawthorns and hazels, till they came face to face with Nicholas, who had turned to meet them.
“Mr. Dearden?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” Nicholas said.
“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Roland.” The man, who was in plain clothes, was tall and broad-shouldered and heavy in his build. Though he could not have been much over forty his short, rough hair was grey. He had a square face with wide-spaced, heavy-lidded eyes. “It was you who telephoned?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said.
“And that poor chap in there is your father?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure? He isn’t exactly recognizable.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Is it his car?”
“Yes.”
The car, Andrew had decided, was a Mercedes, though what colour it had been was impossible to tell.
“Did you see it happen?” the detective asked.
“No,” Nicholas said. Then he turned to Colin and Andrew. “This is my next-door neighbour, Mr. Cahill, and a friend of his, Professor Basnett.”
“And none of you saw anything?”
“We were all indoors,” Colin said. “We only heard it.”
“A loud noise?”
“Very loud.”
“Did you see anybody in the lane when you came out?”
“Nobody.”
“It isn’t that I’d expect it, but one’s got to ask.” The inspector looked towards the other men who had come with him. They were standing near the car, watching the remains of the blaze with what looked almost like a stolid lack of interest. Perhaps they had seen other things like it before. One, like the inspector, was in plain clothes, the other two were in uniform. “And that’s where you live?” he said to Nicholas, nodding towards the Deardens’ house.
“Yes,” Nicholas said again. It was almost as if he had lost the power of saying anything else.
“Well, I think it would be best if you’d go in while we have a look round, then I’ll come in and get a few facts from you. There’s an ambulance coming, but it’s obvious there’s nothing they can do.”
Except remove a corpse, Andrew thought, though the inspector did not put this into words.
When the three men reached the drawing room, Lyn Goddard went out and returned with more glasses, and gave them brandy without asking if they wanted it. Andrew was not sure that he did. The brandy that he had drunk before he went out was still coursing warmly through his blood. But he did not refuse it. Nicholas went to Gwen, put a hand on her shoulder and bent to kiss her.
“It’s him?” she said. “It is?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said.
“But why was he here?” she said. “He ought to have been with Erica and Henry.”
“I know, and I’ll have to telephone them to tell them what’s happened,” he said. “Perhaps they’ll be able to explain it.”
He moved towards the telephone.
“You could do it from the other room,” she said.
He appeared not to hear her. He gave the impression of being lost to what was happening around him. He picked up the telephone and dialled. Everyone else in the room was silent.
After a moment he said, “Henry? Nicholas. A frightful thing—What?”
It seemed that he had been interrupted. It was a little while before he went on. “Today, you say? This morning?… Yes, yes, of course, I understand, but where…? It’s difficult to take in after what’s happened here. Is she badly hurt?… Well, thank God for that… St. Raphael’s, that’s a private place, isn’t it? And they think it’ll be only a week or so?… I’m sorry, very sorry, Henry… No, I didn’t know anything about it, because, you see, he never got here. That’s to say, well, he did get here almost, but there seems to have been a bomb or something in his car, or in the lane or somewhere, and it went off just before he reached us and the car went up in flames and he’s dead… Yes, dead, no question of it. The police are here and the fire brigade and an ambulance… I don’t know, Henry, I think he was killed instantly, which is something to be thankful for…” There was another longish pause while the sound of the other voice on the telephone could be faintly heard in the room. Then Nicholas went on, “Yes, I see. Yes, naturally. It was probably the best thing to do. But who knew he was going to do it, Henry? That’s the question I’d like answered at the moment. Did he see anyone in London besides you and Erica?… Yes, yes, the police, of course, but no one else that you know of?… Yes, it’s an appalling thing and I’ll keep in touch and tell you what happens. And you’ll tell Erica when she’s fit to be told, and give her our love.”
He put the telephone down. Turning back to the room, he thrust his hand through his shock of fair hair, clawing it back from his forehead.
“Erica was in a car smash this morning,” he said. “It happened quite near their home. A motorcyclist tried to get ahead of her at the lights and she swerved to avoid him and was hit by a bus. She isn’t badly hurt—well, not seriously. She’s got two broken ribs and a damaged collarbone and a good many cuts on her face from glass from the smashed windscreen, but she’ll be all right. She was just going out shopping when this maniac tried to get past her. And that’s why Dad didn’t stay in London. She’s in hospital, of course, that’s to say a private place near them called St. Raphael’s, which I believe is very good, and Henry’s alone in their flat and Dad didn’t think he could do any good by staying there, so he came home. But why he didn’t let us know…?” He paused and took the glass of brandy that Lyn held out to him.
“Perhaps he took for granted Henry would do that,” she said. “And he may have been too shocked to think of doing it.”
“Yes, that must be it,” Nicholas said. “Henry seemed a bit surprised that I didn’t know of it. And I’m not sure if he’s really taken in what I told him about what’s happened here. I can’t say I have myself yet.”
“And did Dad really see no one in London but Henry and Erica?” Gwen asked.
“So Henry says. That’s to say, they both saw the police who were handling Erica’s accident, and the ambulance people, but that’s all. Dad didn’t even see his agent, whom he was going to see today. When he got to London yesterday the three of them went out to dinner together, then they went back to the flat and they didn’t meet anyone they knew, and anyway, Erica’s accident hadn’t happened yet, so Dad hadn’t any thought of coming home. He didn’t decide to do that until after she was taken to the hospital.”
“But someone must have known he was coming,” Gwen said.
“And just about when too,” Andrew observed.
He was thinking that a less self-centred man than Sir Lucas Dearden might have stayed with Henry Haslam to bear him company while he was becoming used to the thought of his wife’s accident, even if perhaps he would have been less comfortable without his daughter there to look after him; if Lucas had done this he might have saved his own life.
The doorbell rang.
“The police,” Colin said. He had sat down on the sofa beside Dorothea.
But it was not the police; it was Jonathan Cahill.
He had a slightly dishevelled look, with some scraps of charred twig clinging to the jacket of the dark suit that he wore to work. His hair was windblown and he had a scratch down one side of his face, which had a bewildered look of shock.
“What the hell’s been going on?” he asked.
Dorothea jumped up from her chair, went to him and put her arms round him.
“Oh, Jonathan, when I first saw it I thought it was you!” she cried.
“How could it have been me, I don’t drive a Mercedes,” he said. He seemed to want to free himself from her embrace.
“But how did you get here?” she asked. “Did the police let you through?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “They wanted to know who I was and told me you were all in here, and I scrambled along the hedge past the wreck. Nicholas, I’m bloody sorry about it. It’s your father, isn’t it?”
“Didn’t the police tell you that?” Nicholas asked.
“One of them did, as a matter of fact. They were just getting him—his body—out of the car, what’s left of it, and taking it to an ambulance. But what happened? How did the car go on fire?”
“We don’t know,” Nicholas said, “except that there was a violent bang that sounded like a bomb, and when we got outside the car was in flames.”
“What have you done with your car?” Dorothea asked.
“Backed it into one of the passing-bays when I saw the road ahead was blocked,” Jonathan answered.
“Is the fire out yet?” Lyn asked.
He seemed to become aware of her presence for the first time. It appeared that he knew her. “Hallo, Lyn,” he said. “When did you get here?”
“This morning,” she answered, and repeated, “Is the fire out?”
“Just about,” Jonathan answered. “But you aren’t serious, are you, Nicholas? It couldn’t have been a bomb.”
“We won’t really be sure till the police tell us,” Nicholas said. “But it’s unusual, I believe, for a car to explode of its own accord.”
“Who’d want to do that to him?”
“Do any of us know who our enemies are?” Colin asked.
“Oh, I do, I certainly do,” Jonathan said. He mopped at the scratch on his face. “But I don’t really expect even the worst of them to get around to murdering me.”
“Unless one of them’s insane,” his father said. “You can’t predict what they’ll do then, even if you think you know them well. What have you done to your face?”
“I think it was the remains of a briar in the hedge, when I was getting past the car,” Jonathan said. “It isn’t anything. Have we all got to wait here for the police?”
“I think they expect it,” Nicholas said.
“It’s only that I thought we must be awfully in the way.” Jonathan accepted the drink that Lyn brought him. “Did you drive down?” he asked her.
“No, I came by train,” she said, “writing the Christmas cards that I ought to have done days ago and which are all going to arrive days late. Mine nearly always do. I make good resolutions about getting them off early every year, and then just forget them.” She seemed to want to bring a note of normality into the talk in the room. A mistake, Andrew thought. Nothing could make it normal. “Gwen and Nicholas met me at the station.”
That explained to Andrew why the house next door had been empty when Thomas Waterman called in the morning.
“Perhaps we really are in the way,” Dorothea said. “I expect you’d all much sooner be alone. You’ve this worry about Erica too. You don’t know about that, Jonathan. Erica was in a car crash this morning and she’s in hospital. Luckily not too badly hurt.”
“No, no, please don’t go,” Gwen said. “I can’t give you much to eat, but I could make some sandwiches.”
“I doubt if anyone’s hungry,” Colin said.
“And I should think you ought to stay until the police say if they want you here or not,” Nicholas said. “They may want us all here.”
Detective Inspector Roland presently arrived, accompanied by the other man in plain clothes whom they had all seen in the lane, and whom the inspector introduced as Detective Sergeant Porter; a short, very wide man with a wide, bland face, he had the somewhat surprising look of appearing to think that he was on a pleasant social visit. It turned out that it would suit the inspector if the Cahills and Andrew returned to the house next door, so that he had not quite such a roomful of people to deal with all at once. He said that he would call on them shortly, though he understood that they might have seen nothing until after the explosion of the bomb.
“So you’re sure it was a bomb,” Colin said as they got up to go.
“Call it a land mine,” the inspector said. “But we’re not a hundred percent sure. We’ll have to wait till our experts get on to the job for that. But it’s the assumption on which we’re working at the moment.”
Colin, Dorothea, Jonathan and Andrew left after Dorothea had told Gwen that she should call them immediately if there was any way in which they could help. They went out into the evening, which had become much darker than when they had come in, the flames from what was left of the wrecked car having died. Colin was still carrying the torch that he had brought with him. He switched it on and turned it towards the car and it showed the figures of the two uniformed men standing in the lane, talking. The fire engine and the ambulance had gone, and so had the crouching figure that had been visible in the car. There was a heavy smell of burning in the air and the hedgerows on both sides of the lane were blackened.
They walked in silence to the house next door with Colin leading the way and Dorothea clinging to Jonathan’s arm, as if she were still not quite sure that he might somehow be lost to her if she did not keep a tight hold of him.
In the sitting room they found the electric fire on, as they had left it, and the remains of the drinks on which they had started before the noise of the explosion had sent them racing out. After the brandy they had been drinking, the sherry did not seem very inviting, but Jonathan poured out a glass for himself.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought old Lucas was in London.”
Colin told him about Erica’s accident and the reason for Lucas Dearden’s return home.
“Good Lord!” Jonathan muttered. “Good Lord!” He drank some sherry. “But who knew he was coming home? Someone must have known if—well, if they intended to murder him.”
“Or any of the rest of us,” Colin said. “Or perhaps no one in particular. Vandalism on a peculiarly gruesome scale.”
“Is that what you really think?” Jonathan asked. “A bomb just left in the lane as a sort of hideous joke for anyone who came along to run over?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” Colin answered. “I think it was very deliberately aimed at Lucas. Andrew, what do you think?”
“He does seem somehow the most murderable of the people who live down this way,” Andrew said.
“But someone did know he was coming,” Jonathan insisted.
“Henry knew he was,” Dorothea said.
“But Henry happens to be in London,” Colin reminded her.
“But he could have telephoned… Oh, I didn’t mean to say that!” she cried. “I almost said he could have telephoned them next door, or for that matter Lucas himself could have done that, but of course I didn’t mean that. I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think someone who didn’t know he’d gone away planted the bomb, someone who perhaps saw him drive off this morning—No, that won’t do, he drove off yesterday. So Jonathan’s right, someone knew he was coming back, but didn’t know Jonathan would be driving along the lane so soon after him and could as easily have been blown up in his car as Lucas was. And that doesn’t sound like any of the Deardens, does it, though they all knew just about when Jonathan came home. I wonder…” She paused in her hurrying speech. “Suppose Lucas had someone in the car with him, someone who was armed with a bomb, and when Lucas slowed down as he was getting near his gate, the man jumped out, hurled the bomb at the car and bolted. Not one of us looked at the allotments when we came out, did we? He might have been running away across them without our seeing him.”
“As a matter of fact, that makes rather good sense,” Jonathan said in a slightly surprised tone, as if he were not accustomed to hearing sense from his mother. “Actually I think the police thought of it themselves, because when I arrived those two men we saw in the lane just now were going from one toolshed to the other and taking a look inside them all. Not that this man, if there was one, wouldn’t be miles away by now. He’d probably have a car stashed somewhere. Mum, what are we going to eat?”
He was young enough to be hungry in spite of what had happened.
Dorothea gave a deep sigh, as if for once she found it difficult to think about providing food, which normally was at the forefront of her mind.
“There’s a cold chicken,” she said, “and some salad, of course, and a lot of mince pies, though I really meant to keep them for tomorrow.”
“ ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…’” Jonathan sang, half under his breath. “Well, we shall have no carol singers this year, not even the Salvation Army. They’ll hardly think it appropriate to stand just out there and sing. I’ll miss them.”
“I’m sorry, Dorothea, but I couldn’t face a mince pie just now,” Andrew said. “Chicken only, please, and a very small piece at that.”
“Oh dear, Andrew, it’s so awful to have brought you down here for this,” she said. “Just think, if you’d stayed at home you could be sitting comfortably by your fire, just watching the splendid sort of horrors that happen on television, and eating something nice from Marks and Spencer’s, without a care in the world. I’m really sorry.” She swallowed her sherry at a gulp, looked a little astonished that she had done so and went out to the kitchen.
Andrew admitted to himself, though he would not have done so to anyone else, that what she had said had entered his own mind. The lonely life that he led now, often meeting friends yet seldom anyone with whom he was truly intimate, had perhaps made him selfish, too concerned with his own comfort, as he had really not much else to live for. But he was trying to keep the deep desire to be in his own home well to the back of his mind.
“I’m only afraid I may be in the way,” he said hypocritically. “I don’t see how I can help, hardly knowing the Deardens.”
“I think you can help us,” Colin said, “just by being around. It may be useful having someone here who’s detached from the whole situation. If any of us start to get hysterical, you can calm us down.”
“But look!” Jonathan broke in. “Someone knew the old man was coming down. We’re agreed on that. And it must have been someone here. He himself or Henry must have telephoned someone… No, I’m getting as bad as Mum. I don’t mean any of the Deardens. All the same, someone knew.”
That was what the police plainly believed, as appeared when Inspector Roland and Sergeant Porter arrived at the house about an hour later. By then Dorothea had produced a meal of cold chicken, salad and tinned apricots with some cream that she happened to have in the refrigerator. At first no one except Jonathan had wanted to eat, but she had insisted that it was very important to keep up one’s strength at a time of stress, and everyone had managed to consume a small amount, though this was probably more in obedience to her authority than from any desire for food. Jonathan, helped by Andrew, was doing the washing-up when the police arrived.
They were offered drinks, refused them and sat down with the Cahills and Andrew in the sitting room, the washing-up having been left only half finished.
“I believe you heard the bomb and were on the scene as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Dearden,” Inspector Roland said. The heavy-lidded eyes in his square face moved from one to another of the people there, but seemed to say very little. They did not even show much curiosity.
“So it really was a bomb, was it?” Colin said.
“An explosive device of some sort, planted in the road,” Roland said. “The area’s roped off now, and if any traffic tries to come along the lane to Upper Cullonden it’ll be turned off at the road junction.”
“There won’t be any traffic,” Colin said. “Hardly anything comes here except to these two houses.”
“I’ll have to go and collect my car sometime,” Jonathan said. “I can back it down the lane and drive round here by the village.”
“It’s your car, is it, the one in the lay-by?” Roland asked.
“Yes, I backed it in there when I saw the way ahead was blocked,” Jonathan answered.
“But you were expected here, were you?” Roland said.
“Oh yes, it’s just about my usual time for coming home,” Jonathan said. “I work in Rockford, but I live here.”
Roland turned back to Colin. “Did you go straight out as soon as you heard the bang?”
“Yes,” Colin said.
“But I understand you didn’t see anyone in the lane, either someone you might have expected to see, or some stranger?”
“No one at all.”
“Did you happen to look at the allotments?”
“I don’t think I did, no.”
“Did any of you?”
He was answered by some muttered negatives.
“In any case,” Colin said, “if there’d been someone there it would have been too dark to see him.”
“Even with the flames from the fire lighting things up?”
“I think so, yes.”
“And none of you knew that Sir Lucas was expected home? You had no telephone call from him or his son-in-law and then happened to mention it to someone?”
“As a matter of fact…” Andrew said and stopped.
“Yes?” Roland’s incurious gaze settled on his face.
“It isn’t that I knew anything about Sir Lucas coming home,” Andrew said. “But there’s something perhaps I ought to mention. In the morning when I was alone here while Mr. and Mrs. Cahill were out shopping, a visitor called. For a moment he seemed to think I might be Sir Lucas, then he came to the conclusion that I wasn’t and he asked where Sir Lucas was, as he’d been told he lived here. I told him that Sir Lucas lived next door but that he was in London and I didn’t know when he’d be back, and the man went away. I began to feel for some reason that I ought not to have said even as much as I had, but I didn’t think much about it. Then in the afternoon I went for a walk along to the village and home again by the main road, and when I was in the village I think I saw this man going into that pub there, The Running Man. But I didn’t go after him and try to speak to him or anything of the kind, and I can’t tell you anything more about him. I’m only telling you this because I think you may be interested in any strangers who are interested in Sir Lucas who happen to be around at the moment.”
“But I went to the pub later,” Colin said quickly. “And this man, at least I presume it was the same man, had booked a room there for the night, though he wasn’t there when I called in. But the landlord told me his name was Thomas Waterman.”
For a moment the inspector’s eyelids lifted and he said, “Waterman!”
“Didn’t a Thomas Waterman commit a murder some years ago?” Colin asked. “And didn’t Lucas Dearden prosecute him?”
Roland said nothing. He folded his big hands over his stomach and gazed down at them. Sergeant Porter smiled as if someone at a party of some kind had just made a particularly good joke.
Jonathan seemed to have been getting restive. He leant forward in his chair.
“But still, even if this man Waterman planted the bomb,” he said, “he’d have had to know when Lucas was coming. But he could have, you know. Once he knew Lucas was in London, he could have guessed he’d be with Henry and Erica. If he knew anything about the family, that is, and perhaps he did, he might have rung them up to say he wanted to meet Lucas or something, and been told he could meet him here if he waited. And so he waited, armed with his bomb, at the end of the lane where Lucas was sure to pick him up…”
He stopped, for just then the doorbell rang.
It was Lyn Goddard. She had no overcoat on and though the evening for the time of year was mild, she looked chilled. Dorothea tried to draw her towards the fire, but she resisted it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt. But I wondered, Dorothea, if you could come back with me. Gwen’s got quite hysterical. I can’t do anything with her, and if Nicholas goes anywhere near her she screams. I thought perhaps you could help.”
Dorothea looked at Roland. “Is it all right for me to go?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “Must have been a terrible shock for the poor lady. But am I right that she’s Sir Lucas’s daughter-in-law, not daughter?”
“That’s right,” Colin said.
“His daughter is Mrs. Haslam, who’s been in an accident in London, is that it?” Roland said. “That’s what I understood from Mr. Dearden.”
Colin nodded.
“But you came down from London this morning, Miss Goddard?” Roland went on.
“Yes, I told you so,” she said.
“It’s just that there’s a question I’d like to ask you,” he said. “Probably of no importance.” It was the first time that Andrew noticed how often Inspector Roland asked questions which he insisted were of no importance. “Since you arrived next door, have there been any telephone calls?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Ah, you don’t think so, but there might have been perhaps.”
“No. No, I’m sure there weren’t. Of course Mr. Dearden phoned his brother-in-law as soon as we got back into the house after—after seeing what had happened. And he heard then about his sister’s accident and why it was that his father had come home.”
“But you don’t remember any incoming calls?”
“No.”
“What time was it when you got here from the station?”
“I think it was about twelve.”
“And Mrs. Haslam’s accident, I understand from what Mr. Dearden has just told me, happened about then too. So Sir Lucas could hardly have made up his mind to come home until a little later. So if he or anyone else had phoned to say he was coming, it would have been later than midday.”
“Of course.”
“And you’d have heard the telephone, if it had rung, or do you think you might not have done so?”
“Certainly I should have, and no one rang,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Dearden had no way of knowing that Sir Lucas was expected home, and so could not have planted a bomb in the lane to murder him, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“Just covering a small point,” he said. “I’m sorry, it’s my job. Nothing important.”