As the screams continued – they could be heard in Meldrum Slocum – Mrs Rottecombe acted. She got into the reporters’ car, drove it out into the road and shut and locked the gate before sauntering back to the scene of such satisfactory carnage. By that time the Postmaster in Little Meldrum had phoned for an ambulance. It was clearly needed urgently if lives were to be saved. The Flashgun Kid shared the Postmaster’s opinion. Having dragged Pickles, still firmly attached to his thigh and, by the feel of things seemingly a permanent fixture, through the rose bed, he had tripped at the lawn’s edge and was being dragged back the way he’d come through those same roses. They were old roses on canina stock and exceedingly thorny. They had also been recently mulched with horse manure. Flashgun made the mistake of grabbing at them again and this time there could be no mistaking in Meldrum Slocum the imminence of death at Leyline Lodge. Butcher Cassidy shared that opinion. He clung to the branch of the oak with even more determination than he had pestered the mother, several mothers in fact, whose daughters had just been murdered, to find out how they were feeling about the deaths. Nothing on God’s earth was going to make him let go. Wilfred was obviously of the same opinion. He’d got that ankle and he meant to keep it. He shook Butcher’s leg, he worried it, he sank his teeth even deeper into it and took not a blind bit of notice of the suede shoe on Butcher’s other foot that kept kicking him on the side of the head. Wilfred rather liked being kicked so gently. Mr Rottecombe had once in a moment of intense irritation kicked him a damned sight harder and Wilfred hadn’t minded that either. Butcher’s kicks merely tickled him.
Having provided evidence that the reporters had trespassed by climbing over the locked gate, Mrs Rottecombe returned from the road. Even she could see it was time to call the bull terriers off before Wilfred removed Butcher Cassidy’s foot or the other wretch was savaged to death on the ground.
‘That’s enough of that,’ she commanded, hurrying across to the oak. Wilfred ignored her. He was enjoying that ankle too much. Mrs Rottecombe resorted to sterner measures. She knew her bull terriers. There was no point in clobbering them over the head; the backside was far more vulnerable and in Wilfred’s case more accessible. Seizing the dog’s scrotum with both hands she applied the nutcracker method with the utmost force. For a moment Wilfred merely grunted but the pain was too much even for him. He opened his mouth to voice a proper protest and was promptly dragged to the ground.
‘Naughty dog, naughty dog,’ Mrs Rottecombe scolded him. ‘You are a very naughty doggie.’
To Butcher, now on top of the branch and scrambling on to an even higher one, there was something insane about those words. Naughty that fucking dog wasn’t. It was a canine crocodile, a four-legged mantrap, and he was going to see the brute was put down fast and, he hoped, painfully.
Mrs Rottecombe turned her attention to Pickles who, being a bitch, lacked a scrotum. Instead she seized the nearest weapon, a plant label which announced that the roses were Crimson Glory. Carefully wiping the horse manure and earth off the plastic (she didn’t want dear little Pickles to get tetanus or any more terminal lockjaw than she was already displaying), she lifted the bull terrier’s tail and jabbed. If anything, Pickles’s reaction was more immediate than that of Wilfred. She let go of the Flashgun Kid and shot across the rose bed into the deepest shrubbery to lick her wound. Mrs Rottecombe replaced the metal label and turned her attention to the savaged cameraman.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she demanded with a haughty lack of concern for his injuries that would have taken Flashgun’s breath away if he had had any to spare. Flashgun didn’t think, he knew what he was doing there. Dying. He looked up at the ghastly woman and managed to speak.
‘Help me, help me,’ he whimpered. ‘I’m bleeding to death.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Rottecombe. ‘You’re trespassing. If you choose to trespass on private property, it’s your own fault if you get bitten. There’s a sign by the gate. It says quite clearly “BEWARE OF THE DOG”. You must have seen it. You ignored it and trespassed and attacked a perfectly harmless family pet and then you are surprised when it defends itself. You are a criminal. And what is that other fellow doing up in my tree?’
Jones’s eyes rolled in his head. A woman who could call the murderous brute which had been on the point of gnawing his leg off ‘a harmless family pet’ had to be clean off her fucking head.
‘For Christ’s sake …’ he began but Mrs Rottecombe brushed his prayer aside.
‘Name and address,’ she snapped. ‘Both your names and addresses.’ Then realising she was still in her dressing gown, she turned towards the house. ‘And just you wait where you are,’ she said as she went. ‘I intend to call the police and have you both prosecuted for trespass and cruelty to animals.’
The threat was too much for Flashgun. He sank back on to the horse manure and passed out. It was left to Butcher Cassidy, now three branches further up the tree, to protest.
‘Cruelty to animals, you fucking bitch,’ he shouted at her as she led the chastened Wilfred into the house. ‘You’re the one who’s going to be done for cruelty. We’ll fucking crucify you. You see if we don’t. We’ll sue you for everything you’ve got.’
Mrs Rottecombe smiled and patted Wilfred. ‘Good dog, Wilfie. You’re a good dog, aren’t you? Nasty man kicked you, didn’t he?’
She went into the house and fetched a tube of tomato purée from the kitchen. Holding him by the collar she poured the stuff on to his back. Then she led him out into the garden again and left him underneath the oak tree. He was still there when the ambulance came and shortly afterwards the police. There was blood from Butch’s ankle all over the ground under the tree and quite a lot on Wilfred’s back where it added authenticity to the tomato purée. Mrs Rottecombe had achieved her object. In an emergency she was a resourceful woman.
14
The Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement sat in the grass against the wall with his head in his hands. He knew now he should never have come home a day early. He was equally certain about his marriage. He should never have come within a mile of the damned woman who could let loose those terrible dogs on two reporters. The sounds of snarls and screams, not to mention the knowledge that there was an unconscious man, his head covered in blood, lying on the floor of the garage convinced him of that. Harold Rottecombe had no intention of being an accessory after the fact of the poor devil being there and possibly even of his murder. If that lot hit the headlines, as it was almost bound to now, his position not only as Shadow Minister but also as an MP would be ended. And it was all the fault of that insane bitch. He should never have married her. A new thought struck him. There had been something genuine about her horror when she’d returned from the garage which almost convinced him she hadn’t put him there. Cut that ‘almost’. She really hadn’t known he was in there. In that case someone else was responsible. Harold Rottecombe searched for another explanation and found one. Someone was out to ruin his career. That was why the newspapers had been informed. Anyway it was too late to do anything about that now. The first thing he had to do was to get back to London by train. There was no way he could drive. A glance over the wall showed him the group of journalists and the TV men down at the bottom of the drive. They would be there all day and the police from Oston would undoubtedly come to the house. He couldn’t use the train station there. He’d have to get to Slawford to catch the train to Bristol and London. The town was outside his constituency and he’d be less likely to be recognised there. Against that it was a hell of a long way to have to walk.
On the other hand there was the river. It flowed through Slawford, and along the wall he could see the roof of the boat-house and a far better method than trudging for ten miles across fields occurred to him. He’d take the rowing boat and go downstream.
Behind him Ruth was putting her skills in tying people up to good use on Wilt. Having made sure he wasn’t dead or dying she had bound his wrists together with several turns of Elastoplast whic
h wouldn’t leave any obvious marks like rope, and removed his jeans. Then she dragged him over to the Volvo estate, in the process getting some of Wilt’s own blood on to the Y-fronts, and by using two planks rolled him with great difficulty into the back. Next she tied a handkerchief across his mouth so he could still breathe, and covered him with newspapers and several cardboard boxes. Finally she took his knapsack and jeans, locked the garage doors and returned to the house to wait for Harold to return.
After half an hour she called his name but there was no reply. She went out into the garden and looked over the wall. There was a patch of crushed long grass where he must have sat but no sign of him. He had evidently taken fright and scurried away. It was just as well. She had to deal with the reporters at the gate. They could wait for a bit. She wanted to see what was in the knapsack. She went back to the garage and by the time she’d been through the bag she was completely bewildered. Wilt’s driving licence gave his address as 45 Oakhurst Avenue, Ipford. Ipford? But Ipford was away to the south. How come the wretched man had ended up in her garage? Like everything else it made no sense. On the other hand, if she dumped him somewhere near Ipford he’d have a job explaining what he had been doing without his trousers in a sleepy place like Meldrum Slocum. For ten long minutes Mrs Rottecombe sat and considered the problem before making her decision.
An hour later she went down the drive with Wilfred and Pickles and showed the group of media people there the supposed wounds the brutes from the News on Sunday had inflicted on Wilfred.
‘They trespassed on private property and tried to break into the house and then when Pickles caught them they were foolish enough to kick her. You can’t do that to an English bull terrier and not expect the little darling to defend herself, can you, sweetie?’ Pickles wagged her tail and looked pleased with herself. She liked being petted. Wilfred was far too heavy to pick up but his hindquarters were impressively swathed in bandages. ‘One of the men attacked him with a knife,’ she explained. ‘That was a really horrid thing to do.’
‘No, I’m not prepared to answer any questions,’ she said when one reporter began to ask if it was true that—‘I am far too upset. I can’t bear cruelty to animals and what those two men did was quite dreadful. No, my husband is in London. If you want to talk to him, you’ll find him there. I’m going to get some rest. It’s been a very distressing day. I’m sure you can see that.’
What the reporters could see was that Butcher Cassidy and the Flashgun Kid must have been completely insane to go anywhere near such fearsome dogs, and as for kicking the bitch … well, they must have been bent on suicide with that enormous Wilfred around. As Mrs Rottecombe went back to the house, opinion was divided among the men at the gate. Some were delighted that Butcher and Flashgun had finally met their match while others seemed to think they had shown immense courage, courage far beyond the call of duty, in pursuit of a story. No one was prepared to follow their example and presently the convoy moved off.
Mrs Rottecombe watched them go and then went back to the house to attend to Wilt.
She put his boots, socks and trousers into a garbage bag. She would dump them somewhere along the way. For a moment she considered taking Wilfred and Pickles but decided against it. She needed to be totally anonymous and people might remember seeing the dogs in the car. Then she checked the bottom of the drive from a bedroom window and was relieved to see that the reporters had left. At 9 p.m. she drove down to the road and was on her way south towards Ipford.
15
Being up at the cabin overlooking Lake Sassaquassee with the quads wasn’t making Uncle Wally feel even slightly safer. Not that it was a cabin. As Sheriff Stallard had said Wally Immelmann had built himself an ante-bellum mansion there and had felled nearly ever tree for half a mile around the place because Auntie Joan was frightened of bears and wasn’t going to go walking in the woods where she couldn’t see if there were bears about. And beyond the open space she’d insisted on his erecting an extremely strong wire fence to make sure as hell bears didn’t get in and start marauding around the house and coming through the picture windows that looked out over the terrace and the swimming-pool (she wasn’t swimming in the lake because she’d heard there were snakes that swam too, water moccasins and cotton-mouths) and the barbecue area and all. It was the ‘all’ that excited the Wilt girls. And had always excited Wally which is why he had taken such pains and paid so much to collect it.
‘That there is a Sherman tank. Went right through the Second World War,’ he told them proudly. ‘Up Omaha Beach on D-Day with General Patton – they say he rode into battle on it – and on all the way to Berlin. Well, not right to Berlin because that General Montgomery chickened out taking the city but it got pretty damn close. Best battle tank there was. Now over here is a Huey ’copter with a Puff the Magic Dragon in the door. Knocked the sh … knocked the charlies out in ’Nam like they didn’t know what hit them. That gun could fire thousands of rounds in no time at all. And this here is a howitzer that was with General MacArthur in Korea and when that baby fired, those yellow-bellies knew that Uncle Sam meant business. Same with this baby.’ He indicated a flame-thrower. ‘Went in on Okinawa barbecuing Nips like—’
‘Barbecuing whats?’ Emmeline asked.
‘Japs,’ said Uncle Wally proudly. ‘Shoots flame out the nozzle here and zaps a guy and you got a turkey roast up and running on the hoof. Those bastards were torched in their hundreds. And this here is a napalm bomb. You know what napalm is. It’s great stuff. Like cooking oil and jello. You want a village fry-up all you need do is drop one of those and – boom! – you’ve got a charlie roasted better than anything you’ve ever seen. Now this is a missile I got from Germany when we won the Cold War. Put a nuclear warhead on that sweetheart and a town five times the size of Wilma you wouldn’t even find on a map it would go so fast. The Russkies knew that, which is how we saved the world from Communism. They weren’t going to risk nuclear annihilation, no way.’
All over the grounds there were the mementoes of terrible wars but the pride of Uncle Wally’s military collection was a B-52. It stood on the other side of the house where it could be seen through the picture window even at night with lights set in the ground shining up on it, a black monstrous bomber with fifty-eight missions over Vietnam and Iraq painted in symbols on the side; it was, as Wally said, capable of flying twelve thousand miles and dropping an H-bomb that would take out the biggest city in the world.
‘What does “take out” mean, Uncle Wally?’ Josephine asked with seeming innocence. But Wally Immelmann was too immersed in his dream of a world made safe by mass destruction to notice.
‘It means first you get the blast wave and second the fireball and third you get radiation and fifteen, sixteen million people dead. That’s what it means, honey. Used to keep them flying round the clock, the Strategic Air Force, and all ready to go if the President of the US of A pressed the button. Course we got better weapons now but in their day that baby ruled the sky. And the world. We don’t need anything that big now. Got ICBMs and Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles and neutron bombs and stuff no one knows about that can cross the Atlantic like in less than an hour. Best of all there’s lasers in outer space that can fry anywhere on earth at the speed of light.’
By the time they got back to the house Uncle Wally was in a genial and generous mood.
‘Those girls of yours are smart, real smart,’ he told Eva who had been watching rather nervously from a distance. ‘I’ve been giving them a history lesson why we win wars and nobody can get near us technologywise. Isn’t that so, girls?’
‘Yes, Uncle Wally,’ said the quads in unison. Eva looked at them suspiciously. She knew that unison. It was a portent.
That night while Uncle Wally was watching baseball and having his fifth bourbon on the rocks, and Eva and Auntie Joan were talking family back in England, Samantha found an old portable tape recorder in Wally’s romper room. It was a reel-to-reel one with an automatic cut-out when the tape came to t
he end and it had a four-hour reel on it. By the time Wally and his wife staggered up to the bedroom it was running under the doublewide. And Wally wanted a hump.
‘Aw, come on, honey pie,’ he said. ‘We aren’t getting any younger and—’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Auntie Joan. She wasn’t in a good mood. Eva had told her that Maude, who was Auntie Joan’s sister, had decided to become a lesbian and was living with a gay who’d had a sex-change operation. That wasn’t the sort of family news she wanted. Wally humping her wasn’t what she wanted either. Could be something to be said for becoming a lesbian.
‘I am speaking for myself,’ Wally said. ‘Only person I can speak for. You don’t have a goddam prostate or if you do I haven’t heard that Dr Hellster I go to in Atlanta speak about it. He tells me I got to keep it up or else.’
‘Keep it up? You haven’t got it to keep up. Leastways I haven’t noticed it lately. You sure you haven’t left it in the bathroom along with your hairpiece? Like trying to get some action out of a sea slug.’
‘Yeah,’ said Wally, evidently ignoring the comparison with difficulty. ‘And I’m not likely to get it up if you don’t give me some foreplay.’
‘Foreplay? You think a woman’s got to do the foreplay? You’ve got the wrong woman if you think that. You’re the one supposed to do the foreplay. Like with the tongue and all.’
‘Sweet fuck!’ said Uncle Wally. ‘At your age you want me playing the old mouth-organ? Like whale blowing in reverse? Shit. This is no time to be making cracks like that.’
‘Well, it isn’t the time to be asking me to go down on you either.’
‘I wasn’t talking about going down. Last time you did that must have been around the time of the Watergate hearings.’