CHAPTER TEN

We were in front of the house, talking to policemen. I couldn't remember walking up the drive.

Our appearance on the scene had been a shock to the assembled forces, but a welcome one. They had been searching for our remains in the rubble.

They told us that the explosion had happened at four-thirty in the morning, the wumph and reverberation of it waking half the village, the shock waves breaking windows and setting dogs howling. Several people had called the police, but when the force had reached the village, everything had seemed quiet. No one knew where the explosion had occurred. The police drove round the extended neighbour hood until daylight, and it was only then that anyone saw what had happened to Quantum.

The front wall of the hall, the antique front door with it, had been blown out flat onto the drive, and the centre part of the upper storey had collapsed into the hall. The glass in all the windows had disappeared.

"I'm afraid it's worse at the back," a policeman said phlegmatically. "Perhaps you'd come round there, sir. We can at least tell everyone there are no bodies."

Malcolm nodded mechanically, and we followed the policeman round to the left, between the kitchen and garage, through to the garden and along past the dining-room wall. The shock when we rounded onto the terrace was, for all the warning, horrific and sickening.

Where the sitting-room had been, there was a mountain of jumbled dusty bricks, plaster, beams and smashed furniture spilling outwards onto the grass. Malcolm's suite, which had been above the sitting-room, had vanished, had become part of the chaos. Those of the attic rooms that had been above his head had come down too. The roof, which had looked almost intact from the front, had at the rear been stripped of tiles, the old sturdy rafters standing out against the sky like picked ribs.

My own bedroom had been on one side of Malcolm's bedroom: all that remained of it were some shattered spikes of floorboards, a strip of plaster cornice and a drunken mantle clinging to a cracked wall overlooking a void.

Malcolm began to shake. I took off my jacket and put it round his shoulders.

"We don't have gas," he said to the policeman. "My mother had it disconnected sixty years ago because she was afraid of it."

There was a slight spasmodic wind blowing, enough to lift Malcolm's hair and leave it awry. He looked suddenly frail, as if the swirling air would knock him over.

"He needs a chair," I said.

The policeman gestured helplessly to the mess. No chairs left.

"I'll get one from the kitchen. You look after him."

"I'm quite all right," Malcolm said faintly.

"The outside kitchen door is locked, sir, and we can't allow you to go in through the hall."

I produced the key, showed it to him, and went along and in through the door before he could stop me. In the kitchen, the shiny yellow walls themselves were still standing, but the door from the hall had blown open, letting in a glacier tongue of bricks and dust. Dust everywhere, like a veil. Lumps of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Everything glass, everything china in the room had cracked apart. Moira's geraniums, fallen from their shelves, lay in red farewell profusion over her all-electric domain.

I picked up Malcolm's pine armchair, the one thing he had insisted on keeping through all the changes, and carried it out to where I'd left him. He sank into it without seeming to notice it and put his hand over his mouth.

There were firemen and other people tugging at movable parts of the ruins, but the tempo of their work had slowed since they'd seen we were alive. Several of them came over to Malcolm, offering sympathy, but mostly wanting information, such as were we certain there had been no one else in the house? As certain as we could be.

Had we been storing any gas in the house? Bottled gas? Butane? Propane? Ether? No.

Why ether? it could be used for making cocaine. We looked at them blankly. They had already discovered, it seemed, that there had been no mains gas connected. They were asking about other possibilities because it nevertheless looked like a gas explosion. We'd had no gas of any sort. Had we been storing any explosive substances whatsoever?

No. Time seemed disjointed.

Women from the village, as in all disasters, had brought hot tea in thermos flasks for the men working. They gave some to Malcolm and me, and found a red blanket for Malcolm so that I could have my jacket back in the chill gusty air. There was grey sheet cloud overhead – the light was grey, like the dust.

A thick ring of people from the village stood in the garden round the edges of the lawn, with more arriving every minute across the fields and through the garden gate. No one chased them away. Many were taking photographs. Two of the photographers looked like Press.

A police car approached, its siren wailing ever louder as it made slow progress along the crowded road. It wailed right up the drive, and fell silent, and presently a senior-looking man not in uniform came round to the back of the house and took charge.

First, he stopped all work on the rubble. Then he made observations and wrote in a notebook. Then he talked to the chief of the firemen. Finally he came over to Malcolm and me.

Burly and black moustached, he said, as to an old acquaintance, "Mr Pembroke."

Malcolm similarly said, "Superintendent," and everyone could hear the shake he couldn't keep out of his voice. The wind died away for a while, though Malcolm's shakes continued within the blanket.

"And you, sir?" the superintendent asked me.

"Ian Pembroke."

He pursed his mouth below the moustache, considering me. He was the man I'd spoken to on the telephone, I thought. "Where were you last night, sir?"

"With my father in London," I said. "We've just… returned."

I looked at him steadily. There were a great many things to be said, but I wasn't going to rush into them.

He said noncommittally, "We will have to call in explosive experts as the damage here on preliminary inspection, and in the absence of any gas, seems to have been caused by an explosive device."

Why didn't he say bomb, I thought irritably. Why shy away from the word? If he'd expected any reaction from Malcolm or me, he probably got none as both of us had come to the same conclusion from the moment we'd walked up the drive.

If the house had merely been burning, Malcolm would have been dashing about, giving instructions, saving what he could, dismayed but full of vigour. It was the implications behind a bomb which had knocked him into shivering lassitude: the implications and the reality that if he'd slept in his own bed, he wouldn't have risen to bath, read the Sporting Life, go to his bank for travellers' cheques and eat breakfast at the Ritz.

And nor, for that matter, would I.

"I can See you're both shocked," the superintendent said unemotionally. "It's dearly impossible to talk here, so I suggest you might come to the police station." He spoke carefully, giving us at least theoretically the freedom of refusing.

"What about the house?" I said. "It's open to the four winds. Apart from this great hole, all the windows are broken everywhere else. There's a lot of stuff still inside… silver… my father's papers in his office… some of the furniture."

"We will keep a patrol here," he said. "If you'll give the instructions, we'll suggest someone to board up the windows, and we'll contact a construction firm with a tarpaulin large enough for the roof."

"Send me the bill," Malcolm said limply.

"The firms concerned will no doubt present their accounts."

"Thanks anyway," I said.

The superintendent nodded.

A funeral for Quantum, I thought. Coffin windows, pall roof. Lowering the remains into the ground would probably follow. Even if any of the fabric of the house should prove sound enough, would Malcolm have the stamina to rebuild, and live there, and remember?

He stood up, the blanket clutched around him, looking infinitely older than his Years, a sag of defeat in the cheeks. Slowly, in deference to the shaky state of his legs, Malcolm, the superintendent and I made our way along past the kitchen and out into the front drive. The ambulances had departed, also one of the fire-engines, but the rope across the gateway had been overwhelmed, and the front garden was full of people, one young constable still trying vainly to hold them back. A bunch in front of the rest started running in our direction as soon as we appeared, and with a feeling of unreality I saw they were Ferdinand, Gervase, Alicia, Berenice, Vivien, Donald, Helen… I lost count.

"Malcolm," Gervase said loudly, coming to a halt in front of us, so that we too had to stop. "You're alive!"

A tiny flicker of humour appeared in Malcolm's eyes at this most obvious of statements, but he had no chance of answering as the others set up a clamour of questions.

Vivien said, "I heard from the village that Quantum had blown up and you were both dead." Her strained voice held a complaint about having been given erroneous news.

"So did I," Alicia said. "Three people telephoned… so I came at once, after I'd told Gervase and the others, of course." She looked deeply shocked, but then they all did, mirroring no doubt what they could see on my own face but also suffering from the double upset of misinformation.

"Then when we all get here," Vivien said, "we find you aren't dead." She sounded as if that too were wrong.

"What did happen?" Ferdinand asked. "Just look at Quantum!"

Berenice said, "Where were you both, then, when it exploded?"

"We thought you were dead," Donald said, looking bewildered.

More figures pushed through the crowd, horror opening their mouths. Lucy, Edwin and Serena, running, stumbling, looking alternately from the wounded house to me and Malcolm.

Lucy was crying, "You're alive, you're alive!" Tears ran down her cheeks. "Vivien said you were dead."

"I was told they were dead," Vivien said defensively. Dim-witted… Joyce's judgement came back.

Serena was swaying, pale as pale. Ferdinand put an arm round her and hugged her. "It's all right, girl, they're not dead after all. The old house's a bit knocked about, eh?" He squeezed her affectionately.

"I don't feel well," she said faintly. "What happened?"

"Too soon to say for certain," Gervase said assertively. "But I'd say one can't rule out a bomb."

They repudiated the word, shaking their heads, covering their ears. Bombs were for wars, for wicked schemes in aero planes for bus stations in far places, for cold-hearted terrorists… for other people. Bombs weren't for a family house outside a Berkshire village, a house surrounded by quiet green fields, lived in by an ordinary family.

Except that we weren't an ordinary family. Ordinary families didn't have fifth wives murdered while planting geraniums. I looked around at the familiar faces and couldn't see on any of them either malice or dismay that Malcolm had escaped. They were all beginning to recover from the shock of the wrongly reported death and also beginning to realise how much damage had been done to the house. Gervase grew angry. "Whoever did this shall pay for it!" He sounded pompous more than effective.

"Where's Thomas?" I asked.

Berenice shrugged waspishly. "Dear Thomas went out early on one of his useless job-hunting missions. I've no idea where he was going. Vivien telephoned after he'd left."

Edwin said, "Is the house insured against bombs, Malcolm?"

Malcolm looked at him with dislike and didn't answer.

Gervase said masterfully, "You'd better come home with me, Malcolm. Ursula will look after you."

None of the others liked that. They all instantly made counter- proposals. The superintendent, who had been listening with attentive eyes, said at this point that plans to take Malcolm home would have to be shelved for a few hours.

"Oh, really?" Gervase stared down his nose. "And who are you?"

"Detective Superintendent Yale, sir."

Gervase raised his eyebrows but didn't back down. "Malcolm's done nothing wrong."

"I want to talk to the superintendent myself," Malcolm said. "I want him to find out who tried to destroy my house."

"Surely it was an accident," Serena said, very upset.

Ferdinand still had his arm round her. "Face facts, girl." He hesitated, looking at me. "Vivien and Alicia told everyone you were both living here again… so how come you escaped being hurt?"

"Yes," Berenice said. "That's what I asked."

"We went to London for a night out and stayed there," I said.

"Very lucky," Donald said heartily, and Helen, who stood at his elbow and hadn't spoken so far at all, nodded a shade too enthusiastically and said, "Yes, yes."

"But if we'd been in the office," I said, "we would have been all right."

They looked along the front of the house to the far corner where the office windows were broken but the walls still stood.

"You wouldn't be in the office at four-thirty in the morning,"Alicia said crossly. "Why should you be?"

Malcolm was growing tired of them. Not one had hugged him, kissed him, or made warm gestures over his survival. Lucy's tears, if they were genuine, had come nearest. The family obviously could have accommodated his death easily, murmuring regrets at his graveside, maybe even meaning them, but looking forward also with well-hidden pleasure to a safely affluent future. Malcolm dead could spend no more. Malcolm dead would free them to spend instead.

"Let's go," he said to the superintendent, "I'm cold."

An unwelcome thought struck me. "Did any of you," I asked the family, "tell Joyce… about the house?"

Donald cleared his throat. "Yes, I… er… broke it to her."

His meaning was clear. "You told her we were dead?"

"Vivien said you were dead," he said, sounding as defensive as she had. "She said I should tell Joyce, so I did."

"My God," I said to the superintendent, "Joyce is my mother. I'll have to phone her at once."

I turned instinctively back to the house, but the superintendent stopped me, saying the telephones weren't working.

He, I and Malcolm began to move towards the gates, but we had gone only halfway when Joyce herself pushed through the crowd and ran forward, frantically, fearfully distraught.

She stopped when she saw us. Her face went white and she swayed as Serena had done, and I sprinted three or four long strides and caught her upright before she fell.

"It's all right," I said, holding her. "It's all right. We're alive."

"Malcolm…"

"Yes, we're both fine."

"Oh, I thought… Donald said… I've been crying all the way here, I couldn't see the road…" She put her face against my jacket and cried again with a few deep gulps, then pushed herself off determinedly and began searching her tailored Pockets for a handkerchief. She found a tissue and blew her nose. "Well, darling," she said, "as you're alive, what the hell's been going on?" She looked behind Malcolm and me and her eyes widened. "The whole bloody tribe come to the wake?" To Malcolm she said, "You've the luck of the devil, you old bugger."

Malcolm grinned at hera distinct sign of revival.

The three ex-wives eyed each other warily. Any mushy idea that the near-death of the man they'd all married and the near-destruction of the house they'd all managed might have brought them to sisterly sympathy was a total non-starter.

"Malcolm can come and stay with me, "Joyce said.

"Certainly not," Alicia said instantly, clearly alarmed. "You can take your precious Ian. Malcolm can go with Gervase."

"I won't have it," Vivien said sharply. "If Malcolm's going anywhere, it's fitting he should stay with Donald, his eldest son."

Malcolm looked as if he didn't know whether to laugh or scream.

"He's staying with me," I said. "If he wants to."

"In your flat?" Ferdinand asked.

I had an appalling vision of my flat disintegrating like Quantum but, unlike Quantum, killing people above and below. "No, not there," I said.

"Then where, darling?" Joyce asked.

"Wherever we happen to be."

Lucy smiled. It was the sort of thing she was happy with. She pulled her big brown cloak closer round her large form and said that it sounded a thoroughly sensible proposal. The others looked at her as if she were retarded instead of the brains of the tribe.

"I'll go wherever I want to," Malcolm said flatly, "and with Ian."

I collected a battery of baleful glares, all of them as ever afraid I would scoop their shares of the pool: all except Joyce, who wanted me to.

"As that's settled," she said with a hint of maternal smugness which infuriated all the others, "I want to see just how bad the damage is to the house." She looked at me briefly. "Come along, darling, you can show me."

"Run along, mummy's boy," Gervase said spitefully, smarting from having been spurned by Malcolm.

"Poor dear Ian, tied to mummy's apron strings." Berenice's effort came out thick with detestation. "Greedy little Ian."

"it isn't fair," Serena said plaintively. "Ian gets everything, always. I think it's beastly."

"Come on, darling, "Joyce said. "I'm waiting."

I felt rebellious, tried to smother it, and sought for a different solution.

I said to them. "Come and see what really happened here. You can all come."

The superintendent had in no way tried to break up the family party but had listened quietly throughout. I happened to catch his eye at that point, and he nodded briefly and walked back beside Malcolm as everyone slowly moved round to the rear of the house.

The extent and violence of the damage there silenced even Gervase. All of the mouths gaped: in all eyes, horrified awe.

The chief fireman came over and with a certain professional relish began in a strong Berkshire accent to point out the facts.

"Blast travels along, the lines of least resistance," he said. "This is a good strong old house, which I reckon is why so much of it is still standing. The blast, see, travelled outwards, front and back from a point somewhere near the centre of the main upper storey. Some Of the blast went upwards into the roof, bringing down some of those little attic bedrooms, and a good bit of blast, I'd reckon, blew downwards, making a hole that the upper storey and part of the attic just collapsed into, see what I mean?"

Everyone saw.

"There's this wall here" – he pointed to the one between what had been the sitting-room and was still the dining-room – "this wall here, with the chimney built into it, this is one of the main load- bearing walls. It goes right up to the roof. Same the other side, more or less. Those two thick walls stopped the blast travelling sideways, except a bit through the doorways." He turned directly to Malcolm. I've seen a lot of wrecked buildings, sir, mostly burned, it's true, but some gas explosions, and I'd say, and mind you, you'd have to get a proper survey done, but I'd say, on looking at this house, that although it got a good shaking you could think of rebuilding it. Good solid Victorian house, otherwise it would have folded up like a pack of cards."

"Thank you," Malcolm said faintly.

The fireman nodded. "Don't you let any fancy demolition man tell you different, sir. I don't like people being taken advantage of when they're overcome by disasters. I've seen too much of that, and it riles me. What I'm telling you is a straight opinion. I've nothing to gain one way or the other."

"We're all grateful," I said. He nodded, satisfied, and Gervase finally found his voice. "What sort of bomb was it?" he asked.

"As to that, Sir, I wouldn't know. You'd have to wait for the experts." The fireman turned to the superintendent. "We shut Off the electricity at the meter switch in the garage when we got here, and likewise turned off the mains water under a man-hole cover out by the gate. The storage tank in the roof had emptied through the broken pipes upstairs and water was still running when we got here, and all that water's now underneath the rubble. There's nothing I can see Can start a fire. If you want to go into the upper storey at the sides, you'll need ladders, the staircase is blocked. I can't vouch for the dividing walls up there, we looked through the windows but we haven't been inside, you'd have to go carefully. We didn't go up to the attic much, bar a quick look from up the ladder. But down here, you should be all right in the dining-room and in that big room the other side of this mess, and also in the kitchen and the front room on the far side."

"MY office," Malcolm said.

The superintendent nodded, and I reflected that he already knew the layout of the house well from earlier repeated visits.

"We've done as much as we can here," the fireman said. "All right if we shove off now?"

The superintendent, agreeing, went a few steps aside with him in private consultation and the family began to come back from suspended animation.

The Press Photographers moved in close rand took haphazard pictures of us, and a man and a woman from different papers approached with insistent questions. Only Gervase seemed to find those tolerable and did all the answering. Malcolm sat down again on the pine chair, which was still there, and gathered his blanket around him, retreating into it up to his eyes like a Red Indian.

Vivien, spotting him, went over and told him she was tired of standing and needed to sit down and it was typically selfish of him to take the only seat, and an insult to her as she was the senior woman present. Glancing at her with distaste, Malcolm got to his feet and moved a good distance away, allowing her to take his place with a self-satisfied smirk. My dislike of Vivien rose as high as her cheekbones and felt as shrewish as her mouth.

Alicia, recovered, was doing her fluttery feminine act for the reporters, laying out charm thickly and eclipsing Serena's little- girl Ploy. Seeing them together, I thought that it must be hard for Serena to have a mother who refused to mature, who in her late fifties still dressed and behaved like an eighteen-year-old, who for years had blocked her daughter's natural road to adulthood. Girls needed a motherly mother, I'd been told, and Serena didn't have one. Boys needed one. too and Joyce wasn't one, but I'd had a father all the time and in the end I'd also had Coochie, and Serena hadn't had either and there lay all the difference in the world.

Edwin was having as hard a time as Donald in putting on a show of rejoicing over Malcolm's deliverance.

"It's all very well for You," he said to me bitterly, catching my ironic look in his direction. "Malcolm despises me – and don't bother to deny it, he makes it plain enough – and I don't see why I should care much for him. Of course, I wouldn't wish him dead…"

"Of course not," I murmured.

"… but, well, if it had happened…" he stopped, not actually having the guts to say it straight out.

"You'd have been glad?" I said.

"No." He cleared his throat. "I could have faced it," he said.

I almost laughed. "Bully for you, Edwin," I said. "Hang in there, fellow."

"I could have faced your death, too," he said stuffily.

Oh well, I thought. I asked for that. "How much do you know about bombs?" I asked.

"That's a ridiculous question," he said, and walked off, and I reflected that Norman West had reported Edwin as spending an hour most days in the public library, and I betted one could find out how to make bombs there, if one persevered.

Berenice said to me angrily, "It's all your fault Thomas is out of work."

I blinked. "How do you make that out?"

"He's been so worried about Malcolm's behaviour that he couldn't concentrate and he made mistakes. He says you could get Malcolm to help us, but of course I tell him you won't, why should you, you're Malcolm's pet." She fairly spat the last word, the rage seething also in her eyes and tightening all the cords in her neck.

"You told Thomas that?" I said.

"It's true," she said furiously. "Vivien says you've always been Malcolm's favourite and he's never been fair to Thomas."

"He's always been fair to all of us," I said positively, but of course she didn't believe it.

She was older than Thomas by four or five years and had married him when she was well over thirty and (Joyce had said cattily) desperate for any husband that offered. Ten years ago, when I'd been to their wedding, she had been a thin, moderately attractive woman lit up by happiness. Thomas had been proud of himself and proprietary. They had looked, if not an exciting couple, stable and full of promise, embarking on a good adventure.

Ten years and two daughters later, Berenice had put on weight and outward sophistication and lost whatever illusions she'd had about marriage. I'd long supposed it was basic disappointment which had made her so destructive of Thomas, but hadn't bothered to wonder about the cause of it. Time I did, I thought. Time I understood the whole lot of them, because perhaps in that way we might come to know who could and who couldn't murder.

To search through character and history, not through alibis. To listen to what they said and didn't say, to learn what they could control, and what they couldn't.

I knew, as I stood there looking at the bunch of them, that only someone in the family itself could go that route, and that if I didn't do it, no one else would.

Norman West and Superintendent Yale could dig into facts. I would dig into the people. And the problem with that, I thought, mocking my own pretension, was that the people would do anything to keep me out.

I had to recognise that what I was going to do could produce more trouble than results. Spotting the capability of murder could elude highly-trained psychiatrists, who had been known to advise freedom for reformed characters only to have them go straight out and kill. A highly-trained psychiatrist I was not. just someone who could remember how we had been, and could learn how we were now.

I looked at the monstrously gutted house and shivered. We had returned unexpectedly on Monday; today was Friday. The speed of planning and execution was itself alarming. Never again were we likely to be lucky. Malcolm had survived three attacks by sheer good fortune, but Ferdinand wouldn't have produced healthy statistics about a fourth. The family looked peacefully normal talking to the reporters, and I was filled with a sense of urgency and foreboding.

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