Hot Money

CHAPTER TWELVE

Malcolm had achieved a double suite at the Ritz with views of Green Park. He had lunched on Strasbourg pate and Dover sole, according to the remains on the white-clothed room-service table, and had reached the lower half of a bottle of Krug.

"How are the shakes?" I said, putting his briefcase down beside him.

"Were you followed here?" he asked.

"I was not."

He was doing his best to pretend he had regained total command of himself, yet I guessed the train journey had been an anxious and lonely ordeal. It was difficult for me to imagine the escalating trauma within him. How could anyone be the target of deadly unrelenting virulence and not in the end break down? I'd got to invent something better for him, I thought, than cooping him up in millionaire cells. Make him safe, give him back his lightheartedness, set him free.

"Um," I said, "I hope your passport's still in your briefcase."

"Yes, it is." He had taken it in his briefcase to Paris.

"Good."

An unfortunate thought struck him. "Where's yours?" Malcolm asked.

"In the rubble. Don't worry, I'll get a replacement. Do you have a visa for America?"

"Yes. I also had one for Australia once, but they only last a year. If we go, we'll have to get new visas from Australia House."

"How about if you go to America tomorrow?" I said.

"Tomorrow? How can I?"

"I'll take you safely to Heathrow and see you off."

"Dammit, that's not what I meant."

"No," I said. "Well… the Breeders' Cup races are three weeks tomorrow at Santa Anita. Why don't we phone Ramsey Osborn? Why don't we phone Blue Clancy's trainer? Why don't you fly to Los Angeles tomorrow and have a fine old time at the races for three weeks? They have racing every day on the same track. If I know you, you'll be cronies with the racetrack committee immediately. Ramsey Osborn will send introductions. You can stay where the Breeders' Cup organisers do, at the Beverly Wilshire hotel which I've heard is right at the end of Rodeo Drive where there's a man's shop so expensive you have to make an appointment to be let in. Buy a few shirts there, it'll make a nice dent in your bankroll. Forget Quantum. Forget the bloody family. They won't know where you are and they'll never find you."

I stopped only a fraction for breath, not long enough for him to raise objections. "On the Tuesday after the Breeders' Cup, they're running the Melbourne Cup in Melbourne, Australia. That's their biggest race. The whole country stops for it. A lot of the people from the Breeders' Cup will go on to Australia. You'll have made cronies among them by the dozen. I've heard it's all marvellous. I've never been, and I'd love to. I'll join you as soon as my passport's renewed and I'll go on minding your back – if you still want me to."

He had listened at first with apathy, but by the end he was smiling. I'd proposed the sort of impulsive behaviour that had greatly appealed to him in the past, and it still did, I was grateful to see. "A damn sight better than rotting at the Ritz," he announced.

"Great," I said. "Get out your diary for the numbers."

It was soon settled. Blue Clancy would go over for the Breeders' Cup as long as he was fit. Ramsey Osborn, booming away in Stamford, Connecticut, promised introductions galore to a score of very dear friends he'd met a couple of times out West. Why didn't Malcolm stop off at Lexington on the way and feast his eyes on some real blood stock Ramsey had some very good friends in Lexington who would be delighted to have Malcolm stay with them. Ramsey would call them and fix it. Stay by the phone, you guys, he said. He would fix it and call back. It was breakfast time in Connecticut, he said. It would be an hour earlier in Lexington. He would see if the lazy so and so's were out of bed. Whether they were or they weren't, Ramsey phoned back within twenty minutes. As before, Malcolm talked on the sitting-room telephone, I on the extension in my bedroom.

"All set, "Ramsey said. "They're expecting you, Malcolm, tomorrow. And I'm flying down Sunday. They're real sweet guys, you'll love them. Dave and Sally Cander. Dogwood Drift Farm, outside of Lexington." He read out the telephone number. "You got that?" Malcolm had got it. Ramsey asked where Malcolm was planning to stay for the Breeders' Cup. "Beverly Wilshire? Couldn't be better. Centre of the universe. I'll make reservations right away." Malcolm explained he needed a two-bedroom suite for himself and Me. Sure thing, Ramsey agreed. No problem. See you, he said. We had made his day, he said, and to have a good one. The sitting-room seemed smaller and quieter when he'd gone off the line, but Malcolm had revitalised remarkably. We went at once by taxi to Australia House where Malcolm got his visa without delay, and on the way back stopped first at his bank for more travellers' cheques and then in Piccadilly a little short of the Ritz to shop in Simpson's for replacement clothes from the skin up, not forgetting suitcases to pack them in. Malcolm paid for all of mine with his credit card, which was a relief. I hardly liked to ask him outright for my fare to California, but he'd thought of my other finances himself already and that evening gave me a bumper cheque to cover several additional destinations.

"Your fare and so on. Pay Arthur Bellbrook. Pay Norman West. Pay the contractors for weatherproofing Quantum. Pay for the hired car. Pay your own expenses. Anything else?"

"Tickets to Australia?"

"We'll get those in the morning. I'll pay for them here, with mine to Lexington. If we can get you a Los Angeles ticket without a date on, I can pay for that, too."

We made plans about telephone calls. He was not to phone me, I would phone him.

We dined in good spirits, the dreadful morning at least overlaid. He raised his glass: "To Blue Clancy" and "To racing" and "To life."

"To life," I said.

I drove him to Heathrow in the morning safely as promised, and saw him on his way to Lexington via New York and Cincinnati. He was fizzing at least at half strength and gave me a long blue look before he departed.

"Don't think I don't know what I owe you," he said.

"You owe me nothing."

"Bloody Moira," he said unexpectedly, and looked back and waved as he went.

Feeling good about him, I telephoned from the airport to Superintendent Yale but got one of his assistants: his chief was out at Quantum and had left a message that if I phoned I was to be asked if I could join him. Yes, I could, I agreed, and arrived in the village about forty minutes later.

The road to the house wasn't as congested as the day before, but fresh waves of sightseers still came and went continuously. I drove up to the gate and after radio consultation the constable there let me pass. Another policeman was at my side the moment I stopped in front of the house. Different men, both of them, from the day before.

Superintendent Yale appeared from the direction of the kitchen, having been alerted by the gate man I surmised.

"How is Mr Pembroke?"he asked, shaking hands with every sign of having adopted humanity as a policy.

"Shaken," I said.

He nodded understandingly. He was wearing an overcoat and looked cold in the face, as if he'd been out of doors for some time. Thee mild wind of yesterday had intensified rawly and the clouds looked more threatening, as if it would rain. Yale glanced with anxiety at the heavens and asked me to go round with him to the back garden.

The front of the house looked sad and blind, with light brown plywood hammered over all the windows and a heavy black tarpaulin hanging from under the roof to hide the hole in the centre. At the rear, the windows were shuttered and the bare roof rafters were covered but the devastated centre was still open to the elements. Several men in hard hats and overalls were working there, slowly picking up pieces from the huge jumble and carrying them to throw them into a rubbish skip which stood a short distance away across the lawn.

"Do they Propose to move all that by hand?" I asked.

"As much as is necessary," Yale said. "We've got a surprise for you." He waved to a man in beige overalls with a blue hard hat who came over to us and asked me my name.

"Ian Pembroke," I said obligingly.

He unzipped the front of his overalls, put a hand inside and drew out a battered navy-blue object which he held out to me with a small satisfied smile. "You may need this," he said.

Never a truer word. It was my passport.

"Where on earth did you find it?" I said, delighted.

He shrugged and pointed to the mess. "We always come across a few things unharmed. We're making a pile of them for you, but don't get your hopes up."

I zipped the passport into my new Simpson's Barbour and thought gratefully that I wouldn't have to trail around getting a new one. "Have you found any gold-and-silver-backed brushes?" I asked.

"Not so far."

"They're my father's favourite things." "We'll look out for them," he said. "Now, we'd like you to help us in return."

"Anything I can."

He was a lean, highly professional sort of man, late forties I guessed, giving an impression of army. He said his name was Smith. He was an explosives expert.

"When you first came here yesterday morning," he said, "did you smell anything?" I was surprised. I thought back. "Brick dust," I said. "The wind was stirring it up. It was in my throat."

He grunted. "This looks like a gas explosion, but you're quite certain, aren't you, that there was no gas in the house?"

"Absolutely certain."

"Do you know what cordite smells like?" he asked.

"Cordite? Like after a gun's been fired, do you mean?"

"That's right."

"Well, yes, I know what it smells like."

"And you didn't smell that here yesterday morning?"

I looked at him, puzzled. "No one was shot," I said.

He smiled briefly. "Do you know what cordite is?" he asked.

"Not really."

"It was used very commonly as a general explosive, "he said, "before Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. it's less fierce than dynamite. It's sort of high- grade gunpowder and it's still used in some types of quarries. It explodes comparatively slowly, at about two thousand five hundred metres per second, or a little over. It explodes like a gas. It doesn't punch small holes through walls like a battering ram. It's rather like an expanding balloon that knocks them flat."

I looked at the house.

"Yes, like that," Smith said.

"Cordite…" I frowned. "It means nothing."

"Its strong smell lingers," he said.

"Well… we didn't get here until ten, and the explosion was at four-thirty in the morning, and it was fairly windy, though not as rough as today. I should think any smell had blown away." I paused. "What about all the people who were here before us? What do they say?"

"They're not here today," Smith said succinctly. "I haven't asked them."

"No one said anything to me about a smell," I said.

Smith shrugged. "We'll do microscopic tests. We would do, anyway. But it looks to me as if cordite is a strong possibility."

"Can you buy cordite?" I asked vaguely. "Can anyone?"

"No, they definitely can't," Smith said with decision. "Twenty years or so ago, maybe, but not now. Since terrorism became a part of life, most sorts of explosives are highly regulated. It's extremely difficult for the general public to get hold of them. There are a few explosive substances on the open market, but detonators to set them off are not."

I found I was thinking of cordite in terms of the small quantities used in firearms, whereas to knock down half a house…

"How much cordite would that have taken?" I asked, gesturing to the results.

"I haven't yet worked it out. A good deal."

"What would it have been in?"

"Anything."

"What does it look like? Is it like jelly?"

"No, you're thinking of high-explosive TNT. That's liquid when it's fed into bomb cases, then it gels inside. Bombs dropped from aircraft are that sort. Cordite is loose grains, like gunpowder. To get a useful result, you have to compress it. Confine it. Then you need heat to start off the chemical reaction, which proceeds at such a rate that the ingredients appear to explode."

"Appear!" I said, and added hastily, "OK, I take your word for it, don't explain."

He gave me a slightly pitying look but let up on the lecture and went back to searching in the ruins. Superintendent Yale asked if any of the Pembrokes had ever had any connection whatever with quarries. None that I knew of, I said. It was most improbable.

"Or had friends who had quarries, or who worked in quarries?"

I didn't know. I'd never heard of any.

My gaze wandered away from Smith and his fellow diggers after truth, and I became more aware of the audience beyond the rope in the garden. There weren't anything like as many as the day before but clearly the work in progress was a draw in itself.

Arthur Bellbrook was there again, talking away. He must enjoy the celebrity, I thought. He'd been the one who'd found Moira, and now there was the house… Arthur was talking as if he owned the news, rocking back on his heels and sticking his stomach out. The dogs on their leads patiently waited. It didn't matter to them, I supposed, that Arthur was into maybe the twentieth account of life and death with the Pembrokes.

A stray piece of memory connected Arthur to the smell of cordite, and I couldn't think why that should be until I remembered him carrying his shotgun into the house on the day he'd thought I was a burglar.

I cast the stray thought out but it sauntered back, telling me it was nothing to do with Arthur and shotguns.

What then?

I frowned, trying to remember.

"What's the matter?" Yale said, watching me.

"Nothing, really."

"You've thought of something. One of your family DOES have a quarry connection, is that it?"

"Oh no," I half laughed. "Not that. The smell of cordite…"

The smell of cordite on a misty morning, and the gardener… not Arthur, but old Fred before him… telling us children to keep out of the way, to go right back out of the field, he didn't want our heads blown off…

I remembered abruptly, like a whole scene springing to life on a film screen. I walked across to where Smith in his hard blue hat bent to his task and said, without preamble, "Does cordite have another name?"

He straightened, with a piece of brick and plaster in his hand.

"I suppose so," he said. "It's commonly called 'black powder'."

Black powder.

"Why?" he said.

"Well, we had some here once. But long ago, when we were children. Twenty years ago at least, probably more. But I suppose… some of the family could have remembered… as I just have." Yale, who had followed me to listen, said, "Remember what?"

"There used to be four or five great old willow trees down by the stream, across the field." I pointed. "Those you can see now are only twenty years old or so. They grow very fast… they were planted after they took the old trees down. They were splendid old trees, huge, magnificent."

Yale made hurrying-up motions with his hands, as if to say the state of long-gone willows, however patrician, was immaterial.

"They were at the end of their lives," I said. "If there was a gale, huge branches would crack off. Old Fred, who was the gardener for years here before Arthur, told my father they weren't safe and they'd have to come down, so he got some foresters to come and fell them. It was dreadful seeing them come down…" I didn't think I'd tell Yale that half the family had been in tears. The trees had been friends, playground, climbing frames, deepest purple imaginary rain forests: and, afterwards, there was too much daylight and the dead bodies being sawn up for firewood and burned on bonfires. The stream hadn't looked the same when open to bright sunshine; rather ordinary, not running through dappled mysterious shade.

"Go on," Yale said with half-stifled impatience. "What's all this about trees?"

"The stumps," I said. "The tree men sawed the trees off close to the ground but left the stumps, and no one could get them out. A tractor came from a nearby farm and tried… " We'd had a great time then, having rides all day. "Anyway, it failed. Nothing else would move the stumps, and Fred didn't want to leave them there to rot, so he decided to blow them up… with black powder."

"Ah," Yale said.

Black powder had sounded, somehow, as if it ought to belong to pirates. We'd been most impressed. Fred had got his powder and he'd dug a hole down below the stubborn roots of the first stump, and filled it and set off one enormous explosion. It was just as well he'd cleared us out of the field first because the blast had knocked Fred himself flat although he'd been about a hundred feet away. The first tree stump had come popping out of the ground looking like a cross between an elephant and an octopus, but Malcolm, who came running in great alarm to see what had happened, forbade Fred to blow up the others.

As I told the gist of this to Yale and Smith, the second reel of the film was already unrolling in my mind, and I stopped fairly abruptly when I realised what I was remembering.

"Fred," I said, "carried the box of black powder back to the tool shed and told us never to touch it. We were pretty foolish but not THAT crazy. We left it strictly alone. And there the box stayed until it got covered over with other junk and we didn't notice it or think of it any more…" I paused, then said, "Wouldn't any explosive be useless after all this time?"

"Dynamite wouldn't last much more than a year in a tool shed," Smith said. "One hot summer would ruin it. But black powder – cordite – is very stable, and twenty years is immaterial."

"What are we waiting for?" Yale said, and walked towards the tool shed which lay behind the garage on the near side of the kitchen garden.

The tool shed was a place I hadn't thought of looking into the day before: but even if I had, I doubted if I would have remembered the black powder. Its memory had been too deep.

"Where is this box?" Yale asked.

I looked at the contents of the tool shed in perplexity. I hadn't been in there for years, and in that time it had passed from Fred to Arthur. Fred had had an upturned orange box to sit on while he waited through heavy showers: Arthur had an old fireside chair. Fred had had a tray with a cracked mug and a box of sugar cubes and had come indoors to fetch his tea: Arthur had an electric kettle. Fred had tended old tools lovingly: Arthur had shiny new ones with paint still on the handles.

Beyond the tools and the chair, in the centre section of the spacious shed, were things like mowers, chainsaws and hedge clippers and, at the furthest shadowy end, the flotsam by-passed by time, like the stuff in the cellar, stood in forgotten untidy heaps.

It all looked un promisingly undisturbed, but Yale called up a pair of young policemen and told them to take everything out of the tool shed and lay each object separately on the ground. Smith went back to the rubble, but Yale and I watched the policemen and so did Arthur Bellbrook, who came hurrying across the moment he saw what was happening.

"What's going on?" he said suspiciously.

"When did you last clean out the tool shed?" Yale asked.

Arthur was put out and beginning to bridle.

"Just say," I said to him. "We just want to know."

"I've been meaning to," he said defensively. "That's Fred's old rubbish, all that at the back."

The superintendent nodded, and we all watched the outgoing procession of ancient, rusting, broken and neglected tat. Eventually one of the men came out with a dirty wooden box which I didn't recognise at first because it was smaller than I'd seen in my memory. He put it on the ground beside other things, and I said doubtfully, "I think that's it."

"Mr Smith," Yale called.

Mr Smith came. Yale pointed at the box, which was about the size of crates used for soft drink bottles, and Smith squatted beside it.

The lid was nailed shut. With an old chisel, Smith prised it open and peeled back the yellowish paper which was revealed. Inside the paper, half-filling the box, there was indeed black powder.

Smith smelled it and poked it around. "It's cordite, all right, and in good condition. But as it's here, it obviously hasn't been used. And anyway, there wouldn't have been anything like enough in this box to have caused that much damage to the house."

"Well," I said weakly, "it was only an idea."

"Nothing wrong with the idea," Smith said. He looked around at the growing collection of discards. "Did you find any detonators?"

He had everyone open every single packet and tin: a lot of rusty staples and nails saw daylight, and old padlocks without keys and rotting batteries, but nothing he could identify as a substance likely to set off an explosion.

"Inconclusive," he said, shrugging, and returned to his rubble.

Yale told Arthur to leave the cordite where it was and do what he liked with the rest, and Arthur began throwing the decaying rubbish into the skip.

I tried to apologise for all the waste of time, but the superintendent stopped me.

"When you saw the tree stump blown up, which of your brothers and sisters were there?"

I sighed, but it had to be faced. "Gervase, Ferdinand and I were always together at that time, but some of the older ones were there too. They used to come for weekends still after they were grown up. Vivien used to make them, so that Malcolm wouldn't cut them out. Alicia hated it. Anyway, I know Lucy was there, because she wrote a poem about roots shrieking blindly to the sky."

Yale looked sceptical.

"She's a poet," I said lamely. "Published."

"The roots poem was published?"

"Yes."

"All right, then. She was there. Who else?" "Someone was carrying Serena on his shoulders when we had to leave the field for the explosion. I think it must have been Thomas. He used to make her laugh."

"How old were you all at that time?" Yale asked.

"I don't know exactly." I thought back. Alicia had swept out not very long after. "Perhaps I was thirteen. Gervase is two years older, Ferdinand one year younger. Lucy would have been… urn… twenty-two, about, and Thomas nineteen. Serena must have been six, at that rate, and Donald… I don't know if he was there or not… he would have been twenty-four."

Yale thoughtfully pulled out his notebook and asked me to repeat the ages, starting with Donald.

"Donald twenty-four, Lucy twenty-two, Thomas nineteen, Gervase fifteen, myself thirteen, Ferdinand twelve, Serena six."

"Right," he said, putting a full-stop.

"But what does it matter, if the cordite is still here?" I said.

"They all saw the force of the explosion," he said. "They all saw it knock the gardener over from a hundred feet away, isn't that what you said?"

I looked at the shattered house and said forlornly, "None of them could have done it."

Yale put his notebook away. "You might be right," he said.

Smith again came over to join us. "You've given me an idea," he said to me. "You and your tree roots. Can you draw me a plan of where the rooms were, exactly, especially those upstairs?"

I said I thought so, and the three of us went into the garage out of the wind, where I laid a piece of paper on the bonnet of Moira's car and did my best.

"The sitting-room stretched all the way between the two thick walls, as you know," I said. "About thirty feet Above that…" I sketched, "there was my room, about eight feet wide, twelve deep, with a window on the short side looking out to the garden. Malcolm's bedroom came next, I suppose about fifteen feet wide and much deeper than mine. The passage outside bent round it… and then his bathroom, also looking out to the garden, with a sort of dressing-room at the back of it which also led out of the bedroom…" I drew it. "Malcolm's whole suite would have been about twenty-two feet wide facing the garden, by about seventeen or eighteen feet deep."

Yale studied the drawing. "Your room and the suite together were more or less identical with the sitting-room, then?" "Yes, I should think so."

"A big house," he commented.

"It used to be bigger. The kitchen was once a morning-room, and where the garage is now there were kitchens and servants' halls. And on the other side, where the passage now goes out into the garden, there were gun-rooms and flower-rooms and music-rooms, a bit of a rabbit warren. I never actually saw the wings, only photographs of them. Malcolm had them pulled down when he inherited the house, to make it easier to deal with without the droves of servants his mother had."

"Hm," he said. "That explains why there are no sideways-facing windows on the ground floor."

"Yes," I agreed.

He borrowed my pen and did some calculations and frowned.

"Where exactly was your father's bed?"

I drew it in. "The bed was against the wall between his room and the large landing which was a sort of upstairs place to sit in, over the hall."

"And your bed?"

"Against the wall between my room and Malcolm's."

Smith considered the plan for some time and then said, "I think the charge here was placed centrally. Did your father by any chance have a chest, or anything, at the foot of his bed?"

"Yes, he did," I said, surprised. "A long box with a padded top for a seat. He kept his tennis things in it, when he used to play."

"Then I'd think that would be where the explosion occurred. Or under your father's bed. But if there was a box at the foot, I'd bet on that." Smith borrowed the pen again for some further calculations and looked finally undecided.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Mm… well, because of your tree roots, I was thinking of an explosive that farmers and landowners use sometimes which is safer than cordite. They blow up tree trunks, clear blocked ditches, that sort of thing. You can buy the ingredients anywhere without restrictions and mix it yourself."

"That sounds extraordinary," I said.

He smiled slightly. "It's not so easy to get the detonators to set it off." "What is it, then?" I asked.

Yale, too, was listening with great interest.

"Fertiliser and diesel oil," Smith said.

"What?" I sounded disappointed and Smith's smile expanded.

"Ammonium nitrate," he said. "You can buy it in fine granules from seed merchants and garden cent res places like that. Mix it with fuel oil. Dead simple. As far as I remember, but I'd have to look it up to be sure, it would be sixteen parts fertiliser to one part oil. The only problem is," he scratched his nose, "I think you'd need a good deal of it to do the sort of damage we have here. I mean, again I'd have to look it up, but I seem to remember in be volume in cubic metres over three, answer in kilos."

"What volume?" I asked.

"The volume of the space you want cleared by the explosion."

He looked at the mixed emotions I could feel on my face and dealt at least with the ignorance.

"Say you want effective destruction of everything within a space three metres by three metres by three metres. Twenty-seven cubic metres, OK? Volume of your bedroom, near enough. Divide by three, equals nine. Nine kilos of explosive needed."

"is that," I said slowly, "why reports of terrorist attacks are often so definite about the weight of the bomb used?"

"Absolutely. The area cleared directly relates to the size of the… er… bomb. If you can analyse the type of explosive and measure the area affected, you can tell how much explosive was needed."

Superintendent Yale was nodding as if he knew all that.

"But you don't think this bomb went off in my bedroom," I said.

"No, I don't. Nine kilos of ammonium nitrate in your bedroom would have annihilated it and made a nasty hole all round, but I wouldn't have thought it would bring half a house down. So if we locate the device in that foot-of-the-bed box, we are looking at something in the region of…" he did some more calculations "… say at least seventy-five cubic metres for your father's bedroom… that's twenty-five kilos of explosive."

"That's heavy," I said blankly.

"Yes. A large suitcase. But then you'd need a suitcase also if you were using cordite. For demolishing this whole house, you'd have needed four times that amount, placed in about four places on the ground floor right against the thickest walls. People often think a small amount of explosive will do a tremendous lot of damage, but it doesn't."

"What sets it off, then?" I asked.

"Ah." He smiled the professional smile that wasn't about to give away its secrets. "Let's just say fulminate of mercury, plus, I should say, an electrical circuit."

"Please do explain," I said.

He hesitated, then shrugged. "ANFO won't explode on its own, it's very stable."

"What's ANFO?" I interrupted.

"Ammonium nitrate fuel oil. The first letters. ANFO for short."

"Oh yes. Sorry."

"So you stick into it a package of something that explodes fast: the detonator, in fact. Then you arrange to heat the detonating substance, either with a burning fuse, or by an electrical circuit which can be achieved by ordinary batteries. The heat sets off the detonator, the detonator detonates the ANFO. And bingo."

"Bang, you're dead."

"Quite right."

"At four-thirty in the morning," I said, "it would probably be a time-bomb, wouldn't it?"

Mr Smith nodded happily. "That's what we're looking for. If it was an alarm clock, for instance, we'll probably find the pieces. We usually do if we look hard enough. They don't vaporise in the explosion, they scatter."