The Throwback

Chapter fourteen

No more did anyone else in Sandicott Crescent. Poetry was the last thing on their minds. Colonel Finch-Potter had no mind to have anything on, and it was doubtful if his Scarlet Woman would ever be the same again. Certainly the Pettigrews' house wouldn't. Torn to shreds by the bull-terrier, the house was in a state of total chaos. The Pettigrews, emerging finally from the closet under the stairs just after the lights had failed, supposed that they alone had suffered this misfortune and it was only when Mr Pettigrew, trying to reach the phone in the living-room, tripped over the hole in the Persian carpet and landed on a savaged lampshade that the true extent of the damage began to dawn on them. By the light of a torch they surveyed the remnants of their furniture and wept.

There's some terrible curse on the street,' wailed Mrs Pettigrew, echoing Lockhart's prayer, 'I won't stay here a moment longer.' Mr Pettigrew tried in vain to adopt a more rational approach but he wasn't helped by the demented howls of the bull-terrier in the bird sanctuary. Having lost a tooth it had fortunately lost its way as well and after gnawing several large trees in the archetypal belief that they were mammoths' legs had given up to wail at five multi-coloured moons that squirmed in the sky above its imagination. Mr and Mrs Lowry were busily trying to bandage one another in portions of anatomy least amenable to bandaging and were considering suing Colonel Finch-Potter for his dog's damage when they too were plunged into darkness. Next door, Mrs Simplon, convinced that her husband had deliberately fused the lights so that he could the more easily break in to retrieve his belongings, proceeded to warn him off by loading the shotgun he kept in the cupboard in the bedroom and firing it out of the window twice at nothing in particular. Not being the best shot in the world and lacking the light of the bull-terrier's imaginary moons, she managed with the first shot to blast the greenhouse in the garden of the Ogilvies at Number 3 and with the second, fired from the front, to add to the Pettigrews' problems by peppering those windows the bull-terrier had left unscathed. Only then did she realize her mistake and the fact that the entire street was in darkness. Not to be dissuaded but rather encouraged by the screams and yells of the Scarlet Woman, who was being dragged into the police car, and convinced now that the IRA had struck again, she reloaded and loosed off two more barrels in the general direction of Mr O'Brain's former house. This time she missed the house and fired point-blank into the Lowrys' bedroom which happened to intervene between the Simplons' and Mr O'Brain's residence. Outside Colonel Finch-Potter's the policemen hastily dropped their burden, took cover and radioed for armed assistance.

It was no time at all coming. Sirens sounded, police cars converged and under covering fire a dozen men surrounded

Mrs Simplon's mock-Georgian mansion and ordered everyone inside to come out with their hands up. But Mrs Simplon had finally discovered her mistake. The volley of revolver shots that seemed to come from all quarters and through every window, and the winking lights of the police cars, not to mention the voice on the loudhailer, persuaded her that absence was the best defence. Dressing as swiftly as she could and grabbing her jewels and what money she had, she went through the connecting door in the garage and hid in the sump pit which Mr Simplon, who liked tinkering with the underbodies of cars as well as Mrs Grabble's, had thoughtfully constructed. There, with the wood pulled over her head, she waited. Through the wood and the garage door she could hear the loudhailer declare that the house was surrounded and there was no point in further resistance. Mrs Simplon had no intention of resisting. She cursed herself for her stupidity and tried to think of an excuse. She was still trying in vain when dawn finally broke over the Crescent and fifteen policemen broke cover, the front and back door, four windows and found the house to be empty.

'There's no one there,' they told the Superintendent who had come to take charge. 'Searched the attic but there's not a soul.'

Mr Pettigrew protested that there must be. 'I saw the flash of the guns myself,' he said, 'and you've only got to look at my house to see what they did.'

The Superintendent looked and expressed some doubt that gunshot had ripped lampshades from their stands, cushions from sofas and curtains from windows, and had sunk what looked like fangs into the mahogany dining-tables.

'That was the dog,' said Mr Pettigrew, 'the dog the ambulance men brought with them.'

The Superintendent looked even more doubtful. 'Are you trying to tell me that all this devastation was caused by a dog and that the aforesaid dog was introduced into your house by ambulance men?' he asked.

Mr Pettigrew hesitated. The Superintendent's scepticism was contagious.

'I know it doesn't sound likely,' he admitted, 'but it looked like a dog.'

'I certainly find it hard to believe that a dog can have created this degree of havoc on its own,' said the Superintendent, 'and if you're suggesting that the ambulance men -…' He was interrupted by a howl from the bird sanctuary. 'What in God's name is that?'

'That's the thing that wrecked my house,' said Mr Pettigrew. 'It's coming from the bird sanctuary.'

'Bird sanctuary my foot,' said the Superintendent. 'More like a banshee sanctuary by the sound of things.'

I didn't think banshees wailed,' said Mr Pettigrew inconsequentially. A sleepless night, most of it spent in a broom cupboard, and the rest in the darkness of his devastated house, had not helped to make him clear-headed and Mrs Pettigrew was wailing too. She had discovered the remnants of her underwear shredded in the bedroom.

'I tell you it wasn't a dog,' she screamed, 'some sex maniac's been chewing my undies.'

The Superintendent looked at Mrs Pettigrew dubiously. 'Anyone who chewed your undies, madam, would have to be…' he began before checking himself. Mrs Pettigrew had only her vanity left and there was no good to be done by removing that too. 'You've got no idea who might have a grudge against you?' he asked instead. But the Pettigrews shook their heads in unison. 'We've always lived such quiet lives,' they said. It was the same in every other occupied house the Superintendent visited. There were only four. At Number 1 Mr and Mrs Rick-enshaw had nothing to add except gratitude that the police car was always parked outside their house. 'It makes us feel much safer,' they said.

The Ogilvies didn't share their opinion. The blast of the shotgun that had smashed every pane of glass in their greenhouse had given them a sense of grievance they voiced to the Superintendent. 'What's the world coming to when peaceful citizens can't rest easy in their beds, that's what I want to know,' said Mr Ogilvie indignantly. 'I shall complain to my MP, sir. The country is going to the dogs.'

'So it would appear,' said the Superintendent soothingly, 'but you're not suggesting that a dog destroyed your greenhouse?'

'Certainly not,' said Mr Ogilvie, 'some damned swine with a shotgun did.'

The Superintendent breathed a sigh of relief. He was getting sick of hearing all the blame put on dogs. Mrs Simplon wasn't.

Cowering beneath the wooden beams in the inspection pit under her car her nerves, like Mrs Pettigrew's undies, were in tatters. She fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, found one and was in the process of striking a match to light it when the Superintendent, thanking the Ogilvies for their cooperation and being trounced by Mr Ogilvie for the lack of police protection made his way past the garage door.

In fact the garage door made its way past him. Mrs Simplon had discovered to her cost that inspection pits filled with oil waste and petrol fumes were not the best place to light cigarettes. With several explosions, first of the fume-laden air in the pit, second of the petrol tank of the car above, and third of the half-empty oil tanks that had served to provide Number 5 Sandicott Crescent with hot water and central heating, Mrs Simplon's hopes of calming her nerves succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She was no longer conscious after the first explosion and by the time the oil tanks exploded she had passed into the great beyond. With her went portions of the garage, the car and the oil tanks. A ball of flame containing elements of all three billowed out where the garage door had been and hurtled round the head of the Superintendent before pocking still more the Pettigrews' already-acned facade. In the middle of this holocaust the Superintendent kept his head. He kept little else. What the blast hadn't stripped from his little authority the flames did. His moustache crinkled and turned black under his nose. His eyebrows streaked, flaming, past the top of his ears, themselves sufficiently hot to suggest that several million people were thinking about him at the same time, and he was left standing in his boots and leather belt, a blackened, scorched and thoroughly disenchanted copper.

Once again the sirens sounded on the approaches to Sandicott Crescent but this time it was the fire brigade. As they worked frantically to extinguish the flames, which flames had already extinguished Mrs Simplon so thoroughly that she was in no need of a more ceremonial cremation, the bull-terrier made its last sortie. The flames that had flickered in its head had been dying down when the Simplons' garage revived them. With

blood-red eyes and lolling tongue it lumbered out of the bird sanctuary, through the Misses Musgroves' herb garden, and having whetted its appetite on the calf of a fireman, proceeded to engage one of the fire brigade's hosepipes in mortal combat in the belief that it was wrestling with an anaconda in the ancestral forest of its dreams. The hosepipe fought back. Punctured in a dozen places, it shot water into the air with enormous pressure, and carried the bull-terrier several feet off the ground where it hung a moment snarling ravenously. By the time the dog bit the ground again the Superintendent no longer disbelieved the Pettigrews. He had seen it with his own two scorched eyes, a dog that wailed, snarled, slobbered and snapped like a crocodile with St Vitus' dance. Convinced that the animal had rabies the Superintendent stood still according to instructions. He would have been better advised to move. Baffled by the liquid resistance of the writhing hosepipe the bull-terrier sank its teeth into the Superintendent's leg, let go momentarily to re-engage the hose which it savaged in several more places and then hurled itself at the Superintendent's throat. This time the Superintendent moved and his juniors, twenty firemen, the Ogilvies and Mr and Mrs Rickenshaw were privileged to see a naked (and badly scorched) policeman in boots and belt cover one hundred metres in under ten seconds from a standing start. Behind him with starting eyes and scrabbling paws came, bullet-like, the bull-terrier. The Superintendent hurdled the Grabbles' gate, clobbered across their lawn and into the bird sanctuary. And presently in harmony with the dog he too could be heard howling for help.

'Well, at least he knows we were telling the truth,' said Mr Pettigrew and told his wife to shut up wailing like some woman for her demon lover, a remark hardly calculated to restore domestic peace to their sufficiently demented lives.

From their bedroom at the end of the street Lockhart and Jessica watched the chaotic scene. The Simplons' garage still blazed, largely thanks to the intervention of the dog, the hosepipe still writhed and spouted water from a score of holes high into the air like a lawn sprinkler with megalomania, firemen huddled on their engines and policemen in their cars. Only the armed men, brought in to deal with whoever had fired from the house, were still abroad. Convinced that the blazing garage was a diversion to allow the gunmen inside the house, who had eluded their search, to make good their escape under cover of the smoke, they lurked in the adjacent gardens and in the foliage of the bushes by the golf course. It was in consequence of this and of the smoke that obscured their view and that of an early foursome, one of whom had an incurable slice, that a ball hit an armed constable on the head.

'They're coming at us from the rear,' he yelled and emptied his revolver into the drifting smoke, hitting the man with the now terminal slice and the Club House. He was followed by several other policemen who fired in the general direction of the screams. As the bullets ricocheted round the East Pursley Golf Course and punctured the windows of the bar, the Secretary lay on the floor and dialled the police.

'We're under attack,' he screamed, 'bullets are coming from every direction.' So were other golfers. As they dashed through the smoke they were met by a hail of bullets from the Simplons' back garden. Four fell on the eighteenth, two on the first, while on the ninth a number of women clustered together in a bunker they had previously done their best to avoid. And with each fresh volley the police, unable to observe who was firing from where, engaged in warfare among themselves. Even the Rick-enshaws at Number 1 who had only an hour before been congratulating themselves on the presence of police protection came to regret their premature gratitude. The contingent of police who arrived at the Club House armed now with rifles as well as revolvers and stationed themselves in the bar, the Secretary's office and the changing-room, answered their comrades' desultory fire with a positive barrage of their own. A hail of bullets screamed across the heads of the women cowering in the sandtrap on the ninth and through the smoke into the Rick-enshaws' sitting-room. In the sandtrap the women screamed, in the sitting-room Mrs Rickenshaw shot through the thigh screamed and the fire engine driver, mindless of his extended ladder, decided the time had come to get out while the going was good. The going was not good.

'Never mind that fucking fire,' he yelled at the men huddled on the back, 'it's gunfire we've got now.' At the top of the ladder a fireman didn't share his point of view. Clutching his dribbling hose he suddenly found himself moving backwards. 'Stop,' he yelled, 'for God's sake stop!' But the roar of the flames and the rifles drowned his protest and the next moment the fire engine was off at top speed down Sandicott Crescent. Fifty feet above it the fireman clung to the ladder. He was still clinging when having cut a swathe through half a dozen telephone wires and a overhead electric cable the fire engine, travelling at seventy miles an hour, shot under the main railway line to London. The fireman on the ladder didn't. He shot over and landed in the path of an oncoming petrol tanker, missing the London to Brighton express by inches on the way. The tanker driver, already unnerved by the careering fire engine, now ladder-less, swerved to avoid the catapulting fireman, and the tanker ploughed into the railway embankment and exploded in time to shower flaming petrol over the last five coaches of the express above. In the guards van, now engulfed in flames, the guard did his duty. He applied the emergency brake and the express's wheels locked at eighty miles an hour. The subsequent screech of scored metal drowned even the sound of gunfire and the Police Superintendent's howls in the bird sanctuary. Inside every compartment passengers sitting with their fronts to the engine shot into the laps of those with their backs to it and in the dining-car, where breakfast was being served, coffee and waiters mingled with diners to shoot everywhere. Meanwhile the last five coaches blazed away.

So did the police in the golf club. The sight of the burning train emerging from what appeared to be a napalm bomb exploded in the centre of East Pursley only lent weight to their conviction that they were dealing with an outbreak of urban and golf-course terrorism unprecedented in the annals of British history. They radioed for army help and explained that they were pinned down in the East Pursley Club House by suburban guerrillas firing from the houses in Sandicott Crescent who had just exploded a bomb under the London to Brighton express. Five minutes later helicopter gunships were hovering over the golf course searching for the enemy. But the policemen in the Simplons' garden had had their fill. Three lay wounded, one was dead and the rest were out of ammunition. Dragging their wounded they wormed their way across the lawn and round the side of the house, and ran for the police cars.

'Get the hell out of here,' they yelled as they scrambled in, 'there's a fucking army out there.' A minute later, their sirens receding into the distance, the patrol cars had left the Crescent and were heading towards the police station. They didn't reach it. The tanker that had exploded on to the express had doused the road beneath and the tunnel was an inferno. Behind them Sandicott Crescent was in little better shape. The fire in the Simplons^? garage had spread to the fence and from the fence to the Ogilvies' potting shed. It was well named. Riddled with bullet holes it added its flames and smoke to the general pall that hung over Jessica's inheritance and lent a grisly light to the scene. The Ogilvies clung to one another in the cellar listening to the whine of bullets ricocheting round their kitchen, and at Number 1 Mr Rickenshaw, tightening a tourniquet round his wife's leg, promised her that if they ever get out of this alive they'd get out of the house.

It was the same at the Pettigrews'. 'Promise me we'll move,' whined Mrs Pettigrew. 'Another night in this awful house and I'll go mad.'

Mr Pettigrew needed no urging. The series of events that had swept through Sandicott Crescent, and in particular their house, like the plagues that had affected Egypt inclined him to renounce his rationalism and return to religion. His social conscience had certainly deserted him and when Mr Rickenshaw, unable to phone for medical assistance thanks to the scythe-like activities of the fire engine's ladder, crawled across the street to ring the Pettigrews' doorbell to ask for help, Mr Pettigrew refused to open the door on the reasonable grounds that the last time anyone had asked for medical help, namely the ambulance men, of all people, they had introduced a mad dog into the house and that as far as he was concerned Mrs Rickenshaw could bleed to death before he opened his door again.

'You can think yourself lucky,' he shouted, 'your fucking wife's only got a hole in her leg, mine's got one in her head.' Mr Rickenshaw cursed him for his bad neighbourliness and, wholly unaware that Colonel Finch-Potter, having been relieved of his penis-grater, was now in intensive care at the Pursley Hospital, tried to knock him up. It was Jessica who finally came to his aid, and braving the slackening gun-fire from the Club House went down to Number 1 and applied her knowledge of first aid to Mrs Rickenshaw's wound. Lockhart took advantage of her absence to make a last sally into the sewer. Donning his wet-suit he crawled along to the outlet of Mr Grabble's house with a bucket and a World War II stirrup pump that Mr Sandicott had kept in his workshop for watering plants. Lockhart had another purpose in mind, and having introduced the nozzle into the discharge pipe and cemented it there with putty, filled the bucket from the sewer and began to pump vigorously. He worked steadily for an hour and then undid his apparatus and crawled home. By that time Mr Grabble's ground floor was awash with the effluent from every other house in the street and all his attempts to get his ground-floor lavatory to behave in the normal manner and discharge excreta out of the house rather than pump it in had failed disastrously. Driven to desperate measures and wading through sewage with his trousers rolled up, Mr Grabble had seized on the idea of using caustic soda. It was not a good idea. Instead of going down the pipe to unblock whatever infernal thing was blocking it, the caustic soda erupted from the pan in an extremely vindictive fashion. Fortunately Mr Grabble had had the good sense to foresee this possibility and was out of the tiny room when it happened. He was less sensible in resorting to an ordinary lavatory cleanser and when that failed, adding to it a liquid bleach. The two combined to produce chlorine and Mr Grabble was driven from his house by the poisonous gas. Standing on the back lawn he watched his living-room carpet lap up the foul liquid and the caustic soda eat into his best armchair. Mr Grabble took the unwise step of trying to dam the flood and the caustic soda dissuaded him. He sat on the edge of the fishpond bathing his feet and cursing.

In the bird sanctuary the Superintendent was still shouting for help, though less loudly, and at the far end the bull-terrier was sleeping it off on the mat outside his master's back door.

Lockhart, divesting himself of the wet-suit, ran himself a bath and lay in it contentedly. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. There could be no doubting now that Jessica would be in full possession of her inheritance and with the right to sell every house whenever she chose. He lay thinking about the tax problem. His experience at Sandicott & Partners had told him that Capital Gains Tax was levied on every extra house an individual owned. There had to be some way round it. The tax on twelve houses would be enormous. By the time he got out of the bath he had found a simple solution.