Trouble on the Heath: A Comedy of Russian Gangsters, Town Planners and a Dog Called Nigel

Chapter Twelve

Malcolm normally had very little time for his sister. In fact he disliked her. He disliked her house, her hair-do and her job. She was a pattern-cutter for one of the big fashion houses in London, and in her spare time she was a dress-maker.

He disliked her general attitude. She accepted everything that happened to her with a cheerful shrug.

He disliked the way she lived. She lived amidst clutter. The real problem was that she never threw anything away. That was the thing Malcolm hated most about her. She was a hoarder.

“Glenys! Just get rid of them!” he would say as she hesitated over throwing away tins of sardines that had a sell-by date of around 1,000 years BC.

“But they may come in handy,” Glenys would murmur as she loaded them back into the cupboard.

She never threw away newspapers. There were stacks of them behind the sofa, on every seat, in the coal shed, in the pantry and (for some strange reason) even in the sink!

Glenys had been pleasantly surprised when Malcolm phoned to ask if he and his family could come and stay. She had given up expecting her brother to want to spend time with her.

“Ah, well, it’s probably difficult when you’ve got a family,” she would say to her neighbour. “I’m sure he’d come if he could.”

Glenys herself had no family. She had been married for a short time, but she and her husband had not really got on together. Secretly, Malcolm was in sympathy with the husband, who also could not stand clutter.

Malcolm once told Angela: “He had wanted to throw out the newspapers, so she threw him out instead.”

Glenys made a great fuss of her brother and his wife and son when they arrived. She’d baked a sponge cake, but hadn’t been able to read the recipe, because she’d lost her glasses. So the sponge didn’t really rise like it should have done. It was more like a large biscuit than a cake. However they ate it for tea, with the result that Glenys found her glasses. They were in the cake.

“Isn’t it lucky we ate the cake?” she said. “If I’d just thrown it out I would never have found them!”

Malcolm had warned Angela not to tell Glenys why they needed to stay with her so suddenly, and since Glenys never asked, Angela had no problem staying silent. She did feel a little guilty that they might be exposing Glenys to some danger, but then she told herself that there was really no danger. They had shaken off their pursuer the previous night, and there was no way he could have traced them to this address in Leicester.

That evening Malcolm treated them all to a curry in the local Indian restaurant, rather than face Glenys’s cooking again.

When they got back, they put Freddie to bed in Glenys’s old work-room, and retired early.

About two o’clock in the morning they were woken by a scream.

“Freddie!” yelled Angela at the top of her voice, and leapt out of bed.

Malcolm could hardly keep up with Angela as she flew downstairs to the work-room. They flung open the door to the work-room and switched on the light.

There they stood.

Anton Molotov had one hand over Freddie’s mouth and was using the other to try to restrain him.

Anton had planned to use the mace spray, but he hadn’t checked it before setting off, and, when he’d pulled it out, he’d found that it was still in its plastic shrink-wrap.

Anton had cursed in Russian.

That’s when Freddie had screamed. Anton had abandoned the mace canister and simply grabbed the child.

The three adults stood there frozen for a few seconds. Only Freddie kept on struggling.

Now, at this moment, something strange happened to Malcolm.

He had spent a lifetime avoiding personal danger and confrontation. He seldom got cross (except when he was reading History Now!). He’d always regarded himself as an easy-going sort of chap, but there was something about seeing his son struggling in the arms of a gangster, in the middle of the night, that tapped into a deep well of anger buried inside him. The anger came gushing up like an oil spill.

He flung himself at the stranger, without thinking what he was going to do. He found he had grabbed the man by his head, and his thumbs were going into his eyes. The man screamed, as he staggered back against a tall wardrobe. Freddie leapt free. The door of the wardrobe splintered, such was the violence of the attack. The wardrobe itself tottered back against the wall, upsetting the vast pile of objects that were stacked on top of it.

Amongst these objects was an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. It dated from the 1920s, when things were still made out of first-class materials. The machine itself was made out of cast iron and it was screwed onto a heavy wooden base. It was a triumph of solid workmanship, and, when it fell, it struck Anton Molotov right on the back of his head.

In his surprise, Malcolm let go of him. Anton gave a sort of grunt and sank to his knees. But Malcolm’s deep well of anger had by no means run dry, and he leapt onto the man’s chest and, grabbing him round the neck, banged his head on the floor, again and again, until Angela ran forward and pulled her husband off.

They looked at the intruder.

Anton lay on the floor, not moving at all.

“Oh my God!” whispered Angela. “You’ve killed him!”

Malcolm was coming to his senses. The fury was spent, but he found he was trembling so much that he couldn’t move.

Angela knelt over the man’s body and felt him.

“He’s still breathing,” she said, in a tone of voice halfway between relief and regret.

“Rope!” whispered Malcolm, and he grabbed a length of cord from a pile that had fallen with all the other things that were stacked on top of the wardrobe.

In a few minutes, Anton was trussed up like a joint of meat from the butchers. He was just starting to come to.

Freddie was clinging to his father, too astonished to even cry.

At that moment Glenys appeared.

“What on earth’s going on?” she asked.