Bernard wasn’t hurt. He made a diving tackle and brought Alice down like a skittle. She kicked out and managed to wiggle clear on all fours.
He picked himself up without hurrying and stalked her, out of my line of sight, to the interior of the barn below the hayloft. She was trapped.
I heard her scream, “Theo!”
I threw myself over the edge.
Up to now life had spared me from the sight of a dead person, let alone a physical contact. The prospect repelled me. Yet this was a reaction so automatic and instantaneous that I was unaffected. I dropped onto Harry’s lifeless form, felt the flesh under the clothes respond flaccidly to my weight, touched one of the cold hands and saw it flop aside, then dragged myself clear and down to floor level.
My eyes were on Bernard. He was ten feet away from me, in a semi-crouch, with Alice flat to the floor beside him. I would have said face down, were it not that her face was up, and stressfully so. Bernard was grasping the root of her plait, tugging at her head, while his knee pinned her chest to the floor. Her neck looked ready to snap any second.
She gave an agonized moan.
I’d started a rescue act I wasn’t equipped to complete. With my stick way out of reach on the other side of the barn, the best I could hope to do was crawl towards them, and then Bernard would tear me to pieces and have me on toast.
There had to be a better way.
The previous night, Harry had taken the Colt.45 from my house. If he still had it…
I put my hand up to the corpse and pressed it against the jacket pocket.
Nothing.
The other pocket, then.
Couldn’t reach.
Another cry of pain from Alice.
I grabbed the body with both hands and tugged it towards me, off the bales. It toppled heavily onto me. Next second, I was wrestling with a dead man.
Thank God my arms are strong. I pushed him upwards and to one side and sat up in the same movement.
Alice gave a more piercing scream.
I felt for Harry’s right-hand pocket and this time located the gun. I tugged it out, leveled it at Bernard, and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet ripped into his.back. He was thrown forward, face first, collapsing across a bale of hay. I don’t know if he was dead, but I didn’t fire a second shot.
Alice lay still for a second, gasping, then rolled over and looked towards me, wide-eyed in horror.
“You’re on fire!”
I wasn’t-much. Harry was. His saturated clothes were ablaze.?m not sure if it was Bernard’s lighter or the gunshot that had ignited the petrol. I jerked away from the corpse and ripped off my smoldering jacket.
The speed of a petrol fire is awesome. I looked towards the door and saw huge white-and-yellow flames leaping for the gap. We’d never get out through there.
Alice was on her feet and beside me, trying to drag me to the other side of the barn where the fire wasn’t raging yet. With her help I crawled and slithered across, but there wasn’t much comfort there. No petrol, certainly, but black smoke swirled in our faces. They say that you usually suffocate before you burn.
“The ladder,” I shouted, dragging myself upright against a beam. If we could get up there, the hayloft would screen us from the worst of the flames and the heat. I wasn’t thinking about survival, just the immediate need to put something between us and the fire.
Together we hoisted the ladder and propped it against the hayloft. The heat was intense. There was a roar like Niagara, and things were cracking and spitting all round us.
Alice shinnied up first.
You may think this ridiculous, but I looked for my stick before I followed her. I groped in the hay until I found it and threw it up. Then I grabbed the ladder and climbed rapidly hand over hand, with a technique that was improving with practice.
Up there, the smoke was the main problem. Alice had unfurled her polo-neck collar to cover her mouth.
I’ll take some credit now for smart thinking. I gestured to her to help me pull up the ladder.
Together we hauled it up to our level. It was blackened and smoking at the lower end. I indicated to Alice that we should use it as a battering ram to attack the tiled roof from the underside.
It was a high risk. There was a chance that the flames would be drawn up and leap through any gap we made. I pinned my faith on the loft floor screening us for long enough to make an escape. At the rate the fire was progressing, the floor couldn’t last many minutes more. It was a moot point whether it would collapse from underneath before the sparks ignited the bales stored on top.
I propped myself on a bale, and with Alice guiding the front of the ladder, we drew it back and thrust it against the tiles at the innermost end of the loft. All we got was a numbing jolt in our arms. I thought cynically of the truism that old structures like this were built to last. Oh, for a nineteenth-century jerry-builder or an apprentice tiler on his first job.
We gave it another crack. With an exhilarating crunch, two tiles split open together and the end of the ladder projected through. We tugged it back and drove at the rest more frenziedly. Another tile fell out, and then, praise be, a group of four. A sizable hole. We dropped the ladder and rushed forward, desperate for air. I picked up my stick and poked out more tiles, then signaled to Alice to climb through.
She was quick. I tried pushing the ladder through after her, thinking we could use it to get down from the roof, but she shouted, “Theo, forget it. It’s too short!”
I could feel the heat of the loft floor through my shoes. I told Alice to move aside. Then I hauled up a bale of hay and thrust it through the gap and over the edge of the building. It would cushion our landing when we jumped. I dragged another towards me and shoved it after the first.
Alice cried, “Theo, for God’s sake!”
I climbed out onto the tiles.
The top couldn’t have been much over fifteen feet, and the smoke gushing out behind us was a strong incentive to jump. I looked down at the bales and said a familiar phrase. “All right, then?”
Alice was black-faced, and her glasses were peppered with carbon. She smiled and put out her hand to me and we jumped together.
TWENTY-THREE
“I hope to God I had the exposure right,” said Digby for I the third time at least. “If you’d given me more warning, I’d have brought a photographer with me.”
“Quit complaining, will you?” Alice told him in an up-rush of anger, letting the tension out. “You got your scoop.”
Digby bunched his shoulders and tried to look uninvolved, like a perching vulture.
“What’s one picture?” demanded Alice.
In a pained voice Digby said, “You two jumping off the blazing roof? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s?scape From Death Barn’-the shot of a lifetime. Millions will see it on the front page of their paper tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. I didn’t want to know about tomorrow. Coping with the past was more than I could manage. The three of us were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse. One young constable was in attendance. In another room, Inspector Voss was questioning the Lockwoods. Across the yard, a fire crew was hosing the gutted barn.
“Let me get this right,” I said to Digby, letting my resentment show. “You were actually waiting outside with a camera while Alice and I were in that inferno in danger of our lives?”
“It’s not a pressman’s job to get involved, old man.”
