at Seabury.
I was way out in one respect. The religious poster was not due to be put in place the following day.
THIRTEEN
‘I think,’ I said gently to the elderly couple, ‘that it might be better if you went indoors. We will explain to the man who is coming what we are doing to his mirror.’
Dad glanced up the path towards the road, put his arm protectively round his wife’s woolly shoulders, and said gratefully, ‘Er… yes… yes.’
They shuffled rapidly through the back door into the bungalow just as a large man carrying an aluminium folding ladder and a large rolled up paper came barging through their front gate. There had been the squeak of his large plain dark blue van stopping, the hollow crunch of the handbrake being forcibly applied, the slam of the door and the scrape of the ladder being unloaded. Chico in the tree crouched quite still, watching.
I was standing with my back to the sun, but it fell full on the big man’s face when he came into the garden. It wasn’t the sort of face one would naturally associate with religious posters. He was a cross between a heavyweight wrestler and Mount Vesuvius. Craggy, brutally strong, and not far off erupting.
He came straight towards me across the grass, dropped the ladder beside him, and said enquiringly, ‘What goes on?’
‘The mirror,’ I said, ‘Comes down.’
His eyes narrowed in sudden awareness and his body stiffened. ‘There’s a poster going over it,’ he began quite reasonably, lifting the paper roll. Then with a rush the lava burst out, the paper flew wide, and the muscles bunched into action.
It wasn’t much of a fight. He started out to hit my face, changed his mind, and ploughed both fists in below the belt. It was quite a long way down for him. Doubling over in pain on to the lawn, I picked up the ladder, and gave him a swinging swipe behind the knees.
The ground shook with the impact. He fell on his side, his coat swinging open. I lunged forward, snatching at the pistol showing in the holster beside his ribs. It came loose, but he brushed me aside with an arm like a telegraph pole. I fell, sprawling. He rolled over into a crouch, picked up the gun from the grass and sneered down into my face. Then he stood up like a released spring and on the way with force and deliberation booted his toe-cap into my navel. He also clicked back the catch on his gun.
Up in the tree Chico yelled. The big man turned and took three steps towards him, seeing him for the first time. With a choice of targets, he favoured the one still in a state to resist. The hand with the pistol pointed at Chico.
‘Leo,’ I shouted. Nothing happened. I tried again.
‘Fred!’
The big man turned his head a fraction back to me and Chico jumped down on to him from ten feet up.
The gun went off with a double crash and again the day flew apart in shining splintering fragments. I sat on the ground with my knees bent up, groaning quietly, cursing fluently, and getting on with my business.
Drawn by the noise, the inhabitants of the bungalows down the line came out into their back gardens and looked in astonishment over the fences. The elderly couple stood palely at their window, their mouths again open. The big man had too big an audience now for murder.
Chico was overmatched for size and nearly equalled in skill. He and the big man threw each other round a bit while I crept doubled up along the path into the front garden as far as the gate, but the battle was a foregone conclusion, bar the retreat.
He came alone, crashing up the path, saw me hanging on to the gate and half raised the gun. But there were people in the road now, and more people peering out of opposite windows. In scorching fury he whipped at my head with the barrel, and I avoided it by leaving go of the gate and collapsing on the ground again. Behind the gate, with the bars nice and comfortingly between me and his boot.
He crunched across the pavement, slammed into the van, cut his cogs to ribbons and disappeared out on to the London road in a cloud of dust.
Chico came down the garden path staggering, with blood sloshing out of a cut eyebrow. He looked anxious and shaken.
‘I thought you said you could bloody well fight,’ I mocked him.
He came to a halt beside me on his knees. ‘Blast you.’ He put his fingers to his forehead and winced at the result.
I grinned at him.
‘You were running away,’ he said.
‘Naturally.’
‘What have you got here?’ He took the little camera out of my hand. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, his face splitting into an unholy smile. ‘Don’t tell me.’
‘It’s what we came for, after all.’
‘How many?’
‘Four of him. Two of the van.’
‘Sid, you slay me, you really do.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I feel sick.’ I rolled over and retched what was left of my breakfast on to the roots of the privet hedge. There wasn’t any blood. I felt a lot better.
‘I’ll go and get the horse-box,’ said Chico, ‘and pick you up.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ I said, wiping my mouth on a handkerchief. ‘We’re going back into the garden. I want that bullet.’
‘It’s half way to Seabury,’ he protested, borrowing my handkerchief to mop the blood off his eyebrow.
‘What will you bet?’ I said. I used the gate again to get up, and after a moment or two was fairly straight. We presented a couple of reassuring grins to the audience, and retraced our way down the path into the back garden.
The mirror lay in sparkling pointed fragments all over the lawn.
‘Pop up the tree and see if the bullet is there, in the wood. It smashed the mirror. It might be stuck up there. If not, we’ll have to comb the grass.’
Chico went up the aluminium ladder that time.
‘Of all the luck,’ he called. ‘It’s here.’ I watched him take a penknife out of his pocket and carefully cut away at a section just off-centre of the back board of the ex-mirror. He came down and held the little misshapen lump out to me on the palm of his hand. I put it carefully away in the small waist pocket of my breeches.
The elderly couple had emerged like tortoises from their bungalow. They were scared and puzzled, understandably. Chico offered to cut down the remains of the mirror, and did, but we left them to clear up the resulting firewood.
As an afterthought, however, Chico went across the garden and retrieved the poster from a soggy winter rosebed. He unrolled it and showed it to us, laughing.
‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’
‘One of them,’ said Chico, ‘has a sense of humour.’
Much against his wishes, we returned to our observation post in the scrubby gorse.
‘Haven’t you had enough?’ he said crossly.
‘The patrols don’t get here till six,’ I reminded him. ‘And you yourself said that dusk would be the likely time for them to try something.’
‘But they’ve already done it.’
‘There’s nothing to stop them from rigging up more than one booby trap,’ I pointed out. ‘Especially as that mirror thing wouldn’t have been one hundred per cent reliable, even if we hadn’t spotted it. It depended on the sun. Good weather forecast, I know, but weather forecasts are as reliable as a perished hot-water bottle. A passing cloud would have wrecked it. I would think they have something else in mind.’
