As time went on the noises above lessened somewhat, though the intolerable heat reached a peak some hours after the sounds of the fire had faded. The first improvement I noticed was that smoke wasn't coming in anything like as frequently as it had. My breathing was difficult from the heat, though, and once I cried out in pain when, shifting my cramped position on the steps, I inadvertently touched the flagstone above my head. It burned my arm, and stinging blisters rose swiftly on my skin. As I resumed my pumping they burst and serum washed warm patches down my arm and onto my knee. I'd been going some eight hours at a guess when I finally decided to chance a minute's rest.
Numbly, I forced myself to work out the time by counting. The vent was showing that daylight glow. I could actually hear the cracklings of the settling ash mixed incongruously with faint twitters of the birds. No sound of revving engines now, no faint shouts either real or imaginary. If the firemen had come at all, they were gone now. And a wise murderer returns to see his job's properly done. Maybe he was already sifting through the embers for the turnkey. I know I would have done just that. God knows, I thought wearily, what the robin thinks of all this. I drank about a third of my water and endured the discomfort as the heat rose while I sat down. The ache was almost pleasurable. Sitting and eating dry bread and cheese seemed almost bliss after the horrible efforts I'd expended at the old bellows. Within two or three minutes, however, the heat rose again and I had to resume my action with the air pump to cool the cell down and allow me to breathe properly.
Throughout the morning I drove myself into forming a scheme. I would pump for about five minutes, then rest for as long as I could tolerate the heat, upon which I'd resume pumping. Limping along in this fashion for a while, I soon realized I'd overestimated the rate at which the incoming air cooled my prison. I reluctantly had to increase pumping time to about half an hour or so, which gave me sufficient coolth for about five minutes. There was an additional danger here, in that I was tempted to fall asleep while resting. I had to prevent this by standing up.
With time to think I became bitter. Where the hell were the fire people? And the police? And my lazy, swarmy, self-satisfied bloody friends? Why weren't they calling frantically for me, digging through the ash with their bare hands? I would. For them. But Lovejoy's nearest and dearest let him have a private bloody holocaust. The swine had all assumed I was shacked up elsewhere with some crummy bird. Could life be so outrageous that I'd been trapped by an armed maniac and so-say roasted alive by him in my own bloody home, and the entire country was just not caring enough? I wept from frustrated anger at the insult. All life in that moment seemed utterly mad. No wonder people just set out determined to simply get what they could. Who could blame them? The proof was here, in ashes above me. And I, honest, God-fearing Lovejoy, finished up buried underneath the smoking ruins of my own bloody house, cut, filthy, bleeding, weary, and as naked as the day I was born.
My elbows were like balloons full of fluid, swollen and soggy. My wrists were more painful still but not so swollen. Despite them and the blisters I had to resume at the bellows.
As time wore wearily on I became aware of lessening temperature. In rest periods I could hear rain on grass and a faint drumming. Could it be rain on the old Armstrong? My rest periods were becoming longer and safer and the need of cool air was not so absolute. I was able to risk sitting down and having a rough meal.
Eventually there came a time when I felt it would not be risking total extinction to fall asleep. I lodged myself upright on the steps and was into oblivion within seconds.
You'd never seen such a sight. The cottage was a pile of smoking cinders and ash. In the dusk the garden seemed so small without the cottage to make the plot seem a little more imposing. The whole scene was pathetic. Where the kitchen alcove had been the ash was knee deep, perhaps the result of my water trap. Water was seeping from below, there, probably from a damaged rising main.
The rain had ceased. Smoke still rose from the debris in places. You can't help wondering at the curious consequences of physical events, almost as much as at biological goings-on. Why, I wondered, had that particular crossbeam, lying half charred among the ruins, not burned all the way through as the rest appeared to have done? And why was part of the wattle-and-daub wall still standing to a height of about three feet close to where the front door stood, with the rest in ashes?
It had taken me a full hour to extricate myself from the hole. The weight of smoldering debris had made the slab difficult to lift. Still, I thought grimly, the murderer can't push even his phenomenal luck too far. Quick-to-burn stuff makes light ash.
I placed the time at about nine o'clock Sunday night. The grass was wet from the rain. I had the sense to kick ashes back onto the paving over the priest hole to obscure signs of my escape, and I skipped swiftly onto the damp grass because my trousers were smoldering. With the same facility of the previous night I knew he'd gone. I had the Nock with me and slipped it to half-cock for safety.
The car was a wreck, the tires shreds of charred rubber, the paint gone, the metal twisted, and the trimmings burned to blazes. I hadn't a bean. Except for the few items down in the priest hole I was bust. Dizziness forced me to rest a few minutes. I sat in the darkness beneath the hedge to recover and bathed my face with wet grass. There was nothing for it but to ask for help, but from whom?
My neighbors didn't get back until Monday as a rule, so they weren't about yet, assuming I'd guessed right about it being Sunday evening. Other people up the lane couldn't be approached. I knew hardly any of them, and anyway I would send them into screaming fits by heaving out of the darkness like a charred scarecrow. I would have to phone somebody. Muriel? Margaret? Jane? Tinker? Dick or Brad? Who was safe?
There were signs people had come. Great marks were gouged in the gravel path. Several bushes were crushed. A fire engine, probably. Foot hollows in the grass were filled with rainwater already. A small crowd of well-wishers, half disappointed at not seeing Lovejoy crisped, the rest busy speculating which bird it was that had luckily seduced me away from the danger. Friendship's a great restorative.
The idea of a telephone seemed bizarre. You just pick up the receiver, dial, and have a perfectly normal conversation with whoever's at the other end. After a night such as I'd spent? I'd heard somewhere that people rescued from bizarre episodes full of danger—like sailors on a raft for days—weren't allowed back to normal life immediately but were put into solitude until the idea of rescue became a tangible reality. Maybe human brains can't accept too much relief all at one go. Not knowing if I was doing right or not, I compelled myself to sit there beneath the darkening hedge watching the ruins smolder, trying to keep my relief from dominating my thoughts.
The proper thing to do would be to walk through the gathering dusk to the policeman's house. It was only about a half-mile. Nobody would see what a state I was in. He might lend me some clothes. I was wearing socks, shoes, trousers, and a shirt, all filthy and torn. Caked as I was with grime, ashes, and dried blood, I couldn't be a pretty sight, cut and blistered. Or perhaps the telephone booth? Our one public phone was always lit and stood by the village pond in front of the Queen's Head. We have no street lamps, but the place was too prominent.
After some two hours or so tasting fresh damp air, I rose creakily, holding on to the hedge to keep myself upright. It proved difficult even to walk, to my surprise. I kept to the verge of the gravel path so as to make no noise and examined the lane before limping quickly across, carrying the two-barreled pistol now at full cock should my premonitions let me down.
My neighbor has two cottages knocked into one and extended to the rear. Like me he has a curving gravel path up to the front. I ignored this and crept slowly through his garden to the rear of the house. To help in harvesting his
