box room no one in the bathrooms, no one in the plum and pink lushness of Malcolm's own suite. By the end, I was still as scared as I'd been at the beginning, and I hadn't started on cellars or attics or small hiding places.
I hadn't looked under the beds. Demons could be waiting anywhere to jump out on me, yelling. Giving in, I switched off all the upstairs lights and went cravenly back to the hall.
Everything was still quiet, mocking me.
I was a fool, I thought.
Leaving the hall and kitchen lights on, I went back to Malcolm who started to get out of the car when he saw me coming. I waved him back and slid in beside him, behind the driving wheel.
'What's the matter?' he said.
'Someone may be here.'
'What do you mean?'
I explained about the doors.
'You're imagining things.'
'No. Someone has used their key.'
We hadn't yet been able to have the locks changed, although the carpenter was due to be bringing replacements the following morning. He'd had difficulty finding good new locks to fit into such old doors, he'd said, and had promised them for Thursday, but I'd put him off until Friday because of Cheltenham.
'We can't stay out here all night,' Malcolm protested. 'It's bound to be the wind or something that moved the doors. Let's go to bed, I'm whacked.'
I looked at my hands. They weren't actually shaking. I thought for a while until Malcolm grew restless.
'I'm getting cold,' he said. 'Let's go in, for God's sake.'
'No… we're not sleeping here.'
'What? You can't mean it.'
'I'll lock the house, and we'll go and get a room somewhere else.'
'At this time of night?'
'Yes.' I made to get out of the car and he put a hand on my arm to catch my attention.
'Fetch some pyjamas, then, and washing things.'
I hesitated. 'No, I don't think it's safe.' I didn't say I couldn't face it, but I couldn't.
'Ian, all this is crazy.'
'It would be crazier still to be murdered in our beds.'
'But just because two doors…'
'Yes. Because.'
He seemed to catch some Of MY own uneasiness because he made no more demur, but when I was headed again for the kitchen he called after me, 'At least bring my briefcase from the office, will you?'
I made it through the hall again with only a minor tremble in the gut; switched on the office light, fetched his briefcase without incident and set the office door again at its usual precise angle. I did the same to the sitting- room door. Perhaps they would tell us in the morning, I thought, whether or not we had had a visitor who had hidden from my approach.
I went back through the hall, switched the lights off, shut the hall to-kitchen door, let myself out, left the house dark and locked and put the briefcase on the car's back seat.
On the basis that it would be easiest to find a room in London, particularly at midnight, for people without luggage, I drove up the M4 and on Malcolm's instructions pulled up at the Ritz. We might be refugees, he said, but we would be staying in no camp, and he explained to the Ritz that he'd decided to stay overnight in London as he'd been delayed late on business.
'Our name is Watson,' I said impulsively, thinking suddenly of Norman West's advice and picking out of the air the first name I could think of. 'We will pay with travellers' cheques.'
Malcolm opened his mouth, closed it again, and kept blessedly quiet. One could write whatever name one wanted onto travellers' cheques.
The Ritz batted no eyelids, offered us connecting rooms (no double suites available) and promised razors, toothbrushes and a bottle of scotch.
Malcolm had been silent for most of the journey, and so had I, feeling with every heart-calming mile that I had probably over- reacted, that maybe I hadn't set the doors, that if any of the family had let themselves into the house while we were out, they'd been gone long before we returned. We had come back hours later than anyone could have expected, if they were judging the time it would take us to drive from Cheltenham.
I could have sat at the telephone in the house and methodically checked with all the family to make sure they were in their own homes. I hadn't thought of it, and I doubted if I could have done it, feeling as I had.
Malcolm, who held that sleeping pills came a poor second to scotch, put his nightcap theory to the test and was soon softly snoring. I quietly closed the door between our two rooms and climbed between my own sheets, but for a long time lay awake. I was ashamed of my fear in the house which I now thought must have been empty. I had risked my neck without a qualm over big fences that afternoon: I'd been petrified in the house that someone would jump out on me from the dark. The two faces of courage, I thought mordantly: turn one face to the wall.
We went back to Berkshire in the morning and couldn't reach Quantum by car because the whole village, it seemed, was out and blocking the road. Cars and people everywhere: cars parked along the roadsides, people walking in droves towards the house.
'What on earth's going on?' Malcolm said.
'Heaven knows.' In the end I had to stop the car, and we finished the last bit of the journey on foot. We had to push through crowds and were unpopular until people recognised Malcolm, and made way for him, and finally we reached the entrance to the drive… and there literally rocked to a stop.
To start with there was a rope stretched across it, barring our way, with a policeman guarding it. In front of the house, there were ambulances, police cars, fire-engines, swarms of people in uniform moving purposefully about.
Malcolm swayed with shock, and I felt unreal, disconnected from my feet. Our eyes told us: our brains couldn't believe.
There was an immense jagged gaping hole in the centre of Quantum.
People standing near us in the gateway, round-eyed, said, 'They say it was the gas.'
CHAPTER TEN
We were in front of the house, talking to policemen. I couldn't remember walking up the drive.
Our appearance on the scene had been a shock to the assembled forces, but a welcome one. They had been searching for our remains in the rubble.
They told us that the explosion had happened at four-thirty in the morning, the wumph and reverberation of it waking half the village, the shock waves breaking windows and setting dogs howling. Several people had called the police, but when the force had reached the village, everything had seemed quiet. No one knew where the explosion had occurred. The police drove round the extended neighbour hood until daylight, and it was only then that anyone saw what had happened to Quantum.
The front wall of the hall, the antique front door with it, had been blown out flat onto the drive, and the centre part of the upper storey had collapsed into the hall. The glass in all the windows had disappeared.
'I'm afraid it's worse at the back,' a policeman said phlegmatically. 'Perhaps you'd come round there, sir. We can at least tell everyone there are no bodies.'
Malcolm nodded mechanically, and we followed the policeman round to the left, between the kitchen and garage, through to the garden and along past the dining-room wall. The shock when we rounded onto the terrace was, for all the warning, horrific and sickening.
Where the sitting-room had been, there was a mountain of jumbled dusty bricks, plaster, beams and smashed furniture spilling outwards onto the grass. Malcolm's suite, which had been above the sitting-room, had vanished,
