I said to them. 'Come and see what really happened here. You can all come.'
The superintendent had in no way tried to break up the family party but had listened quietly throughout. I happened to catch his eye at that point, and he nodded briefly and walked back beside Malcolm as everyone slowly moved round to the rear of the house.
The extent and violence of the damage there silenced even Gervase. All of the mouths gaped: in all eyes, horrified awe.
The chief fireman came over and with a certain professional relish began in a strong Berkshire accent to point out the facts.
'Blast travels along, the lines of least resistance,' he said. 'This is a good strong old house, which I reckon is why so much of it is still standing. The blast, see, travelled outwards, front and back from a point somewhere near the centre of the main upper storey. Some Of the blast went upwards into the roof, bringing down some of those little attic bedrooms, and a good bit of blast, I'd reckon, blew downwards, making a hole that the upper storey and part of the attic just collapsed into, see what I mean?'
Everyone saw.
'There's this wall here' – he pointed to the one between what had been the sitting-room and was still the dining-room – 'this wall here, with the chimney built into it, this is one of the main load- bearing walls. It goes right up to the roof. Same the other side, more or less. Those two thick walls stopped the blast travelling sideways, except a bit through the doorways.' He turned directly to Malcolm. I've seen a lot of wrecked buildings, sir, mostly burned, it's true, but some gas explosions, and I'd say, and mind you, you'd have to get a proper survey done, but I'd say, on looking at this house, that although it got a good shaking you could think of rebuilding it. Good solid Victorian house, otherwise it would have folded up like a pack of cards.'
'Thank you,' Malcolm said faintly.
The fireman nodded. 'Don't you let any fancy demolition man tell you different, sir. I don't like people being taken advantage of when they're overcome by disasters. I've seen too much of that, and it riles me. What I'm telling you is a straight opinion. I've nothing to gain one way or the other.'
'We're all grateful,' I said. He nodded, satisfied, and Gervase finally found his voice. 'What sort of bomb was it?' he asked.
'As to that, Sir, I wouldn't know. You'd have to wait for the experts.' The fireman turned to the superintendent. 'We shut Off the electricity at the meter switch in the garage when we got here, and likewise turned off the mains water under a man-hole cover out by the gate. The storage tank in the roof had emptied through the broken pipes upstairs and water was still running when we got here, and all that water's now underneath the rubble. There's nothing I can see Can start a fire. If you want to go into the upper storey at the sides, you'll need ladders, the staircase is blocked. I can't vouch for the dividing walls up there, we looked through the windows but we haven't been inside, you'd have to go carefully. We didn't go up to the attic much, bar a quick look from up the ladder. But down here, you should be all right in the dining-room and in that big room the other side of this mess, and also in the kitchen and the front room on the far side.'
'MY office,' Malcolm said.
The superintendent nodded, and I reflected that he already knew the layout of the house well from earlier repeated visits.
'We've done as much as we can here,' the fireman said. 'All right if we shove off now?'
The superintendent, agreeing, went a few steps aside with him in private consultation and the family began to come back from suspended animation.
The Press Photographers moved in close rand took haphazard pictures of us, and a man and a woman from different papers approached with insistent questions. Only Gervase seemed to find those tolerable and did all the answering. Malcolm sat down again on the pine chair, which was still there, and gathered his blanket around him, retreating into it up to his eyes like a Red Indian.
Vivien, spotting him, went over and told him she was tired of standing and needed to sit down and it was typically selfish of him to take the only seat, and an insult to her as she was the senior woman present. Glancing at her with distaste, Malcolm got to his feet and moved a good distance away, allowing her to take his place with a self-satisfied smirk. My dislike of Vivien rose as high as her cheekbones and felt as shrewish as her mouth.
Alicia, recovered, was doing her fluttery feminine act for the reporters, laying out charm thickly and eclipsing Serena's little- girl Ploy. Seeing them together, I thought that it must be hard for Serena to have a mother who refused to mature, who in her late fifties still dressed and behaved like an eighteen-year-old, who for years had blocked her daughter's natural road to adulthood. Girls needed a motherly mother, I'd been told, and Serena didn't have one. Boys needed one. too and Joyce wasn't one, but I'd had a father all the time and in the end I'd also had Coochie, and Serena hadn't had either and there lay all the difference in the world.
Edwin was having as hard a time as Donald in putting on a show of rejoicing over Malcolm's deliverance.
'It's all very well for You,' he said to me bitterly, catching my ironic look in his direction. 'Malcolm despises me – and don't bother to deny it, he makes it plain enough – and I don't see why I should care much for him. Of course, I wouldn't wish him dead…'
'Of course not,' I murmured.
'… but, well, if it had happened…' he stopped, not actually having the guts to say it straight out.
'You'd have been glad?' I said.
'No.' He cleared his throat. 'I could have faced it,' he said.
I almost laughed. 'Bully for you, Edwin,' I said. 'Hang in there, fellow.'
'I could have faced your death, too,' he said stuffily.
Oh well, I thought. I asked for that. 'How much do you know about bombs?' I asked.
'That's a ridiculous question,' he said, and walked off, and I reflected that Norman West had reported Edwin as spending an hour most days in the public library, and I betted one could find out how to make bombs there, if one persevered.
Berenice said to me angrily, 'It's all your fault Thomas is out of work.'
I blinked. 'How do you make that out?'
'He's been so worried about Malcolm's behaviour that he couldn't concentrate and he made mistakes. He says you could get Malcolm to help us, but of course I tell him you won't, why should you, you're Malcolm's pet.' She fairly spat the last word, the rage seething also in her eyes and tightening all the cords in her neck.
'You told Thomas that?' I said.
'It's true,' she said furiously. 'Vivien says you've always been Malcolm's favourite and he's never been fair to Thomas.'
'He's always been fair to all of us,' I said positively, but of course she didn't believe it.
She was older than Thomas by four or five years and had married him when she was well over thirty and (Joyce had said cattily) desperate for any husband that offered. Ten years ago, when I'd been to their wedding, she had been a thin, moderately attractive woman lit up by happiness. Thomas had been proud of himself and proprietary. They had looked, if not an exciting couple, stable and full of promise, embarking on a good adventure.
Ten years and two daughters later, Berenice had put on weight and outward sophistication and lost whatever illusions she'd had about marriage. I'd long supposed it was basic disappointment which had made her so destructive of Thomas, but hadn't bothered to wonder about the cause of it. Time I did, I thought. Time I understood the whole lot of them, because perhaps in that way we might come to know who could and who couldn't murder.
To search through character and history, not through alibis. To listen to what they said and didn't say, to learn what they could control, and what they couldn't.
I knew, as I stood there looking at the bunch of them, that only someone in the family itself could go that route, and that if I didn't do it, no one else would.
Norman West and Superintendent Yale could dig into facts. I would dig into the people. And the problem with that, I thought, mocking my own pretension, was that the people would do anything to keep me out.
I had to recognise that what I was going to do could produce more trouble than results. Spotting the capability of murder could elude highly-trained psychiatrists, who had been known to advise freedom for reformed characters only to have them go straight out and kill. A highly-trained psychiatrist I was not. just someone who could remember how we had been, and could learn how we were now.
