I looked at the monstrously gutted house and shivered. We had returned unexpectedly on Monday; today was Friday. The speed of planning and execution was itself alarming. Never again were we likely to be lucky. Malcolm had survived three attacks by sheer good fortune, but Ferdinand wouldn't have produced healthy statistics about a fourth. The family looked peacefully normal talking to the reporters, and I was filled with a sense of urgency and foreboding.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One of Malcolm's dogs came bounding across the grass towards him, followed a few seconds later by the other. Malcolm put a hand out of his blanket and patted them, but with more absent mindedness than welcome. After them came Arthur Bellbrook with a face of consternation and concern which lightened considerably when he set eyes on Malcolm. In his grubby trousers and ancient tweed jacket, he came at a hobbling run in old army boots and fetched up very out of breath at Malcolm's side.
'Sir! You're alive! I went to Twyford to fetch some weed killer When I got back, they told me in the village…'
'Gross exaggeration,' Malcolm said, nodding.
Arthur Bellbrook turned to me, panting. 'They said you were both dead. I couldn't get down the road… had to come across the fields. Look at the house!'
I explained about our going to London, and asked him what time he'd gone home the previous day.
'Four o'clock, same as always. Say three-forty, then. About then.' He was beginning to get his breath back, his eyes round with disbelief as he stared at the damage.
Nearer to three-thirty, I privately reckoned, if he was admitting to going home early at all.
'Did you go in the house at any time during the day?' I asked.
He switched his gaze from the ruins to me and sounded aggrieved. 'No, I didn't. you know I couldn't have. You've been locking the place like it's a fortress since you came back, and I didn't have a key. Where could I have got a key from?'
I said placatingly, 'It' just that we're anxious… someone got in, they must have.'
'Not me.' He was Slightly mollified. 'I was working in the kitchen garden all day, digging potatoes and such like. I had the two dogs with me, tied up on their leads. If anyone had tried to get in the house, they'd have barked for sure, but they didn't.'
Malcolm said, 'Arthur, could you keep the dogs with you for another day or two?'
'Yes, I…' He looked helplessly at the heap of rubble spilling out across the terrace and onto the lawn. 'What do you want me to do about the garden?'
'Just… carry on,' Malcolm said. 'Keep it tidy.' It didn't seem incongruous to him to polish the setting, though I thought that perhaps, left to its own, nature would scatter leaves and grow longer grass and soften the raw brutality of the jagged edges.
The superintendent, seeing Arthur Bellbrook, came across to him and asked the same questions that I had. Again, they seemed to know each other well, undoubtedly from Moira's investigations, and if there didn't seem to be friendship, there was clearly a mutual respect.
The reporters, having sucked the nectar from Gervase, advanced on Malcolm and on the gardener and the superintendent. I moved away, leaving them to it, and tried to talk to Ferdinand.
He was unfriendly and answered with shrugs and monosyllables.
'I suppose,' I said bitterly, 'you would rather I was lying in shreds and bloody tatters under all that lot.'
He looked at the tons of fallen masonry. 'Not really,' he said coolly.
'That's something.'
'You can't expect us to like it that you've an inside edge with Malcolm!'
'You had three years,' I pointed out, 'during which he wouldn't speak to me. Why did You waste them? Why didn't you get an inside edge yourself?'
'We couldn't get past Moira.'
I half smiled. 'Nor could I.'
'It's now we're talking about,' he said. He looked greatly like Malcolm, right down to the stubbornness in the eyes.
'What do you want me to do, walk away and let him be murdered?' I said.
'Walk away…?'
'That's why he wants me with him, to try to keep him safe. He asked me to be his bodyguard, and I accepted.'
Ferdinand stared. 'Alicia said…'
'Alicia is crazy,' I interrupted fiercely. 'So are you. Take a look at yourself. Greed, jealousy and spite, you've let them all in. I won't cut you out with Malcolm, I'd never attempt it. Try believing that instead, brother and save yourself a lot of anxiety!'
I turned away from him in frustration. They were all illogical, I thought. They had almost begged me to use any influence I had with Malcolm to stop him spending and bale them out, and at the same time they believed I would ditch them to my own advantage. But then people had always been able to hold firmly to two contradictory ideas at the same time, as when once, in racing's past, Stewards, Press and public alike had vilified one brilliant trainer as 'most crooked', and elected one great jockey as 'most honest', blindly and incredibly ignoring that it was the self-same trusted jockey who for almost all of his career rode the brilliant trainer's horses. I'd seen a cartoon once that summed it up neatly: 'Entrenched belief is never altered by the facts.'
I wished I hadn't lashed out at Ferdinand. My idea of detection from the inside wasn't going to be a riotous success if I let my own feelings get in the way so easily. I might think the family unjust, they might think me conniving: OK, I told myself, accept all that and forget it. I'd had to put up with their various resentments for much of my life and it was high time I developed immunity.
Easier said than done, of course.
Superintendent Yale had had enough of the reporters. The family had by this time divided into two larger clumps, Vivien's and Alicia's, with Joyce and I hovering between them, belonging to neither. The superintendent went from group to group asking that everyone should adjourn to the police station. 'As you are all here,' he was saying, 'we may as well take your statements straight away, to save you being bothered later.'
'Statements?' Gervase said, eyebrows rising.
'Your movements yesterday and last night, sir.'
'Good God,' Gervase said. 'You don't think any of us would have done this, do you?'
'That's what we have to find out.'
'It's preposterous!'
None of the others said anything, not even Joyce.
The superintendent conferred with a uniformed colleague who was busy stationing his men round the house so that the ever- increasing, spectators shouldn't get too close. The word must have spread, I thought. The free peepshow was attracting the next villages, if not Twyford itself.
Much of the family, including Malcolm, Joyce and myself, packed into the three police cars standing in the front drive, and Gervase, Ferdinand and Serena set off on foot to go back to the transport they had come in.
'I wouldn't put it past Alicia,' Joyce said darkly to the superintendent as we drove past them towards the gate, 'to have incited that brood of hers to blow up Quantum.'
'Do you have any grounds for that statement, Mrs Pembroke?'
'Statement? It's an opinion. She's a bitch.' In the front passenger seat, Yale's shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
The road outside was still congested with cars, with still more people coming on foot. Yale's driver stopped beside Joyce's car, which she'd left in the centre of the road in her haste, and helped to clear room for her to turn in. With her following, we came next to the hired car Malcolm and I had arrived in, but as it was hopelessly shut in on three sides by other locked vehicles, we left it there and went on in the police car.
In his large modern police station with its bullet-proofed glass enquiry desk, the superintendent ushered us
