him.
‘I’m sorry, Bob, but it is true. The house is on fire. We’d better go.’
‘On fire? Can’t bloody be. It’s a listed building. Built two hundred years ago. Houses that old don’t catch fire. Not like the modern rubbish they put up nowadays.’
Mrs Rottecombe ignored the implied insult to her own house and with the Club Secretary’s help got him up from the chair and out to her Volvo estate.
It was only now as he stood swaying in the roadway surrounded by fire hoses and stared at the smoking shell of the beautiful house–fires were burning in the interior and being doused by the firemen when they flared up again–that some sense of reality returned to Beastly Battleby.
‘Oh God, what are the family going to say?’ he whined. ‘I mean, the family portraits and everything. Two Gainsboroughs and a Constable. And the fucking furniture. Oh shit! And they weren’t insured.’
He was either sweating profusely or weeping. It was difficult in the dim light to tell which. He was still drunk and maudlin. Mrs Rottecombe said nothing. She had despised him before; now she had nothing but utter contempt. She should never have associated with the wimp.
‘It was probably the wiring,’ she said finally. ‘When did you have it rewired last?’
‘Rewired? I don’t know. Twelve or thirteen years ago. Something like that. Nothing wrong with the bloody wiring.’
They were interrupted by the police Superintendent.
‘A terrible tragedy, Mr Battleby. A tragic loss.’
Battleby turned and looked at him belligerently. A sudden flare-up in what had been the library illuminated his suffused face.
‘What’s it got to do with you? Not your bloody loss,’ he said.
‘Not mine personally, no, sir. I meant for you and the county, sir.’
The Superintendent’s deference was tinged with hidden anger. He would lard his questions with ’sirs’ and take his time. No need to get up Mrs Rottecombe’s nose. On the other hand, now was the time to see Battleby’s reaction to the filth in the Range Rover.
‘I wonder if you’d mind stepping round to the back, sir?’
‘What the hell for? Why don’t you just bugger off. It’s not your fucking house.’
Mrs Rottecombe intervened. ‘Now, Bob, the Inspector is only trying to help.’
The Superintendent ignored his demotion. ‘It’s a question of identification, sir,’ he said and watched carefully.
Mrs Rottecombe was shocked but the drunken Battleby misunderstood. ‘What the fuck! You know me already. Known me for bloody years.’
‘Not you, sir,’ the Superintendent said and paused significantly. ‘There’s something else.’
‘Something else, Chief Superintendent?’ Mrs Rottecombe corrected her previous mistake. There was genuine anxiety in her voice now.
The Superintendent took advantage of it. He nodded slowly and added, ‘A bad business, I’m afraid. Not at all pleasant.’
‘Surely not someone dead…’
The Superintendent didn’t reply. He led the way round to the Range Rover, stepping over hose-pipes and with the acrid smell of smoke in their nostrils. Battleby stumbled after them. Mrs Rottecombe wasn’t helping him now. The smell and the Superintendent’s sinister emphasis was playing on her imagination. In the darkness the Range Rover might have been an ambulance. Several policemen stood nearby. Only when they got closer did she see it was Bob’s vehicle. So did he and protested.
