another one lay on its side. He remembered these surplus containers, heavy as hell, but he could not remember their purpose, strode towards them, began to heave them aside, conscious of spilling the last of the liquid from one, disgusted by the smell.
Stopped to the sound of a muffled question from under his feet.
Evie? That you, Evie?'
`No, it bloody isn't, son.'
Oh, God, it's you.'
Harold was repelled by the leaden disappointment in William's voice, audible through wood and heavy with rejection, even in extremis. It carried the sudden, strangely unacceptable truth that the loathing he felt for his son was entirely reciprocal, and it angered him. The voice continued with leaden, indifferent calm.
`Can you open the trapdoor, Dad? You pull from the left.'
Harold felt splinters enter his skin as he scrabbled for a gap on the left of an ill-fitting door, scarcely remembered now. He pulled, surprised by the ease of it until he saw the pale glow of Bernadette's hands pulling beside his own. Breathless with effort, he peered downward into the pitch, saw two upturned faces.
`Hello,' said one. 'We're very pleased to see you.'
Harold swore, passed his hands across his eyes, squinting. The cigarette lighter fell from his top pocket, plopped on the earth below. He had the vague, irrelevant sense of William stooping to retrieve it. In the distance, his ears caught the sound of a siren, an intrusion in the night, sounding the imminence of invasion. It increased his anger beyond his own believing.
`You're a filthy little bastard, William, that's what you are. Bringing women here, are you? Saves them looking at you. They'd need the dark, you pathetic little shit. You can stay in this stinking pit for ever, as far as I'm concerned, you little sod.'
Oh, be quiet, Mr Featherstone, will you,' said the other one, only now discernible as Helen West, speaking in a tone of almost pleasant urgency, not free, he noticed, of a slight overtone of disgust. 'Just shut up and help us out, will you?' She touched William's arm in the vain hope of giving him the comfort of conspiracy. 'Someone locked us in here by mistake.
And the ladder's broken.'
`
Take her, Dad.' Instructions from William, now utterly calm. He seized Helen by the waist and lifted her on to his shoulders. `Reach, missus, go on.' Miraculously swift, one balletic lift and an agonizing yank of shoulders taking her through the aperture virtually into Harold's arms. She pushed him away, knelt by the opening.
`Now you, William. Come on, the air's fresh up here.' Fresh with newly spilled paraffin seeped from the empty flagon, fresh with sour whisky breath, controlled rage, and the whimperings of Bernadette. Apart from the relief of escape there was little to recommend such freedom for William. It was unloving, threatening, full of retribution.
`Go away,' said William. 'Leave me alone.'
I'll tan your bloody hide,' roared Harold, his fists clenched.
`Belt up,' said Helen. 'Go and fetch a ladder, will you? And keep your mouth shut. He doesn't deserve that. Your bloody son deserves a whole lot better than that.'
Her furious face was upturned, eyes glittering in skin streaked with dirt, making Harold recoil in shock. He moved to the open shed door, Bernadette retreating with him, obedient.
'S'all right,' William said to Helen. 'Honestly, 's'all right. I can get out now. Just let me stay still a bit. Till he's calmed down.' She nodded agreement.
And then, from beyond the summerhouse came flashes of light and crashings of sound, footsteps thundering from the direction of the pub, crashing through bushes in directionless haste, men searching with raised voices, Helen at the opening: 'Wait here, William. You'll be out soon. And you won't be in trouble, I promise,' leaving the trapdoor in response to one familiar voice, running outside to find it. She had heard Bailey. She was sure she had heard Bailey, saw nothing but torchlight approaching the shed, the sound of male humanity, indistinguishable as anything but a ragged procession, the first breaking into a run, wavering torch beam catching first her own face, then something farther distant.
`There she is, there she is.' Bailey incredibly running into her, touching her shoulder en route, not in comfort, simply to deflect her from his path, running beyond her. A scuffle out of sight in the darkness, the meshing of several urgent bodies in an orgy of contact, the tableau of Helen and the Featherstones standing still, oblivious to what was happening outside their view at the boundary with the field. Then, snarling and screaming, one girl child embraced by many hands, spitting like a cat, swayed back towards them in a fierce huddle that squirmed to a halt, still moving.
The space outside the summerhouse door was suddenly crowded. Bailey transferred one arm of the cotton-clad figure into the grasp of another large form. Evelyn Blundell slumped between them, and the officers now grasping those thin arms tightened their hold to keep her upright. Three more men hovered breathlessly behind. Bailey's face was a mask of incredulity, the voice short of breath but accusingly calm as the beam of his torch caught first Bernadette's pallor, then Harold's sweating skin, Helen's face last as if noting them for memory. He spoke with a final weariness. `What the hell are you doing here, Helen? Go home.'
Evelyn looked up, face contorted, towards Helen's familiar face, the Featherstone parents, the dreadful presence of her captors. Helen's own reactions to Bailey's words, those verbal slaps to her own existence, might have been more audible than her own recoil of rejection, had the girl not interrupted, flinging back her head, arching herself forward, the lithe body jackknifing itself straight in a moment of enormous strength. An officer twisted one arm up her back with sudden brutality. She did not scream in reaction, simply screamed like a howling animal, long, loud, and pained, words clear in the vicious harmony of her yelling.
`William… you bastard! You told, you told, I hate you…' A scream going on and on and on, until Bailey slapped her hard. Her head jerked back with the sheer violence of the blow and the scream stopped. Their ears rang with the sound and the message of it, spitting hatred, the echo of it floating and settling on perspiring bodies and stunned minds, until slowly, very slowly, the group began to shuffle and re-form.
Into Helen's numbed consciousness there floated the image of William downstairs in his den, listening to this crescendo, thinking slowly on what he had heard. First abuse from a father, then Evelyn yelling condemnation like a valedictory curse. William, searching for the matches that were safe in Helen's pocket, thinking, thinking: Evie came back, she came back, and she hates me. Wanted to kill me did Evie, and I thought she loved me. No other bugger does. The thought in Helen's head became an arrow of alarm, a sense of his loneliness, sharper because of her own in the face of Bailey's vituperative stare.
Alarm became a premonition of fear, turning her back to the door of the shed. She ran the few steps forward, shouting, `William, William, it's all right.' Bernadette running with her, both guilty for momentary forgetfulness of his presence, victim of them all. As she reached the door, there was an internal explosion like the long-delayed lighting of the gas in an oven.
She felt Bailey yank her back with enormous force, sending her sprawling to the ground while Bernadette ran on. Not a summer house for a child. A tinderbox.
From the distance, the flames sprang into the air like a beacon. Only the very nearest heard the thin shriek of sublime pain, brief and lost in the crackling of the wood.
END PIECE
The rain was buffeting the windows. Brown leaves from the station's single tree were plastered to the glass by the wind. Dead, they looked, dead and getting deader, pathetic.
Bowles did not want to move, obscurely comforted by the sight and sound of autumn desolation outside the warmth of the police station canteen. He was still in a state of half-mourning, half-shock. Come off it, his wife had said, you've seen worse. No, he told her, I haven't, not really; nothing like that. Or heard worse.
He had recognized in Bailey a condition similar to his own, liked him better for it, both of them suffering a kind of moving tension, a sort of sleepwalking, where all sights, all sounds, were shoved into the background by the memory of a single scream. Shock, the doctor told him, you'll recover, but he knew neither his life nor his
