Blott On The Landscape (25 page)

“I must have been mad to have come up here,” he thought.

The same thought had already occurred to Sir Giles though in his case the madness he had in mind was in no way metaphorical. As dawn broke over the Park, Sir Giles wrestled with the lock on the gate to the footbridge and tried to imagine how it had got there. It had not been on the gate when he arrived. He wouldn’t have been able to enter if it had. But if the existence of the lock was bad enough, that of the fence was worse and it certainly hadn’t been there when he had last been at the Hall. It was an extremely high fence with large metal brackets at the top and four strands of heavy barbed-wire overhanging the Park so that it was evidently designed to stop people getting out rather than trespassers getting in.

It was at this point that Sir Giles gave up the struggle with the lock and decided to look for some other way out. He followed the fence along to the edge of the pinetum and was about to clamber over the iron railings when the sense of unreality that had come over him with the sudden appearance of a large lock where no lock had previously been took a decided turn for the worse. Against the grey dawn sky he saw a head, a small head with a long nose and knobs on it. Below the head there was a neck, a long neck, a very long neck indeed. Sir Giles shut his eyes and hoped to hell that when he opened them he wouldn’t see what he thought he had seen. He opened them but the giraffe wais still there. “Oh my God,” he murmured and was about to move away when his eye caught sight of something even more terrifying. In the long grass fifty yards behind the giraffe there was another face, a large face with a mane and whiskers.

Sir Giles gave up all thought of looking for a way out in that direction. He turned and stumbled back into the pinetum. Either he had gone mad or he was in the middle of some fucking zoo. Giraffes? Lions? And what the hell was it that he had almost stumbled across during the night? An elephant? He got back to the gate and looked at the lock hopefully. But instead of one lock there were now two and the second was even larger than the first. He was just trying to think what this meant when he heard a noise on the path across the river. Sir Giles looked up. Blott was standing there with a shotgun, smiling down at him. It was a horrible smile, a smile of quiet satisfaction. Sir Giles turned and ran into the pinetum. He knew death when he saw it.

By the time Blott got back to the Hall Lady Maud was down and making breakfast in the kitchen.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I moved the Bentley,” Blott told her. “I brought it round and put it in the garage. I thought it would look more natural.”

Lady Maud nodded. “You are probably right,” she said. “People might have started asking questions if they found it left up by the church. Besides if he did get out he might have telephoned the AA for assistance.”

“He isn’t going to get out,” said Blott, “I saw him. He’s in the pinetum.”

“Well it’s his own fault. He came up here to burn the house down and whatever happens now he has only himself to blame.” She handed Blott a plate of cereal. “I’m afraid I can’t give you a cooked breakfast. The electricity has been cut off. I telephoned the electricity office in Worford but they say there has been a power failure.”

Blott ate his cereal in silence. There didn’t seem much point in telling her about his part in the power failure and besides she seemed in a talkative mood herself.

“The trouble with Giles was,” she said using the past tense in a way that Blott found most agreeable, “that he liked to think of himself as a self-made man. I have always thought it an extremely presumptuous phrase and in his case particularly inappropriate. I suppose he had some right to call himself a man, though from my experience of him I wouldn’t have said virility was his strong point, but as for being self-made, he was nothing of the kind. He made his money, and of course that’s what he meant by self, by speculating in property, by evicting people from their homes and by obtaining planning permission to put up office blocks. At least my family made its money selling beer, and very good beer at that. And it took them generations to do it. There’s nothing so splendid about that but at least they were honest men.” She was still talking and doing the washing-up when Blott left to go out to the kitchen garden.

“Is there anything else you want done about him?” he asked as he left.

Lady Maud shook her head. “I think we can just leave nature to take its course,” she told him. “He was a great believer in the law of the jungle.”

In Worford Police Station Dundridge was having difficulty with the law of the land. Hoskins had been no great help.

“According to him,” said the Superintendent in charge of the case, “you gave specific orders for random sorties to be made by bulldozers on various properties. Now you say you didn’t.”

“I was speaking figuratively,” Dundridge explained. “I certainly didn’t give any instructions that could lead anyone but a complete idiot to suppose that I wanted the late Mr Bullett-Finch’s house demolished.”

“Nevertheless it was demolished.”

“By some lunatic. You don’t seriously imagine I went out there and smashed the house up myself?”

“If you’ll just keep calm, sir,” said the Superintendent, “all I am trying to do is to establish the chain of circumstances that led up to this murder.”

“Murder?” mumbled Dundridge.

“You’re not claiming it was an accident, are you? A person or persons unknown deliberately take a large crane and use it to pulverize a house in which two innocent people are sleeping. You can call that all sorts of things but not an accident. No sir, we are treating this as a case of murder.”

Dundridge thought for a moment. “If that’s the case there must have been a motive. Have you given any thought to that?”

“I’m glad you mentioned motive, sir,” said the Superintendent. “Now I understand that Mr Bullett-Finch was an active member of the Save the Gorge Committee. Would you say that your relations with him were marked by an unusual degree of animosity?”

“Relations?” shouted Dundridge. “I didn’t have any relations with him. I never met the man in my life.”

“But you did speak to him over the telephone on a number of occasions.”

“I may have done,” said Dundridge. “I seem to remember his phoning once to complain about something or other.”

“Would that have been the occasion on which you told him that quote ‘If you don’t stop pestering me I’ll see to it that you’ll lose a bloody sight more than a quarter of an acre of your bleeding garden’ unquote?”

“Who told you that?” snarled Dundridge.

“The identity of our informant is irrelevant, sir. The question is did you or did you not say that.”

“I may have done,” Dundridge admitted, promising that he would make Hoskins’ life difficult for him in future.

“And wouldn’t you agree that the late Mr Bullett-Finch has in fact lost more than a quarter of an acre of his bleeding garden?”

Dundridge had to admit that he had.

As the morning wore on the Controller Motorways Midlands had the definite impression that a trap was closing in around him.

In Sir Giles’ case there was the absolute conviction. His attempts to scale the wire fence had failed miserably. Oily gumboots were not ideal for the purpose and Sir Giles’ physical activities had been of too passive a nature to prepare him at all adequately for scrambling up wire mesh or coping with barbed-wire overhangs. What he needed was a ladder, but his only attempt to leave the pinetum to look for one had been foiled by the sight of a rhinoceros browsing in the rockery and of a lion sunning itself outside the kitchen door. Sir Giles stuck to the pinetum and waited for an opportunity. He waited a long time.

By three o’clock in the afternoon he was exceedingly hungry. So were the lions. From the lower branches of a tree overlooking the park Sir Giles watched as four lionesses stalked a giraffe, one moving upwind while the other three lay in the grass downwind. The giraffe moved off and a moment later was thrashing around in its death throes. From his eyrie Sir Giles watched in horror as the lionesses finished it off and were presently joined by the lions. Stifling his disgust and fear Sir Giles climbed down from the branch. This was his opportunity. Ignoring the rhinoceros which had its back to him he raced across the lawn towards the house as fast as his gum-boots would allow. He reached the terrace and hurried round past the conservatory where Lady Maud was watering a castor-oil plant. As he ran past she looked up and for a moment he had an impulse to stop and beg her to let him in but the look on her face was enough to tell him he would be wasting his time. It expressed an indifference to his fate, almost an ignorance of his existence, which was in its way even more frightening than Blott’s terrible smile. As far as Maud was concerned he simply wasn’t there. She had married him to save the Hall and preserve the family. And now she was prepared to murder him by proxy for the same purpose. Sir Giles had no doubt about that. He ran on into the yard and opened the garage door. Inside stood the Bentley. He could get away at last. He pushed the doors back and got into the car. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned them and the starter whirred. He tried again but the car wouldn’t start.

In the kitchen garden Blott listened to the engine turning over. He was wasting his time. He could go on till Doomsday and the car wouldn’t start. Blott had no sympathy for him. “Nature must take its course,” Lady Maud had said and Blott agreed. Sir Giles meant nothing to him. He was like the pests in the garden, the slugs or the greenfly. No that wasn’t true. He was worse. He was a traitor to the England that Blott revered, the old England, the upstanding England, the England that had carved an Empire by foolhardiness and accident, the England that had built this garden and planted the great oaks and elms not for its own immediate satisfaction but for the future. What had Sir Giles done for the future? Nothing. He had desecrated the past and betrayed the future. He deserved to die. Blott took his shotgun and went round to the garage.

Lady Maud in the conservatory was having second thoughts. The look on Sir Giles’ face as he hesitated outside had awakened a slight feeling of pity in her. The man was afraid, desperately afraid, and Lady Maud had no time for cruelty. It was one thing to talk in the abstract about the law of the jungle, but it was another to participate in it.

“He’s learnt his lesson by now,” she thought, “I had better let him go.” And she was about to go out and look for him when the phone rang. It was General Burnett.

“It’s about this business of poor old Bertie,” said the General. “The committee would like to come over and have a chat with you.”

“Bertie?” said Lady Maud. “Bertie Bullett-Finch?”

“You know he’s dead, of course,” said the General.

“Dead?” said Lady Maud. “I had no idea. When did this happen?”

“Last night. House was knocked down by the motorway swine. Bertie was inside at the time.”

Lady Maud sat down, stunned by the news. “How absolutely dreadful. Do they know who did it?”

“They’ve taken that fellow Dundridge in for questioning,” said the General. Lady Maud could think of nothing to say. “Knocked half Guildstead down too. The Colonel and I thought we ought to come over and have a talk to you about it. Puts a very different complexion on the whole business of the motorway, don’t you know.”

“Of course,” said Lady Maud. “Come over at once.” She put the phone down and tried to imagine what had happened. Dundridge taken in for questioning. Mr Bullett-Finch dead. Finch Grove demolished. Guildstead Carbonell … It was such astonishing news that it drove all thoughts of Giles from her mind.

“I must phone poor dear Ivy,” she muttered and dialled Finch Grove. Not surprisingly, she got no reply.

In the garage Sir Giles was doing his best to persuade Blott to stop pointing the twelve-bore at his chest.

“Five thousand pounds,” he said. “Five thousand pounds. All you’ve got to do is open the gates.”

“You get out of here,” said Blott.

“What do you think I want to do? Stay here?”

“Out of the garage,” said Blott.

“Ten thousand. Twenty thousand. Anything you ask …”

“I’ll count to ten,” said Blott. “One.”

“Fifty thousand pounds.”

“Two,” said Blott:

“A hundred thousand. You can’t ask better than that.”

“Three,” said Blott.

“I’ll make it -“

“Four,” said Blott.

Sir Giles turned and ran. There was no mistaking the look on Blott’s face. Sir Giles stumbled round the house and across the lawn to the pinetum. He scrambled over the iron railings and climbed back into his tree. The lions had finished the giraffe and were licking their paws and wiping their whiskers. Sir Giles wiped the sweat off his face with an oily handkerchief and tried to think what to do next.

Dundridge was saved that trouble by the discovery of an empty vodka bottle in the cab of the crane and by eyewitnesses who testified that one of the two men seen driving the crane up the High Street had been singing bawdy songs and was very clearly intoxicated.

“There seems to have been some mistake,” the Superintendent told him apologetically. “You’re free to go.”

“But you told me you were treating the case as one of murder,” shouted Dundridge indignantly. “Now you turn round and say it was simply drunken driving.”

“Murder in my view implies premeditation,” explained the Superintendent. “Now, two blokes go out and have one too many. They get a bit merry and pinch a crane and knock a few houses down, well you can’t feel the same about it, can you? There’s no premeditation there. Just a bit of fun, that’s all. Now I’m not saying I approve. Don’t get me wrong. I’m as hard on vandalism and drunkenness as the next man, but there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into account.”

Dundridge left the police station unconvinced, and as far as Hoskins’ behaviour was concerned he could find no mitigating circumstances whatsoever.

“You deliberately led the police to believe that I had given orders for the Bullett-Finches’ house to be demolished,” he shouted at him in the Mobile HQ. “You gave them to understand that I set out to murder Mr Bullett-Finch.”