They stopped the car and got out. Brown-Horrocks had been in the passenger seat, but the small car had not been designed to fit his lanky frame, and he had sat the whole journey with his knees almost around his ears.
“When do you get your vintage Rolls-Royce back from the garage?” he asked. “I don’t think much of their loaner.”
“Next week,” replied Jack as he pulled on a coat against the wind and looked up and down the empty road. “I don’t see a car anywhere.”
“Hoax?”
“Could be. But let’s be sure. You take that road, I’ll take this one. Search as you go.”
They went their separate ways, with Brown-Horrocks walking behind Jack and asking occasional questions.
“Are you an alcoholic or a reformed alcoholic?”
“Reformed… but with occasional lapses,” said Jack, hazarding a guess as to what would be most acceptable to the Guild.
“Good,” said Brown-Horrocks, making another note.
It was Mary who made the discovery. A rickety-looking Quonset hut in a field that was mostly overgrown by brambles. She called Jack over, opened the gate and walked over to the hut. Its doors had sagged and were fastened with a rusty hasp that was secured by a tent peg. Jack carefully lifted out the peg and let the doors swing open. The hut was dry and the floor made of compacted soil; the brambles that covered the outside had also forced holes in the corrugated iron roof and were now starting to take over the interior as well. Sitting in the middle of the hut and looking as clean and new as when it was built was the Zephyr.
Mary delicately tried the doors. “Locked.”
“He had no car keys on him,” said Jack. “Try the tailpipe.”
Mary walked to the back of the car as Jack cupped his hands around his face and peered in the window.
The driver’s seat was converted for Humpty’s unusual shape, looking a bit like a padded egg cup with a high back. The pedals were all on extensions for his little legs, and the gearshift had been elongated to compensate for his short arm reach.
“Bingo,” said Mary, holding up a set of car keys. She inserted one into the door and unlocked it. She grasped the handle and opened the door.
“RUN, FOR GOD’S SAKE, RUN!” yelled Jack, sprinting out of the makeshift garage at full speed and hoping that Mary and Brown-Horrocks were behind him. He got as far as the middle of the road when the car exploded. He didn’t hear the sound at first, just a shock wave that scooped him up off his feet like an unseen hand and propelled him through the air to the ditch at the other side of the road, where he landed with a thump that knocked the wind out of him. He covered his head with his arms as a shower of debris rained down and a sheet of twisted corrugated iron fell close beside him. His ears were ringing, and in the momentary semideafness that followed, all sounds seemed dead and lacking in detail. He got up, checked he wasn’t damaged and divested himself of his singed overcoat. The remains of the car were fiercely ablaze, and the roadway was covered with wreckage. He appeared, apart from a cut on his face from where he had landed in the ditch, unharmed.
“Are you okay?” he asked Mary, who had landed a half dozen paces from him.
“I think so,” she replied as she dusted herself down. It was only when Jack started to think clearly again that he remembered there was someone missing.
“Brown-Horrocks?” he said, quietly at first, scanning the roadway for any sign of life. “BROWN-HORROCKS!” he said again, this time louder as he ran towards the shattered building with a sinking feeling. Of the Guild examiner there was no sign, and the car looked as if someone had tried to inflate it with an air hose. The roof bulged outwards, and all the doors had blown off.
“BROWN-HORROCKS!” he yelled once more, now looking around the wreckage for any clue as to what had happened to him, no matter how gruesome.
“Where is he?” asked Mary, who’d arrived by Jack’s side.
“I don’t know. Shit. Killing a Guild examiner. And he was a giant. I’ll never live this down at the station.”
“I’m six foot nine,” came an indignant voice behind them. “I’m not a giant.”
They turned to find him staggering up from the side of the road. He had been thrown in a quite different direction and been deposited in a muddy ditch.
“Thank God,” said Jack. “Turn around.”
He turned around for them, and they checked him over. Apart from some singed hair and a few cuts and bruises, he was fine.
“I expect you’ll want to call it a day after that?”
“On the contrary,” said Brown-Horrocks in a resolute tone,
“I’m curious to see how this turns out.”
Jack shook his mobile phone, and some bits fell out. “Buggered. Where’s yours, Mary?”
“Car.”
They walked back towards the Allegro to find a dent in the hood and a nail that had pierced the door skin like a crossbow bolt.
“Look what they’ve done to my car!”
“Did someone just try to kill us?” asked Mary as her mobile hunted for a signal.
“I think so,” replied Jack as he opened the door and took a seat.
She got through to the NCD and told Ashley to have uniform close the road and get the fire service down there—and the bomb squad, too. She snapped the mobile shut and sat on the hood. “I owe you, sir. How did you know?”
Jack ran his fingers through his hair and picked out several bits of debris.
“The interior light had been pried off and a small piece of wire ran down the inside of the door pillar. It might have been nothing, but I wasn’t going to risk it.”
“I have to say I’m very glad you didn’t.”
“So am I,” said Brown-Horrocks, making a note on his muddy and singed clipboard.
“Probably about two pounds of high explosive,” explained Lee Whriski, a young major in the bomb squad, “attached to a short time-delay fuse. We’ll be able to tell you which explosive it was given a few days, but not much more, I’m afraid. This kind of thing is not hard to do—obtaining the explosives is harder—but when we find out what it was, we might be able to narrow the search. You were lucky.”
They were standing on the road surrounded by several drab green army vehicles. The road had been closed while the bomb squad made a detailed search of the area.
Jack thanked him and walked over to where Mary was being checked by a medic.
“You know you’re near the target when you start to cop flak,” said Mary.
“Yes,” agreed Jack. “But which target?”
“Don’t you know?” asked Brown-Horrocks.
“Of course,” replied Jack hastily. “It was a rhetorical question. I’m just waiting for them… to make a mistake. Then we’ll have them.”