The actual witnesses were few, but those few were well able to give pictorial accounts that did justice, and more than justice, to what they had seen. And, as skill in narration increased with practice, the story eventually and joyfully accepted by the town was one of Pompeiian plenitude.
The most significant version, inasmuch as it constituted an official complaint to authority, was provided by a Miss Hilda Cannon, aged fifty-one, of Lehar House, Oakland, a cul-de-sac off Partney Drive.
Miss Cannon, formerly for many years the female lead of the Flaxborough Operatic Society, was a tall, thin, somewhat desiccated lady, who lived with an ancient mother and five corgi dogs. These dogs she was in the nightly habit of exercising in relays around certain grass-verged roads south and east of Jubilee Park in order that they might, in accordance with their mistress’s loyal devotion to old imperial principles, defecate at a safe distance from their own immediate neighbourhood.
She began her third and last trip half an hour or so before midnight. Montgomery, the most malicious of the corgi quintet, had dragged her along the whole of Partney Avenue and some way down Arnhem Crescent before making its first exploratory halt. Miss Cannon adopted the time-honoured stance of dog owners, holding the slackened leash casually at one end while she searched horizons with a cool nobility of visage that proclaimed her utter lack of responsibility for what was going on at the other.
Her gaze happened to be upon the upper storey of the house on Partney Avenue directly opposite its conjunction at right-angles with Arnhem Crescent, when she heard a car draw gradually and quietly to a stop just behind her. The car had come from the direction of Fen Street and the town.
Miss Cannon turned her head just far enough to see the big black shape. The driver had parked on a stretch of the road that was humped over a stream conduit so that the front wheels were higher than the rear. No door opened. The engine continued to tick over softly.
She looked away again, but tightened her grip on Montgomery’s leash.
The dog snuffled around in the short grass at the edge of the sidewalk and once or twice squatted experimentally. Miss Cannon resolved to pull it clear and walk on. It was better that Montgomery should be frustrated and even a little vengeful for a while than that she should risk abduction or whatever other unpleasantness the man in the car might be contemplating.
She gave the leash a tug.
At that very second—exactly as if she had pulled a switch—there was a silent explosion of violent white light. The dog jumped and tried frantically to scuttle away.
“Now, Monty! Heel! Stay! Sit!” She sought the magic word.
Montgomery bit her leg, but it fortunately was too upset to get good purchase. She managed to slip the leash round a gate-post, then looked about her.
The light was coming from the car’s two sets of twin head-lamps.
The four fierce beams streamed out along Arnhem Crescent, at the slightly upward angle imparted by the car’s tilt, to engulf in sun-like brilliance the upper part of “Primrose Mount”, the residence of Mr and Mrs Arnold Hatch.
How very remarkable, mused Miss Cannon. Just like the floodlighting of Buckingham Palace. Was something being advertised, perhaps?
She stood staring up, her thin, severe mouth uncharacteristically slightly agape.
A couple of seconds went by, then all the upstairs curtains of “Primrose Mount” began to move.
In one smooth, synchronous action, they parted and withdrew across the windows. Everything within the room beyond was revealed in bright and sharp detail, like an elevated stage set.
Miss Cannon took a gulp of air as if she had been punched in the stomach. Instinct urged her to shut her eyes, but their lids had been jammed open by shock.
For a while, the four people on stage in the sky above Partney Avenue seemed also to be suffering some kind of paralysis. Frozen in the attitudes in which the searchlights had discovered them, they were not unlike a group of shop window models waiting to be dressed. A more worldly observer than Miss Cannon might have seen a resemblance to a still from a blue movie; one more classically educated, a Greek frieze depicting nymphs and satyrs. She, though, whose imaginative world was no wider than that delineated by musical comedy, was at a loss for analogy: nothing like that had happened even in “The Arcadians”.
The two girls in the tableu were the first to recover power of movement. Diane Winge, 16, of Queen’s Road, Flaxborough, alias Daisy de Vere, hostess and gogo dancer, abandoned the posture into which she had been cajoled by her new friend Mr Baxter and made what haste she could to get off the water bed. This necessitated a frantic, high-stepping trudge, like that of one escaping from a bog. Never had there been publicly offered such impressive testimony to the truth of Mrs Winge’s anxious description of her daughter as “a well developed girl”.
The skinnier but slightly less agile Lily, who was five years older and correspondingly more practical than Daisy, did not try to rise to her feet but instead rolled to the bed’s edge and over it. She thus much reduced the chances of being recognised by outside spectators as Selina Clay, whose father, the headmaster of Flaxborough Grammar School, was a resident of Dorley Road and therefore a fairly near neighbour of Mr Hatch.
Baxter took longest to grasp what had happened and to react to the new circumstances. He first tried shouting “Put the bloody light out!” over and over again, then, suddenly converted to realisation that the dreadful glare came from outside, he lumbered to the window and began hauling at curtains like a drunken sailor trying to shorten sail.
Two curtains had been dragged from their runway altogether before Hatch was able to persuade Baxter to desist. Then, each seizing and wrapping a ruined curtain around his middle, they retreated hastily to the door and sought refuge in some rearward and unexposed portion of the house.
The girls, tipsily giggling, left their shelter in the lee of the bed and scampered across the floor in pursuit.
About a minute later, the car’s lights were dimmed. It drew away as quietly as it had arrived, passed Miss Cannon and made a right turn into Partney Avenue.
“ ‘And leaves the world to darkness, and to me’,” she said to herself, feeling by now just a little hysterical. She allowed Montgomery to pull her as far as Fen Street corner. Should she go the few extra yards to the police station and make her complaint there and then? No, better wait until morning, when she would be more likely to find in attendance an officer of rank commensurate with the seriousness of her report.
Miss Cannon began to return the way she had come, urging her dog homeward with a mixture of pleas and blandishments. She was still too far off to notice when the car she had encountered earlier re-entered Arnhem Crescent and drove into its waiting garage.
When she reached the corner of Partney Avenue once more, she looked up at “Primrose Mount”. A light moved fitfully about in the bedroom. Someone was using a torch. For an instant, a figure was outlined; the movement of others could be dimly discerned. There was a sudden squeal. Then another. The squeals, thought Miss Cannon, betokened felicity rather than fear. She shuddered.