In the bird sanctuary the Superintendent was still shouting for help, though less loudly, and at the far end the bull-terrier was sleeping it off on the mat outside his master's back door.
Lockhart, divesting himself of the wet-suit, ran himself a bath and lay in it contentedly. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. There could be no doubting now that Jessica would be in full possession of her inheritance and with the right to sell every house whenever she chose. He lay thinking about the tax problem. His experience at Sandicott & Partners had told him that Capital Gains Tax was levied on every extra house an individual owned. There had to be some way round it. The tax on twelve houses would be enormous. By the time he got out of the bath he had found a simple solution.
Chapter fifteen
Nobody else could find a simple solution to the problem of what had occurred in East Pursley. The discovery by an army helicopter of the Superintendent of Police hanging to the upper branches of a monkey-puzzle tree which would have defied the efforts of any but the most insane men to climb it didn't help to clarify matters. He kept screaming about mad dogs being loose in the neighbourhood and his statement was supported by Mr Pettigrew and the Lowrys who had wounds to prove it.
'It hardly explains how six golfers and five of my own men came to be shot,' said the Commissioner of Police. 'Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the midday sun but the former don't carry side-arms. And what the hell do we say about that fire engine and the petrol tanker, not to mention the London to Brighton express? How many passengers went west in that inferno?'
'Ten,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'though accurately speaking they were going south. The Southern Region
caters…'
'Shut up,' snarled the Commissioner, 'I've got to explain this to the Home Secretary and it's got to sound good.'-
'Well, I suppose we could divide the two incidents into separate areas,' suggested the Assistant Commissioner, but the Commissioner only looked at him the more lividly.
'Two? Two?' he yelled rattling the windows of his office. 'One, we have an utterly insane half-pay colonel whittling his prick with a cheese-grater in the company of a high-class whore. Two, we have a mad dog roaming the district biting everything in sight. Three, someone looses off firearms into several houses and then explodes a fucking garage with an unidentifiable woman in the inspection pit. Do I have to spell it all out for
you?'
'I take your point,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'which according to Miss Gigi Lamont is what Colonel Finch-Potter…'
'Shut up,'said theCommissioner savagely and crossed his legs. They sat in silence and considered a convincing explanation.
'At least the TV people and the press weren't present,' said the Assistant Commissioner, and his superior nodded thankfully.
'What about blaming the IRA?'
'And give them something else to boast about? You must be out of your tiny mind.'
'Well, they did blow up Mr O'Brain's house,' said the AC.
'Nonsense. The sod blew himself up. There wasn't a trace of explosive in the house,' said the Commissioner, 'he was fiddling with the gas stove…'
'But he wasn't connected to the gas main…' the AC began.
'And I won't be connected to my job unless we come up with something before noon,' shouted the Commissioner. 'First of all we've got to stop the press going in there and asking questions. Got any ideas on the subject?'
The Assistant Commissioner considered the problem. 'I don't suppose we could say the mad dogs had rabies,' he said finally. 'I mean we could put the area in quarantine and shoot anything…'
'We've already shot half the police in that patch,' said the Commissioner, 'and while I'm inclined to agree that they were mad you still don't go round shooting people who've contracted rabies. You inoculate the brutes. Still, it would serve to keep the press and the media out. And how do you explain the six bleeding golfers? Just because some fool slices his drive you don't have a drive to slice him and five others with multiple gunshot wounds. We've got to come up with some logical explanation.' 'Sticking to the rabies theory,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'if one of our men contracted rabies and went berserk…'
'You can't contract rabies instantaneously. It takes weeks to come out.'
'But if there were a special sort of rabies, a new variety like swine fever,' persisted the Assistant. 'The dog bites the Colonel…'
'That's out for a start. There's no evidence that anybody bit Colonel Finch-Fucking-Potter except himself and that in an anatomically impossible place unless the bastard was a contortionist as well as a pervert.' 'But he's not in a fit condition to deny the rabies theory,' said the Assistant Commissioner. 'He's clean off his rocker.'
'Not the only thing he's off,' muttered the Commissioner, 'but all right, go on.'
'We start with galloping rabies and the dog and everything follows quite logically. The armed squad go off their heads and start shooting…'
'That's going to sound great on the nine o'clock news. "Five officers of the Special Squad, organized to protect foreign diplomats, this morning went mad and shot six golfers on the East Pursley Golf Course.' I know there's no such thing as bad publicity but in this case I have my doubts.'
'But it doesn't have to be announced on the news,' said the Assistant Commissioner. 'In a case of this sort we invoke the Official Secrets Act.'
The Commissioner nodded approvingly. 'We'd need the cooperation of the War Office for that,' he said.
'Well, those helicopters could have come from Porton Down and the Biological Warfare Research Station is there.'
'They just happen to have come from somewhere else, and anyway they came after the show was over.'
'But they don't know that,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'and you know how dim the Army Command is. The main thing is that we can threaten to put the blame on them and…'
In the end it was agreed at a Joint Meeting of the Home Secretary, the Minister of Defence and the Commissioner of Police that the happenings at Sandicott Crescent were subject to official silence and, invoking the Defence of The Realm Act together with the Official Secrets Act, the editors of all papers were ordered not to publicize the tragedy. The BBC and ITV were similarly warned and the news that night contained only the story of the petrol tanker that had exploded and set the London to Brighton express on fire in the process. Sandicott Crescent was sealed off and army marksmen went through the bird sanctuary with rifles killing anything that moved as an exercise in stopping the spread of rabies. They found only birds and from a sanctuary the wood became a mortuary. Fortunately for the bull-terrier it didn't move. It slept on and on outside the Colonel's kitchen door. It was about the only creature apart from Lockhart and Jessica who didn't move. Mr Grabble, driven from his house by the upsurge of the sewer, handed in his notice that afternoon wearing a pair of bedroom slippers over his chemically cauterized feet. Mr Rickenshaw finally managed to get his wife to hospital and the Pettigrews spent the afternoon packing. They too left before dark. The Lowrys had already left and were being given rabies inoculations in the company of several firemen, the Police Superintendent and a number of his men at the local isolation hospital. Even Mrs Simplon had gone, in a small sinister plastic bag which so upset Mrs Ogilvie that she had to be sedated.
'There's only us left,' she moaned, 'everyone else has gone. 1 want to go too. All those dead men lying out there… I'll never be able to look out at the golf course without seeing them on the dogleg ninth.'
This remark put Mr Ogilvie in mind of both dogs and legs. He too would never feel the same about Sandicott Crescent. A week later they too left and Lockhart and Jessica could look out their bedroom window at eleven empty houses, each standing (with the exception of Mr O'Brain's Bauhaus, which had slumped somewhat) in substantial and well-kept grounds in an apparently desirable neighbourhood within easy reach of London and adjoining an excellent golf club whose waiting list had been conveniently shortened by recent events. As the builders moved in to restore the houses to their pristine state, and in the case of Mr Grabble's to a sanitary one, Lockhart had time to turn his attention to other things.