be away for some considerable time.' 'The Misses Musgrove?' said Jessica. 'But they never go away.' 'They've gone this time,' said Lockhart. 'In a police car.'
Chapter twelve
That afternoon, on Lockhart's suggestion, Jessica went round to the Wilsons to ask if there was anything she could do as their landlady to rectify the state of their drains.
'There's a very nasty smell,' she said to the wild-eyed Mrs Wilson. 'It's really most offensive.'
'Smell? Drains,' said Mrs Wilson, who hadn't considered this practical reason for the stench of death in the house.
'Surely you can smell it?' said Jessica as Little Willie wafted from the coal cellar.
'The grave,' said Mrs Wilson, sticking firmly to first principles. 'It is the smell of afterlife.'
"It smells more like that of afterdeath,' said Jessica. 'Are you sure something hasn't died? I mean things do, don't they? We had a rat die once behind the fridge and it smelt just like this.'
But though they looked behind the fridge and under the oven, and even inside the Wilsons' tumbler drier, there was no sign of a rat.
'I'll ask my husband to come over,' Jessica said, 'and see if it isn't the drains. He's very practical.'
Mrs Wilson thanked her but doubted there was anything practical Mr Flawse could do. She was wrong. Lockhart arrived ten minutes later with two hundred yards of plastic piping, and proceeded to investigate the drainage system with a thoroughness that was entirely reassuring. His conversation wasn't. Lapsing into bis broadest Northumbrian as he worked he spoke of ghosties and ghouls and things that went bump in the night.
'I ha' the gift of second sight,' he told a gibbering Mrs Wilson. ' 'Twas given me as ma birthright. Tis death I smell and not the drain, aye, not one death but e'en the twain.'
'Twain? Don't you mean two?' shuddered Mrs Wilson.
Lockhart nodded grimly. 'Aye twain it is depart this life, with blude red throats and bludier knife, so runs the rune my heart espied, 'tis murder first then suicide.'
'Murder first? Then suicide?' said Mrs Wilson in the grip of a terrible curiosity.
Lockhart glanced significantly at a carving knife hanging from a magnetic board. 'A woman screams without a tongue, and then from rafter man is hung. I see it all as I ha' said, ye both mun leave ere both be dead. The hoose it is that has the curse, I smell your death and soomat worse.'
His eyes lost their glazed look and he busied himself about the drains. Upstairs Mrs Wilson was packing frantically and when Mr Wilson returned she had already left. On the kitchen table there was a hardly legible note in her shaking hand to say that she had gone to her sister's and that if he was wise he'd leave at once too. Mr Wilson cursed his wife, the ouija board and the smell, but being of a more insensitive nature refused to be daunted.
'I'm damned if I'll be driven out of my own house,' he muttered, 'ghost or no ghost.' And went up to have a bath, only to find a rope with a noose on it hanging from the rafter in the mock-Tudor ceiling in the bedroom. Mr Wilson stared at it in horror and recalled his wife's message. The smell in the bedroom was equally alarming. Lockhart had retrieved portions of the putrefying Willie and distributed them in the wardrobe, and as Mr Wilson stood sickened by the bed the voice he had heard before spoke again, and this time closer and more convincingly. 'Hanged by your neck till ye be dead, the grave tonight shall be your bed.'
'It bloody well won't,' quavered Mr Wilson but he too packed and left the house, stopping briefly at Number 12 to hand Jessica the key and his notice. 'We're going and we're never coming back,' he said, 'that bloody house is haunted.'
'Oh surely not, Mr Wilson,' said Jessica, 'it's just got a nasty smell, but if you are leaving would you mind saying so in writing?'
'Tomorrow,' said Mr Wilson who didn't want to dally. 'Now,' said Lockhart emerging from the hall with a form. Mr Wilson put down his suitcase and signed a formal statement to the effect that he renounced his tenant-right to Number 11 Sandicott Crescent immediately and without condition.
'But that's marvellous,' said Jessica when he had gone. 'Now we can sell the house and have some money.'
But Lockhart shook his head. 'Not yet,' he said. 'When we sell we sell them all. There's such a thing as Capital Gains Tax.' 'Oh dear, why are things always so complicated,' said Jessica, 'why can't they be simple?'
'They are, darling, they are,' said Lockhart. 'Now don't worry your sweet little head about anything.' And he crossed to the Wilsons' house and began to work again. His work involved the hosepipe, the drains and the gas system, and that night when he slipped down the manhole entrance to the sewer in his wet suit with a large lump of putty in one hand and his torch in the other there was murder in Lockhart's heart. Mr O'Brain was about to rue the day he ignored the threat of the Pursley Brigade of the IRA. Dragging the hosepipe behind him he crawled down to the outlet from Mr O'Brain's lavatories. There was one on the ground floor and one in the bathroom upstairs. Working swiftly Lockhart fed the pipe up the outlet and then cemented it in place with the putty. Then he crawled back, emerged from the manhole, replaced the cover and entered the Wilsons' empty house. There he switched on the gas main to which he had connected the pipe and waited. Outside all was quiet. The police at the entrance to the Crescent burbled occasionally with car radio messages but there was no criminal activity in East Pursley to warrant their attention, only a slight burbling, bubbling sound in the U bend of Mr O'Brain's downstairs toilet. Upstairs Mr O'Brain slept soundly, secure in the knowledge that he had police protection. Once during the night he got up for a pee and thought he smelt gas but, since he didn't use it himself but relied on electricity, imagined sleepily that he must be mistaken and went back to bed. Mr O'Brain slept more soundly still, but when he awoke in the morning and went downstairs the smell overpowering. Mr O'Brain groped for the telephone and was less wisely for a cigarette and, while dialling Emergency Services, struck a match.
The resulting explosion dwarfed all Sandicott Crescent's previous catastrophes. A ball of fire enveloped Mr O'Brain, billowed through the kitchen, blew out both front and back doors and every downstairs window, destroyed the conservatory, ripped plaster from the ceiling and turned to shrapnel the thick glazed porcelain of the downstairs lavatory pan which hurtled through the door and embedded itself in the wall of the hall outside. In an instant Number 9 was turned from British Bauhaus into Berlin bunker by a series of sequential explosions that ripped cupboards from walls, Mr O'Brain from the telephone, the telephone from its connection box, books on gynaecology from their shelves and finally sweeping upstairs lifted the fiat roof off its moorings and deposited fragments of concrete in the road at the front and the garden at the back. By some extraordinary miracle Mr O'Brain survived the blast and was catapulted, still clutching the receiver, through the drawing-room window on to the gravel of his drive as naked as ever Mr Simpson had been but blackened beyond belief and with his moustache and fringe of hair scorched to a tinder. He was found there raving about the IRA and the ineffectuality of the British police force by Colonel Finch-Potter and his bull-terrier. It was an unfortunate rendezvous. Colonel Finch-Potter held the firmest views about the Irish and had always regarded Mr O'Brain as a pussy-prying Paddy on account of the consultant's profession. Assuming, with some slight justification, that Mr O'Brain had brought this holocaust on himself by making bombs, Colonel Finch-Potter exercised his right as a citizen to make a citizen's arrest and Mr O'Brain's demented resistance only exacerbated matters. The bull-terrier, resenting his resistance and particularly the punch Colonel Finch-Potter had just received on the nose, turned from the amiable beast it had previously been into a ferocious one and sank its implacable teeth in Mr O'Brain's thigh. By the time the police car arrived, a matter of two minutes, Mr O'Brain had escaped the clutches of the Colonel and was climbing the lattice-work of his magnolia with an agility that was surprising for a man of his age and sedentary profession, but was to be explained by the bull-terrier's adherence to his backside. His screams, like those of Mr Raceme, Mrs Truster and Mrs Grabble, could be heard beyond the bird sanctuary and below the surface of the road where Lockhart was busily removing the putty from the outlet and dragging the hosepipe back to the Wilsons' house. Ten minutes later, while more police cars sealed off the entrance to Sandicott Crescent and only allowed the ambulance through, Lockhart emerged from the sewer and crossing the Wilsons' back garden went home for a bath. Jessica met him in her dressing-gown. 'What was that awful bang?' she asked. 'I don't know,' said Lockhart, 'I thought it might have been the Wilson's drains.' And having explained his noisome odour he shut the bathroom door and undressed. He came out twenty minutes later and went down the street with Jessica to survey his handiwork. Mr O'Brain had still to be coaxed from the lattice-work, a process that required the cooperation of the bull-terrier, but which, having at long last got its teeth into something juicy, the dog seemed disinclined to give. Colonel Finch-Potter was likewise uncooperative. His loathing for Mr O'Brain and his admiration for his bull-terrier's British tenacity plus the punch he had received on the nose all combined to add weight to his opinion that the bloody Irishman had got what was coming to him and that if swine like him chose to make bombs they deserved to be hoist with their own petards. In the end it was the lattice-work which gave way. Mr O'Brain and the bull-terrier flaked off the wall and landed on the drive where the police tried to prise them apart. They failed. The bull-terrier seemed to have developed lock-jaw and Mr O'Brain rabies. He foamed at the mouth and shouted expletives with a fluency and particularity that came presumably from his professional interest in women's anatomy. By the time he had abused all ten policemen, who between them were holding his shoulders and the dog's hind legs, they were in no mood to exercise their renowned moderation.