Mr Pettigrew protested that there must be. 'I saw the flash of the guns myself,' he said, 'and you've only got to look at my house to see what they did.'
The Superintendent looked and expressed some doubt that gunshot had ripped lampshades from their stands, cushions from sofas and curtains from windows, and had sunk what looked like fangs into the mahogany dining-tables.
'That was the dog,' said Mr Pettigrew, 'the dog the ambulance men brought with them.'
The Superintendent looked even more doubtful. 'Are you trying to tell me that all this devastation was caused by a dog and that the aforesaid dog was introduced into your house by ambulance men?' he asked.
Mr Pettigrew hesitated. The Superintendent's scepticism was contagious.
'I know it doesn't sound likely,' he admitted, 'but it looked like a dog.'
'I certainly find it hard to believe that a dog can have created this degree of havoc on its own,' said the Superintendent, 'and if you're suggesting that the ambulance men -…' He was interrupted by a howl from the bird sanctuary. 'What in God's name is that?'
'That's the thing that wrecked my house,' said Mr Pettigrew. 'It's coming from the bird sanctuary.'
'Bird sanctuary my foot,' said the Superintendent. 'More like a banshee sanctuary by the sound of things.'
I didn't think banshees wailed,' said Mr Pettigrew inconsequentially. A sleepless night, most of it spent in a broom cupboard, and the rest in the darkness of his devastated house, had not helped to make him clear-headed and Mrs Pettigrew was wailing too. She had discovered the remnants of her underwear shredded in the bedroom.
'I tell you it wasn't a dog,' she screamed, 'some sex maniac's been chewing my undies.'
The Superintendent looked at Mrs Pettigrew dubiously. 'Anyone who chewed your undies, madam, would have to be…' he began before checking himself. Mrs Pettigrew had only her vanity left and there was no good to be done by removing that too. 'You've got no idea who might have a grudge against you?' he asked instead. But the Pettigrews shook their heads in unison. 'We've always lived such quiet lives,' they said. It was the same in every other occupied house the Superintendent visited. There were only four. At Number 1 Mr and Mrs Rick-enshaw had nothing to add except gratitude that the police car was always parked outside their house. 'It makes us feel much safer,' they said.
The Ogilvies didn't share their opinion. The blast of the shotgun that had smashed every pane of glass in their greenhouse had given them a sense of grievance they voiced to the Superintendent. 'What's the world coming to when peaceful citizens can't rest easy in their beds, that's what I want to know,' said Mr Ogilvie indignantly. 'I shall complain to my MP, sir. The country is going to the dogs.'
'So it would appear,' said the Superintendent soothingly, 'but you're not suggesting that a dog destroyed your greenhouse?'
'Certainly not,' said Mr Ogilvie, 'some damned swine with a shotgun did.'
The Superintendent breathed a sigh of relief. He was getting sick of hearing all the blame put on dogs. Mrs Simplon wasn't.
Cowering beneath the wooden beams in the inspection pit under her car her nerves, like Mrs Pettigrew's undies, were in tatters. She fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, found one and was in the process of striking a match to light it when the Superintendent, thanking the Ogilvies for their cooperation and being trounced by Mr Ogilvie for the lack of police protection made his way past the garage door.
In fact the garage door made its way past him. Mrs Simplon had discovered to her cost that inspection pits filled with oil waste and petrol fumes were not the best place to light cigarettes. With several explosions, first of the fume-laden air in the pit, second of the petrol tank of the car above, and third of the half-empty oil tanks that had served to provide Number 5 Sandicott Crescent with hot water and central heating, Mrs Simplon's hopes of calming her nerves succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She was no longer conscious after the first explosion and by the time the oil tanks exploded she had passed into the great beyond. With her went portions of the garage, the car and the oil tanks. A ball of flame containing elements of all three billowed out where the garage door had been and hurtled round the head of the Superintendent before pocking still more the Pettigrews' already-acned facade. In the middle of this holocaust the Superintendent kept his head. He kept little else. What the blast hadn't stripped from his little authority the flames did. His moustache crinkled and turned black under his nose. His eyebrows streaked, flaming, past the top of his ears, themselves sufficiently hot to suggest that several million people were thinking about him at the same time, and he was left standing in his boots and leather belt, a blackened, scorched and thoroughly disenchanted copper.
Once again the sirens sounded on the approaches to Sandicott Crescent but this time it was the fire brigade. As they worked frantically to extinguish the flames, which flames had already extinguished Mrs Simplon so thoroughly that she was in no need of a more ceremonial cremation, the bull-terrier made its last sortie. The flames that had flickered in its head had been dying down when the Simplons' garage revived them. With
blood-red eyes and lolling tongue it lumbered out of the bird sanctuary, through the Misses Musgroves' herb garden, and having whetted its appetite on the calf of a fireman, proceeded to engage one of the fire brigade's hosepipes in mortal combat in the belief that it was wrestling with an anaconda in the ancestral forest of its dreams. The hosepipe fought back. Punctured in a dozen places, it shot water into the air with enormous pressure, and carried the bull-terrier several feet off the ground where it hung a moment snarling ravenously. By the time the dog bit the ground again the Superintendent no longer disbelieved the Pettigrews. He had seen it with his own two scorched eyes, a dog that wailed, snarled, slobbered and snapped like a crocodile with St Vitus' dance. Convinced that the animal had rabies the Superintendent stood still according to instructions. He would have been better advised to move. Baffled by the liquid resistance of the writhing hosepipe the bull-terrier sank its teeth into the Superintendent's leg, let go momentarily to re-engage the hose which it savaged in several more places and then hurled itself at the Superintendent's throat. This time the Superintendent moved and his juniors, twenty firemen, the Ogilvies and Mr and Mrs Rickenshaw were privileged to see a naked (and badly scorched) policeman in boots and belt cover one hundred metres in under ten seconds from a standing start. Behind him with starting eyes and scrabbling paws came, bullet-like, the bull-terrier. The Superintendent hurdled the Grabbles' gate, clobbered across their lawn and into the bird sanctuary. And presently in harmony with the dog he too could be heard howling for help.
'Well, at least he knows we were telling the truth,' said Mr Pettigrew and told his wife to shut up wailing like some woman for her demon lover, a remark hardly calculated to restore domestic peace to their sufficiently demented lives.
From their bedroom at the end of the street Lockhart and Jessica watched the chaotic scene. The Simplons' garage still blazed, largely thanks to the intervention of the dog, the hosepipe still writhed and spouted water from a score of holes high into the air like a lawn sprinkler with megalomania, firemen huddled on their engines and policemen in their cars. Only the armed men, brought in to deal with whoever had fired from the house, were still abroad. Convinced that the blazing garage was a diversion to allow the gunmen inside the house, who had eluded their search, to make good their escape under cover of the smoke, they lurked in the adjacent gardens and in the foliage of the bushes by the golf course. It was in consequence of this and of the smoke that obscured their view and that of an early foursome, one of whom had an incurable slice, that a ball hit an armed constable on the head.