Hooper shrugged and snapped open the lock. We pulled the door back, and it moved quietly and easily. A strange smell hit us, a mixture of old timber, dry earth and ancient stones. It was the sort of smell that takes me straight back through the centuries to imagine the blokes who’d built the thing. Real craftsmen, who achieved the most amazing things with primitive techniques. Show me a building that’s been put up recently and tell me whether you think it’ll still be there in five hundred years’ time. No? We may have learned a lot of things since the Middle Ages, but we haven’t learned much about craftsmanship.
The space inside also held the ghosts of all the folk who’d used it in those five hundred years — farmhands, labourers, shepherds and general peasants. But there was another smell. It was the sweet, sickly stink of something more recent that didn’t belong here.
A flicked my torch around the floor of the dovecote, keeping its beam pointing downwards. We didn’t want any stray chinks of light creeping out through these old walls. At the far side was the inevitable collection of rusty farm equipment — a baler, a chain harrow, bits of less identifiable rubbish. There were piles of blue fertiliser sacks tied up with baling twine and an old water trough standing on its end against the wall. To one side was a stack of roof tiles not unlike the ones that the Rev lost off the vestry roof. Old bits of horse tack were hanging from six inch nails knocked into a beam.
Nearer to hand, my torch picked out some cardboard boxes. Quite a lot of them, actually. They came from France, and they looked as though they might contain portable CD players.
Then I noticed the wire leading from a sensor by the door. A burglar alarm on a dovecote?
“Hooper, what’s this?”
Hooper frowned at the sensor and began to follow the wire round the wall. It disappeared behind some of the boxes. Slow came over and went with him to move a box or two. Then they both froze.
“Shit, Stones.”
“What?”
“It’s a timer.”
Oh. A vision of that burning Renault van shot through my mind. Fertiliser and sugar, and a timer set to go off half an hour after a box had been opened? Or maybe after a door had been forced with a jemmy?
“Out! Everyone, out! Now!”
I shoved Slow Kid and Hooper out of the door. Then everything was lit up by an almighty flash and we hit the deck, cursing. The explosion blew out the front of the building and sent lumps of stone flying across the garden. As soon as the debris started to settle we were up again and running. Hooper was swearing and clutching his arm, and his hat had come off. The flames from the dovecote were starting to reflect off the sweat on his bald head.
In the trees, I stopped and turned to look back. Although lights were starting to come on and faces were no doubt appearing at windows, I had to watch the dovecote burn. There is nothing more tragic than a piece of history going up in smoke, and this one could have been avoided.
Slow Kid looked at me, puzzled.
“Come on, Stones. We need to be out of here.”
“I won’t be a minute. You two clear out.”
Something about the figures now emerging from Old Manor Farm had caught my attention. Against my better judgement, I slipped back towards the dovecote. The smoke was black and acrid, but billowing away from me and towards the house. No doubt everybody in West Laneton had phoned the fire brigade by now. But for a couple of minutes I had the chance of getting closer to see who we’d flushed out.
When I peered round the corner, I could see only one bloke now, running about like mad in front of the house. He was struggling desperately to untangle a length of garden hose, but the hose was winning. There was something familiar about the figure, but I couldn’t make him out too clearly. I felt sure that if I waited a bit longer he’d turn his face to the fire and I’d be able to recognise him.
But I waited too long. Suddenly there was a movement close to me — a dark shape forming out of the smoke at the corner of the dovecote. I caught a brief glimpse of a pair of stuffed-cat eyes, then a glint of steel flashing towards me through the grey swirl. I pulled my shoulder away sharply from the wall and heard the scrape of the knife as it skidded off the stone.
Panicking, I lashed out with my foot towards where I thought the bloke’s legs might be and felt contact with something solid. If I’d been wearing my boots, he would have been down, but instead I was wearing sodding trainers and all the kick did was throw him off balance. He lurched into me, his shoulder crashing into my chest and his left hand scrabbling for a grip on my belt. I tried to stop him getting the leverage on me to push himself upright, and we stumbled about for a minute in an ungainly dance in the dark.
Every second I was expecting the knife to strike upwards, and my guts contracted with the anticipation of the pain. His head was right under my nose, and I could smell his sweat and the grease from his hair. Finally, I managed to twist his arm and push him away from me. He cursed as he collided with the wall, but he was still up.
It was enough for me to get a head start as I slipped and slithered across the grass, legging it as fast as I could towards the trees. I could hear the bloke grunting behind me as he followed. He didn’t seem to have a torch, but he didn’t need one with the amount of noise I was making. Even in the panic, my mind was working, and I knew where I’d seen those dead blue eyes and the flat-top that had just been shoved in my face.
I saw the hedge coming up ahead of me and remembered the ditch just in time. I jumped and landed in a scramble on the other side. A crash and a squelch, followed by a barrage of curses, told me that my pursuer hadn’t seen the ditch. I was grinning to myself with self-satisfaction when I heard a strange whistling in the air near my ear. Something that glittered in the patchy light from the flames spun past me and buried itself in the ground with an awful thud. It might have been a wild throw, but if he’d been just a bit more accurate with that knife, I’d be dead meat.
My legs were wobbly by the time I reached the trees. But Slow Kid was waiting for me with the van door open and the engine running, anxious to be off.
“You all right, Stones?”
“Shut up and drive.”
Even as we headed out of West Laneton, I could still see the dead eyes of Josh Lee as they appeared through the smoke. And the bloke wrestling with the hose had been his mate Rawlings, for sure.
Yeah, Rawlings and Lee. Fire bombers to the gentry.
23
On Monday morning, I went in the newsagent’s on Ollerton Road. As well as papers and magazines it sells stationery — the stuff that more literate folk up Budby Road use. It doesn’t quite stretch to books, of course, except for stamp albums and the ‘make your own will’ type of thing. Perhaps I ought to have got one of those while I was at it.
The old woman behind the counter is called Betty. As far as I can remember, she’s always been there.
“What can I do for you, duck?”
This ‘duck’ business takes folk by surprise when they’re from out of the area. Some don’t like it, but those are usually soft southerners. They don’t have a greeting down there that they can use for men or women equally without sounding patronising. But ‘duck’ does it. Well, you know you’re at home when they call you ‘duck’. It’s like seeing the first headstocks from the M1 coming north. Or that’s what it used to be like. Now instead you have to watch out for the first tourist signs. Robin Hood Country seems to be the new name for the area that I used know as Nottinghamshire. I suppose it’s all run by UK Heritage plc these days, since our history was privatised.
“I want a street map.”
“Where of, duck? We’ve got Mansfield, Newark, Worksop, Nottingham. We’ve even got one with the whole of the county. That has places on it I didn’t even know had streets.”