"They were at the end of their lives," I said. "If there was a gale, huge branches would crack off. Old Fred, who was the gardener for years here before Arthur, told my father they weren"t safe and they"d have to come down, so he got some foresters to come and fell them. It was dreadful seeing them come down ..." I didn"t think I"d tell Yale that half the family had been in tears. The trees had been friends, playground, climbing frames, deepest purple imaginary rain forests: and, afterwards, there was too much daylight and the dead bodies being sawn up for firewood and burned on bonfires. The stream hadn"t looked the same when open to bright sunshine; rather ordinary, not running through dappled mysterious shade.
"Go on," Yale said with half-stifled impatience. "What"s all this about trees?"
"The stumps," I said. "The tree men sawed the trees off close to the ground but left the stumps, and no one could get them out. A tractor came from a nearby farm and tried ..." We"d had a great time then, having rides all day. "Anyway, it failed. Nothing else would move the stumps, and Fred didn"t want to leave them there to rot, so he decided to blow them up... with black powder."
"Ah," Yale said.
Black powder had sounded, somehow, as if it ought to belong to pirates. We"d been most impressed. Fred had got his powder and he"d dug a hole down below the stubborn roots of the first stump, and filled it and set off one enormous explosion. It was just as well he"d cleared us out of the field first because the blast had knocked Fred himself flat although he"d been about a hundred feet away. The first tree stump had come popping out of the ground looking like a cross between an elephant and an octopus, but Malcolm, who came running in great alarm to see what had happened, forbade Fred to blow up the others. As I told the gist of this to Yale and Smith, the second reel of the film was already unrolling in my mind, and I stopped fairly abruptly when I realised what I was remembering.
"Fred," I said, "carried the box of black powder back to the tool shed and told us never to touch it. We were pretty foolish but not that crazy. We left it strictly alone. And there the box stayed until it got covered over with other junk and we didn"t notice it or think of it any more ..." I paused, then said, "Wouldn"t any explosive be useless after all this time?"
"Dynamite wouldn"t last much more than a year in a tool shed," Smith said. "One hot summer would ruin it. But black powder -cordite - is very stable, and twenty years is immaterial."
"What are we waiting for?" Yale said, and walked towards the tool shed which lay behind the garage on the near side of the kitchen garden.
The tool shed was a place I hadn"t thought of looking into the day before: but even if 1 had, I doubted if I would have remembered the black powder. Its memory had been too deep.
"Where is this box?" Yale asked.
I looked at the contents of the tool shed in perplexity. 1 hadn"t been in there for years, and in that time it had pa.s.sed from Fred to Arthur. Fred had had an upturned orange box to sit on while he waited through heavy showers: Arthur had an old fireside chair. Fred had had a tray with a cracked mug and a box of sugar cubes and had come indoors to fetch his tea: Arthur had an electric kettle. Fred had tended old tools lovingly: Arthur had shiny new ones with paint still on the handles.
Beyond the tools and the chair, in the centre section of the s.p.a.cious shed, were things like mowers, chainsaws and hedgeciippers and, at the furthest shadowy end, the flotsam by-pa.s.sed by time, like the stuff in the cellar, stood in forgotten untidy heaps.
It all looked unpromisingly undisturbed, but Yale called up a pair of young policemen and told them to take everything out of the tool shed and lay each object separately on the ground. Smith went back to the rubble, but Yale and I watched the policemen and so did Arthur Bellbrook, who came hurrying across the moment he saw what was happening.
"What"s going on?" he said suspiciously.
"When did you last clean out the tool shed?" Yale asked.
Arthur was put out and beginning to bridle.
"Just say," I said to him. "We just want to know."
"I"ve been meaning to," he said defensively. "That"s Fred"s old rubbish, all that at the back."
The superintendent nodded, and we all watched the outgoing procession of ancient, rusting, broken and neglected tat. Eventually one of the men came out with a dirty wooden box which I didn"t recognise at first because it was smaller than I"d seen in my memory. He put it on the ground beside other things, and I said doubtfully, i think that"s it."
"Mr Smith," Yale called.
Mr Smith came. Yale pointed at the box, which was about the size of crates used for soft drink bottles, and Smith squatted beside it.
The lid was nailed shut. With an old chisel, Smith prised it open and peeled back the yellowish paper which was revealed. Inside the paper, half-filling the box, there was indeed black powder.
Smith smelled it and poked it around. "It"s cordite, all right, and in good condition. But as it"s here, it obviously hasn"t been used. And anyway, there wouldn"t have been anything like enough in this box to have caused that much damage to the house."
"Well," I said weakly, "it was only an idea."
"Nothing wrong with the idea," Smith said. He looked around at the growing collection of discards. "Did you find any detonators?"
He had everyone open every single packet and tin: a lot of rusty staples and nails saw daylight, and old padlocks without keys and rotting batteries, but nothing he could identify as a substance likely to set off an explosion.
"Inconclusive," he said, shrugging, and returned to his rubble.
Yale told Arthur to leave the cordite where it was and do what he liked with the rest, and Arthur began throwing the decaying rubbish into the skip.
I tried to apologise for all the waste of time, but the superintendent stopped me.
"When you saw the tree stump blown up, which of your brothers and sisters were there?"
I sighed, but it had to be faced. "Gervase, Ferdinand and I were always together at that time, but some of the older ones were there too. They used to come for weekends still after they were grown up. Vivien used to make them, so that Malcolm wouldn"t cut them out. Alicia hated it. Anyway, I know Lucy was there, because she wrote a poem about roots shrieking blindly to the sky."
Yale looked sceptical.
"She"s a poet," I said lamely. "Published."
"The roots poem was published?"
"Yes."
"All right, then. She was there. Who else?"
"Someone was carrying Serena on his shoulders when we had to leave the field for the explosion. I think it must have been Thomas. He used to make her laugh."
"How old were you all at that time?" Yale asked.
"I don"t know exactly." I thought back. Alicia had swept out not very long after. "Perhaps I was thirteen. Gervase is two years older, Ferdinand one year younger. Lucy would have been... um... twenty-two, about, and Thomas nineteen. Serena must have been six, at that rate, and Donald... I don"t know if he was there or not... he would have been twenty-four."
Yale thoughtfully pulled out his notebook and asked me to repeat the ages, starting with Donald.
"Donald twenty-four, Lucy twenty-two, Thomas nineteen, Gervase fifteen, myself thirteen, Ferdinand twelve, Serena six."
"Right," he said, putting a full-stop.
"But what does it matter, if the cordite is still here?" I said.
"They all saw the force of the explosion," he said. "They all saw it knock the gardener over from a hundred feet away, isn"t that what you said?"
I looked at the shattered house and said forlornly, "None of them could have done it."
Yale put his notebook away. "You might be right," he said.
Smith again came over to join us. "You"ve given me an idea," he said to me. "You and your tree roots. Can you draw me a plan of where the rooms were, exactly, especially those upstairs?"
I said I thought so, and the three of us went into the garage out of the wind, where I laid a piece of paper on the bonnet of Moira"s car and did my best.
"The sitting-room stretched all the way between the two thick walls, as you know," I said. "About thirty feet. Above that..." I sketched, "there was my room, about eight feet wide, twelve deep, with a window on the short side looking out to the garden. Malcolm"s bedroom came next, I suppose about fifteen feet wide and much deeper than mine. The pa.s.sage outside bent round it... and then his bathroom, also looking out to the garden, with a sort ofdressing-room at the back of it which also led out of the bedroom ..." I drew it. "Malcolm"s whole suite would have been about twenty-two feet wide facing the garden, by about seventeen or eighteen feet deep."
Yale studied the drawing. "Your room and the suite together were more or less identical with the sitting-room, then?"
"Yes, I should think so."
"A big house," he commented.
"It used to be bigger. The kitchen was once a morning-room, and where the garage is now there were kitchens and servants" halls. And on the other side, where the pa.s.sage now goes out into the garden, there were gun-rooms and flower-rooms and music-rooms, a bit of a rabbit warren. I never actually saw the wings, only photographs of them. Malcolm had them pulled down when he inherited the house, to make it easier to deal with without the droves of servants his mother had."
"Hm," he said. "That explains why there are no sideways-facing windows on the ground floor."
"Yes," I agreed.
He borrowed my pen and did some calculations and frowned.
"Where exactly was your father"s bed?"
I drew it in. "The bed was against the wall between his room and the large landing, which was a sort of upstairs place to sit in, over the hall."
"And your bed?"
"Against the wall between my room and Malcolm"s."
Smith considered the plan for some time and then said, "I think the charge here was placed centrally. Did your father by any chance have a chest, or anything, at the foot of his bed?"
"Yes, he did," I said, surprised. "A long box with a padded top for a seat. He kept his tennis things in it, when he used to play."
"Then I"d think that would be where the explosion occurred. Or under your father"s bed. But if there was a box at the foot, I"d bet on that." Smith borrowed the pen again for some further calculations and looked finally undecided.
"What"s the matter?" I asked.
"Mm... well, because of your tree roots, I was thinking of an explosive that farmers and landowners use sometimes which is safer than cordite. They blow up tree trunks, clear blocked ditches, that sort of thing. You can buy the ingredients anywhere without restrictions and mix it yourself."
"That sounds extraordinary," I said.
He smiled slightly, it"s not so easy to get the detonators to set it off."
"What is it, then?" I asked.
Yale, too, was listening with great interest.
"Fertiliser and diesel oil," Smith said.
"What?" I sounded disappointed and Smith"s smile expanded.
"Ammonium nitrate," he said. "You can buy it in fine granules from seed merchants and garden centres, places like that. Mix it with fuel oil. Dead simple. As far as I remember, but I"d have to look it up to be sure, it would be sixteen parts fertiliser to one part oil. The only problem is," he scratched his nose, i think you"d need a good deal of it to do the sort of damage we have here. I mean, again I"d have to look it up, but I seem to remember it"ll be volume in cubic metres over three, answer in kilos."
"What volume?" I asked.
"The volume of the s.p.a.ce you want cleared by the explosion."
He looked at the mixed emotions I could feel on my face and dealt at least with the ignorance.
"Say you want effective destruction of everything within a s.p.a.ce three metres by three metres by three metres. Twenty-seven cubic metres, OK? Volume of your bedroom, near enough. Divide by three, equals nine. Nine kilos of explosive needed."
"Is that," I said slowly, "why reports of terrorist attacks are often so definite about the weight of the bomb used?"
"Absolutely. The area cleared directly relates to the size of the... er... bomb. If you can a.n.a.lyse the type of explosive and measure the area affected, you can tell how much explosive was needed."
Superintendent Yale was nodding as if he knew all that.
"But you don"t think this bomb went off in my bedroom," I said.
"No, I don"t. Nine kilos of ammonium nitrate in your bedroom would have annihilated it and made a nasty hole all round, but I wouldn"t have thought it would bring half a house down. So if we locate the device in that foot-of-the-bed box, we are looking at something in the region of..." he did some more calculations "... say at least seventy-five cubic metres for your father"s bedroom ... that"s twenty-five kilos of explosive."
"That"s heavy," I said blankly.
"Yes. A large suitcaseful. But then you"d need a suitcaseful also if you were using cordite. For demolishing this whole house, you"d have needed four times that amount, placed in about four places on the ground floor right against the thickest walls. People often think a small amount of explosive will do a tremendous lot of damage, but it doesn"t."
"What sets it off, then?" I asked.
"Ah." He smiled the professional smile that wasn"t about to give away its secrets. "Let"s just say fulminate of mercury, plus, I should say, an electrical circuit."
"Please do explain," I said.
He hesitated, then shrugged. "ANFO won"t explode on its own, it"s very stable."
"What"s ANFO?" I interrupted.
"Ammonium nitrate fuel oil. The first letters. ANFO for short."
"Oh yes. Sorry."
"So you stick into it a package of something that explodes fast: the detonator, in fact. Then you arrange to heat the detonating substance, either with a burning fuse, or by an electrical circuit which can be achieved by ordinary batteries. The heat sets off the detonator, the detonator detonates the ANFO. And bingo ..."
"Bang, you"re dead."
"Quite right."
"At four-thirty in the morning," I said, "it would probably be a time-bomb, wouldn"t it?"
Mr Smith nodded happily. "That"s what we"re looking for. If it was an alarm clock, for instance, we"ll probably find the pieces. We usually do if we look hard enough. They don"t vaporise in the explosion, they scatter."
Thirteen.
I drove unhurriedly to Epsom but as soon as I let myself into my flat, I knew I wouldn"t stay there. It was too negative, too empty, too boring. I wouldn"t live there much longer, I thought.