all night,’ Malcolm protested. ‘It’s bound to be the wind or something that moved the doors. Let’s go to bed, I’m whacked.’
I looked at my hands. They weren’t actually shaking. I thought for a while until Malcolm grew restless.
‘I’m getting cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in, for God’s sake.’
‘No… we’re not sleeping here.’
‘What? You can’t mean it.’
‘I’ll lock the house, and we’ll go and get a room somewhere else.’
‘At this time of night?’
‘Yes.’ I made to get out of the car and he put a hand on my arm to catch my attention.
‘Fetch some pyjamas, then, and washing things.’
I hesitated. ‘No, I don’t think it’s safe.’ I didn’t say I couldn’t face it, but I couldn’t.
‘Ian, all this is crazy.’
‘It would be crazier still to be murdered in our beds.’
‘But just because two doors …’
‘Yes. Because.’
He seemed to catch some of my own uneasiness because he made no more demur, but when I was headed again for the kitchen he called after me, ‘At least bring my briefcase from the office, will you?’
I made it through the hall again with only a minor tremble in the gut; switched on the office light, fetched his briefcase without incident and set the office door again at its usual precise angle. I did the same to the sitting-room door. Perhaps they would tell us in the morning, I thought, whether or not we had had a visitor who had hidden from my approach.
I went back through the hall, switched the lights off, shut the hall-to-kitchen door, let myself out, left the house dark and locked and put the briefcase on the car’s back seat.
On the basis that it would be easiest to find a room in London, particularly at midnight, for people without luggage, I drove up the M4 and on Malcolm’s instructions pulled up at the Ritz. We might be refugees, he said, but we would be staying in no camp, and he explained to the Ritz that he’d decided to stay overnight in London as he’d been delayed late on business.
‘Our name is Watson,’ I said impulsively, thinking suddenly of Norman West’s advice and picking out of the air the first name I could think of. ‘We will pay with travellers’ cheques.’
Malcolm opened his mouth, closed it again, and kept blessedly quiet. One could write whatever name one wanted onto travellers’ cheques.
The Ritz batted no eyelids, offered us connecting rooms (no double suites available) and promised razors, toothbrushes and a bottle of scotch.
Malcolm had been silent for most of the journey, and so had I, feeling with every heart-calming mile that I had probably overreacted, that maybe I hadn’t set the doors, that if any of the family had let themselves into the house while we were out, they’d been gone long before we returned. We had come back hours later than anyone could have expected, if they were judging the time it would take us to drive from Cheltenham.
I could have sat at the telephone in the house and methodically checked with all the family to make sure they were in their own homes. I hadn’t thought of it, and I doubted if I could have done it, feeling as I had.
Malcolm, who held that sleeping pills came a poor second to scotch, put his nightcap theory to the test and was soon softly snoring. I quietly closed the door between our two rooms and climbed between my own sheets, but for a long time lay awake. I was ashamed of my fear in the house which I now thought must have been empty. I had risked my neck without a qualm over big fences that afternoon: I’d been petrified in the house that someone would jump out on me from the dark. The two faces of courage, I thought mordantly: turn one face to the wall.
We went back to Berkshire in the morning and couldn’t reach Quantum by car because the whole village, it seemed, was out and blocking the road. Cars and people everywhere: cars parked along the roadsides, people walking in droves towards the house.
‘What on earth’s going on?’ Malcolm said.
‘Heaven knows.’
In the end I had to stop the car, and we finished the last bit of the journey on foot.
We had to push through crowds and were unpopular until people recognised Malcolm, and made way for him, and finally we reached the entrance to the drive… and there literally rocked to a stop.
To start with there was a rope stretched across it, barring our way, with