up from the devastation like the arms of the drowning, and pieces of dusty unrecognisable fabric flapped forlornly when a gust of wind took them. Tangled there, too, was everything I’d brought with me from my flat, save only my racing kit - saddle, helmet and holdall—which was still in the boot of the car along with Malcolm’s briefcase. Everything was replaceable, I supposed; and I felt incredibly glad I hadn’t thought of bringing the silver-framed picture of Coochie and the boys.
There was glass everywhere along the front of the house, fallen from the shattered windows. With the constable in tow, I crunched along towards the office, passing the ruins of the downstairs cloakroom on the way, where a half-demolished wall had put paid to the plumbing.
The office walls themselves, like those of the kitchen, were intact, but the office door that I’d set at such a careful angle was wide open with another brick and plaster glacier spilling through it. The shockwave that must have passed through the room to smash its way out through the windows had lifted every unweighted sheet of paper and redistributed it on the floor. Most of the pictures and countless small objects were down there also, including, I noticed, the pen pot holding the piece of wire. Apart from the ancient bevelled glass of a splendid breakfront bookcase which stood along one wall, everything major looked restorable, though getting rid of the dust would be a problem in itself.
I spent a good deal of time gazing through the open spaces of the office windows, but in the end had to admit defeat. The positions oftoo much had been altered for me to see anything inexplicably wrong. I’d seen nothing significant in there the previous evening when I’d fetched Malcolm’s briefcase, when I’d been wide awake with alarm to such things.
Shaking my head I moved on round the house, passing the still shut and solidly bolted garden door which marked the end of the indoor passage. The blast hadn’t shifted it, had dissipated on nearer targets. Past it lay the long creeper-covered north wall of the old playroom, and I walked along there and round into the rear garden.
The police had driven stakes into the lawn and tied ropes to them, making a line for no one to cross. Behind the rope the crowd persisted, open-eyed, chattering, pointing, coming to look and moving away to trail back over the fields. Among them Arthur Bellbrook, the dogs at his side, was holding a mini-court in a semicircle of respectful listeners. The reporters and Press photographers seemed to have vanished but other cameras still clicked in a barrage. There was a certain restrained orderliness about everything which struck me hard as incongruous.
Turning my back to the gawpers, I looked through the playroom window, seeing it, like the office, from the opposite angle to the previous night. Apart from the boxroom and my bedroom, it was the only room unmetamorphosed by Moira, and it still looked what it had been for forty years, the private domain of children.
The old battered armchairs were still there, and the big table that with a little imagination had been fort, boat, spaceship and dungeon in its time. The long shelves down the north wall still bore generations of train sets, building sets, board games and stuffed toys. Robin and Peter’s shiny new bicycles were still propped there, that had been the joy of their lives in the week before the crash. There were posters of pop groups pinned to the walls and a bookcase bulging with reprehensible tastes.
The explosion on the other side of the thick load-bearing wall had done less damage to the playroom than to anywhere else I’d seen; only the broken windows and the ubiquitous dust, which had flooded in from the passage, showed that anything had happened. A couple of teddy bears had tumbled off the shelves, but the bicycles were still standing.
Anything there that shouldn’t be there, anything not there that should be, Yale had said. I hadn’t seen anything the night before in those categories, and I still couldn’t.
With a frustrated shrug, I skirted the poured-out guts of the house and on the far side looked through the dining-room windows. Like the playroom, the dining-room was relatively undamaged, though here the blast had blown in directly from the hall, leaving the now familiar tongue of rubble and covering everything with a thick grey film. For ever after, I would equate explosions with dust.