flotsam by-passed 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