background traffic, which in London never stops all night.
‘Got the money ready, Mr Morgan?’ whispered Mossy. ‘He’ll want to get away quick, once he’s delivered. He’s the nervous sort. And it is the right amount, isn’t it? It doesn’t do to shortchange that lot – you could get kneecapped.’
‘Counted four times, Mossy.’
‘Good.’ He breathed a deep sigh of relief.
The Landrover hesitated outside the gate, then doused its lights and came silently bumping down the side of the house. The hand-brake went on. A little man got out, handed Mossy the keys, and held out his hand for the briefcase of money. My hard-earned savings were going God knew where, to serve God knew what cause. I badly wanted to see the face of the man I was giving it to. All I could see was a white ferret nose, sticking out between a turned-up collar and a pulled-down cap.
But he felt my eyes on him. Turned and looked at me very hard, as if trying to memorize my face, as if to say, well, you wanted to see one of us, and now you’ve seen one of us. The eyes glinted like the eyes of a rat, caught in the torch-beam. Only the eyes of a rat that was very sure of itself; a rat that knew it could bite and kill. I dearly wished I hadn’t looked at him; I dearly wished he hadn’t seen my face . . .
Then he was gone, taking his number-plates with him. We looked inside the Landrover. It was an old one: long wheelbase, hard top. All the stuff was there, the yellow chemical drums, the glass carboys of phosphorous in their metal baskets. And the small glowing figures on the electronic timer by the rear door. It reminded me of the black boxes that Ross and Makepeace still made . . .
‘Better get moving,’ said Mossy. ‘He’s set it. Ten minutes.’
He got into the driver’s seat, restarted the engine, fiddled with the levers of the triple gearbox . . .
‘She lined up right?’
We whispered soft instructions as he backed and turned the Landrover, lining it up with the French window.
‘OK, now?’
He had leapt from the driver’s seat, before the Landrover began moving. It edged so slowly up to the ramp, in its very bottom gear. Began to climb. The front bumper touched the stone pillars. The pillars began to grate and creak. In one second, this purely mechanical creature, that knew nothing of the things of the spirit, that was impervious to both good and evil, would have entered the body of its host, like a poison pill . . .
And then everything flew apart. With a crash and a crunch and a cascade of personal belongings, the ramp gave way. I saw, with despairing eyes, babies bootees spilling on to the old gravel. The Landrover humped up and fell, and humped up again, as it tried to climb the obstacle and failed. There was a whining within it, a smell of burning. The clutch was starting to burn out, as the sagging right front wheel turned slowly, pointlessly . . .
I was ready to run. I saw it all, the whole disaster. The bomb would go off, outside the house. The phosphorous would spray everywhere, on the house walls, on the trees, on us . . . we would die, horribly. And the creature inside would live. And if the house did burn, it would only burn to the cellars, and be demolished, and the binding prayer would be broken and . . .
Somebody knocked me aside, so I fell flat on my face. I saw a figure scrambling into the driver’s seat; heard the Landrover go into reverse, saw it roll back down among the trees.
And then the gears crashed again, and the engine roared like a wild beast, and the Landrover came back towards me at a terrible pace. I just wriggled aside in time, and it flew up the remains of the ramp and crashed into the stonework, and stopped dead.
Then again it reversed, steam pouring from its fractured radiator, and the gears crunched again, and now, screaming with the noise of tortured metal, its bonnet-lid forced vertical by the collision, its tyres screeching and giving off black smoke, it plunged at the window again.
There was a great tinkling of glass; the stone pillars bent inwards and snapped, and, with the heavy-treaded rear tyres still scrabbling and spewing massacred personal possessions, picture-frames and shoes and even a gaudy