Gordon Williams (13 page)

He explained about Niles.

“Do you know who ‘tis outside?”

“There’s a young guy, with sideboards, and a big guy, very big, got a red face. They were in the Inn one night I went down, I don’t know their names.”

There was a pause.

“Look, Mr. Magruder, I was out looking for Janice, I just came back to make sure Jean and the kids were all right, I’m comin’ down
that way anyway, I’ll bring the turkey. I’ll be about ten minutes, I’ll talk to them, everybody’s a bit jumpy with this Janice going off like that. You know how it is.’

“Yeah, sure, I just wish they’d stop kicking the door. Tell them to go and get drunk somewhere else.”

When he rang off the kicking had stopped. He listened. Except for the wind in the trees he could hear nothing. He went into the sitting-room. Niles turned his head, staring at them.

“That was Knapman, he’s coming over,” he said to Louise, patting her arm. “He’ll tell them to push off. I don’t think they’d listen to me.” He looked at Niles. “Are you hurt anywhere?” he asked, speaking as he would to a deaf man or a foreigner, with exaggerated lip movements.

“That blood wasn’t my fault,” said Henry, shaking his head. “It wasn’t me, promise. Gentle Jesus meek and mild.”

George and Louise exchanged horrified looks. Niles began to cry.

“It wasn’t my fault, promise!” he sobbed. “It was a game, Mr. Pawson put the belt round me.”

“OH MY GOD,” Louise shrieked.

“Louise, keep calm for Chrissake.”

She screamed, her hands at her lips, her eyes wide with terror. Niles shut his eyes and blubbered like a baby.

At that moment the room was suddenly filled by what seemed like an explosion. The curtains moved as though punched by a giant fist. A brick fell on the stone floor under the window ledge.

He ran to the window. This time they were standing close, faces peering in at him from the darkness, their shadowy silhouettes traced by snowflakes.

“Us want that Niles.”

It was a silly thing to say at a moment like this, but it was the first thing that came into his head:

“Get off my land.”

“Us’ll burn the bloody house down if us don’t get him.”

“I’ll give you one more warning. Go away now and there won’t be any trouble. But lift another finger and so help me I’ll have you in jail!”

He let the curtain fall back. He had to hope that they’d be shaken by a show of confidence.

“Let them have him, for God’s sake!”

“Keep a grip on yourself, honey. Why don’t you go upstairs and see to Karen? She’ll be terrified at all this noise.”

“I don’t –”

“Louise! I know this is a hellish situation but
please
don’t make it any worse.”

She gave him a look of such contempt he thought she was going to spit in his face. Then she went up the stairs.

“That blood wasn’t me,” Niles groaned, his face red and blotchy with tears.

“Shut up, you,” George snarled.

Niles went into a fit of crying. He was so much like a child George almost got down on his knees to comfort him.

Instead he closed the door at the foot of the stairs. The thing was to stay cool. Outside in that weather the drink would soon wear off and they’d go home.

“Mibbe us oughter clear off, Norman,” said Bert Voizey. The little rat expert didn’t like this kind of business. One thing to get your own back on somebody by slipping poison to his pigs, but not to go fighting like this, face to face.

“Nah, the cops won’t be here for hours. I’ll smash every window in the bloody house. Us’ll get that Niles, I tell you us will. He don’t have no right to live, an animal like that. Them coppers get him and what’ll they do, eh? Put him back in Two Waters, that’s all. An’ he killed them kids – and Janice. I’m fed up wi’ lettin’ them get away wi’ it.”

“I want that Niles,” roared Tom Hedden, who didn’t seem to care, or even notice, what the others were doing. “I’ll blow his bloody brains out I will!”

Phillip Riddaway kept thinking of what Norman had told him. That Niles was a human devil, he’d got hold of little Janice Hedden and done awful things to her, like them other kids. He was an animal.

In all his life Phillip Riddaway had only once gone farther than fifteen miles from Dando Monachorum, when they’d sent for him to take army tests. He hadn’t liked the town, all them people pushing and shoving and staring at him. It had turned out all right, for the army had written to his mother saying they didn’t want him. He was forty-seven, stronger than any man in Dando or Compton. Everybody knew that. Norman was always telling him how strong he was. Norman was his special pal. Norman had told him what it was like to do things with a woman. Norman had been in gaol and had travelled to hundreds of different places. Norman said a man had only one or two real pals and he ought to stick by them. In prison, Norman said, the men didn’t like these animals who did awful things to little kids. Norman had told him how one of these devils had come to Norman’s prison and the men – Norman’s prison pals – had got a razor blade and cut chunks out of the bugger’s backside. Norman knew a lot about it. Norman said that all them posh people didn’t care what happened to folks like them,
even little girls. That made him very angry. Just because he didn’t have any little girls of his own didn’t mean he would let a devil like this Henry Niles do awful things and get away with it. He felt very angry. Norman was right, they ought to burn the house down.

“Us want to get into the house and get Niles without that yank seein’ us like,” said Bert Voizey.

“Aye, you’m be a bloody burglar, Norman,” said Chris Cawsey, “you’m show us how to get into her.” He laughed. His hand was resting on his knife. When he pushed the sheath the tip would touch his john thomas. That was good. If he could get in there he’d use his lovely knife. Better than sheep! Nobody knew the kind of high jinks
he
got up to with his lovely knife. He thought of the American man’s wife, he’d seen her walking about in the village. She’d have lovely big tits on her. It made him want to laugh out loud, just thinking about them. And the knife. What it would do to them!

“Us goin’ round the back,” said Norman. “Kick the door, Tom, us’ll slip in a window and have that Niles out dead easy.”

George Magruder was trying to stick squares of cardboard over the broken panes with Scotch tape when he heard a noise from the kitchen. He knew the back door was locked, but there was a big window in the kitchen. The other windows in the house were fairly small, the panes hardly big enough for a man to crawl through head first, but the kitchen window would be easy to get through. Before he left the sitting-room he looked at Henry Niles, who seemed to have sobbed himself back to sleep. It was hard to realise that all this passion had been aroused by that small, scruffy baby-man. You looked at him sleeping, an ugly little thing of a human being, and you tried to imagine those hands tearing the life out of a child. It made you feel sick.

But that wasn’t the point. When they’d hit him he’d been wandering about on the road, half frozen. The girl had only been out of the school fifteen minutes at the most. He couldn’t have – unless... unless she’d run up the hill... unless Niles was walking
up
the hill when they’d hit him... how long did it take? He shuddered. If only the damn police were here. If only they weren’t stranded in this desolate hole. It was ridiculous to think that in this day and age, in England, a man could find himself under siege by a gang of crazy drunks and have nobody to call on for help. Ridiculous.

He heard the noise again. He ducked his head to avoid the beam which straddled the doorway between the small dining-room and the kitchen. Through the kitchen window he saw a man’s face and hands. They were trying to force the latch.

He felt angry. And sick. There was something nauseating about people trying to force their way into your house.

“Go away,” he shouted.

The man vanished. Through the glass he could see only snowflakes. He checked the window latch. It was that kind with a swan-neck handle and a short, thin bar of metal which slipped upwards into a slot in the centre window post. The two frames moved outwards from the centre post. At the bottom of each frame there was a long metal bar with holes for fitting over a metal peg. Once the glass was broken a man would only have to put his hand inside and both the metal bar and the catch would open in two seconds. He couldn’t see a way of securing the catches.

He checked the door which opened into the small kitchen porch. That had a Yale lock and a fairly strong bolt. He didn’t think they could force it. The outside porch door was probably unlocked. Still, it wouldn’t do them much good to get into the porch.

He went back to the sitting-room. Henry Niles was sitting up, the blankets round his waist.

“I need the lavvy,” he said. George wondered what kind of accent Niles had. Not from these parts. Niles had been about twenty-three when they’d caught him that first time. What kind of life had he had before? How long had his warped mind been preparing him for the moment he got his hands on a little girl? Or had he been doing it for a long time before they caught him, gradually working up to a murder? What did it all mean? A man like that, the mind perverted. Child-like, but warped what did it all
mean?

“I need the lavvy,” Niles said again.

“It’s upstairs,” George said. “I’ll show you.”

That was another thing. Although he knew the man was a murderous lunatic he still found himself adhering to the normal rules of politeness. Was he frightened he might hurt Niles’ feelings? What could he do, ask the guy what it felt like to be a child-murderer?

This pathetic little man, who could hardly walk by himself to the foot of the stairs, was
he
the symbol of the age, the personification of blind, unthinking evil? The ultimate in perverted lust? How could you say he was perverted when you knew he had the mind of a child? You couldn’t punish him – that was what progress and civilisation meant, if it meant anything at all. Yet they’d hung the Nazis. Were they
responsible?
Were they perverted beyond the stage where normal human rules applied?

Perhaps it was too much to ask people to excuse the evil done by Henry Niles. Perhaps it would be better all round to have him extinguished. A hundred million people had been killed this century – by normal men. What was so special about Niles’ case? Did it matter? What a pointless exercise in so-called progress it seemed, to
make a principle out of this shaking little body, climbing the stairs the way Karen had when she first learned to walk, one step at a time, hand clutching the rail.

He showed Niles into the lavatory, the blanket hanging round his shoulders, like a boy playing Red Indians.

“Can you – will you manage?”

Niles nodded. He let the blanket slide to the floor. George turned his head away, disgusted at having seen Niles like that. It was akin to being on good terms with evil. He bolted the door on the outside. It was only a small bolt, but he didn’t think Niles was in any state to force it. He went along the corridor and tapped gently on Karen’s door.

“Louise?”

She came out, her face drawn with worry.

“Is she sleeping?”

Louise shook her head.

“Come on, I want to speak to you. Better lock her door.”

What did he want to tell her? That he was scared? That he was sorry? Sorry for what? Why did she make him feel guilty – inadequate? Was he inadequate – as simple as that?

“They’re still outside,” he said. They stood in the darkness of their bedroom. He wanted her to reassure him. What was the point of fighting for principles if you couldn’t maintain a relationship with your own wife? Was that why some men threw themselves into such battles – as compensation for personal inadequacies? Did those old pioneers tolerate this kind of disruptive influence from their wives?

“If they want him as badly as this we can’t stop them,” she said. She sounded
bored.
“They wouldn’t hurt him, they only want to know what he did to Janice Hedden –”

“You know as well as I do he couldn’t have been anywhere near Janice Hedden. So do they. They’re all steamed up, you can see that as well as I can. That young one who tried to hit him – do you think he cares a nickelsworth about Janice? The hell he does! They want blood, that’s all.”

“What does it matter?”

“Don’t you
care
?”

“No. Why did it have to be us, that’s all I care about. Oh my God, my head’s splitting.”

“You’d better lie down for a bit.”

“With all this going on, silly idiots playing Cowboys and Indians? That’s all it is. Stupidity.”

Downstairs there was another explosion, glass breaking with a popping noise, the sound a bottle makes when smashed against a brick wall. She drew a deep breath. She thought she was going to vomit.

“Oh let them in! Christ Almighty, George, you know that noise goes right into my nerves.”

“Is that all it means to you? I’d better go downstairs.”

He was half-way down the stairs when he remembered Niles. He ran back up.

“Louise! Niles is in the john. Stay with Karen.”

“Don’t leave him up here!”

“Just stay with Karen, damn you.”

He ran down the stairs. The noise seemed to have come from the study. He went through the hall. When he opened the study door the room was completely black except for a faint light at the window, where a white gauze curtain blew out in ghostly folds. He felt along the wall for the light switch.

A man’s arm was pushed through the pane of broken glass, a hand twisting for the window catch. He felt a wave of revulsion. He had to force himself to go up to the window. He stared at the motionless hand, wanting to hit it, nauseated at its proximity. On the window-ledge there was no possible weapon, only his notes for Branksheer.

“What’s wrong with you people?” he shouted. “We’ve got the police coming. Why don’t you go away?”

The hand pulled back through the jagged hole. He couldn’t see if the man had run away or was standing outside in the darkness.

Then he heard a voice. Somebody was shouting. Above the wind the words were only noises.