“I just thought I had better let you know I shan’t be back this weekend,” he said. “I know it is a damned inconvenient time for me to be away with all this motorway business going on, but I really can’t get away.”
“That’s all right,” said Lady Maud, feigning her usual degree of indifference, “I daresay I’ll be able to cope without you.”
“How are things going?”
“We’ve just had a committee meeting to discuss the next move. We are thinking of organizing protest meetings round the county.”
“That’s the sort of thing we need,” said Sir Giles. “I’m doing my damnedest down here to get the Ministry to reconsider. Keep up the good work at your end.” He rang off. Lady Maud smiled grimly. She would keep up the good work all right. And he could go on doing his damnedest. She picked up the phone and dialled. In the next two hours she spoke to her bank manager, the Head Keeper at Whipsnade Zoo, the Game Warden at Woburn Wildlife Park, the managers of five small private zoos and a firm of fencing experts in Birmingham. Finally she went outside to look for Blott.
Ever since the night of Dundridge’s visit she had been worried by Blott’s attitude. It hadn’t been like him to behave like that and she had been alarmed by the sound of the shotgun going off outside. She rather regretted what she had said about his drinking too. It certainly hadn’t had any good effect. If anything he had taken to going off to the Royal George more often and late one night she had heard him singing in the pinetum. “Typically Italian,” she thought, confusing “Wir Fahren Gegen England” with La Traviata. “Probably pining for Naples.” But Blott stumbling through the park was merely drunk and if he was pining for anything it was for her innocence which Dundridge’s visit had destroyed.
She found him, as she had expected, in the kitchen garden. “Blott,” she said, “I want you to do something for me.”
Blott grunted morosely. “What?”
“You know the wall safe in the study?” Blott nodded. “I want you to open it for me.”
Blott shook his head and went on weeding the onion bed. “Not possible without the combination,” he said.
“If I had the combination I wouldn’t have to ask you to open it,” Lady Maud said tartly. Blott shrugged. “If I don’t know the combination,” he said, “how do I open it?”
“You blow it open,” said Lady Maud. Blott straightened up and looked at her.
“Blow it open?”
“With explosive. Use a… what are those things with flames… oxy…”
“Acetylene torch,” said Blott. “It wouldn’t work.”
“I don’t mind how you do it. You can pull it out of the wall and drop it from the roof for all I care but I want that safe opened. I’ve got to know what is inside it.”
Blott pushed back his hat and scratched his head. This was a new Lady Maud speaking. “Why don’t you ask him for the combination?” he said.
“Him?” said Lady Maud with a new contempt. “Because I don’t want him to know. That’s why.”
“He’ll know it if we blow it open,” Blott pointed out.
Lady Maud thought for a moment. “We can always say it was burglars,” she said finally.
Blott considered the implications of this remark and found them to his liking. “Yes, we could do that. Let’s go and have a look at it.”
They went into the house and stood in the study examining the safe which was set into the wall behind some books.
“Difficult,” said Blott. He went into the dining-room next door and looked at the wall on that side. “It’s going to do a lot of damage,” he said when he came back.
“Do whatever damage you have to. The house is coming down if we don’t do something. What does it matter if we do some damage to it now? It can always be repaired.”
“Ah,” said Blott, who had begun to understand. “Then I’ll use a sledgehammer.” He went round to the workshop in the yard and returned with a sledgehammer, a metal wedge and a crowbar.
“You’re quite sure?” he asked. Lady Maud nodded. Blott swung the sledgehammer against the dining-room wall. Half an hour later the safe was out of the wall. Together they carried it outside and laid it on the drive. It was quite small. Blott twiddled the knob idly and tried to think what next to do.
“What we need is some high-explosive,” he said. “Dynamite would do it.”
“We haven’t got any dynamite,” Lady Maud pointed out. “And you can’t go into a shop and buy it. You couldn’t bore a hole in it and hoik things out with a wire?”
“Too thick and the steel is too hard,” said Blott. “It’s like armour-plate on a tank.” He stopped. Like a tank. Somewhere among the armoury of weapons he had collected during the war there was a rocket-launcher. It was in a long wooden box and labelled PIAT. Projectile Infantry Anti-Tank. Now where had he buried it?
Chapter 17
As dusk fell over the Cleene Gorge Blott left the Lodge with a spade. He had had his supper, sausages and mashed potatoes, and was comfortably full. Above all he was happy. As he followed the park wall round to the west and found the exact spot where he had climbed over as a prisoner of war he was boyishly excited. There had been a piece of iron fencing which he had propped against the wall to give himself a leg-up. It was still there, rusting in a patch of stinging-nettles. Blott dragged it out and leant it against the wall and climbed up. The barbed-wire had gone but as he straddled the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side he had the same feeling of freedom he had experienced night after night over thirty years before. Not that he had disliked life in the camp. He had felt freer then than at any time before. To sneak out at night and roam the woods on his own was to escape from the orphanage in Dresden and all the petty restrictions of his dreadful childhood. It had been to cock a snook at authority and to be himself.
And so it was now as he pushed through the bracken and began to climb through the trees. He was doing the forbidden thing again and he exulted in it. Half a mile up the hillside he came to a clearing. You turned left here. Blott turned left, following the old instinct as surely as if there had been a path there, and came out into the setting sunlight behind a mound of stones that had once been a cottage. Here he turned up the hill again until he found the tree he was looking for. It was a large old oak. Blott went round the trunk and found the slash he had made in the bark. He walked away from the tree, counting his paces. Then he took off his jacket and began to dig. It took him an hour to get down to the cache but it was there exactly where he had recalled. He pulled out a box and prised the lid open with a hammer. Inside caked in grease and wrapped in oilskin was a two-inch mortar. He dragged out another box. Mortar bombs. Finally he found what he was looking for. The long box and the four cases of armour-piercing rockets. He sat down on the box and wondered what to do next. Now that he came to think about it, all he needed were the rockets. All he had to do was to tie a piece of string to the fin and drop it from a height on to the safe. That would do the trick just as well as firing the rocket at the safe.
Still, he had come so far, he might as well take the PIAT home with him and clean it up. It would make an interesting souvenir. Blott put the mortar back with the cases of bombs, and covered them with earth. Then he went back down the hill with the long box. It was very heavy and he had to stop fairly frequently to rest. By the time he got back to the Lodge it was dark. He humped the box up to his room and went back for the rockets. He didn’t take those up to his room but left them in the grass outside. He didn’t feel like sleeping beside some rockets that were thirty years old.