The offices were locked. My keys had long vanished but, seen dimly through windows, the three rooms looked as orderly as usual. The canteen, door open, had been left alone.
I went along to the barn. The tool store was secure. Nothing looked out of place. I went back to Sandy and Lizzie and reported: no damage and no one about.
Sandy stared at me strangely.
‘Miss Croft,’ he said, ‘tells me someone tried to kill you.’
‘Lizzie!’ I protested.
Lizzie said, ‘Constable Smith wanted to know where we were when all that... that wicked destruction... was going on at the house. I had to tell him. I couldn’t avoid it.’
‘I don’t know that anyone actually meant to kill me,’ I said. I told Sandy briefly about waking up in Southampton. ‘Maybe the reason for taking me there was to give time for attacking my house.’
Sandy thought things over, buttoned his tunic absent-mindedly and announced that all things considered he had better report to his headquarters.
‘Can’t it wait till later this morning?’ I said. ‘I could do with some sleep.’
‘You’ve had two dead men on your premises since last Thursday,’ Sandy pointed out. ‘And now this. I’ll be in trouble, Freddie, if I don’t report it at once.’
‘The two dead men were accidental.’
‘Your house isn’t.’
I shrugged and leaned on his car while he telephoned. No, he was saying, no one was dead, no one was injured, the damage was to property. He gave the address of my house and listened to instructions, relaying them to me after. In effect, two plain clothes detectives would come in due course.
‘How long is due course?’ Lizzie asked.
‘There’s a major flap on in Winchester,’ Sandy said. ‘So... whenever they can.’
‘Why do you say no one was injured?’ Lizzie sounded indignant. ‘Freddie was injured.’
Sandy eyed me with long knowledge. ‘Injured to him means both legs broken and his guts hanging out.’
‘Men!’ Lizzie said.
Sandy said to me, ‘Do you want me to call out Doc Farway?’
‘No, I don’t.’
He listened to my emphatic reply and smiled at Lizzie. ‘See?’
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
Sandy and Lizzie both looked at their watches. ‘Three thirty-two,’ Sandy said with precision. ‘My message to headquarters was timed at three twenty-six.’
Still leaning on Sandy’s car, I couldn’t decide which to guard, my business or my home. The damage already done might not be all. With such wanton pointless behaviour as stamping on daffodils, logical prediction could get nowhere. The graffiti mind, the urge to throw stones at windows, looting, destruction for its own sake, they were the natural glee of untamed humanity. It was civilisation and social conscience that were artificial.
The side door of Harve’s house opened directly into the farmyard. He came hurrying out in jeans, shrugging his arms into an anorak, anxiety plain.
‘Freddie! Sandy!’ His relief was partial. ‘One of my kids got up for a pee and woke me to say there was a police car by the horseboxes. What’s happened?’ He looked along the intact row of vehicles and repeated, puzzled, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Some vandals broke into my house,’ I explained. ‘We came to see if they’d been here too, but they haven’t.’
Harve looked more worried, not less.
‘I walked round late,’ he said. ‘It was all OK.’
‘What time?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’d say about ten.’
‘Um,’ I said, ‘you weren’t out here by any chance an hour or so later? You didn’t hear anything?’
He shook his head. ‘When I went in I watched a video of a football match for a while, and went to bed.’ He still looked anxious. ‘Why?’
‘I came here at roughly half-eleven. The gates were open and someone was moving about. I thought it was you.’
‘No, not that late. I shut the gate at ten. Everyone was back by then, see?’
‘Thanks, Harve.’
‘Who was here at half-eleven?’ he demanded.
‘That’s rather the point, I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone close enough to recognise whether I knew them or not.’
‘But if they didn’t do any damage...’ Harve frowned, ‘what were they here for?’
It was a question worth answering but I was not at that moment going to put forward the one reason I could think of. It was logical, besides: perhaps too logical for the poltergeist-type irrationality of so much that had happened that night.
Sandy and Lizzie between them told Harve about my bit of seaside bathing, Harve looking increasingly horrified.
‘You might have drowned!’ he said, exclaiming.
‘Mm. But there we are, I didn’t.’ I belatedly asked Harve to keep watch in the farmyard for what was left of the night. ‘Doze in your own box,’ I suggested, ‘and phone me the minute you see anything odd.’
With his promise to do that once he’d told his wife and brought a hot drink and a blanket, I went back to my house with Sandy and Lizzie and left them in the kitchen tut-tutting at life over steaming tea. As for me, I went wearily upstairs, decided to shower, lay down instead on top of the duvet for a minute still in fleecy boots and padded jacket, felt the world whirl briefly and fell instantly and comprehensively asleep.
I didn’t wake until Lizzie shook me, her voice urgent.
‘Freddie! Freddie, are you all right?’
‘Mm.’ I struggled from the depths. ‘What is it?’
‘The police are here.’
‘What?’
Realisation and remembrance came back with unwelcome clarity. I groaned. I felt unwell. I inconsequentially thought of Alfred, King of Wessex, who delivered his country from Danish invaders although suffering from half the diseases known to the ninth century. Such fortitude! And he could write and translate Latin as well.
‘Freddie, the police want to talk to you.’
King Alfred had had haemorrhoids, I’d read once. With all that on his mind, no wonder he’d let the cakes burn.
‘Freddie!’
‘Tell them I’ll be down in five minutes.’
When she’d gone I took off the night’s clothes, showered, shaved, dressed again in fresh things, combed my hair carefully and, at least on the outside, began to look like F. Croft Esquire, master of a few things he would rather not have surveyed.
The sitting-room looked no better in the opal light of dawn, and the soul had gone out of the tangled heap of metal that had been my precious car. I walked from one disaster to the other with the policemen, who weren’t the two who had come to Jogger. These were older, wearier, hard worked and unimpressed by my troubles, which they seemed to suggest I had brought on myself. I answered their questions monosyllabically, partly from malaise, chiefly from ignorance.
No, I didn’t know who had done all the damage.
No, I couldn’t guess.
No, I knew of no one who held a business grudge against me.
Had I dismissed a worker? No. One had recently left of his own choice.
Had I had any personal enemies? None that I knew of.
I must have some, they said. Everyone had enemies.
Well, I thought privately, reflecting on Hugo Palmerstone, I had no personal enemy who could be sure my house would be empty at two a.m. on the Wednesday morning of Cheltenham races. Not unless, of course, they’d tapped me on the head...
Who hated me this much? If I knew, I said, I would certainly tell.
Had anything been stolen?
That question stopped me short. So many things had been smashed that I hadn’t thought of theft. My car could have been stolen. My television, my computer, the china birds, the Waterford vase, all had had value. I hadn’t, I said lamely, inspected my safe.
They accompanied me indoors again, looking as if they couldn’t believe I hadn’t checked the safe first.