“Purely fortuitously. Fire was rumoured. I happened to be near at hand.”
The well-bred Mr Harrington concealed his scepticism behind his napkin.
Reaction from Miss Teatime was more direct. “Ah, hence the intriguing announcement in this week’s local newspaper.”
The inspector looked blank.
“On behalf,” said Miss Teatime, “of the Mumblesby Relic Committee.”
She waited a moment. The inspector said nothing.
“It seems you saved something or other that had been presented to the village by the late Mr Loughbury. A relic? I should love to know what it was—or is.”
Purbright gave in.
“So should I.”
Chapter Twelve
Had Inspector Purbright been paying less attention to what was happening inside the Old Mill Restaurant, he might have noticed the passing of a very unusual vehicle outside.
It was monstrously large. Each of its four wheels was the height of a man and bore a tyre the girth of a beer barrel. The sound as of an ore crusher came from the engine in its long rectangular box, gashed with cooling vents and surmounted by a great mushroom-shaped exhaust.
The cab was set high above the front pair of wheels. It was a steel-ribbed glass tank that in daylight exhibited the driver, arms, legs and all, with a sort of brash candour. Now, at dusk, he could be seen only in silhouette, a high-perched figure lurching and wrestling with levers.
The machine ground ponderously past a row of parked cars, then swung abruptly through ninety degrees and began to cross the empty square towards the Manor House.
There was a broad paved alley on the south side of the Manor House, leading to what once had been stables.
Very slowly, as if the bearing strength of the ground beneath were being assayed, the vehicle moved into the alley like a huge hermit crab annexing a shell.
It was brought to a halt at a point opposite the centre of the gable wall. To the grinding throb of the engine was added a high whine as four stabilizing rams descended from the underbelly.
The darkness was thicker in the shelter of the house, and the only witness of what was happening there was a child who saw the machine arrive in the village and had furtively followed it. Now he made the extraordinary discovery that it had a neck.
He watched this neck stretch aloft, retract a little, descend, and bear its head forward almost to the wall of the house. It moved next in slow, exploratory arcs, as if in search of concealed prey.
The neck, in fact, was an articulated boom; the head, a heavy, cuspidal grab.
After a while, the lateral movements of the boom ceased and a gear change drew from the engine a deeper, more powerful surge of sound. The boom swung back all of a piece, joints locked, head rigid.
It was poised in the sky like a great hammer.
The child had ventured, bit by bit, into the alley, but his back and hands were pressed to the wall behind him, spring-loaded for flight.
The note of the engine changed once again. It spoke to him of immediate menace. He crouched low and scuttled back to the corner, where he clung to the wall as to a mothers skirt.
Suddenly, there ran through the stone beneath his hands a heavy shudder, like that of an old horse, pained by a kick.
Moments later, a second shock reached the child. He heard a rumble of falling masonry.
When he peeped again into the alley, the neck was drawing back for another strike. The child sniffed the acrid smell of ancient plaster. A cloud of dust was rolling slowly from the alley into the light of a street lamp.
He darted through the dust and sheltered against the house on the further side.
From there, the view was better.
A small, but excitingly dangerous looking hole had appeared in the gable wall about mid-way between ground and roof apex. A thin, black fissure had been opened, and some stone facing had peeled off.
The machine launched its third strike.
The boy shut his eyes but heard a sound so unexpectedly dull (it reminded him of when he had knocked a melon off the top shelf of his mothers pantry and heard it burst on the stone floor) that he felt cheated and opened them again.
Disappointment changed instantly to horrified admiration.
A section of wall ten feet across was bulging outward. Here and there, a piece broke off and crashed to the ground. Then, quite slowly, the whole great bleb split and sloughed away and sank, growling, into a cauldron of dust.
For a long time, Oggy Howell stared up at the gaping rooms that were slung so precariously, it seemed to him, in the sky. The shapes within were too shadowy to identify, but he sensed them to be intimate and secret things, which the light of morning would outrageously display.
He waited until the machine had retracted its rams, backed out of the alley, and rumbled off across the market place. Then he ran to the side door of the Barleybird, confident that news so momentous justified breach of his mother’s often repeated injunction to stay home when she was doing the evening bar.
Sadie’s face darkened with exasperation when she heard Oggy’s “Hsst!” at the off-sales hatch. She hurried out into the corridor, snatched at the child’s arm and shook him.
Oggy was not to be quelled.
“Mam, there was this great big machine, like from Mars, and it had a neck and a great big head, and there was a man in it, and it’s knocked a house down in the square there, next to Roger Hinley’s house, and this great big machine just went Gthwurrhh...and Crumph! and just bashed this whopping great hole in the wall and you can see the bed and a sort of wardrobe thing and...”
She shook him into momentary silence.
“Austin, if you don’t go straight home this minute and get into bed...”
“But Mam, it’s right what I’m telling you. It did, it knocked the wall down and there was a lot of smoke and that, and there’s this great big hole—you can SEE it, Mam—you go and look...”
Again she shook him, but with care not to hurt.
“Get off home,” she commanded.
“But Mam...”
This time, she clipped the back of his head. He winced, covered the spot with his hand. She spoke fiercely, pulling him close and bending to him. “If you don’t stop playing me up like this, do you know what’ll happen? Do you? Mr Cork-Bradden’ll have them take you away.”
“Don’t care.”
She stared at him, near to tears. Someone came into the corridor from the bar. “Hey, girl, we’re dying of thirst!”
The man noticed the child. He became solicitous.
“Oh, he’s got some cock and bull story about a house getting knocked down,” Sadie told him.
“It did, it did, it did!” Oggy was tense and resentful now. “A machine knocked it down. A great big machine.” Daringly, “And it was from Mars.”