Roots of Evil(119)

That sprint to the front door was no longer an option; Michael stepped back into the study, and got behind the door. There was a heavy pottery vase on a side table; if it came to a fight he could probably make use of it. But with luck the prowler would see the light from the electric fire, and would realize someone was in the house and beat it back into the night.

The small room was hot and claustrophobic and there was a smell of burning dust from the electric fire. Michael’s heart was beating so furiously that he had the absurd idea that the burglar would hear it. Like the Edgar Allen Poe story where the murdered heart beat so loudly it betrayed the killer.

He had expected the intruder to come into the hall, and every muscle of his body was tense with anticipation. But the intruder did not. He moved around the kitchen for a few moments, and then there was the unmistakable sound of the garden door opening and closing again, and of the key being turned in the lock. The stealthy footsteps went down the gravel path once more.

Michael let out a huge breath of relief, and after a moment went across to the window, opening the curtain the tiniest chink in order to look outside. Was the man walking down the lane to the main road? There had not been the sound of a car – or had there? The radio had been on and this was an old and solid house; he might not have heard a car driving up.

The intruder had not come in a car, or if he had, he had parked it near to the road. He was just coming around the side of the house, doing so quite briskly as if he had just completed a necessary task, and heading towards the lane. But as he came out of the shadows cast by the old beech trees, he paused and turned to look back. Michael froze, praying not to be seen.

The intruder did not see him, but Michael saw the intruder. The man who had spent barely five minutes inside the house – the house which he had entered by means of a key – was Edmund Fane. But it was an Edmund Fane without the prim, rather spinsterish exterior; this was an Edmund Fane with such malice in his face and with such cold mad brilliance in his eyes that if it had not been for recognizing the jacket, Michael might have believed it to be a complete stranger.

He watched Edmund walk away from the house, and when he judged him to have reached the main road, he let the curtain fall back, and sat down. He was acutely puzzled. Why on earth would Edmund Fane steal into the house in that furtive way, spent those three or four minutes in the kitchen, and then creep out again, locking the door behind him?

Unless Fane had found the mobile phone, and had returned it. Was it possible that he had slipped quietly into the house, not wanting to wake Michael in case he was zonked out after taking the pills? This did not entirely square with Michael’s impression of Edmund Fane, but it was the only thing he could think of. In that case his phone should be lying somewhere prominent, perhaps with an explanatory note. This would be very good indeed.

But he had barely taken two steps into the hall when a strong suffocating stench met him, sending him instinctively dodging back into the study. For a moment he was unable to identify it, but whatever it was, it was ringing loud alarm bells in his mind. Something on fire? No, not fire—But something as dangerous as fire—

And then he knew what it was. A strong smell of gas. Inside the kitchen, gas was escaping and filling up the house.



Michael did not stop to think. He tore the sling off his hand and crammed it over his mouth as a makeshift mask. Then he ran into the kitchen, banging the door back against the wall.

Even in those few minutes the gas had built up, and it seized his throat and lungs so that he gasped and breathed in the cotton of the sling for a moment. His eyes streamed, but he realized that the old-fashioned gas cooker near the door was hissing out gas, and that all four rings had been turned full on and the oven door propped wide open. That bastard Edmund Fane had come quietly into the house and turned the gas on!

Keeping the sling across his mouth, he wrenched the switches around and slammed the oven door shut. But his mind had already flown ahead to all the various electrical connections in the house, and then had flown back to the surveyor’s head-shaking report on the state of the wiring. Very antiquated, the report had said, in fact downright dangerous, and the whole house needed rewiring. Michael was no electrician but you did not need a PhD to realize that belching gas and faulty electrical wiring were a lethal combination. If the gas fumes were to reach a flawed electrical circuit – or even, dear God, the electric fire that was still blazing in the study—

He wasted several valuable seconds trying to unlatch the garden door before he remembered that Edmund Fane had locked it, and grabbed a large saucepan, flinging it hard at the kitchen window. Several panes of glass shattered at once, and the cold night air streamed in. Michael, still trying to keep the makeshift mask over his nose and mouth, ran back into the study, knocking the switch of the electric fire off, and then dived through the hall, snatching up his jacket on the way. As he half fell through the front door, he was expecting the gas fumes to hit some worn-away section of wiring at any minute and the whole house to blow up.

But it did not. Taking deep shuddering gulps of the cold clean air, he reached his car, and unlocking it, slid thankfully inside. The engine fired at once, and he fumbled for the gears. This was going to be hellishly difficult; his left hand was throbbing with pain, and he would be lucky if he could change gear. He did not care. Adrenaline was flooding his body, and he would drive all the way to the White Hart in first gear with the hazard lights flashing if he had to. He depressed the clutch, knocked the car into first gear with his right hand, and then turned the wheel. It resisted slightly and then turned, but there was a grinding sound from somewhere near the back. Michael tried again, and encountered the same resistance and the same grating noise. Like bare steel on stone. Steel— Oh God.