The Gropes Read online

  Chapter 19

  Far to the south, Albert spent the night in part on the unsavoury carpet and later, when he discovered he couldn’t open the sitting-room door and that the keys to the house had mysteriously disappeared from his pocket, thrashing around on the Dralon sofa, periodically taking slugs from the Chivas Regal he’d found lying by his side. At 4 a.m. he was desperate to reach his own bed and even more desperate to relieve himself.

  ‘Belinda,’ he bawled drunkenly and repeatedly. ‘Belinda, you bitch, let me out.’

  In the end, unable to open the triple-glazed, bullet-proofed windows, he rather inaccurately hurled two empty whisky bottles at them, cursed Belinda a great many times and, as the last straw, cut his hand rather badly searching for some more substantial Scotch bottles in the drinks cabinet. Finally, realising he was in need of some medical self-help if he didn’t want to bleed to death, he used his handkerchief to bandage his hand as best he could.

  Albert was still suffering from a painful head and hand when the front doorbell chimed, although he had alleviated his other agony by peeing in the giant fern Belinda had been cultivating in the corner of the sitting room. He staggered to his feet and went to open it before remembering that he was locked in, and that the keys were missing. He peered at the CCTV screen used to check visitors but it was dead and refused to work. All the same, he could hear Vera screaming, ‘Let me in, let me in.’

  Albert should have guessed she would come to check if her bloody adolescent love child was safe and well. Considering his own hangover he was damned certain Esmond’s was infinitely worse. Best not to try to open the door. Vera wouldn’t stand there all day. She’d go and telephone and he wouldn’t answer. Half an hour later she did and he didn’t. He was too busy trying to kick the sitting-room door down.

  Vera concluded that her brother and darling son must be working at the Ponson second-hand car showroom, and set off on foot in that direction. But it was Sunday and the garage was shut. Foiled there she trudged back to the bungalow, prowled round to the rear and tried the back door and attempted to peer through its black-glazed windows. That didn’t help. Nor did hammering on the kitchen windows since it only provoked a volley of shots, some of which pinged alarmingly against the triple-glazed armoured glass. Vera slid down the wall under the window in a state of panic. She redoubled her screams without getting any response apart from the sound of even more shots.

  For the first time, she had to hand it to Horace. He’d said her brother was a gangster and one day he’d get his comeuppance. By the sound of things that day had come. Not that she really cared what happened to Albert. It was the presence of her darling Esmond in what sounded like the Gunfight at the OK Corral that sent her into hysterics: little did she know that she need not have worried.

  Inside the bungalow, Albert Ponson had finally thought of a way of getting through to the kitchen and had emptied his Colt .45 automatic into the lock. Gaining entry only to find the back door also locked incensed him, so much so that he began firing indiscriminately, the bullets ricocheting off expensive appliances, puncturing several stainless-steel saucepans in a cupboard and the Kenwood mixer in the process.

  At the sound of this new burst of gunfire Vera finally took action. Something terrible was happening in the bungalow and her darling Esmond was in there. She dashed into the street and used her mobile phone to call the police station.

  ‘There’s shooting going on in my brother’s house,’ she screamed.

  The police seemed only vaguely interested. ‘Really? And who’s your brother?’

  ‘Albert Ponson. They’re murdering him.’

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Mrs Wiley and Albert’s my brother.’

  At the police station the news was greeted calmly. A voice in the background seemed to be saying it was about time the bugger bought it.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Which one?’ demanded Vera, now thoroughly confused.

  ‘Yours of course. We know where Al Ponson’s garage is.’

  But Vera had reached the end of her tether.

  ‘I told you, the shooting’s up at his house – Ponson Place – not mine. For God’s sake hurry. My darling son’s in there with him.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My darling son Esmond. I left him with Albert yesterday to protect him and now there’s all this shooting and –’

  But the inspector didn’t want to hear any more. He covered the receiver with his hand and handed it to a sergeant. ‘We’ve got a right nutter up there bleating on about her darling son Esmond and how she’s given him to our local Al Capone for protection.’

  The sergeant listened for a moment and put the phone down hurriedly.

  ‘Some hysterical woman says there’s shooting up at Ponson Place,’ he told the constable. ‘Pray to God she’s right. So move. It will give us a chance to see what that bastard’s got in his fortified house at any rate.’

  Five minutes later, with Vera wailing behind them, the inspector, the sergeant and the constable (backed up by two further policemen on the grounds that you never knew what you might find when you crossed paths with the Ponsons) were hammering on the front door and ordering Albert to open up.

  He would happily have done so if he could have got the lock to work, but not only was the back-door key missing, thanks to Belinda cutting the entire electrical system off, the whole place was also in total darkness.

  For the first time Albert cursed the metal plates he had installed over the windows and doors to the outside to prevent burglars and nosy neighbours seeing the orgies he called parties. He used his remaining bullets to fire his way from the kitchen through into the garage only to find the electronic doors firmly down and with no chance of raising them. Not only that, his Aston Martin wasn’t there. The car was known to be his pride and joy which he treasured more than anything else. That suggested to Albert that an organised crime syndicate was responsible and that he could be looking at either kidnapping or, worse still, murder.

  With his head throbbing he tried to think. If Belinda and Esmond had been kidnapped or murdered, the intrusion of the law was the last thing he needed. Peering through the keyhole in the door, he was only slightly relieved to see his damned sister being forced into an ambulance by five hefty policemen.

  Ten minutes later, the chief inspector had joined his five colleagues outside the Ponson bungalow. He was taking his turn in trying to persuade Albert to come out only to be repeatedly told that he was a complete arse. Didn’t he understand that Albert couldn’t because the electronic lock wouldn’t work. And that even if the arsing lock would work, the arsing keys were missing.

  The chief inspector tried being reasonable. ‘No one’s accusing you of anything. We just want to know what the trouble is.’

  ‘The fucking trouble is that I’m locked in my bloody house and I can’t get out, you stupid dick. How many times do I have to tell you?’ Albert shouted back. ‘And some swine’s stolen my Aston Martin into the bargain.’

  The chief inspector tried another tack.

  ‘Have there been any shots in the house?’

  ‘Have there been any what?’ screamed Albert, still hung-over and now thoroughly muddled. Befuddled was the better word.

  ‘Has anyone been shooting in the house?’

  Albert struggled to think.

  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I shot the lock off the sitting-room door.’

  ‘I see,’ said the chief inspector, who didn’t. He continued after a long pause. ‘And why do that?’

  ‘Because some bugger didn’t want me to get out.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Whoever locked the bloody thing.’

  ‘What bloody thing was behind the door?’ he asked, perked up by the supposition that it was a person.

  ‘I don’t know. It was pitch dark like I told you.’

  ‘So you fired through the lock and hit someone on the other side.’

  ‘No I didn’t. When
I looked in the kitchen I didn’t see anyone. How could I? It was pitch dark. I told you that.’

  ‘So how come you said someone was bloody?

  Distracted by a large lorry hooting at a tractor in its path, the sergeant lost track of the statement he was taking down and concentrated on that ‘bloody’. The ‘whoever’ didn’t help.

  ‘So you admit you shot the person who had locked you out of the kitchen?’ he said.

  Albert struggled vainly to think of an innocent answer. ‘I didn’t know there was anyone on the other side. I couldn’t even see the lock. Had to feel for it. I mean, I put my finger out until I found the lock and then put the muzzle up against it and pulled the trigger. I didn’t mean to shoot anyone.’

  The chief inspector took over from the sergeant.

  ‘How do you know your Aston Martin has been stolen?’

  ‘Because it’s not in the garage.’

  ‘Is the door between the kitchen and the garage locked too?’

  ‘Not now it isn’t.’

  ‘And you say it has been stolen? How do you know?

  ‘Because the car isn’t there. I felt all over the place and it’s missing.’

  ‘Well, if there’s access from the garage to the kitchen, the only thing is to bring up a bulldozer and drag that garage door down.’

  Albert Ponson stood horrified in the darkness.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he squawked. ‘You’ll bring the whole front of the house down.’

  ‘We’re only going to push it open. May damage the door of course but –’

  ‘You don’t understand. You push it or drag it and the whole front is going to come down, all of it.’

  ‘All of the front wall of the house? Of course it won’t. You just don’t want us to come in. You’ve got something to hide in there.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a dead body. Like this nephew your sister keeps banging on about.’

  ‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ shrieked Albert. ‘I haven’t touched him.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he saying anything? If he’s in there with you, let him say something – provided he’s still alive, that is.’

  ‘Oh God, oh God, I’m going mad,’ Albert moaned.

  ‘Is that what you’re going to plead in court? That you’re out of your mind, that you’re a homicidal maniac? And where is Mrs Ponson? Is she dead too?’

  Albert slumped to the floor and whimpered, in the darkness inadvertently seating himself in a pool of oil. Outside, the chief inspector and the inspector smiled happily and crossed the road.

  ‘I reckon we’ve finally got the bastard,’ the chief inspector said gleefully. ‘I’ve been waiting years for this day. He’ll get life plus, as sure as eggs is eggs.’

  ‘Why do you think the place is in darkness?’ said the inspector. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘The old bird we sent down to the hospital was right after all. She did hear shots. That would have been when he killed the lad. Then, having got the body out of the house, and probably having dumped it somewhere, he comes back and puts a bullet through the main electricity cable so he’s got some sort of alibi. There must have been blood on the carpet or wherever and he’d have got rid of that far away from the body. In a river or somewhere like that.’

  ‘And the car? What’s he done with that?’

  ‘Same as the carpet, or perhaps flogged it,’ the chief inspector said. ‘There’s almost certainly blood on it too.’

  They were interrupted by a tracked bulldozer that was grinding up the road. The two police officers crossed the road towards the garage.

  ‘Put the hook over the top,’ the chief inspector ordered.

  There was a scream from inside the garage.

  ‘For shit’s sake, don’t pull the fucking thing, I’ve told you the whole front will come down. I mean the house.’

  ‘I can’t see how. I mean, we’re only going to drag that gate down. Shove the bloody great hook over the top and stand clear, lads.’

  As the bulldozer moved up, and the huge hook at the end of the chain was pushed over the top of the metal gate, Albert shouted even more frantically.

  ‘The gate’s let into the wall of the house, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Pull the other one, Al, you crook,’ the sergeant shouted back. ‘You’ve got something hidden inside.’

  The bulldozer had gone into reverse and as the chain took up the strain, it was clear that Albert Ponson had been telling the truth. The entire front of the house was moving forward. Seconds later, the roof tilted and then, as the wall fell into the garden, the roof dropped after it.

  When the wall started to shift, Albert had had the sense to race to the back of the bungalow and was now lying under a bed close to a column on top of which two steel girders rested that had previously supported the roof. Above him, the darkened sky began to indicate rain. When the roof’s fall forwards had finally stopped, he crawled out, shocked by the noise, the cement and the concrete dust, and above all by the demise of his dream house. To add to the horror of the situation, several water pipes had broken in the bathrooms and one perverse pipe directly above his head was taking excellent aim at his face. As Albert opened his mouth to scream for help, while trying to disentangle his left leg from some electric cables, he realised he was in acute danger of drowning. Then came the thought that one of those bloody coppers might take it into his head to switch the electricity on in which case he’d be electrocuted as well.

  With a desperate, not to say frantic, effort, Albert pulled his leg free and used it to kick the wires away. Heaving himself out of the now shattered window frame, he crawled through the undergrowth and went to hide in the depths of a large evergreen shrub. Lying there, trying to steady his still-shaking limbs, he suddenly remembered the small fortune locked in the safe under the carpet in the bedroom.

  Screw it. He wasn’t going to crawl back and get it now while the police were around. He’d have to wait until they’d made themselves scarce.

  As it was, he could hear that bloody bulldozer, evidently still with the gate attached by the hook and chain to a large section of the front wall since it seemed to be trying to get rid of these encumbrances and, by the sound of scraping metal, not succeeding.

  Exhausted and stunned at the destruction of his home, Albert Ponson passed out.

  Chapter 20

  In front of what had been the bungalow, the police had been joined by the superintendent who was considering the consequences to his career of what could only be called a total catastrophe.

  ‘You bloody moron,’ he shouted at the chief inspector. ‘I asked you to arrest this Ponson crook, not knock his blasted house to the ground. You’ve almost certainly killed the bastard. You wouldn’t have made a competent parking attendant let alone a kindergarten crossing keeper. The front-page headlines of every paper in the country are going to blazon this little lot out. POLICE TERRORISTS BLOW HOUSE UP and WHO NEEDS TERRORISTS WHEN WE’VE GOT THE SECURITY POLICE? As sure as hell I’ll lose my job. Well, let me tell you this: when I go, you’re going a fucking sight further down.’

  ‘But how were we to know he’d got an armour-plated bungalow? The old bird, his sister, said her son was in there to protect the lad from his father and that she’d heard gunshots. We had to get in.’

  The superintendent looked insanely round.

  ‘Are you telling me she was married to her brother? That’s incest, that is.’

  ‘No, she’s married to a bank manager in Croydon who’s gone off his rocker and tried to kill his son with a carving knife. She said we had to get him out of his uncle’s house.’

  ‘What? Before he killed him too?’ asked the superintendent.

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Instead of which he left you to do it for him by bringing the place down. And where is this Mrs Ponson now?’

  ‘Well, inside too, I suppose.’

  ‘You mean she heard gunshots and her son being killed and –’

&
nbsp; ‘No, sir. Her name is Mrs Wiley. She’s down at Accident and Emergency.’

  ‘Reverse that order of words, Chief Inspector. Emergency and Accident. In fact, cut out the Accident altogether. This was deliberate and you’re responsible. Wait till we’ve an inquest and after that the trial and see what the verdict is.’

  He turned and was about to get as far away as quickly as possible when the chief inspector stopped him.

  ‘Hadn’t you better question Mrs Wiley first, sir?’

  The superintendent turned and tried vainly to remember who Mrs Wiley was. He was feeling even madder now.

  ‘Is she still alive? I thought you said her husband tried to kill her with a carving knife.’

  ‘Not her. Her son. Mr Wiley is a bank manager. He took a carving knife and –’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember now. She brought him up to this wrecked bungalow to have him shot by the bigamist husband she’d married before the bank manager. All right, we’ll go and see her. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a bigamist before.’

  The chief inspector kept his mouth shut. He was wondering if the superintendent had been drinking, and he was wishing he could have a stiff whisky himself.

  Chapter 21

  Waking in London following yet another self-indulgent evening, Horace wasn’t feeling too well, not least because he’d woken to discover that he’d overslept and the tramp steamer had long since left on its voyage.

  After a minimal lunch he finally felt able to leave the hotel and, realising that buying another ticket at the same travel agency might make even the dozy clerk there suspicious, he took a taxi to the most lawless part of London, near Docklands.

  Deciding that he needed to better cover his tracks, he chose the nastiest second-hand clothing shop he could find and bought a shabby raincoat and a pair of thoroughly disreputable boots several sizes too big for him. Using the cover of a public lavatory to change, he stuffed the bottom of some old and grubby trousers he’d had the foresight to bring from his gardener’s shed into them. By the time he emerged Horace was even more unrecognisable as a fugitive bank manager.