From the first appalling mouthful the old lady wondered what the hell had hit her. It wasn’t simply that the stuff tasted foul, so foul that she had immediately taken another shot to try to wash her mouth out, it was also extremely potent. Having choked down a second mouthful Mrs de Frackas looked at the bottle with downright disbelief. It was impossible to suppose that anyone had seriously distilled the stuff for human consumption, and for a moment or two she considered the awful possibility that Wilt had, for some diabolical reason of his own, laid up a binful of undiluted paint stripper. It didn’t seem likely somehow, but then again what she had just swallowed hadn’t seemed likely either. It had seared its way down her gullet with all the virulence of a powerful toilet-cleaner going to work on a neglected U-bend. Mrs de Frackas examined the label and felt reassured. The muck proclaimed itself ‘Lager’, and while the title was in blatant disregard of the facts, whatever the bottle contained was meant to be drunk. The old lady took another mouthful and instantly forgot her rheumatism. It was impossible to concentrate on two ailments simultaneously.
By the time she had finished the bottle she had difficulty concentrating on anything. The world had suddenly become a delightful place and all it needed to make it even better was more of the same. She swayed back to the wine store and selected a second bottle and was in the process of unscrewing the top when the thing exploded. Doused with beer and holding the neck of the bottle Mrs de Frackas was about to try a third when she caught sight of several larger bottles in the bottom rack. She pulled one out and saw that it had once contained champagne. What it contained now she couldn’t imagine but at least it seemed safer to open and less likely to fragment than the beer bottles. She took two bottles out into the cellar and tried to uncork them. It was easier said than done. Wilt had fastened the corks down with Sellotape and what looked like the remnants of a wire coathanger.
‘Need some pliers,’ she muttered as the quads gathered round with interest.
‘That’s Daddy’s best,’ said Josephine. ‘He wouldn’t like it if you drank it.’
‘No dear, I daresay he wouldn’t,’ said the old lady with a belch that suggested her stomach was of the same opinion.
‘He calls it his four-star BB,’ said Penelope. ‘But Mummy says it ought to be called peepee.’
‘Does she?’ said Mrs de Frackas with mounting disgust.
‘That’s because he has to get up in the night when he’s drunk it.’
Mrs de Frackas relaxed. ‘We wouldn’t want to do anything that would upset your father,’ she said, ‘and anyway, champagne needs to be chilled.’
She went back to the bins, returned with two opened bottles that had proved less explosive than the others, and sat down again. The quads were gathered round the freezer but the old lady was too busy to care what they were doing. By the time she had finished the third bottle the Wilt quads were octuplets in her eyes and she was having difficulty focusing. In any case she had begun to understand what Eva had meant about peepee. Wilt’s homebrew was making its presence felt. Mrs de Frackas got up, fell over and finally crawled up the steps to the door. The damned thing was locked.
‘Let me out,’ she shouted, and banged on the door. ‘Let me out this inshtant.’
‘What you want?’ demanded Baggish.
‘Never you mind what I want. Itsh what I need that matters and thatsh no concern of yours.’
‘Then you stay where you are.’
‘I shan’t be reshponshible for what happens if I do,’ said Mrs de Frackas.
‘What you mean?’
‘Young man, there are shome things better left unshaid and I don’t intend dishcushing them with you.’
Through the door the two terrorists could be heard struggling with slurred English sentences. ‘Things better left unshed’ had them baffled, while ‘not be reshponshible for what happens’ sounded faintly ominous, and they had already been alarmed by several popping noises and the crunch of glass from the cellar.
‘We want to know what happens if we don’t let you out,’ said Chinanda finally.
Mrs de Frackas was in no doubt. ‘I shall almosht shertainly burst,’ she yelled.
‘You what?’
‘Burst, burst, burst. Like a bomb,’ screamed the old lady, now convinced she was in the terminal stage of diuresis. A muttered conversation took place in the kitchen.
‘You come out with your hands up,’ Chinanda ordered, and unlocked the door before backing away into the hall and aiming his automatic. But Mrs de Frackas was no longer in a condition to obey. She was trying to reach one of several door-knobs and missing. From the bottom of the steps the quads watched in fascination. They were used to Wilt’s occasional bouts of booziness but they had never seen anyone paralytically drunk before.
‘For heaven’s shake shomeone open the door,’ Mrs de Frackas burbled.
‘I will,’ squealed Samantha and a rush of competing girls fought their way over the old lady for the privilege. By the time Penelope had won and the quads had cascaded over her into the kitchen the old lady had lost all interest in toilets. She lay across the threshold and, raising her head with difficulty, delivered her verdict on the quads.
‘Do me a favour, shomeone, and shoot the little shits,’ she gurgled before passing out. The terrorists didn’t hear her. They knew now what she had meant about a bomb. Two devastating explosions came from the cellar and the air was filled with frozen peas and broad beans. In the freezer Wilt’s BB had finally burst.
19
Eva had been busy too. She had spent part of the morning on the phone to Mr Gosdyke and the rest arguing with Mr Symper, the local representative of the League of Personal Liberties. He was a very earnest and concerned young man, and in the normal course of events, would have been dismayed at the outrageous behaviour of the police in putting at risk the lives of a senior citizen and four impressionable children by refusing to meet the legitimate demands of the freedom fighters besieged in Number 9 Willington Road. Instead, Eva’s treatment at the hands of the police had put Symper in the extremely uncomfortable position of having to look at the problem from her point of view.
‘I do understand the case you’re making, Mrs Wilt,’ he said, forced by her bruised appearance to subdue his bias in favour of radical foreigners, ‘but you must admit you are free.’
‘Not to enter my own house. I am not at liberty to do that. The police won’t let me.’
‘Now if you want us to take up your case against the police for infringing your liberty by holding you in custody, we’ll …’
Eva didn’t. ‘I want to enter my own home.’
‘I do sympathize with you, but you see our organization aims to protect the individual from the infringement of her personal liberty by the police, and in your case …’
‘They won’t let me go home,’ said Eva. ‘If that isn’t infringing my personal liberty I don’t know what is.’
‘Yes, well I do see that.’
‘Then do something about it.’
‘I don’t really know what I can do about it,’ said Mr Symper.
‘You knew what to do when the police stopped a container truck of deep-frozen Bangladeshis outside Dover,’ said Betty. ‘You organized a protest rally and …’
‘That was quite different,’ said Mr Symper, bridling. ‘The Customs officials had no right to insist that the refrigeration unit be turned on. They were suffering from acute frostbite. And besides, they were in transit.’
‘They shouldn’t have labelled themselves cod fillets, and anyhow you argued that they were simply coming to join their families in Britain.’
‘They were in transit to their families.’
‘And so is Eva, or should be,’ said Betty. ‘If anyone has a right to join her family it’s Eva.’
‘I suppose we could apply for a court order,’ said Mr Symper, sighing for less domestic issues. ‘That would be the best way.’
‘It wouldn’t,’ said Eva, ‘it would be slowest. I am going home now and you are
coming with me.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mr Symper, whose concern didn’t extend to becoming a hostage himself.
‘You heard me,’ said Eva, and loomed over him with a ferocity that put in question his ardent feminism, but before he could make a plea for his own personal liberty he was being hustled out of the house. A crowd of reporters had gathered there.
‘Mrs Wilt,’ said a man from the Snap, ‘our readers would like to hear how it feels as the mother of quads to know that your loved ones are being held hostage.’
Eva’s eyes bulged in her head. ‘Feel?’ she asked. ‘You want to know how I feel?’
‘That’s right,’ said the man, licking his ballpen, ‘human interest –’
He got no further. Eva’s feelings had passed beyond the stage of words or human interest. Only actions could express them. Her hand came up, descended in a karate chop and as he fell her knee caught him in the stomach.
‘That’s how it feels,’ said Eva as he rolled into a foetal position on the flowerbed. ‘Tell your readers that.’ And she marched the now thoroughly cowed Mr Symper to his car and pushed him in.
‘I am going home to my children,’ she told the other reporters. ‘Mr Symper of the League of Personal Liberties is accompanying me and my solicitor is waiting for us.’
And without another word she got into the driver’s seat. Ten minutes later, followed by a small convoy of press cars, they reached the road block in Farringdon Avenue to find Mr Gosdyke arguing ineffectually with the police sergeant.
‘I’m afraid it’s no use, Mrs Wilt. The police have orders to let no one through.’
Eva snorted. ‘This is a free country,’ she said, dragging Mr Symper out of the car with a grip that contradicted her statement. ‘If anyone tries to stop me from going home we will take the matter to the courts, to the Ombudsman and to Parliament. Come along, Mr Gosdyke.’
‘Now hold it, lady,’ said the sergeant, ‘my orders …’
‘I’ve taken your number,’ said Eva, ‘and I shall sue you personally for denying me free access to my children.’
And pushing the unwilling Mr Symper before her she marched through the gap in the barbed wire, followed cautiously by Mr Gosdyke. Behind them a cheer went up from the crowd of reporters. For a moment the sergeant was too stunned to react and by the time he reached for his walkie-talkie the trio had turned the corner into Willington Road. They were stopped half-way down by two armed SGS men.
‘You’ve no right to be here,’ one of them shouted. ‘Don’t you know there’s a siege on?’
‘Yes,’ said Eva, ‘which is why we’re here. I’m Mrs Wilt, this is Mr Symper of the League of Personal Liberties and Mr Gosdyke is here to handle negotiations. Now kindly take us to …’
‘I don’t know anything about this,’ said the soldier. ‘All I know is that we’ve got orders to shoot …’
‘Then shoot me,’ said Eva defiantly, ‘and see where that gets you.’
The SGS man hesitated. Shooting mothers wasn’t included in Queen’s Rules and Regulations, and Mr Gosdyke looked too respectable to be a terrorist.
‘All right, come this way,’ he said, and escorted them into Mrs de Frackas’ house to be greeted abusively by Inspector Flint.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he yelled. ‘I thought I gave orders for you to stay away.’
Eva pushed Mr Gosdyke forward. ‘Tell him,’ she said.
Mr Gosdyke cleared his throat and looked uncomfortably round the room. ‘As Mrs Wilt’s legal representative,’ he said, ‘I have come to inform you that she demands to join her family. Now to the best of my knowledge there is nothing in law to prevent her from entering her own home.’
Inspector Flint goggled at him. ‘Nothing?’ he spluttered.
‘Nothing in law,’ said Mr Gosdyke.
‘Bugger the law,’ shouted Flint. ‘You think those sods in there give a tuppenny fuck for the law?’
Mr Gosdyke conceded the point.
‘Right,’ continued Flint, ‘so there’s a houseful of armed terrorists who’ll blow the heads off her four blasted daughters if anyone so much as goes near the place. That’s all. Can’t you get that into her thick skull?’
‘No,’ said Mr Gosdyke bluntly.
The Inspector sagged into a chair and looked balefully at Eva. ‘Mrs Wilt,’ he said, ‘tell me something. You don’t by any chance happen to belong to some suicidal religious cult, do you? No? I just wondered. In that case let me explain the situation to you in simple four-letter words that even you will understand. Inside your house there are –’
‘I know all that,’ said Eva, ‘I’ve heard it over and over again and I don’t care. I demand the right to enter my own home.’
‘I see. And I suppose you intend walking up to the front door and ringing the bell?’
‘I don’t,’ said Eva, ‘I intend to be dropped in.’
‘Dropped in?’ said Flint with a gleam of incredulous hope in his eyes. ‘Did you really say “dropped in”?’
‘By helicopter,’ explained Eva, ‘the same way you dropped that telephone in to Henry last night.’
The Inspector held his head in his hands and tried to find words.
‘And it’s no use your saying you can’t,’ continued Eva, ‘because I’ve seen it done on telly. I wear a harness and the helicopter …’
‘Oh my God,’ said Flint, closing his eyes to shut out this appalling vision. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I can,’ said Eva.
‘Mrs Wilt, if, and I repeat if, you were to enter the house by the means you have described, will you be good enough to tell me how you think it would help your four daughters?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘But I do mind, I mind very much. In fact I’ll go so far as to say that I mind what happens to your children rather more than you appear to and …’
‘Then why aren’t you doing something about it? And don’t say you are, because you aren’t. You’re sitting in here with all this transistor stuff listening to them being tortured and you like it.’
‘Like it? Like it?’ yelled the Inspector.
‘Yes, like it,’ Eva yelled back. ‘It gives you a feeling of importance and what’s more you’ve got a dirty mind. You enjoyed listening to Henry in bed with that woman and don’t say you didn’t.’
Inspector Flint couldn’t. Words failed him. The only ones that sprang to mind were obscene and almost certain to lead to an action for slander. Trust this bloody woman to bring her solicitor and the sod from the Personal Liberties mob with her. He rose from his chair and stumbled through to the toy-room, slamming the door behind him. Professor Maerlis, Dr Felden and the Major were sitting watching Wilt pass the time by idly examining his glans penis for signs of incipient gangrene on the television screen. Flint switched the unnerving image off.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he mouthed, ‘but that bloody Mrs Wilt is demanding that we use the helicopter to swing her through the attic window on the end of a rope so she can join her fucking family.’
‘I hope you’re not going to allow it,’ said Dr Felden. ‘After what she threatened to do to her husband last night I hardly think it’s advisable.’
‘Don’t tempt me,’ said Flint. ‘If I thought I could sit here and watch her tear the little shit limb from limb …’ He broke off to savour the thought.
‘Damned plucky little woman,’ said the Major. ‘Blowed if I’d choose to swing into that house on the end of a rope. Well, not without a lot of covering fire anyhow. Still, there’s something to be said for it.’
‘What?’ said Flint, wondering how the hell anyone could call Mrs Wilt a little woman.
‘Diversionary tactics, old man. Can’t think of anything more likely to unnerve the buggers than the sight of that woman dangling from a helicopter. Know it would scare the pants off me.’
‘I daresay. But since that doesn’t happen to be the purpose of the exercise I’d like some more constructive suggestion.’
>
From the other room Eva could be heard shouting that she’d send a telegram to the Queen if she wasn’t allowed to join her family.
‘That’s all we need,’ said Flint. ‘We’ve got the press baying for blood and there hasn’t been a decent mass suicide for months. She’ll hit the headlines.’
‘Certainly hit that window with a hell of a bang,’ said the Major practically. ‘Then we could rush the sods and –’
‘No! Definitely no,’ shouted Flint and dashed into the Communications Centre. ‘All right, Mrs Wilt, I am going to try to persuade the two terrorists holding your daughters to allow you to join them. If they refuse that’s their business. I can’t do more.’
He turned to the sergeant on the switchboard. ‘Get the two wogs on the phone and let me know when they’ve finished their Fascist Pig Overture.’
Mr Symper felt called upon to protest. ‘I really do think these racialist remarks are quite unnecessary,’ he said. ‘In fact they are illegal. To call foreigners wogs –’
‘I’m not calling foreigners wogs. I’m calling two fucking murderers wogs, and don’t tell me I shouldn’t call them murderers either,’ said Flint as Mr Symper tried to interject. ‘A murderer is a murderer is a murderer and I’ve had about as much as I can take.’
So, it seemed, had the two terrorists. There was no preliminary tirade of abuse. ‘What do you want?’ Chinanda asked.
Flint took the phone. ‘I have a proposal to make,’ he said. ‘Mrs Wilt, the mother of the four children you are holding, has volunteered to come in to look after them. She is unarmed and is prepared to meet any conditions you may choose to make.’
‘Say that again,’ said Chinanda. The Inspector repeated the message.
‘Any conditions?’ said Chinanda incredulously.
‘Any. You name them, she’ll meet them,’ said Flint looking at Eva, who nodded.