Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

I couldn’t get into his pockets — it was too dark and there was too much movement — but somehow I found myself grasping the collar of his jacket, and I pulled it backwards and downwards with both hands, temporarily fastening his arms to his sides. He plunged and kicked and managed to throw my weight off his back, but I held fiercely on to the jacket, which was entangling his arms and driving him frantic.

To get loose he slid right out of the jacket, leaving it in my hands, and before I could do anything he was up from his knees to his feet, and running.

Instead of chasing him I turned towards Bobby, who was rolling on the ground exchanging short jabbing blows and breathless grunts with the man who’d been holding the ladder. Throwing the jacket into the deep shadow against the house wall I went to Bobby’s help, and between the two of us we managed to pin the intruder face down on to the grass, Bobby astride his legs and I with a foot on his neck. Bobby delivered several meaningful blows to the kidneys, designed to hurt.

‘Something to tie him with,’ he said.

I bent down, gripped the collar of that jacket also, and pulled it as before backwards over the burglar’s shoulders, pinning his arms, and then yanking it right off, I took my foot off the neck and said to Bobby, ‘That’s enough.’

‘What? Don’t be stupid.’

The intruder rolled under him still full of fight. Bobby punched him wickedly on the ear and again in the small of his back.

I shoved a hand into an inside pocket of the jacket and drew out a wallet.

‘See,’ I said to Bobby, pushing it under his nose. He shook his head, ignoring it, not wanting to be deterred.

I put the wallet back into the jacket and threw that jacket too into the shadows, and for a second watched Bobby and the now shirt-sleeved intruder tearing at each other and punching again, half standing, half falling, the one trying to cling on and hit, the other to escape.

Bobby was tall and strong and angry at having his house attacked, and no doubt erupting also with the suppressed and helpless fury of the past traumatic days: in any case he was hitting his adversary with tangible hatred and very hard, and I thought with spurting sudden alarm that it was too much, he was beating the man viciously and murderously and not merely capturing a burglar.

I caught Bobby’s raised wrist and pulled his bunched fist backwards, upsetting his balance, and his victim twisted out of his grasp and half fell on his knees, coughing, retching, clutching his stomach.

Bobby shouted ‘You bugger’ bitterly and hit me instead, and the intruder got unsteadily to his feet and staggered towards the gate.

Bobby tried to follow and when I grasped at him to stop him he jabbed his fist solidly into my ribs, calling me a bloody Fielding, a bloody sod, a fucking bastard.

‘Bobby... Let him go.’

I got a frightful cuff on the head and another clout in the ribs along with some more obscene opinions of my character and ancestors, and he didn’t calm down, he kicked my shin and shoved me off him, tearing himself away with another direct hit to my head which rattled my teeth.

I caught him again in a couple of strides and he swung at me, swearing and increasingly violent, and I said to him, ‘For God’s sake, Bobby...’ and just tried to hang on to his lethal fists and parry them and survive until the fireball had spent itself.

The generations were all there in his intent face: Allardecks and Fieldings fighting with guns and swords and bare knuckles in malice and perpetuity. He had transferred the intruder-born fury on to the older enemy and all rational restraints had vanished. It was me, his blood’s foe, that he was at that point trying to smash, I the focus of his anger and fear and despair.

Locked in this futile archaic struggle we traversed the lawn all the way to the gate; and it was there, when I was wedged against the heavy post and finally in serious trouble, that the killing rage went out of his hands from one second to the next, and he let them fall, the passion dying, the manic strength draining away.

He gave me a blank look, his eyes like glass reflecting the moonlight, and he said ‘Bastard’, but without much force, and he turned and walked away along the path to the yard.

I said ‘God Almighty’ aloud, and took a few deep breaths of rueful and shaky relief, standing for a while to let my hammering heart settle before shoving off the gatepost to go and fetch the burglars’ coats. Bobby’s fists hadn’t had the same weight as the hurdlers’ hooves, but I could well have done without them. Heigh ho, I thought, in about twelve hours I would ride three tricky jumpers at Newbury.

The coats lay where I had thrown them, in the angle of the empty flower bed and the brick wall of the house. I picked them up and stood there looking at the silvery ladder which had reached high up the wall, and then at the wall itself, which stretched in that section right to the roof, smooth and unbroken.

No windows.

Why would burglars try to break into a house at a point where there were no windows?

I frowned, tipping my head back, looking upwards. Beyond the line of the roof, above it, rising like a silhouette against the night sky, there was a sturdy brick chimney, surmounted by a pair of antique pots. It was, I worked out, the chimney from the fireplace in the drawing room. The fireplace was right through the wall from where I stood.

Irresolutely I looked from the ladder to the chimney pots and shivered in the wind. Then, shrugging, I put the jackets back into the shadow, propped the ladder up against the eaves, rooted its feet firmly in the flower bed, and climbed.

The ladder was aluminium, made in telescopic sections. I hoped none of them would collapse.

I didn’t much like heights. Halfway up I regretted the whole enterprise. What on earth was I doing climbing an unsteady ladder in the dark? I could fall and hurt myself and not be able to race. It was madness, the whole thing. Crazy.

I reached the roof. The top of the ladder extended beyond that, four or five more rungs going right up to the chimney. On the tiles of the roof lay an opened tool-kit, a sort of cloth roll with spanners, screwdrivers, pliers and so on, all held in stitched pockets. Beside it lay a coil of what looked like dark cord, with one end leading upwards to a bracket on the chimney.

I looked more closely at the chimney and almost laughed. One takes so many things for granted, sees certain objects day by day and never consciously sees them at all. Fixed to the chimney was the bracket and mounted on the bracket were the two terminals of the telephone wires leading to Bobby’s house. I had seen them a hundred times and never noticed they were fixed to the chimney.

The wire itself stretched away into darkness, going across the telephone pole out on the road; the old above-ground wiring system of all but modern housing.

Attached to the telephone bracket, at the end of the dark cord leading from the coil, there appeared to be a small square object about the size of a sugar cube, with a thin rod about the length of a finger extending downwards. I stretched out a hand precariously to touch it and found it wobbled as if only half attached.

The moon seemed to be going down just when I needed it most. I fumbled around the small cube and came to what felt like a half-undone screw. I couldn’t see it, but it turned easily anti-clockwise and in a few moments slipped out into my hand.

The cube and the rod fell straight off the bracket, and I would have lost them in the night if it hadn’t been for the coil of stiff cord attached to them. Some of the cord unwound before I caught it, but not a great deal, and I put the coil, the cube and the rod on to the row of tools and rolled up the canvas kit and fastened it with its buckle.