Ken McClure: Deception

Three minutes passed without a shot being fired so Steven decided it was time to check on the opposition’s presence. He rolled over three times in quick succession to the other side of the door opening and a bullet thudded into the door frame, sending splinters up into the air and telling him what he wanted to know. His new vantage point however, gave him sight of a small explosion which resulted in several trees catching fire about a hundred metres away. This was significant because the trees were on Crawhill Farm. The ‘spread’ of the fire had started.

Steven moved back a little: the last bullet had come dangerously close. It had missed him but he had felt it pass close to his head. He became aware of a diesel engine starting up and being revved hard. It sounded very near and his pulse rate rose as he realised that this could be a trump card for the opposition. His gun would be of little use against the bulldozer, he’d noticed in the yard. It was now coming towards them. He moved back a little and signalled that the women move as far back as they could. They backed into the tunnel in the sacks because there was nowhere else to go.

The yellow monster lumbered into view, its tracks churning up the earth as Steven looked desperately for an angle to get off a shot at its driver. It was impossible. The shovel of the vehicle was being held at a height that obscured the driver from view. Steven was expecting the vehicle to come straight into the barn and for Childs and Leadbetter to alight with guns blazing but it didn’t happen that way. Instead it halted outside the front doors and a few moments later he saw the barn doors start to close. He loosed off a shot at them but it was no more than a gesture. The wood was too thick to allow a bullet from a hand gun to penetrate.

The barn doors closed completely and the bulldozer outside revved up before moving in to nudge up against them. The engine died and Steven faced the fact that he and the women were now trapped inside. Childs and Leadbetter were back to pursuing their original plan. The barn was going to go up in flames, but now with three people inside instead of just Trish Rafferty. It would all be just a tragic accident, resulting from the riot at Peat Ridge.

There was no chance of getting out through the front door so Steven searched desperately for other options. He turned to Trish and asked, ‘You said that Tom didn’t repair this barn as he’d agreed to do, what’s wrong with it? Where are the weak spots?’

Trish looked as if she was living a nightmare, as indeed she was. ‘It was rotten along the bottom of the back wall,’ she said. ‘But ... they fixed it when they found out that Tom hadn’t.’

Steven’s hopes were dashed.

‘After I told them what had been going on, the authorities inspected it and then sent men to stop the rats getting in,’ said Trish. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’

Steven was reluctant to voice the affirmative that he felt. ‘No we’re not,’ he said, not entirely convincing himself, let alone Trish. ‘Did they completely renovate the barn?’ he asked.

‘No, they just plugged the gaps in the back wall.’

‘So maybe there’s a weakness higher up,’ said Steven, thinking out loud. He started to fight his way up through the mountain of sacks by throwing them one at a time behind him where he asked Trish and Eve to move them out of the way. By the time he had reached the narrow gap between the top of the sacks and the apex of the barn roof, he was finding the heat almost unbearable and the air foul but he was now committed to this course of action. There wasn’t going to be time to think of another one.

He turned and shouted back to the women that he was going to try to reach the back wall by crawling along the narrow tunnel formed by the ridge of the roof.

‘Be careful!’ yelled Eve before he started his wriggle along the top of the sack pile. The space was so narrow that he had to keep his arms stretched out in front of him all the time: there was no room to withdraw them.

There came a point when the space between the sacks and the roof became so narrow that he had to force himself through it, grazing his stomach on the sack stitching and raking his back along the roof ridge beam. But the pain was secondary to the knowledge that it would now be impossible to turn back. There was just no room to turn round and he couldn’t force himself backwards with the same strength as he could forwards. He was now committed to getting out... or dying in the attempt. There would be no in-between.

Steven reached the apex of the back wall where it met the roof and felt around it for any sign of weakness. It seemed depressingly solid. It took great effort but he managed to move one sack to his left back into the space behind him so that he could move a little to the side in order to test another joint. The heat and the bad air was now joined in tormenting him by sweat running into his eyes from the effort he was expending. The beam joints still seemed secure but when he hit his fist off a roof panel in giving vent to his frustration, he felt a weakness in it. He tried again and found a definite looseness where the fixing nails had rusted away. Christ! If only he had more room to manoeuvre.

Steven fought to make more space for himself to work in but the effort of moving sacks in such a confined space was bringing him dangerously close to complete exhaustion. He managed to give himself the thickness of one more sack by gripping the sack below his belly and rolling round on to his back so that he took the place of the sack. He then forced the sack — now on top of him — back into the space he had just crawled along. After all, he would not be going back that way.

After taking a few moments to recover he brought up his knees in an agonising contortion and managed to get the soles of his feet against the suspect roof panel. He pushed with all his might and it split away from its fixing nails to move upwards but only for about half a metre before it stopped.

Steven rested for a moment, taking pleasure in the fact that light was coming in and he could breathe in the outside air, although it was a long way from being fresh as the whole world, as far as he could see, was covered in thick smoke. He could now see that the roof panel had jammed because of a rusty metal fixing plate that was still holding fast despite its condition. There was no time for subtle strategy. The sound of one more explosion in the Blackbridge air was hardly going to matter any more. He pulled out his gun from the holster and fired twice at the plate. It flew off and the roof panel was now free to rise.

Steven replaced the gun in its holster and pulled himself up through the gap and out on to the roof of the barn where he paused to look around him although he realised that there couldn’t be much time left before Childs and Leadbetter set fire to the barn. He could see that several fires had broken out on Crawhill, all looking as if they had been the result of fire spreading from Peat Ridge.

He kept himself pressed flat against the roof as he tried to see where Childs and Leadbetter might be and finally caught sight of one of them — he couldn’t tell which one — about a hundred metres away and very near to the road between Peat Ridge and Crawhill.

He kept himself on the other side of the barn roof as he made his way up to the front of the building and looked down over the edge at the bulldozer, parked hard up against the front doors. For him this was now an advantage. The drop to earth would be daunting but a drop down on to the roof of the ‘dozer’s cab presented no real problem at all, providing that he wasn’t being lined up in a gun sight as he contemplated it.

Steven could see no sign of the opposition watching the barn and committed himself to rolling off the roof to hang by his fingers for a moment before dropping down on to the roof of the cab. It was then a simple enough manoeuvre to swing his body down into the cab to begin figuring out how to start up the vehicle. The dangling ignition key was a welcome sight. He turned it to the right and hit the green button with the flat of his hand. The engine roared into life and Steven looked skywards briefly in a gesture of thanks. He knew that he might only have seconds to do what he had to do. He crunched the gear stick into reverse and almost went through the cab’s screen as the vehicle lurched backwards.