Broken Homes

easier for me and Lesley to clear the area.
    I glared at Max.
    ‘We’re all going out the front,’ I hissed. ‘But if you give me any aggro I’ll just leave you here. Understand?’
    Max nodded, his eyes wide with fear. I was really tempted to smack him in the face again, but common sense prevailed.
    ‘One,’ called Lesley. ‘Two . . .’
    A ball of fire the size of my fist ripped through the air over my head and curved away to explode against a ceiling joint.
    ‘Fuck it!’ yelled Lesley. ‘Go, go, go.’
    So we went, went, went. I kept my eyes on the sunlit farmyard and, hauling Max behind me, I lurched to my feet and ran for it. Outside, the sunlight blinded me but I kept going until I bounced painfully off the Range Rover. I turned as Lesley, pushing Barry ahead of her, caught up with us.
    The roof blew off the top of the barn. It didn’t explode. It lifted, almost intact, ten metres into the air before crashing back down and breaking its back. Grey slate tiles cascaded off the slopes and crackled as they hit the ground.
    We manhandled Max and Barry around the other side of the Range Rover and pushed them onto their faces in the mud. We didn’t have our cuffs, so we made them put their hands on their heads and hoped they weren’t stupid enough to move. Crouching, I took a careful peek over the bonnet just in time to see the roof of the barn collapse in on itself.
    It went strangely quiet as a wave of brown brick dust rolled out across the farmyard, starting to flatten out as it reached the Range Rover. A solitary brick, falling from who knows how high up, thudded belatedly onto the ground.
    I heard tentative birdsong beginning again, and the wind rustling in the tops of the hedgerow.
    ‘Do you think we should . . .’ I nodded in the direction of the barn.
    ‘Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘From a purely operational point of view I believe that would be a really fucking bad idea.’
    I noticed then that Nightingale’s Jag, which I swore I’d heard pull up in front of the barn was nowhere to be seen.
    I felt a tremor through the soles of my shoes.
    A crack. And then the unmistakable sound of breaking sheet glass made me crane my neck to get a view of the bungalow. Left of the backdoor, where I judged the kitchen to be, a picture window had shattered. Chunks of glass fell outwards into the yard. Even as I watched, whorls of frost spread out from the empty frame, the surrounding pebble-dash cracking and flaking and popping off to expose the red brick underneath. Probably improving the value of the house, I thought.
    A whimper caused me to check on our prisoners. I finally realised that we were missing one, the guy whose nose I’d broken with his own shotgun. I told Lesley.
    ‘I know,’ she said.
    ‘Do you think we should go look for him?’
    There was a series of thuds from inside the bungalow, then a crash as an old-fashioned white-enamelled gas cooker exited via the window and cartwheeled jangling across the yard.
    ‘Not just at the moment,’ said Lesley.
    A blue 15kg Calor Gas Bottle fell out of the sky, bounced once off the ground in front of the bungalow and came down again with a loud boing sound.
    Me and Lesley hunched down and tried to make sure that every bit of our bodies had some Range Rover between them and the gas bottle.
    I was just about to suggest that it might be empty, when it blew up – something that Frank Caffrey swears shouldn’t happen spontaneously under any circumstances.
    I managed to bang my head against the wheel arch in startlement, the Range Rover’s windows cracked and a chunk of blue metal casing whirred over my head, over the fence, around the yard and off into the field beyond.
    I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player. The ground trembled again, and what was left of the Range Rover’s windows blew out and showered us with crystal fragments – something I’d always thought couldn’t happen with safety glass.
    There was a rapid series of solid thuds like a boxer would make taking out his frustration on a punch bag.
    Then silence and then Varvara Sidorovna said, ‘Enough, enough, I surrender.’
    I risked a look. She was squatting on her heels in the middle of the farmyard, her face cast down and her hands raised palms forward. Her natty suit had lost an arm and the pale pink blouse underneath was torn and bloodied.
    We stood up for a better look, and saw that the bungalow had been cut in two as if someone had driven