‘Ten seconds!’ yelled Mrs Thatcher, and we all hurried towards the door. The other members of the team had already made their way out, and as the door closed and the lock clunked, Mrs Thatcher and the Compliance Officers compared stopwatches. We had made it with only three seconds to spare.
‘Well done, everyone,’ I said, trying to inject a sense of cheeriness into the proceedings, but only Stanley Baldwin and Mrs Thatcher were standing beside me. The others had instead congregated around the observers outside, and in particular Norman and Victor Mallett, presumably to question them on how they let a rabbit slip past them and into the library in the first place, and then figuring out the next move. Already I could see Norman’s neck turning a nasty shade of purple, and several of the villagers directed frosty glances in my direction.
I looked around to see whether Connie was still about and caught sight of her as she leapt in a series of energetic bounds down the street towards the Leominster road, her library book in one hand and a mobile phone clamped to her ear in the other.
She hadn’t recognised me at all.
‘Why was there a rabbit in the village?’ asked Mrs Thatcher, following my gaze.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, it was a good Blitz, Peter,’ she said, then hurriedly moved away as she saw Victor and Norman Mallett approach.
‘Now then,’ said Norman in the lofty tones of someone who believes, despite bountiful evidence to the contrary, that they have the moral high ground, ‘let’s have a little chat about whether bunnies are welcome in the library, shall we?’
But he didn’t get to vent his anger. At that precise moment Mr Beeton gave out a quiet moan and collapsed in a heap. We called an ambulance while Lloyd George and Mrs Thatcher took turns in giving him CPR, but to no avail. We found out later he suffered a heart attack, which was the first and last time I’d had a Code 2-22: ‘Unavoidable death while Librarying’.
‘I told you he looked unwell,’ said Stanley Baldwin.
Toast & TwoLegsGood
RabCoT or the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce was originally named the ‘Rabbit Crime Taskforce’, but that was deemed too aggressive, so was quietly renamed, much to Mr Smethwick’s annoyance. He had wanted the original name to send a clear message that Cunicular Criminality would not be tolerated.
‘So Mr Beeton just keeled over?’ asked Pippa at breakfast on Monday morning. She’d been out all day and the night before and I hadn’t heard her come in, but that wasn’t unusual. I like to turn in early in order to read, and her bedroom was on the ground floor and she could totally look after herself these days. Sometimes it’s better not to know when daughters don’t come home for the night. She was twenty, but even so, still best not to know.
‘Yup,’ I said, ‘went down like a ninepin. Mind you, he was eighty-eight, so it’s not like it wasn’t expected.’
I looked out of the kitchen window at Hemlock Towers opposite, where up until Saturday Mr Beeton had been a long-term resident. We lived in what had once been the stables to the old house, but unlike the Towers, it had been modernised over the years and was considerably more comfortable.
‘I wonder who will take it over?’ I mused – the impressively turreted building was the jewel in Much Hemlock’s not inconsiderable collection of fine buildings. Parts of it dated back to the fourteenth century and some say that the pockmarks in the façade were the result of erratic musket-fire during the Civil War. The marksmanship of parliamentary forces, I figured, was little better than that of Star Wars stormtroopers.
‘Someone like Mr Beeton, I should imagine,’ said Pippa, ‘lots of money, an imperviousness to cold.’
‘… and insanely suspicious of modern plumbing,’ I added, ‘with a fondness for mice and rising damp.’
Pippa smiled and handed me a slice of toast with marmalade before pouring herself another coffee.
‘I was over at Toby’s yesterday evening,’ she said.
‘Ah.’
My relationship with the Malletts, always strained, had become immeasurably more complex since Toby Mallett, Victor’s youngest, had been seeing Pippa on a regular basis. Despite his somewhat difficult family, Toby was handsome and generally well mannered, but I’d never entirely warmed to him. He’d professed vaguely liberal views, but I felt that was for Pip’s benefit, as I knew for a fact his opinions were really more in tune with his father’s. When the village put on a production of The Sound of Music, it was Toby who volunteered most enthusiastically to play Rolf. He told everyone it was so he could sing ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ opposite Pippa’s Liesl, but when in a less generous frame of mind I thought it was probably because he got a free pass to dress up as a Nazi.
My own feelings aside, she could do a lot worse. She had done a lot worse. But there was Daughter Rule Number Seven to consider: don’t have opinions over boyfriends unless expressly asked, and then – well, play it safe and sit on the fence.
‘Did you get any feedback over Mr Beeton’s death?’ I asked.
‘No one blamed you,’ she said, as the Malletts would often use Pippa as a conduit of information in my direction. ‘He’d done the Blitz at least fifteen times and understood the risks of high-impact Librarying.’
‘I hope everyone else thinks the same.’
‘Aside from us, Mr Beeton wasn’t particularly well liked,’ observed Pippa. ‘D’you remember when he scandalised the village by publicly announcing: “the poor aren’t so bad”?’
‘I liked him for that,’ I said, chuckling at the memory.
‘So did I. But he’ll be forgotten in a couple of weeks. The village takes its grudges seriously. Remember when old Granny Watkins kicked the bucket? I’ll swear most people in the church were only there to personally confirm she was dead.’
Pippa moved herself to the kitchen table and took a sip of coffee.
‘The Malletts had a few choice words over what they saw as your overly generous treatment of the rabbit,’ she added, ‘and within earshot of me so they wanted it repeated.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, having expected something like this would happen.
‘Yes. Something along the lines of how they generally tolerated your left-wing views, but if you were going to start being “troublesomely ambivalent” towards undesirables there might be consequences.’
I turned from the window to face her.
‘Would you describe me as left-wing, Pip?’
I considered myself centrist, to be honest. Apolitical, in fact. I had no time for it.
‘Compared to the rest of the village,’ she said with a smile, ‘I’d say you’re almost Marxist.’
Much Hemlock had always been a hotbed of right-wing sentiment, something that had strong historical precedent: the village had the dubious distinction of having convicted and burned more witches than any other English town in history. Thirty-one, all told, right up until a dark night in 1568 when they burned a real one by accident, and all her accusers came out in unsightly black pustules and died hideously painful deaths within forty-eight hours. Zephaniah Mallett had been the magistrate during the trials, but in a dark day for evolution he’d had children before dying so four centuries later Victor and Norman were very much in existence. They liked to keep family traditions alive, even if witch-burning was currently off limits.