Chapter 16

Next morning, around 10 a.m., the doorbell rang, and Carol answered, careful to keep the door on the chain. She greeted the man who stood at the door.

“Yes, sir?”

“Mr Robertson, please. Are you one of the ladies that were with him?”

“With him, where?”

“On his trip to Scarborough.”

“No sir. I am the housekeeper. Please wait while I ask Mr Robertson if he wishes to speak with you.”

She closed the door in his face, picked up the house phone and dialed the office. Reg answered.

“Mr Robertson, there is a stranger at the door asking for you.”

“I see. Did he give his name?”

“No, sir.”

“Then go back to the door, please, ask him his name and his business with me.”

She returned to the door and opened it a little once more.

“Sir, my master wishes to know your name and your business with him.”

“Tell him, ‘John Brown, and the business has to do with drugs’.”

“Thank you. Please wait, sir.” She shut the door again, and went to fetch Reginald.

Reg came to the door in person this time, and opened it slightly, keeping his body out of direct line of sight in case a weapon might be used against him.

“Mr Brown? Are you delivering a question or a message?”

“Both, in a way. Did you travel in a private rail carriage the other day? If so, my employers are willing to do a trade for some drugs.”

“And what drugs are you offering to trade for?”

“No, you have it the wrong way round. A trade for drugs that YOU have.”

“I see. Most unusual. What sort of trade are you suggesting?”

“Your life, sir. My employers are quite dangerous.”

“So am I, Mr Brown – if that is your name. Tell your employers that they are running a grave risk to themselves if they threaten me. My reply is that I have no drugs to trade.”

“I will pass that on. Goodbye, sir, and farewell.”

Reg closed the door and said to himself thoughtfully, “That sounded quite final.”

Reg and Carol gave a report to the others of the visitor. Carol described what he looked like, and Reg just agreed, saying, “I was more concentrating on what we were saying to each other. It was like a verbal sparring match, and everything I said was truthful, if not very helpful. I think he assumed I was lying when I said we didn’t have any drugs to trade. He paid more attention to the ‘to trade’ bit than to the ‘don’t have any drugs’ part!”

Frances was a bit worried.

“Does that mean that he and his friends are likely to make our home a target?”

Reg admitted, “I am afraid that might be the case, but it depends on what his employers think. I was quite strong in my response, sorry. I guess that some of their gang must have been picked up by the police at the rail station, so they will be trying to be careful not to be caught, themselves. They may regard us as not worth bothering, hopefully. It depends on whether they think we have drugs in the house, or not.”

Fiona cautioned, “If they have sent a man to our door, they are already bothering us. I say, prepare to repel boarders!”

Erika gave her opinion. “We have had the building better protected against burglars, after that break-in, so getting into this building will not be easy!”

“That is so,” Frances added, “And our front door has been made more secure as well. It would be difficult to get through it, and all the windows have internal plastic sheathing to hold broken panes together if they get shattered. I don’t think we could do much more to protect the building.”

Reg contributed, “Except for the personnel. For the next few days, no-one goes outside unless they have to, such as the twins’ husbands: they have their work to go to. We can advise them to use the back door, so they are not obviously linked to this building. Tell them to casrry their tradesman’s bag of tools or whatever, so making them appear non-resident if they get linked to our building.

As for the rest of us, surely we have enough food supplies for a week or so, and don’t have to go to the university or the medical centre?”

Prudence mentioned, “The midwife is due her regular follow-on check-ups on us, and now on Jessica. When is she due back?”

Freda offered, “Not until next Thursday, so there is no worry about her being attacked as she comes to the door.”

Reg suggested, “We should do like we do with suspected thefts at businesses: ask ourselves what the criminal will be thinking. Any ideas along that line?”

Prudence smiled as she said, “I wouldn’t expect them to arrive with Tommy-guns blazing, 1930s-America style! It is much more likely to be a frontal attack in strength, trying to smash the door down.”

Reg murmured, “In that case, if they tried an explosion at the door, would it work? I don’t think so. It is a solid oak door to start with.The security bolts on both sides would simply lock tight, and they won’t get through. We would have trouble getting out afterwards, but we should be safe in such circumstances. Are there any windows they might get through?”

Fiona was doubtful. “The ground floor windows are quite high off the ground, so even if they managed to smash the double-glazing and plastic reinforcement, trying to climb through would be difficult to achieve, particularly if we can have some retaliation in place, unless they bring a short ladder to reach them. Any ideas on retaliation? We have no weapons here, apart from kitchen knives.”

There was a significant pause of awkward silence before Jessica said tentatively, “Sidra once had a water pistol with a large water reservoir. Do we have a water pistol in the house?”

Frances laughed. “We would have to ask the twins; they know what can be found in our building. But what use is a water pistol?”

Jessica was positive. “You could use something other than water: something that stings the eyes, for example. Probably chlorine bleach will do the job; spray that at an attacker’s face and he will back off smartly!”

“Chemistry? I thought you didn’t have a good education, Jessica?”

“I didn’t, but I can still learn on my own, can’t I?” she said defensively. “I always carefully read the descriptions on the household products I was using, and noted the warnings about chlorine in the bleach; how dangerous it was if it got in your eyes. I also read something online about not mixing chlorine and ammonia, as that produces toxic gas that can kill you.”

“What made you do that, Jessica?”

“I wanted to prepare for a time when my husband’s beatings got too bad for me, or if he did the same to Sidra; and I would have had to kill him. I had no access to suitable weapons, so I had to work out how I could do it with what I had to hand.”

“You could have used a kitchen knife, Jessica,” suggested Fiona.

“Yes, but that would be an obvious attack, and I would have been charged with murder. With household chemicals, it could be made to look like an accident. He could have a fall, and knock over bleach and other bottles, such as the window cleaner solution, that contain ammonia. The top would be knocked off as it fell, and the bleach bottle would crack and leak. An unconscious man can’t breathe the gas produced, so he would die: all seemingly by accident of course. That was a better solution than a knife.”

“Good grief! You were really thinking things through, Jessica. You are a lot cleverer than you may have appeared in the past.”

“That is so. Remember, I am a simple Pakistani girl with no education, so how could I possibly work out a way to kill the bastard without being suspected? Obviously it was an accident!” She spread her hands and gave what looked like an innocent, wide-eyed smile as she finished. It brought smiles to the faces of the other women as they admired Jessica’s preparations for killing her abusive husband if pushed to it.

Carol had come back in and listened to this conversation. She commented, “I wouldn’t like to get into your bad books, Jessica; you are terrifying!”

Jessica responded, “No-one in this building has anything to fear from me, Carol. Did you find a water pistol?”

“No, but in the same way as you thought about household chemicals, I remembered that some of the bottles have a skoosher head, as I call it. You press a lever, and the liquid squirts out either as a spray or a jet, depending on how you turn the head. The spray doesn’t go far, but the jet would easily go nearly a metre. Would that do the job?”

Frances exclaimed excitedly, “It certainly would. Okay, perhaps not as a far as a large water pistol can go, but far enough to get to the face of any intruder trying to get in through a window.”

Jessica offered, “We should arm ourselves with about a dozen small bottles of bleach with the squirting heads. Do we have enough bleach in stock, Carol?”

“Sure. We buy it in big 5-litre containers, four to a box, because a building this size requires lots of cleaning, I can tell you! We should have a box in our stores, and it is good quality bleach; quite strong: industrial strength I think it claims.

I am sure there are some empty squirting bottles in our rubbish bin, which only gets emptied once a fortnight. I’ll fetch them back and clean them out for filling with bleach. I’l put a sticky label on them, saying BLEACH. If we need more, we can decant the contents into other containers, and just label the containers as to what is in them. Once we don’t need the bleach squirters any more, we can transfer the chemicals back to where they should be.”

Frances commented, “Sounds good, Carol. Can you get on to that right away, dear? We need to be ready for all comers as soon as possible.”

“Sure, Frances. It will make a change from our usual routine. Hey, I could phone our nearest neighbours to ask if they have any empty household spray bottles, and if so, get them to toss them over the garden wall. We can pick them up from there and convert them to bleach squirters in an hour or two.”

The next few hours were busy ones. As soon as the squirters were prepared, they were placed near, but not too close to, each of the front windows nearest the front door. Then Reg said, “What if they try the back of the house, girls?”

That spurred them to prepare more squirters and lay them near the back ground floor windows. Reg located the nearest heavy chest of drawers on that floor, and pushed and pulled it to the back door, where he wedged it next to the door lock, making opening the door nigh impossible from outside.

They were tired and ready for bed when Prudence warned, “What if they attack the house during the night? Are we ready to jump to it? What if they try a quiet approach to begin with? How will we know they are there? They might try to set fire to the house!”

Reg suggested, “If they are after drugs that they think we might have inside, it would not make sense to burn us out. I agree that we should be on watch for them. Why don’t we set an alarm, and one of us gets up after an hour or so, does a half hour of watching for any signs of them, then sets the alarm for the next person an hour later, and so on? Any signs of preparations to attack, they wake everyone up to be ready. Jessica should not be part of the rota, as she is still recovering from having the baby.”

Jessica retorted, “Reg Robertson, all I have to do is sit and watch, so I can do that as well as the others.”

Frances suggested, “We probably don’t need everyone to do a watch, with the timescale proposed.

Thomas and Gerald have to go to work early in the morning, so they can do the first watch.We’ll put Jessica at the end of the rota, so if anyone gets too tired, we can call on her to fill in. Okay, Jessica?”

“Okay, Frances.That seems fair.”

They all ate well at the evening meal, and went to bed early, in anticipation of a disturbed night.

It was just as well they did. Fiona came around in the dark to wake them and say that a carload of men had arrived outside and were talking; she thought they were discussing how to approach the house.

“Reg asked, “What is the time, Fiona?” and she said, “Just after two a.m.”

Reg hurried to get some clothes on. Despite the darkness, he was able to rush to the back door and opened the cupboard beside it, which had a light inside that he switched on. He pulled out a narrow digging spade, and tried it for size as a sharp club. Satisfied, he switched out the light, closed the cupboard, and went back to the front door, where the girls were gathering.

The twins asked that their husbands sleep on, as they had to leave early in the morning. Reg looked at Frances as he agreed with the twins, and Frances nodded her approval. He had another thought.

“Who is looking after the babies?” he asked. “Is it just Sandra?”

Frances told him, “Jessica decided to help her, in case there was a lot of noise out here.”

“Sounds right,” he said. “No lights, please, girls. With the house dark and street lights outside, we’ll see better than them, and they won’t know we are ready for them.”

That was so obvious that no-one said anything more. They just waited to see what would happen next. Fiona was beside one window, keeping an eye on activity outside, reporting what she saw.

“There are five men heading towards the house. Three are carrying what looks like two baseball bats each; seems like overkill to me! The other two have small parcels, which I think might be bombs of some kind. I hope it is not fire bombs.”

“Right,” said Frances. “Reg, get on the phone to the police, and report an impending attack on our house.”

Reg pulled his phone from his pocket, and made the call to the police station. The call was diverted to the area station, where someone asked what the problem was.

“This is Reginald Robertson. You should have had advance notice from British Transport police of a possible attack on our home. It seems to be starting now. Five armed men outside, heading to our front door.”

“Oh. That was to do with drugs, wasn’t it? I am alerting our mobile patrols now, sir. Can you repeat the address we have, for confirmation?”

Reg did so, just as there was a double bang at the front door, and it shuddered but held. “You hear that, constable? Explosives at our front door.”

“Are you safe, sir?” he wanted to know.

“Our house was recently made burglar-proof, so we should be fine until your cars get here in a few minutes.”

“Both are several miles away from your location, so it may be about ten minutes or so, even with empty roads.”

“That is acceptable, but just barely. We are prepared to defend ourselves.”

“Eh? We would not advise that, sir.”

“Against baseball bats? You must be joking! We have made preparations. My ladies will be our shock troops.”

“Ladies?”

“Yes. It is just me, a number of ladies, and eight babies.”

“Oh. I can see why you may feel aggrieved, sir. Please take care.”

As they spoke, the first window received a smash from a baseball bat, but being double-glazed, the bat bounced back at the wielder, and the glass did not break. He changed to a series of hits with the bat, with little effect, and he must have asked another man to add his own attack, as the blows became more frequent. Reg heard a crack as the exterior pane started to give way.

This led to more attacks with the bats until both panes of glass gave way. The outer pane shattered and pieces of glass fell out, while the interior pane shattered quickly but held together with the tough plastic backing sealing it.

There was a slight pause, then a renewed battering began; probably with new attackers with new bats. Eventually the internal pane collapsed as well, and a man’s gloved hand grabbed the broken glass to pull it free. He was trying to make the hole large enough to climb through, and at last stuck his head forward to see how effective their destruction had been.

At least three of the women squirted their bleach guns at his face, and within seconds, he had jerked backwards, screaming “My eyes! My eyes!”

The other men did not know what had happened, and pulled him away from the window, assuming a bit of broken glass had hit his eye.

Another unsuspecting attacker took his place in trying to enlarge the opening in the window, but was quickly squirted all over his face and reacted the same way, screaming in pain. He did not see anything until the bleach hit him, so had no idea what was happening apart from the pain he was experiencing.

Whoever was in charge demanded to know what the men had happen to them, and was told that something had been thrown at their faces. One asked, “Was it acid?”

A man in pain yelled back, “I don’t bloody know! Find out for yourself!”

The man in charge asked for gloves and once had donned them, he waved his hands in front of the broken window, but nothing happened.

“Whatever it was, it seems to have stopped. Possibly triggered by the glass breaking. It should be fine now.”

Another man called to him derisively, “If you think so, why don’t you try it yourself?”

The leader pulled a pair of spectacles from his shirt pocket and put them on before looking in at the window. This triggered a batch of bleach jets from the ladies, and he felt liquid on his face, but not on his eyes at first, so he declared, “It is just a liquid of some kind, not serious,” but as the liquid ran down from his forehead it ran into his eyes and he yelled, “Agh, my eyes!Someone get me some water for my eyes.”

As he asked this, the first sounds of police sirens began to be heard, getting closer all the time.

“Fuck it!” declared another of the men. “I’m getting out of here!”

One of the others grabbed him. “Not without the rest of us, you fool.”

“But the cops are coming!”

“How do you know they are coming here? We can’t do anything more for now. Get everyone back in the car and get us to the nearest place for water to wash the guys’ eyes.”

They all scrambled to get into the car, with the ones with sore eyes being unable to see properly and having to be helped.

They finally were all aboard and the car set off for the end of the street, but at that moment a police car swung into the street in front of them and slewed round to block the whole road. The escape car driver braked to a stop and tried to turn the car to go the other way, but soon found another police car hurtling towards them from that direction. It too turned to block the road, leaving them trapped between the two blockades. The driver and another man who was uninjured jumped out of the car and ran to the gardens on either side, jumping over fences to find a way through and escape to the street beyond; abandoning their fellow criminals to their fate.

Two policemen ventured cautiously from each police car, and reached the escape vehicle. They discovered the men inside were in agony, complaining about acid on their faces. The policemen immediately rang for an ambulance, but put the men in handcuffs anyway.

Once this was done, one marched over to the address they had been told was being attacked, and saw the damage done to the window and the scorch marks on the front door. He called out, “Hello, inside! Is anyone injured?”

Reg carefully stuck his head out the broken window.

“No injuries inside, constable. Thanks for getting here in time. They were almost inside before we stopped them.”

“They say you sprayed them with acid? Is it true?”

“No. anyone who tried to force their way in got some bleach in their face.”

“Bleach? That is all?”

“All? Check with the ambulancemen, constable. Household bleach is dangerous. These men tried to break in, so we defended our house with bleach. Be careful not to touch anything around the window, as it is probably soaked in chlorine bleach.”

“Sir, can you open your front door and let us in?”

“I doubt it, constable. We will probably need a security expert to get this door open now, after they tried to blow it in.

“I see. We can arrange that in the morning for you.”

“No need. We will get in touch with the security company that fitted the door, and they will sort it for us.”

“Very well, sir. You know you are not supposed to spray anyone’s face with a noxious liquid?”

“Constable, don’t you know that we were under attack, and the ladies merely fired jets of bleach through the broken window? If some nasty man stuck his face in the way, it is his own fault. We did not target anyone, merely fired bleach out of our newly broken window at whoever was attacking. Anyone who got injured did so all by himself!

Our company lawyer, who is a Queen’s Counsel, will be delighted to explain the law on protecting one’s property to you. Our use of the only available means of defence against a gang of men armed with baseball bats and trying to break in, in the middle of the night, is inherently reasonable, as our Q.C. will make clear to any jury.”

“Ah. That will be a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service to consider.”

“The local police force must first consider the circumstances: We are an unarmed family living peacefully, and we find our home attacked by a gang in the middle of the night. Is it not reasonable for us to find some household chemical that we can use to defend ourselves – almost all women and children – against attackers?”

“Well, when you put it that way...”

“Constable, that is how our lawyer will put it, and he is noted for obtaining reparations against persons and organisations unjustly pursuing cases against innocent families.”

“I will put you arguments to my superiors sir.”

“You might also note that if the police had been prepared to respond more speedily to the attack – of which you were adequately warned by the British Transport police - then our defensive actions would not have been necessary at all.”

“A warning was given?”

“Check your records constable. We found a stash of drugs in a rail carriage we had hired, and the B.T. police said our name and address were probably known to the drug runners and we might be a target for them. That is why the B.T. police sent you a warning of a strong probability of attack within days. Now do you see why your force’s delayed response was responsible for us having to defend ourselves?”

“Ah, yes. Thank you. We will check the facts. If that is the case, sir, I do not expect you will hear anything more about this affair.”

Th policeman left to join his colleagues in watching for the ambulance. Two of these emergency vehicles, one following the other, careered round the corner and raced to where the police were signalling them, while a police car was swiftly moved to allow them through. Moments later, they were examining the patients while the police informed them the active ingredient was chlorine bleach. Immediately the ambulance personnel got water bottles out and started applying water to the eyes of the afflicted. One of the ambulance crew who had got out the bottles for his colleagues, remarked to the watching police, “Chlorine bleach is a lot more dangerous than most people assume. Whoever attacked them with bleach knew what they were doing.”

The policeman remarked, “The folk were defending their home from these louts, who were smashing their windows in with baseball bats. The bleach was all they could find to protect themselves.”

“Well, they did a good job of it. How did they manage to get the bleach in their eyes?”

“Having smashed a window, they tried to get through the hole, and that exposed them to those inside, who shot jets of bleach at them. If they hadn’t tried to break in, they would have stayed safe!”

“Clever idea, though. Who are they?”

“According to our information, they are university students who run their own company.”

“Ah, a bunch of cleverclogs!”

“You could say that. They even have a Q.C. as their lawyer!”

“Wow! High-powered law, that. Let a Q.C. near a case, and he will rip it to shreds if he is for the defence.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

“Well, we had a case where we were accused of failing to help a patient in time, but our Q.C. proved there was no way we could have got there any earlier, given the restrictive rules we have to work under.”

“Ah. The rules, yes. We have to abide by these as well, particularly when dealing with people. If we ever get into a position where we are given guns for protection, we have to account for every cartridge we fire. Most of us have never fired a shot because of that, and I see it as a good thing. We have marvellous stab preotection vests if we might encounter someone with a knife, but these are not so useful if some criminal attacks you with a loaded firearm. The situation gets even worse when you don’t know if his weapon is loaded or not. If you shoot him, and it turns out that the weapon was never loaded, or a fake pistol, you are in deep shit; but if you don’t shoot him and he discharges his gun at you, you could be injured or killed. Sometimes it is best to shoot over his head, to see what he does with his gun, for then you are prepared for any response. But you have to be sure that ‘over his head’ doesn’t result in you hitting some unintended target, like through the bedroom window of an innocent person.”

One of the other ambulancemen came over to say, “We have done the best we can on the spot. They will still need further treatment at the hospital, to save their sight. As it is, they are going to have eye problems for a long while. We need to get them loaded up. Do they need the bracelets all the time?”

“Most definitely. They were attacking a house with baseball bats, trying to break in through the windows, after their explosives at the door didn’t get them in. Treat them as dangerous. We’ll follow the ambulances to the hospital and set up a watch rota for the length of time they have to be in the hospital; then we arrest them.”

In the house, the family waited until daybreak before Prudence phoned her dad.

“Dad, we need your practical assistance again. A bunch of drug-runners tried to break into the house during last night, and caused some damage, but we fought them off with chlorine bleach until the police got here.”

“Are you all right, Prudence my love?”

“Yes, none of us were injured. At the one window they managed to break, we were prepared with squirt bottles of bleach, which we shot into their faces. They didn’t like it!”

“What, something as simple as bleach?”

“Yes, Dad. It is nasty to the eyes if you get squirted with it. The ambulancemen had to take them to the hospital after giving them first aid. Oh, and the front door is stuck; the attackers tried some explosives, but it had little effect, as your man had done a good job on it. Now he needs to come back and probably put a new door in place.”

“Okay. Have you got insurance?”

“Mr LeBrun’s business owns the building, so has the place insured, yes.”

“Phone him and get him to tell his insurer that he is engaging our company to reinstate the door and window, as we were the original installers. Our fee to them will price match whatever other company they can get a quote from. Remind them that it is a high security door and window to price for.

We will start work immediately, so get him to say that ‘time was of the essence’ in getting the house secure again, so he employed us for that reason and for our expertise as well; might as well brag about our talents.”

“Yes, Daddy. Thanks, as always. You are a dear, and we appreciate what you do for us. When can we expect your man? We can’t get out our front door, and using the back door is pretty awkward at the moment, as we had it barricaded.”

“I’ll get him there today, but I don’t lnow when that will be; he is a busy man, but I’ll tell him the situation.”

“That’s okay. We planned for being stuck here for a few days, waiting for the attack to happen. It came quicker than we expected, so we had to improvise.”

“Sounds like your improvisation was well thought out. I must get my staff instructed on the value of bleach as a defensive weapon. Your university education just paid for itself, Prudence.”

“Thanks, Daddy. I love you for that, and how you have cared for me all my life. The university also enabled me to find Reginald, and for that I am always grateful. I’ll get off the line now, so you can organise things. Bye.”

Hermione had been busy, and now reported to Reginald.

“Boss, I know it is early, but I managed to get through to that government department about their request for help making budget savings. Do you know that they don’t have a legal advser of their own? When they want legal advice, they have to call another department to get it, and then the cost gets charged to their department! I told them that it was a stupid arrangement, as they needed to have an expert on hand to check the wording of the contracts. I explained that wrong wording could cost them a fortune.”

They didn’t seem to believe me, until I explained that our company has contracts that almost always cost the client more than they anticipate, because they don’t read the wording fully, or don’t get their lawyer to read it thoroughly. We have a lawyer that words our contracts for us, so that we never get ripped off.