Mud Pie

By Emma Lee Bole

A tale of rugby, puddings and murder.
Ingredients: 1 handful of illegal drugs, 1 twelve-inch chef's knife, 1 blood-stained handkerchief, 6 rugby forwards and half a motorbike.
When well stirred by Lannie Herron, a young chef on the run, these make a deadly mixture. One of the players at the rugby club where she's found refuge may be a killer - but which one?
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma Lee Bole
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310047640

Emma Lee Bole

Emma Lee Bole is a pseudonym.I lived in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and Australia before settling in north-west England, where I write magazine short stories and children's books under other names.

Book preview

The Silk Road

I was dead meat.

Everything still worked, bodywise. My heart still pumped at 72 bpm. My lungs inflated too rapidly, if anything, as I sat hunched in the passenger seat, fingers clenched around my knees. My eyes admitted the rain-streaked images of the Silk Road that fled past the window, transferring them efficiently to my brain.

Even my brain was still working. It suggested a suitable compliment to pay to Charlotte’s zippy little Renault, and my mouth dutifully translated this into the right noises.

It’s a good little runner, said Charlotte with affection. She was nothing like her car, being large and horsey rather than small and chic. She was my best friend – possibly my only friend right now – and I knew I loved her, although, being dead, I couldn’t quite remember how that felt.

You’re dead meat, Herron, sneered the voice in my head. My brain was shocked into another convulsive attempt at normality.

It’s raining very hard, I said.

Isn’t it just? Hope you brought your welly-boots, Lannie my girl, because according to Hugh it’s mud, mud, mud from now on, said Charlotte cheerfully. Although I had warned her I was dead meat, she didn’t really believe me. She didn’t understand what my pursuers were like. And I hadn’t quite told her the full story.

I had no welly-boots. I had no raincoat or umbrella. I had a large hold-all, a small tent and a mildewed sleeping-bag crammed into Charlotte’s boot. Tucked between the clothes in the holdall were the only things of value I possessed: my knives. For a moment I cradled the thought of them, strong and gleaming in their soft black cloth. Stronger than I was, since they had no feelings. Ruthless. Invincible.

Hugh says it’s a nice little pub, said Charlotte, nothing flash, but the landlord’s a good sort.

Hugh says that about everyone. Hugh was Charlotte’s brother: like her, tall, posh and amiable, with a benign view of the world.

Can you read out the directions? Charlotte flipped a piece of paper at me. I don’t know this neck of the woods.

I think it’s another left in about a mile. I peered out at the rain, looking for road signs. The dual carriageway had become a dwindling single that meandered as if it had lost its memory. I checked my watch. We were still barely an hour out of Manchester. When I glanced surreptitiously in the mirror, the sleek black car that crawled behind me made my heart pound for a moment, until it overtook us in a whoosh of impatience and hurtled out of sight.

My stomach balled up unhappily. This wasn’t far enough. My first idea of fleeing to Scotland had been better, except that I’d find no work there until Christmas: and I needed work.

It’s not really all that far, commented Charlotte with pleased surprise. You can easily come back and see me. I’d give you a job in the bread shop if I could, you know that, Lannie.

I know you would. But I guessed that Charlotte’s hot bread shop, on the fringes of Didsbury, wasn’t breaking even yet, and Charlotte’s Daddy, who had bankrolled it, would not approve unnecessary employees. Anyway, it was too close.

And you can always move back to Manchester once things have calmed down.

Yes. I couldn’t. Things wouldn’t calm down. Next left, I think.

There was no sign to Tissett. That was good. I’d checked Tissett out in a road atlas at the newsagents’, and had been a little reassured when the index hadn’t heard of it. So I’d hunted it down on an O.S. map in Central Library: a tiny place, barely there, just the letters PH and two little grey squares. It was a mile from Brocklow – distinguished only by a crossroads and a phone box – which I had never heard of either, and which was two miles from Fylington, which I was fairly sure I’d heard of, which was in turn four miles from Macclesfield, which I had definitely heard of but never visited, nor knew anyone, apart from Hugh, who had.

It rained harder as we drove through Fylington – too big for a village, too small for a town, a stony rampart of grey squashed shops and weavers’ cottages.

Hugh says house prices through the roof round here, said Charlotte wistfully. We chugged past an inordinate number of pubs, an antique primary school, and a set of rugby posts in a deserted field of mud. Then we were out, and winding up a hill into real countryside, with cows and sheep and stone walls charcoaled by the wet.

What’s the matter? Charlotte asked.

I must have sighed. I’d felt stagnation dribble over me like the rain. The road crawled along wrinkles in the weather-beaten face of the land. There was nothing here.

But of course that was the point. I could hide in those wrinkles. I hadn’t been able to tell from the map if I would be living in Derbyshire or Cheshire: it might even have been Staffordshire. I was pretty damn sure that none of my pursuers would have ever heard of Brocklow, or Tissett, or the Woolpack Inn.

The thought gave me faint hope, in so far as the dead can have hope. My last week, spent cowering in Charlotte’s tiny Didsbury flat, had been almost entirely hope-free.

Here we are! announced Charlotte, as if we were just out for Sunday lunch.

Pretty, I said as we pulled into the Woolpack’s tiny car park. I lied, of course.

Chapter Two

Tissett

It was a squat, stone pub with window boxes full of drowned pansies. On a patch of grassy mud beside the car park, four blackly sodden picnic benches sprawled with their legs in the air, like cows with rigor mortis.

At three o’clock on a wet autumn Sunday the pub, though open, was almost devoid of life, apart from the pinch-faced middle-aged barmaid, and a lone drinker moodily watching football on the TV in the corner.

The barmaid took an affronted, hissing breath. You’ll be the chef, she accused us. Brendan! They’re here!

A barrel-shaped man burst through from the kitchen with a smell of gravy and damp tea-towels.

Brendan. The landlord shook my hand vigorously. In his late thirties, he had fading curly blond hair, developing jowls and small, sunken eyes. He was nervous: not a usual state for him, I guessed, watching him rub his hands down the tea-towel tucked into the belt below his belly. Not as big as landlord’s bellies often are. Or it could have just been that the rest of him was broad to match.

You’re Charlotte, he said confidently to her, pumping her hand, can tell Hugh’s sister, and to me, more doubtfully, Elanor? I saw his eyes were drawn to my nose. People’s eyes always were.

Lannie.

Lannie? Not heard that one before.

I smiled and said nothing.

You’re from Salford, right?

Originally. Elanor wasn’t a Salford name. Too saintly and sensible. My mother had ideas above her station, once upon a time when she was still capable of having ideas at all. My little brother Karl re-christened me Lannie when he was two and I was six. Only my mother had called me Elanor, maybe in an attempt to keep some sort of ownership over me. She had little enough else, God knows, when I was running the household, doing her shopping and cooking and cleaning. I’d been forced, against my will, to be both saintly and sensible. I hadn’t enjoyed it.

Lannie. Let me show you round. He began to bustle, slowly. There wasn’t a huge amount to show: one largish room and one tiny one, with tobacco-yellow walls and unforgiving bench seats. A photo of the pub in 1912 suggested not much had changed since then.

Brendan wheezed faintly as he talked. Bar. Lounge, toilets, that’s the snug. Lads only. By tradition, not law, but they get narked if… That’s the dart-board. This is Frank. Jesus, Frank, what are you watching?

One of your old tapes, said the man in the corner, gazing at the TV with resigned intensity. The score was 49 nil. Probably not football, then, though there was a lot of running and falling over. I guessed some species of rugby.

Jesus, Frank, said Brendan with exasperation, the tour from hell? Why?

Frank, distant and blunt-featured, took his time. Because it happened.

It shouldn’t have.

But it did.

Brendan plunged at the control and paused the video. Frank! There’s a perfectly good grand slam in that cupboard. Ireland 2003. Or what about the ninety-seven lions? Do you a world of good. Or the Sydney world cup final–

No, I couldn’t.

Well, all right. But what about the semi? Uruguay, for Christ’s sake!

Frank shook his head, cradled the remote, and fast-forwarded. The score went up to 56.

Jesus, muttered Brendan. He motioned us on. Come and see the kitchen. Mind how you… Frank’s a bit, um, he added once we were through the door. Well, you’ll get to know him. Good lad. He’s a regular.

This is nice, said Charlotte to the kitchen. Isn’t it nice, Lannie?

I was still looking. At least it was clean: a big plus there. But after Tzabo, with its acres of top-of-the-range brushed steel, huge grills like the snarling mouths of Hell and stations all separate, all equipped, two yards of white Formica and a trio of domestic gas cookers didn’t qualify as nice, even if one of them was a pretend range. There were two microwaves and a chip pan on a shelf.

You don’t use that? I said. Chip pans give me the heebie-jeebies. The old memory came whoomphing back like a punch bag heading for my stomach. The stink of burning fat, the clinging pall of oily smoke.

The stench had woken me in the night and dragged me downstairs to find the chip pan on fire in the kitchen, and my mother snoring on the living-room floor. The kitchen was full of smoke. Oil had bubbled down the sides of the pan and was burning all over the stove. I switched the electric off at the wall, doused tea-towels in the sink and smothered the flames as I’d learnt in Food Tech. There was a stain like a huge black petal on the wall behind the cooker. I heaved my mother into the recovery position, as taught in Health Ed, crept back to bed, and lay there shivering with fear and anger. I was twelve.

That’s just for ourselves, said Brendan. Makes better chips than that thing. I saw, with relief, a catering-standard deep fat fryer in the corner.

I presume you don’t object to chips? said the stroppy barmaid.

Of course she doesn’t, Rhoda.

The cookers have been serviced, she told me indignantly. We passed our inspection in May.

I realised that she was Brendan’s wife, and that she didn’t want us here. She was younger than I had at first supposed, with a taut, angry face and thin hair starched into paralysis. Her nose was as sharp as her manner: she looked down it fiercely and made curt corrections as Brendan introduced the fridges and freezers in the draughty lean-to, the veteran dishwasher, the pans (not bad) and the knives (not good, but that didn’t matter since I had my own.)

What do you think? asked Brendan. He sounded anxious, though I couldn’t see why. He was doing me a favour. I was the one needing sanctuary.

It’s all quite brilliant! said Charlotte as loudly and enthusiastically as if it were Jamie Oliver’s kitchen complete with TV crew.

I said, Can I see your menus?

Brendan hovered nervously while I studied Steak and Ale Pie, Breaded Haddock and Cajun Chicken. The highlights were Lamb Shank with Autumn Berries and Scotch Salmon with Baby New Potatoes. Tedium leached from the paper.

It all sounds lovely, said Charlotte valiantly.

The salmon’s very popular, said Brendan.

Baby New? I queried. In November?

Most of our clientele are happy with chips. The main meals are in the big freezer. The other’s starters and puddings.

What sort of puddings?

Sticky toffee’s favourite at the moment, and chocolate fudge. You’re a pudding person, right?

I’m a pastry-chef. I didn’t say patissier, since Rhoda disapproved enough as it was.

But you think you can do the job? persisted Brendan. Hugh said you could turn your hand to pretty well anything.

Pretty well. I’ve done it all at Tzabo’s, I said, not strictly correctly, for I’d never been allowed on the grill except once in time of flu. Not woman’s work. But I’d run the grill, and everything else, at the White Duck before I reached the scary, exhilarating heights of Tzabo for those few short months until events kicked me out.

He made out you were Wonderwoman, said Rhoda sardonically.

Not quite. Hugh must have laid it on a bit thick. I suppose he felt he owed me for that time I helped to rescue him, five years ago: now he was doing his good-natured best to rescue me in turn.

So you can make sticky toffee pudding? asked Brendan.

Yes. I could make croquembouche, bourdaloue, pithivier and gaufrettes. I knew a fleuron from a friandise and a ruifard from a rigodon. Sticky toffee pudding, no problem. My problems were stickier by far...

The ghostly image stamped upon my retina reappeared as it had so often in the last two weeks: the boy in the white T-shirt leaning on the chippie counter, while I waited in the queue. I never learnt his name, though I’d seen him hustling on street corners. Now he slumped against the tiles, his white top slowly blossoming to carnation red, his chips all over the floor. The three men in balaclavas stared round at us, daring us to move. None of us did. Last time you’ll rip us off, hissed one, before they all slammed out. He was only a bag-man who’d tried to cheat the dealers. That was nothing compared to what I’d done.

My hands were sweating, but the rest of me felt as cold as clay. I took a long breath and tried to drag my attention back to Brendan.

Me and Rhoda will help, of course, he was saying. I heard a noise like a snort from Rhoda. And there’s a girl comes in at weekends. Rhoda used to run the kitchen but the bar’s taking all her time now, isn’t it, Rhoda? There was an appeal in his voice.

If you say so. Rhoda turned on her heel and marched back into the lounge. Brendan looked after her helplessly.

She’s, he said, she’s. Um. This is her spot. Was. Her domain, you know? It’s not easy.

I see. I wondered if Brendan had invented this job for me in order to please Hugh. Surely not.

Brendan said, Hugh told me Tzabo wasn’t doing so well?

I shrugged. Manchester rents. They had to cut staff. Tzabo had been doing fine. If I hadn’t been dead meat, Klaus would have happily kept me on. It was small consolation.

You might find it dull here.

Oh, no, it’s lovely and peaceful, said Charlotte. Isn’t it, Lannie?

It was dull. But dull was good. I’ll start tomorrow if you like, I said.

Ah, no, no food on Mondays. That’s your day off. Not much on Tuesdays either. Start Wednesday. Give you time to settle in somewhere. Got a place to stay?

I’ve got a tent, I said. Is there a campsite handy? I assumed that being in the Peak District, the place would be littered with campsites.

I don’t think so. Arthur across the way might lend you a field, said Brendan doubtfully. Not the weather for it though, is it? You’d be better indoors. We’d put you up here, if, er–

I could almost hear Rhoda’s hissed, No, we wouldn’t, through the kitchen wall.

Haven’t got room, said Brendan apologetically. The two lasses sharing as it is. We would otherwise.

That’s all right. Did you say Arthur?

Madderlow Farm. I’ll give him a bell.

He led us back into the lounge and used the bar phone with Rhoda glaring at him. Charlotte and I listened, raising eyebrows at each other meaningfully – though what their meaning was, I for one, didn’t know – while Brendan negotiated with the offer of a couple of free pints and a free dinner, yes, for the wife as well, no, not the dogs, you cheeky bugger, for me to camp in the paddock in front of Arthur’s farmhouse.

You can use our facilities, he told me as he replaced the phone. For now. Have to see about getting you somewhere else. Frank!

He won’t, said Rhoda.

He might. Frank?

On the TV, one of the teams was cheering. The score was 76-0. Frank switched it off.

I’m done, he said.

You still in your Nan’s house, Frank? Aren’t you moving in with your young lady?

Rhoda snorted. A definite snort, this time, that I could see Frank hearing and phlegmatically ignoring.

Not quite, he said, returning his glass to the bar.

Well. Just a thought, said Brendan. His eyes followed Frank’s stocky figure to the door with a wistful, worried expression.

You know he won’t, said Rhoda. It’s that bloody motorbike.

Now, Rhoda. Girls, you’d like, um? Coffee? asked Brendan unhappily. Rhoda gazed at us stonily, willing us to refuse.

I’ll go over and pitch my tent while the light’s good, I told him. Then I’ll come back this evening and help out. Stack the dishwasher and that. Work out where things are. I remembered, belatedly, what I ought to say. Thank you for all this. Thank you.

I dived out into the drizzle with Charlotte behind me.

"You’re not going to camp now, are you? Lannie, come back to my place till Wednesday!"

No, I can’t. I began to haul my stuff out of her boot, and she helped me lug it over the road and up the drive of Madderlow Farm to a slurried yard that echoed with the yelps of unseen dogs. I knocked at the front door, causing a furious peal of barking, until a wizened head in a woolly hat poked out of a barn door and yelled, Camp where yer like. And shut up, yer daft buggers.

So I did. Since everywhere was squelchy, I picked a spot at random and we pitched the tent, with some difficulty despite my practice session the previous day on Fletcher Moss playing fields.

This doesn’t seem fair, said Charlotte as we crouched, shivering, on the smelly groundsheet inside the green cocoon. You shouldn’t end up here just for simply doing what’s right.

I winced. What I had done had seemed right at the time. But maybe I had been wrong. Better here than the mortuary.

Don’t say that, Lannie! Do you want me to stay? I’ll stay a bit.

You go. You’ve bread to make, I told her. You’ll be up at five tomorrow morning.

I know. You don’t mind, Lannie? I’ll ring, she promised, and crawled out backwards. I waved her off, then crept back into my new home to unroll my musty sleeping bag and sort out my things. It didn’t take long. The tent smelt of rubber. I felt an unexpected surge of longing for that holiday with Dave, my almost-father, so far away and long ago, now so completely unattainable.

I could do with an airbed. The ground was cold and pitted. So what? I was dead anyway. Why should a little extra cold bother me? I shouldn’t even need the groundsheet between myself and the muddy earth.

Rolling over on the sleeping bag, I reached into the holdall and picked up my knives, lifting them gently from their cloth one by one, contemplating their weight and sharpness. They were a small, pure comfort: perfect, familiar things.

I lay back, crossing my arms against my chest, a knife in each hand, and stared up at the tent’s bowed roof. I wondered how long I would survive being dead.

Chapter Three

Piccadilly

When was it I began to die? I think I felt myself slowly sinking into the sombre underworld all the way through the trial. I slipped deeper and deeper into fear and guilt and grief, the shadows rising all around me. The shouts outside the court. The pellets of spit on my best jacket. The daubings on my door. The icy malice that turned the courtroom chill to permafrost: I was always cold in there.

But I didn’t expect it to last. I thought, back then, naively, that everything would soon get back to normal, that I was immune from reprisal – a prim little girl protected by her shiny halo. I thought that nothing really bad could happen to me just for doing the right thing.

Daft of me. I should have known better. I did know better. My chaotic childhood had already taught me that bad things happen all the time, especially to the innocent. Babies fell off balconies. Toddlers got their faces bitten off by pit bulls. Kids got belted by jealous stepfathers and fed class A drugs by spaced-out mothers. They were visited by endless tormenting plagues of lice and fleas and scabies, and jeering gangs in the playground.

A couple of years later they got pressed into the real gangs. They tooled up and practised mugging skills on everyone smaller, any remaining softness turned to tough, unyielding scar tissue.

I knew all that because I’d been through some of it myself. I knew what those gangs were like. So that encounter in Piccadilly the week after the verdict shouldn’t have come as a shock at all.

In one way I was lucky. Our paths crossed by chance, not design, so that when our eyes met across the platform of the Piccadilly tram-stop they looked as taken aback as I was.

I only knew one of the three men, the one with the narrow hungry rat-face: Peel his name was – a mate of my brother Karl’s whom I’d not spoken to for years and who had lately spoken just four words to me. The whisper in the courtroom lobby, very quiet and distinct. We’ll get you, Herron. It echoed round my head for days.

And there he was. Like looking in a mirror, our mouths both hanging open. I just stared at him and he at me, and it wasn’t until he opened his mouth wider to shout that I came to my senses and ran.

But I ran the wrong way. I should have tried to cut across to Market Street, where the crush of lunchtime crowds would have made it hard for them to follow me. From there I could have dived into the warren of the Arndale Centre and its many bolt-holes.

Instead, since I had no certainty of out-running them, and since the tram was there waiting, I leapt on to it just before the doors hissed closed. Peel and the two others were stranded, as with a doleful hoot it pulled away.

Unfortunately a tram is not a great getaway vehicle. We glided sedately round the end of Piccadilly in agonising slow motion while my pursuers jogged after us. They didn’t even have to run. By the time the tram sighed to a stop three hundred yards away, they were ready and waiting.

I couldn’t get off. I had to watch them get on and pretend I wasn’t watching, that I was just one of the tired shoppers or a distracted office worker. I gazed out of the window with my heart leaping around in my chest like a fish on a line. The three of them stood and swayed by the doors while the tram dragged itself down ponderously to St Peter’s Square where it stopped again, exhausted, and everyone wanted to get out.

So I had to get out too. As I stepped onto the platform they grabbed my sleeves and I felt something sharp jab through my coat into my back. Peel strutted round in front of me, very close, showing me his teeth and his knife. It was a crappy plastic pound-shop craft knife with snap-off blades, a throwaway bit of terror that you could stamp to bits or even melt with a lighter to destroy the evidence.

I think I said Oh no and put my hands up to shield my face. Then I screamed.

I’d never screamed before in my life; it wasn’t easy, and it came out startlingly loud.

No good Samaritans leapt in to rescue me. A few heads turned, but that was all. We were just a bunch of scallies having an argument; nobody was going to interfere.

Shut up, snarled Peel. As the knife came for my face I grabbed it. I felt it slice my fingers, but I was past caring. I held on to it while I kicked Peel and then tried to head-butt him, unsuccessfully but enough to make him stumble backwards. At that I let go, and as I felt a slash across my back, I wriggled wildly and twisted my arms right out of my coat sleeves. The two of them were left grasping the empty coat with wadding erupting from it like whipped cream.

One of them grabbed me by the hair, but I yanked free. Then I turned and launched myself down off the platform, right in front of the departing tram.

This time it was just as well it moved so slowly. It missed me by half a yard, hooting reproaches. I glimpsed the driver furiously gesticulating as I leapt out of the way, and then the tram was between me and them. I had several precious seconds to race across the square to the grand pillars of the Central Library, where I barged through clusters of students to the smooth glass doors and plunged inside.

I ran up the stairs – all glass, curse them – and bolted into the reading room. Heads looked up from laptops in disapproval as I clattered through the silence and out the other side. There was a shout behind me as I raced round the music library to the sound of keyboards and arrived back at the lift.

Its door was just closing. I threw myself in. More glass, dammit, it was like a goldfish tank, and they were waiting in the lobby: but the lift glided past them, down to the basement and the City Library with its unrarified shelves of thrillers. Hyperventilating and clutching my bleeding hand under my arm, I darted past the bookshelves.

I knew the library, but I guessed they didn’t. More stairs – not glass, thank God – brought me up into the Town Hall. Hand clutched in my armpit, I walked briskly down a ornate, curved corridor half-full of sadly waiting claimants and emerged outside at the back.

There I hid behind a convenient stone pillar, sweating and shivering and pressing my hand with my handkerchief, wondering what the hell to do next. Until now I’d been running on pure instinct. But now I remembered where I was – a mere step away from Bootle Street, and the Manchester Police Headquarters.

So I took a few deep breaths and stuck my head round the pillar, only to spot Peel lurking at the back of the Library, waiting for me to pop out of a hole.

I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go. At last he looked down to check his mobile, and I shot out. I got half way across the road before he noticed.

I tore down Bootle Street and stood panting outside the big stern head-teacher of a police station, daring him. Come on, then! I taunted under my breath. Come on, then! Come any closer, I’ll tell my Dad, I’ll tell the teacher. I’ll set my brother on you.

Hah. Some joke. But the building acted as a huge repelling magnet, pushing Peel away. Two or three times he started towards me and then backed off again. The third time, I scampered up to the entrance, half in, half out, but he didn’t back off properly until I had a foot inside the door.

Can I help you?

So then I had to go in properly and say something. Er, I just wondered… is Inspector Higson here?

I’ll check. She looked at my tightly folded arms. Your name is..?

Williams, I said. I didn’t want to be there. I’d already had too many interviews in small over-bright rooms. DI Higson hadn’t been bad, as policemen went, but I didn’t want any more. Bootle Street had the same repellent effect on me as on Peel. Arrest you as soon as look at you, said my mother, who should know. It had been hard enough for me to step through those forbidding doors the first time round.

So I was relieved when the woman eventually reported back that Inspector Higson was out, and assuring her that it didn’t matter, it wasn’t urgent, no message, I edged my way carefully out of the door again.

I suppose I should have asked for someone else, for anyone. I should have told them about Peel. But what was the point? What would they do? I could look after myself.

Anyway, Peel had gone. I scooted down the end of Bootle Street to Deansgate and through the sooty canyons of back streets until I lurched in a clatter of bins into the furnace of Tzabo’s kitchen.

You’re late, snapped Klaus. Then he shouted at me for bleeding all over the langoustines as I rinsed my hand in the big sink. The cuts weren’t that bad; I’d had worse filleting a fish in too great a hurry. Cuts, like burns, were just marks of the trade.

But I’d never had one make me feel so sick and shivery before. All the strength seemed to have been squeezed out of me, so that I had to sit down on the kitchen floor against the fridge, to Klaus’s disgust.

What the hell, Lannie? He threw the big tub of plasters at my feet. Get up and get your whites on.

I stood up and stumbled around, pretending to work. Everyone swore at me. I didn’t mind. At least I was safe in the busy clatter of Tzabo’s kitchen, fierce and fast and well-armoured as a steam engine.

That was what I still thought back then.

And I still thought I was safe at home. I thought they didn’t know