Lightning Strikes Twice 1. Lightning Strikes Twice It had been raining all night, and all the morning; raining hard all over Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. It was a cold February rain, filling the ditches, swelling the rivers, and stripping the few dead leaves that still clung to the trees. It made quagmires of the cow treads at field gates, spouted over blocked gutters, and flooded the low-lying roads so that passing cars sent up bow waves of spray and soaked unlucky passers-by. Now, at half-past eleven precisely, as Smiler was being driven in a police car under the escort of two burly patrol men, the father and mother of a thunder and lightning storm was brewing overhead. At first it was a few little murmurs, slowly rising to a full-scale roll and rumble of heavy thunder. Suddenly there came a great stabbing, downward sword thrust of lightning that turned the whole world into a blue and yellow dazzle of light. Smiler jumped in his seat and cried, ‘Blimey!’ The policeman alongside him smiled.
