Peter Lovesey: The Summons

“I’m in communication, for God’s sake. I know where the men are. Nobody has moved. Nobody. Mountjoy must be doing the shooting. Listen, I’m sending a team up to you now.”

“Don’t,” said Diamond at once. “I can handle this.”

“That’s ridiculous. He’s out of control. He may have shot the hostage.” This crushing possibility had hit Diamond almost as it was spoken. Horrible as it was, it had to be faced. He spoke his thoughts aloud as they came to him: “There were two shots, so he may have killed himself as well. Hold back your men until I’ve clarified what happened.”

Warrilow said, “I don’t take orders from you.”

“I’m on the spot and it’s got to be my decision,” Diamond told him with passionate conviction. “Hold everything. Do you hear me, Mr. Warrilow? Do you hear me? I’ll radio down when I’ve checked.”

He couldn’t rely on Warrilow, but with luck he had bought himself a few minutes. He shut off the radio and shouted into the darkness, “Mountjoy?”

There was just the echo from the bare walls. The burnt gunpowder lingered in the air.

“Mountjoy, this is Peter Diamond. Where are you? Do you need help?”

No answer, but he expected none. The most likely explanation of the silence was that Mountjoy had cracked under the strain and blown his brains out, but that didn’t entirely account for the shooting. It takes one shot to commit suicide and there had definitely been two. A double killing? He had to be prepared for it.

He got up and mounted the last couple of steps and stood on the fifth floor. “I’m alone,” he shouted once more. “Unarmed. Can you hear me?”

Apparently not.

But he fancied he could hear a slight movement higher in the building. Possibly it was coming from the men on the roof. He strained to listen.

It had stopped.

Across the corridor he could just make out the angle of the V, where the spiral staircase ought to be. He stepped forward, through a space where the walls didn’t run exactly parallel, into what had to be the lower level of the turret. The way ahead was practically pitch black.

“Mountjoy?”

Nothing.

“If you’re up there-” He was stopped in mid-sentence by another series of beeps from the personal radio he was carrying. He clasped the thing and fumbled with the controls, wanting just to silence it, but then there was a crackle of static and Warrilow’s voice came over.

“Command Control to Diamond. Our monitors are picking up sound from the top floor of the turret. Are you receiving me? The top floor of the-”

The sentence was never completed because he snatched the radio off his chest and crunched it savagely against the wall.

If there was sound, there was life. “Mountjoy, it’s just me, Diamond.”

Reaching into the space ahead, he found the handrail of the staircase. “I’m unarmed. I want to help you.”

This time he was certain he heard something. Not a response. More the sound of someone whispering. He dared to hope again.

He located the first step and started climbing. “I’m coming up to you,” he said. “I’m not armed. I promised to come back and I have.” Steadily, scarcely pausing, he mounted the steps. At one point he froze when the whole staircase was made visible by a moving light, the rails casting long revolving shadows that threatened to give him vertigo. It was the searchlight beam scanning across the front of the building and it moved away just as suddenly.

The whispering upstairs-if that was what he had heard-had stopped since he had spoken.

The problem about going up a spiral staircase in darkness is that you lose all sense of direction. It was only when the handrail ended that he realized he’d reached the top. At a loss, he tried for a mental picture of the sixth floor plan; there was a landing at the top of the stairs, wasn’t there? There were three doors, each leading to a room, a segment of the heptagon.

Choose the right one, he thought grimly, and you must expect to look down a gun barrel.

“I’m at the top,” he said, wishing he sounded more in control. “In case you didn’t hear, this is Peter Diamond and I’m alone.”

He spread his arms. Where were the doors? One should be to the left, one ahead, one to the right. His outstretched fingers didn’t make contact with anything. Maybe the sensible thing was to wait for the searchlight to pan across this end of the building again.

No. He’d spoken. Mountjoy expected him now. To wait was just to plant suspicion of a trap.

He moved forward a step. His right hand touched a flat surface that moved away from him with the contact-certainly the door. He faced it and pushed. “Are you in here?”

They were not. There was a faint source of light from the window. The room was definitely empty. He could tell without stepping fully inside. To go in would be a mistake.

He stepped back into the corridor and groped for the door at the end. Both hands found it simultaneously. Like the other one, it was already standing slightly open. He expected that. They wouldn’t have wanted it closed. He pressed at it gently without saying anything this time. There was nothing sensible to be said. But he thought he heard an intake of breath.

He stood in the doorway, getting a strong sense that someone was very close. This room was darker than the other. The window space seemed to be screened in some way, because there was a faint semicircle of light at the top, but darkness below. Defensively, he moved his left foot against the base of the door. He tried to decide if the smell he was getting was the smell of unwashed clothes. After some days on the run, they’d be getting pungent. He swayed forward, steadied himself on the door frame and took another step.

There was a distinct scraping sound to his left, then a gasp, a voiced sound, and the voice was female.

He said, “Samantha?”

He stepped toward the source of the voice. His foot touched something soft, like fabric. Clothes? A blanket?

Abruptly the room was bathed in light. The searchlight beam thrust through the space at the top of the window and showed him two people pressed against the wall behind the door, one female and frightened, the other holding a gun. Except that the woman was Una Moon, the man G.B. and the gun a twin-barreled shotgun.

The searchlight moved off the turret. Through pitch black, Diamond spoke the same words he had been poised to say to John Mountjoy: “You can put down the gun. It’s me.” He was too staggered to think of anything else. But he didn’t doubt what he had seen. It wasn’t some trick of the imagination brought on by fumbling about in the dark and getting disorientated on the spiral stairs. He couldn’t have mistaken Una Moon’s pallid face and scraped-back hair ending in the plait; there was no way he could confuse her with Samantha Tott. And the man holding the shotgun couldn’t be anyone except G.B.; his whole physique was larger than Mountjoy’s.

Una spoke out of the darkness. “For God’s sake don’t panic, anyone. I’m going to switch on the torch.”

A beam picked out Diamond’s feet and cast a faint light over the rest of the room. He saw that G.B. had obeyed his order to the extent of slanting the gun across his chest, pointing it upward, though his finger still lingered around the trigger. The crusty everyone treated with awe stood beside Una like a kid caught truanting. They had been waiting in the room with their backs to the wall, hoping not to be discovered.

Diamond stared around the small room, getting his wits together. There were signs of recent occupation on the floor, a heap of blankets and a violin case. “You fired those shots?”

G.B. gave a nod.

“Both?”