Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

As it happens, I was the only one who did, and O’Neal fired off one of his increasingly famous looks in my direction. But Sarah was still glaring at him.

‘I want to know what’s being done about this guy,’ she said. She jerked her head at me, so I thought it best to stop laughing.

‘Mr Lang is our concern, Miss Woolf,’ said O’Neal. ‘You yourself have a responsibility to your State Department, by…’

‘You’re not the police, are you?’ she said. O’Neal looked uneasy.

‘No, we are not the police,’ he said, carefully.

‘Well I want the police here, and I want this guy arrested for attempted homicide. He tried to kill my father, and for all I know he’s going to try again.’

O’Neal looked at her, then at me, then at Solomon. He seemed to want help from one of us, but I don’t believe he got any.

‘Miss Woolf, I have been authorised to inform you…’ He stopped, as if unable to remember whether he really had been authorised, and if he had, whether the author had really meant it. He wrinkled his nose for a moment, and decided to press on after all.

‘I have been authorised to inform you that your father is, at this moment, the subject of an investigation by agencies of theUnited States government, assisted by my own department of the Ministry of Defence.’ This clanged to the floor, and we all just sat there. O’Neal flicked a glance at me. ‘It is in our joint discretion as to whether we charge Mr Lang, or indeed take any other action affecting your father or his activities.’

I’m no great reader of the human face, but even I could see that all of this was coming as something of a shock to Sarah. Her face had gone from grey to white.

‘What activities?’ she said. ‘Investigated for what?’ Her voice was strained. O’Neal looked uncomfortable, and I knew he was terrified that she was going to cry.

‘We suspect your father,’ he said eventually, ‘of importing Class A prohibited substances into Europe andNorth America.’

The room went very quiet, and everybody was watching Sarah. O’Neal cleared his throat.

‘Your father is trafficking in drugs, Miss Woolf.’ It was her turn to laugh.

Four

There’s a snake hidden in the grass.

Like all good things, and like all bad things too, it came to an end. The replica Solomons swept Sarah off towardsGrosvenor Square in one of their Rovers, and O’Neal ordered a taxi, which took far too long to arrive and gave him more time to sneer at my belongings. The real Solomon stayed behind to wash up the mugs, and then suggested that the two of us put ourselves outside a quantity of warm, nourishing beer.

It was only five-thirty, but the pubs were already groaning with young men in suits and misjudged moustaches, sounding off on the state of the world. We managed to find a table in the lounge bar of The Swan With Two Necks, where Solomon made a lavish production out of rootling for change in his pockets. I told him to put it on expenses, and he told me to take it out of my thirty thousand pounds. We tossed a coin, and I lost.

‘Obliged to you for your kindness, master.’

‘Cheers, David.’ We both took a long suck, and I lit a cigarette.

I was expecting Solomon to kick off with some observation about the events of the last twenty-four hours, but he seemed happy to just sit and listen while a nearby gang of estate agents discussed car alarm systems. He’d managed to make me feel as if our sitting there was my idea, and I wasn’t having that.

‘David.’

‘Sir.’

‘Is this social?’

‘Social?’

‘You were asked to take me out, weren’t you? Slap me on the back, get me drunk, find out whether I’m sleeping with Princess Margaret?’

It annoyed Solomon to hear the Royal family being taken in vain, which was why I’d done it.

‘I’m supposed to stay close, sir,’ he said eventually. ‘I thought it might be more fun if we sat at the same table, that’s all.’ He seemed to think that answered my question.

‘So what’s going on?’ I said. ‘Going on?’

‘David, if you’re going to just sit there, wide-eyed, repeating everything I say as if you’ve lived your whole life in a Wendy house, it’s going to be a pretty dull evening.’

There was a pause. ‘Pretty dull evening?’

‘Oh shut up. You know me, David.’

‘Indeed I have that privilege.’

‘I may be many things, but one of the things I am definitely not is an assassin.’

‘Long experience in these matters,’ he took another deep swallow of beer and smacked his lips, ‘has led me to the view, master, that everybody is definitely not an assassin, until they become one.’

I looked at him for a moment. ‘I’m going to swear now, David.’

‘As you wish, sir.’

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

The estate agents had moved on to the subject of women’s breasts, from which they were extracting much humour. Listening to them made me feel about a hundred and forty years old.

‘It’s like dog-owners,’ said Solomon. "‘My dog wouldn’t hurt anyone", they say. Until one day, they find themselves saying "well he’s never done that before".’ He looked at me and saw that I was frowning. ‘What I mean is, nobody can ever really know anybody. Anybody or any dog. Not really know them.’

I banged my glass down hard on the table.

‘Nobody can ever know anybody? That’s inspired. You mean in spite of us spending two years practically in each other’s pockets, you don’t know whether I’m capable of killing a man for money?’ I admit I was getting a little upset by this. And I don’t normally get upset.

‘Do you think I am?’ said Solomon. The jolly smile still hung round his mouth.

‘Do I think you could kill a man for money? No, I don’t.’

‘Sure of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re a clot, sir. I’ve killed one man and two women.’

I already knew that. I also knew how much it weighed on him.

‘But not for money,’ I said. ‘Not assassination.’

‘I am a servant of the Crown, master. The government pays my mortgage. Whichever way you look at it, and believe me I’ve looked at it lots of ways, the deaths of those three people put bread on my table. Another pint?’

Before I could say anything, he’d taken my glass and headed for the bar.

As I watched him carve a path through the estate agents, I found myself thinking back to the games of cowboys and Indians Solomon and I had played together inBelfast.

Happy days, dotted around some miserable months.

It was 1986, and Solomon had been drafted in, along with a dozen others from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, to supplement a temporarily buggered RUC. He’d quickly proved to be the only one of his group worth the air-ticket, so, at the end of his stint, some extremely hard-to-please Ulstermen had asked him to stay on and try his hand at the loyalist paramilitary target, which he did.

Half-a-mile away, in a couple of rooms above the Freedom Travel Agency, I was serving out the last of my eight years in the army on attachment to the snappily-titled GR24, one of the many military intelligence units that used to compete for business in Northern Ireland, and probably still do. My brother officers being almost exclusively Old Etonians, who wore ties in the office and flew to Scottish grouse moors at the weekend, I’d found myself spending more and more time with Solomon, most of it waiting in cars with heaters that didn’t work.

But every now and then we got out and did something useful, and in the nine months we were together, I saw Solomon do a lot of brave and extraordinary things. He’d taken three lives, but he’d saved dozens more, mine included. The estate agents were sniggering at his brown raincoat.