Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

‘You stupid bitch,’ I think I said, ‘I’m… on your side. This is him… the one… he’s the one… to kill your father. Fuck.’

The fuck was because everything was starting to go strange now. Light, sound, action.

Sarah was standing right over me, and I suppose, maybe, if circumstances had been different, I’d have been enjoying her legs. But they weren’t different. They were the same. And all I could look at now was the gun.

‘That would be very strange, Mr Lang,’ she said. ‘He could do that at home.’ I suddenly couldn’t make anything of this. Lots of things were wrong, very wrong, the numbness down my left side being not the least of them. Sarah knelt down next to me and put the muzzle of the gun under my chin.

‘This,’ she jerked a thumb towards McCluskey, ‘is my father.’

As I can’t remember any more, I assume I must have blacked out.

‘How are you feeling?’

It’s a question you’re bound to get asked when you’re lying on your back in a hospital bed, but I wish she hadn’t asked it all the same. My brain was scrambled to the point where you usually have to summon the waiter and ask for a refund, and it would have made more sense for me to be asking her how I felt. But she was a nurse, and therefore unlikely to be trying to kill me, so I decided to like her for the time being.

With a mighty effort, I ungummed my lips and croaked back at her, ‘Fine.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Doctor will be along to see you shortly.’ She patted the back of my hand and disappeared.

I closed my eyes for a few moments, and when I opened them it was dark outside. A white coat was standing over me, and despite the fact that its wearer looked young enough to be my bank manager, I could only assume he was a doctor. He gave me my wrist back, although I wasn’t aware that he’d been holding it, and jotted something down on a clipboard. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine.’

He kept on writing.

‘Well you shouldn’t be. You’ve been shot. Lost quite a bit of blood, but that’s not a problem. You were lucky. Passed through your armpit.’ He made it sound as if the whole thing was my own silly fault. Which, in a way, it was.

‘Where am I?’ I said. ‘Hospital.’

He went away.

Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must have been bad.

She obviously realisedthat she’d over-reacted, because half an hour later she came and took the plate away again. Before she left, she told me where I was. TheMiddlesexHospital, William Hoyle Ward.

My first proper visitor was Solomon. He came in, looking steady and eternal, sat down on the bed and chucked a paper bag of grapes on to the table.

‘How are you feeling?’

A definite pattern was emerging here.

‘I feel,’ I said, ‘almost exactly as if I’ve been shot, I’m now lying in a hospital trying to recover, and a Jewish policeman is sitting on my foot.’ He shifted his weight slightly along the bed.

‘They tell me you were lucky, master.’ I popped a grape.

‘Lucky as in…?’

‘As in it being only a couple of inches away from your heart.’

‘Or a couple of inches away from missing me altogether. Depends on your point of view.’

He nodded, considering this.

‘What’s yours?’ he said, after a while. ‘What’s my what?’

‘Point of view.’

We looked at each other.

‘ThatEngland should play a flat back four againstHolland,’ I said.

Solomon lifted himself off the bed and started to unpeel his raincoat, and I could hardly blame him. The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing.

I’d asked a nurse if she could turn the temperature down a little, but she’d told me that the heating was controlled by a computer inReading. If I was the sort of person who writes letters toThe Daily Telegraph,I’d have written a letter toThe Daily Telegraph.

Solomon hung his coat on the back of the door.

‘Well now, sir,’ he said, ‘believe it or not the ladies and gentlemen who pay my wages have asked me to extract from you an explanation as to how you came to be lying on the floor of a prestigiousWest End art gallery, with a bullet hole in your chest.’

‘Armpit.’

‘Arm, if you prefer, pit. Now will you tell me, master, or am I going to have to hold a pillow over your face until you co-operate?’

‘Well,’ I said, thinking that we may as well get down to business, ‘I presume you know that McCluskey is Woolf.’ I hadn’t presumed any such thing, of course. I just wanted to sound efficient. It was obvious from Solomon’s expression that he hadn’t known, so I pressed on. ‘I follow McCluskey to the gallery, thinking he might be there to do something unpleasant to Sarah. I bop him, get shot by Sarah, who then tells me that the boppee was, in fact, her father, Alexander Woolf.’

Solomon nodded calmly, the way he always did when he heard weird stuff.

‘Whereas you,’ he said eventually, ‘had him down as a man who had offered you money to kill Alexander Woolf?’

‘Right.’

‘And you assumed, master, as I’m sure many would in your position, that when a man asks you to kill someone, the someone is not going to turn out to be the man himself.’

‘It’s not the way we do it on planet Earth, certainly.’

‘Hmm.’ Solomon had drifted over to the window where he seemed captivated by thePostOfficeTower.

‘That’s it, is it?’ I said. ‘"Hmm"? The Ministry of Defence report on this is going to consist of "Hmm", bound in leather with a gold seal and signed by the Cabinet?’

Solomon didn’t answer, but just kept staring at the Post Office Tower.

‘Well then,’ I said, ‘tell me this. What’s happened to Woolfs major and minor? How did I get here? Who rang the ambulance? Did they stay with me until it came?’

‘Have you ever eaten at that restaurant, the one that goes round and round at the top…?’

‘David, for Christ’s sake…’

‘The person who actually rang for the ambulance was a Mr Terence Glass, owner of the gallery in which you were shot, and putter-in of a claim to have your blood removed from his floor at the Ministry’s expense.’

‘How touching.’

‘Although the ones who saved your life were Green and Baker.’

‘Green and Baker?’

‘Been following you about a lot. Baker held a handkerchief over the wound.’

This was a shock. I’d assumed, after my beer session with Solomon, that the two followers had been called off. I’d been sloppy. Thank God.

‘Hurrah for Baker,’ I said.

Solomon appeared to be about to tell me something else when he was interrupted by the door opening. O’Neal was very quickly among us. He came straight over to the side of my bed, and I could tell from his expression that he thought my getting shot was a thoroughly splendid development.

‘How are you feeling?’ he said, almost managing not to smile.

‘Very well, thank you Mr O’Neal.’

There was a pause, and his face fell slightly.

‘Lucky to be alive is what I heard,’ he said. ‘Except that from now on, you might think that you’re unlucky to be alive.’ O’Neal was very pleased with that. I had a vision of him rehearsing it in the lift. ‘Well this is it, Mr Lang. I don’t see how we can keep this one away from the police. In the presence of witnesses, you made a clear attempt on Woolf’s life…’