Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

‘We do, I assure you, intend to interview Miss Woolf at some convenient juncture,’ said O’Neal, as he sipped gingerly at his coffee. ‘However, the immediate concern of this department’s operation is you. You, Mr Lang, were asked to perform an assassination. With or without your consent, money was transferred to your bank account. You present yourself at the target’s house and very nearly kill his bodyguard. You then…’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Just wait one cotton-fucking minute here. What’s all this bodyguard stuff? Woolf wasn’t even there.’

O’Neal gazed back at me in a nastily unruffled way.

‘I mean how,’ I went on, ‘does a bodyguard guard a body who isn’t in the same building? By phone? This is digital bodyguarding, is it?’

‘You searched the house, did you, Lang?’ said O’Neal. ‘You went to the house, and searched it for Alexander Woolf?’ A smile played clumsily about his lips.

‘She told me he wasn’t there,’ I said, annoyed at his pleasure. ‘And anyway, fuck off.’

He flinched slightly.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said eventually, ‘under the circumstances, your presence in the house makes you worthy of our valuable time and effort.’

I still couldn’t work this out.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why you and not the police? What’s so special about Woolf?’ I looked from O’Neal to Solomon. ‘If it comes to that, what’s so special about me?’

The phone on O’Neal’s desk chirped, and he snatched it up with a practised flourish, flicking the wire behind his elbow as he brought the receiver to his ear. He looked at me as he talked.

‘Yes? Yes… Indeed. Thank you.’

The receiver was back in its cradle and fast asleep in an instant. Watching him handle it, I could tell that the telephone was O’Neal’s one great skill.

He scribbled something on his pad and beckoned Solomon over to the desk. Solomon peered at it, and then they both looked at me.

‘Do you own a firearm, Mr Lang?’

O’Neal asked this with a cheerful, efficient smile. Would

you prefer an aisle or a window seat? I started to feel sick.

‘No, I do not.’

‘Had access to firearms of any sort?’

‘Not since the army.’

‘I see,’ said O’Neal, nodding to himself. He left a long pause, checking the pad to see that he’d got the details absolutely right. ‘So the news that a nine millimetre Browning pistol, with fifteen rounds of ammunition, has been found in your flat would come as a surprise to you?’

I thought about this.

‘It’s more of a surprise that my flat is being searched.’

‘Never mind that.’

I sighed.

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not particularly surprised.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I’m starting to get the hang of how today is going.’ O’Neal and Solomon looked blank. ‘Oh do come on,’ I said. ‘Anyone who’s prepared to spend thirty thousand pounds to make me look like a hired gun presumably wouldn’t stop at another three hundred to make me look like a hired gun who has a gun he can hire.’

O’Neal played with his bottom lip for a moment, squeezing it on either side between thumb and forefinger.

‘I have a problem here, don’t I, Mr Lang?’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, I rather think I do,’ he said. He let go of the lip, and it hung there in a bulbous pout, as if it didn’t want to go back to its original shape. ‘Either you are an assassin, or someone is trying to make you look like one. The problem is that every piece of evidence I have applies equally well to both possibilities. It really is very difficult.’

I shrugged.

‘That must be why they gave you such a big desk,’ I said. Eventually they had to let me go. For whatever reason, they didn’t want to involve the police with an illegal firearm charge, and the Ministry of Defence is not, so far as I know, equipped with its own detention cells.

O’Neal asked me for my passport, and before I could spin a yarn about having lost it in the tumble-dryer, Solomon produced it from his hip-pocket. I was told to remain contactable, and to let them know if I received any further approaches from strange men. There wasn’t much I could do but agree.

As I left the building and strolled through St James’s Park in some rare April sunshine, I tried to work out whether I felt any different, knowing that Rayner had only been trying to do his job. I also wondered why I hadn’t known that he was Woolf’s bodyguard. Or even that he had one.

But much, much more to the point, why hadn’t Woolf’s daughter?

Three

God and the doctor we like adore

But only when in danger, not before;

The truth is I was feeling sorry for myself.

I’m used to being broke, and unemployment is more than a nodding acquaintance. I’ve been left by women I loved, and had some pretty fierce toothache in my time. But somehow, none of these things quite compares with the feeling that the world is against you.

I started to think of friends I could lean on for some help, but, as always happened when I attempted this kind of social audit, I realised that far too many of them were abroad, dead, married to people who disapproved of me, or weren’t really my friends, now that I came to think of it.

Which is why I found myself in a phone box on Piccadilly, asking for Paulie.

‘I’m afraid he’s in court at the moment,’ said a voice. ‘May I take a message?’

‘Tell him it’s Thomas Lang, and if he’s not there to buy me lunch at Simpson’s on theStrand atone o’clock sharp, his legal career is over.’

‘Legal career… over,’ recited the clerk. ‘I shall give him that message when he rings in, Mr Lang. Good morning.’ Paulie, full name Paul Lee, and I had an unusual relationship.

It was unusual in that we saw each other every couple of months, in a purely social way - pubs, dinner, theatre, opera, which Paulie loved - and yet we both freely admitted that we had not the slightest liking for each other. Not a shred. If our feelings had run as strong as hatred, then you might interpret that as some twisted expression of affection. But we didn’t hate each other. We just didn’t like each other, that’s all.

I found Paulie an ambitious, greedy prig, and he found me lazy, unreliable, and a slob. The only positive thing you could say about our ‘friendship’ was that it was mutual. We would meet, pass an hour or so in each other’s company, and then part with that all-important ‘there but for the grace of God’ sensation in precisely equal measures. And in exchange for giving me fifty quids-worth of roast beef and claret, Paulie admitted that he got exactly fifty quids-worth of superior feeling, paying for my lunch.

I had to ask to borrow a tie from themaitre d’hфtel,and he punished me for it by giving me the choice between a purple one and a purple one, but attwelve forty-five I was sitting at a table in Simpson’s, melting some of the unpleasantness of the morning in a large vodka and tonic. A lot of the other diners were American, which explained why the joints of beef were selling faster than the joints of lamb. Americans have never really caught on to the idea of eating sheep. I think they think it’s cissy.

Paulie arrived bang on one, but I knew he’d apologise for being late.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘What’s that you’ve got there? Vodka? Gimme one of those.’

The waiter coasted away, and Paulie looked round the room, stroking his tie down the front of his shirt and shooting his chin out from time to time to ease the pressure of his collar on the folds of his neck. As always, his hair was fluffy and squeaky clean. He claimed this went down well with juries, but for as long as I’d known him, love of hair had always been a weakness with Paulie. In truth he was not physically blessed, but as a consolation for his short, round, runty body, God had given him a fine head of hair which he would probably keep, in varying shades, until he was eighty.