Jack Higgins - In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

I stared at her in astonishment and at the same time, some kind of light started to dawn. She had turned away from me slightly. When I got the front view again, she was holding an old Beretta automatic pistol in her right hand and looked as if she knew exactly what to do with it.

“Would you mind going into rather more detail,” I told her. “I’m afraid I’m not with you.”

“Why don’t you pull the other one,” she suggested crisply.

I was still holding the A.K. at the trail. I dropped it at my feet and put the Uzi beside it. “Look, no hands.”

She wasn’t impressed. “What about the thing in the holster?”

I removed the Smith and Wesson, laid it down, then walked back three paces, squatted against a holly-oak and took out my cigarettes.

“Like one?”

She shook her head. “I want to live to a ripe old age.”

“If you think it’s worth it.” I lit one myself. “Now I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen and then you can shoot me – if you still want to.”

“We’ll see,” she said calmly. “Only make it quick. I haven’t had any breakfast.”

So I told her in a few brief sentences and when I was finished, her expression hadn’t altered in the slightest. “Let me get this straight. My stepfather told you I was abducted by Serafino Lentini and held to ransom. That he paid up, but that Serafino decided to have his own wicked way with me after all and kept the money into the bargain?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“A lie, Mr. Wyatt, from beginning to end.”

“I thought so.”

She showed her surprise. “I don’t understand.”

“I happen to know that because of injuries sustained under police interrogation some years ago, Serafino Lentini isn’t physically capable of taking that kind of interest in any woman.”

“But if you knew that, if you realised there was something phoney about my stepfather’s story from the beginning, why did you come?”

“I’ve always been insatiably curious.” I grinned. “The money was good and he made you sound rather interesting. Tell me, did you really sleep with the chauffeur when you were fourteen?”

I certainly cracked that iron composure of hers with that one. Her eyes widened, she gasped and what I can only describe as a virginal flush tinged her cheeks.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s obvious now that he has an unusually inventive streak.”

“You want the facts? I’ll give them to you.” She wasn’t pointing the Beretta at me any longer and she looked mad. “As they say about life insurance, I’m worth more dead than alive. My mother left me everything in trust with my stepfather as executor. Something of a mistake on her part. I’m twenty-one in another three weeks and get personal control of the whole thing. If I die before then Hoffer gets the lot. Two and a half million sterling.”

It certainly made what he was paying us sound very marginal indeed.

“The only true thing he appears to have told you,” she went on, “is the fact that he gave Serafino Lentini twenty-five thousand dollars, but for a different reason. I was to be ambushed when driving alone to visit friends at Villabla one evening, robbed and shot dead beside my car where I would be easily found and identified, apparently just another victim of a bandit outrage.”

“But Serafino wouldn’t play?”

“He intended to at first. Standing there beside my car that evening after he and his men had stopped me I thought my last hour had come. I don’t think I’ll ever be as close to death again.”

“What made him change his mind?”

“He’s told me since that he liked the look of me. That I reminded him of his younger sister who died in childbirth a year ago. I think the real truth is that he doesn’t like my stepfather. It seems they had dealings before although he’s never told me much about that.”

“Then why did he do business with Hoffer at all?”

“He wanted money – big money. He’s enthusiastic about only one thing – the idea of emigrating to South America and leaving this life behind. I think I’m alive because it suddenly struck him that it would be rather amusing to take Hoffer’s money and not carry out his side of the bargain.”

“So he whisked you off to the mountains?”

“I’ve been with him ever since.”

“Doesn’t it ever worry you that he might change his mind on another whim?”

She shook her head. “Not in the slightest. Since I explained the real facts of the situation he and his men are only too well aware which side their bread is buttered on.”

“But of course,” I said softly. “All they’ve got to do is keep you alive long enough and you’ll have all the money in the world.”

“Exactly. Once things are settled satisfactorily, I’ve promised to get them out to South America with a hundred thousand pounds to split between the four of them.”

So now all was revealed. Or was it ? A great deal that had puzzled me was now explained, but there were several things which still didn’t make any kind of sense.

She voiced one of them for me. “One thing I can’t understand. What were you supposed to do once you got your hands on me?”

“Take you to Hoffer. He’s meeting us himself on the Bellona road.”

“Didn’t he expect me to say anything to you? Weren’t you supposed to notice when you got here that I wasn’t the slave of Serafino’s passion that he made out?”

Which had been worrying me for some time and yet I could think of no possible explanation except for the one she offered me herself a moment later.

“Which takes us back to square one,” she said. “The only logical explanation. That you dropped in to finish me off along with Serafino and his men. Then my stepfather goes to the police, wringing his hands, giving them some story about how he’s been afraid for my life and didn’t dare seek official help before, but now he can’t go on. The police make an official search and find what’s left of us.”

“Wouldn’t they want to know who was responsible?”

“There are several groups in the mountains just like Serafino and his men, and there’s no love lost.” She shrugged. “It would be reasonable to suppose that one of them was responsible. All very sad, but nice and tidy for my stepfather. When you think of it, it is the only explanation that makes any kind of sense.”

Her hand started to bring up the Beretta again. It was her eyes that warned me and the sudden, pinched look about the mouth, not that I was particularly alarmed.

I came up in an unnecessarily spectacular spring, got my shoulder to her knees and had her on her back in a moment. Once on top, the war was over, although a certain amount of wriggling continued until I clamped a knee across each of her arms.

I held up the Beretta and slipped the safety catch. “It just won’t fire until you do that. Try again.”

I dropped it on her chest, got up and turned my back on her. I lit another cigarette, an ostentatious bit of theatricality and when I turned again she was standing staring at me in bewilderment, the Beretta swinging loosely from one hand and pointing directly into the ground.

“But it still doesn’t make sense,” she said.

She was right – it didn’t. The only thing which filled her true circumstances was that we had been sent to kill her and we had not.

Or had we…?

It was suddenly cold and my throat went dry. No, it wasn’t possible and I tried to push the thought away from me. Burke would never have stood still for a thing like that.

In any case, I wasn’t allowed to take it any further. Someone jumped on my back, an arm clamped around my throat and down I went.

Someone once said that God made some men big and some small and left it to Colonel Colt to even things up. As a philosophy where violence is concerned, it’s always appealed to me and like most relatively small men, I’ve never been much good at the hand-to-hand stuff.