Gavin Lyall - Blame The Dead

When she'd gone, I pulled the bed apart and remade it and then lay down again. Sleep well. Why not? – I was alone, as usual.

After a time I remembered the half-finished drink I'd brought upstairs and found and finished it. And some time after that, I slept.

It was still dark, still silent. I didn't know what had woken me but it must have been something positive because I'd come awake with a rush. I lay and listened.

Far away, a lorry made a painful gear-change on a hill and wheezed out of hearing. Nothing else. I lifted my wrist to look at my watch. And a door clicked.

It could be Lois. It could be the wind. In a strange house it could be a dozen things I wouldn't know about. But I wanted to know. I reached for my trousers, my shoes, then the Mauser.

Outside the room I stopped, trying to remember the layout. Stairs to my right. I paused again at the head of them, and a cold draught breathed on my chest. The front door was open.

Down there, the dining-room was ahead on the right, the drawing-room back on the right, the study ahead on the left.

And that was where a faint line of light glowed and Vanished. Somebody was working by torchlight in there. It was the obvious place to begin, just as I had.

I kept right over against the wall where the stairs were least likely to creak and mousied my way down.

Halfway down, the door opened and a pool of torchlight wavered across the hall floor. Two figures, barely more than shadows, followed it. I leaned against the wall and held my breath.

The light shifted around indecisively, the figures blended, and an indecipherable whisper floated up towards me.

Then the torch flashed up the stairs, across me, away, and back, pinning me down like a butterfly in a case.

An incredulous voice said, 'Christ, it's Card!'

A younger voice yelped, 'He's got a gun!'

Something long glinted at the base of the light, the older voice shouted, 'Don't shoot!' and I threw myself against the bannister.

A gigantic double explosion slammed through the house and the air swirled around me. A red-hot fingernail scored across my back.

I got my hand out from under me and fired blindly down into the dazzle of the torch. The little Mauser snapped feebly in the ringing deafness after those bangs.

I'd fired three before I realised what I was doing and stopped. The double bang meant a shotgun, of course, and now an empty one. The torch tilted towards the floor, fell, and went out.

I shouted, 'Hold it! You're a lovely target in that doorway!' Then I stood up carefully and winced at the pain in my back. I could feel a trickle of hot blood slide down it. Behind me, a light went on, and Lois said, 'Jamie, what are you-' Then she screamed.

I didn't look round. I kept the gun pointed and moved slowly, carefully, down towards the two figures in the hall. I was beginning to tremble, and not just from the cold blast coming through the front door.

It was Mockby's chauffeur, Charles. It had to be, of course. And his young friend, still clutching the twelve-bore. Charles was holding his right arm out in almost a hand-shaking position, but as I watched, it began to drip blood.

'I got you,' I said. My voice sounded high and strained. 'You got me, too. That makes it all square, doesn't it? Perfectly fair, what? I was aiming at the torch, so it wasn't a bad shot, was it? Only a few inches off. I suppose none of the others got you, did they? Not like through the stomach? I'd like you to have got one through the stomach. It takes about five minutes to come on really strong, they say, but then it apparently feels like rather bad peritonitis. Rather jolly, that. I could stand watching you have peritonitis. You aren't saying much, are you?'

Both of them were standing rigid as ice statues, staring at the Mauser. It was shaking in my hand like the last leaf of summer, but it couldn't miss at that range. And a part of me, a part beyond legality and morality and common sense and probably humanity itself, wanted to squeeze the trigger and go on squeezing until the slide locked open. And they knew it.

I said, 'I think I'd better sit down,' and sat on the stairs. My voice must have sounded more natural because they both took deep breaths and relaxed. The younger one let the shotgun droop.

'You want to be careful with that thing,' I said cheerfully. 'You never know how being mistaken for a partridge is going to affect people. Some people take it one way, some another. You just can't tell, can you? I'm sorry about your arm, Charles, but I think we'd better both stay here bleeding until the US Cavalry arrives.'

At the top of the stairs, a phone bell gave a single ting.

Charles said evenly, 'We're having the coppers in, are we?'

'It sounds like it, doesn't it? I suppose it had to happen eventually. Not my decision, but it's probably all for the best. You know how frightfully jealous the fuzz gets when you try to keep gunshot wounds to yourself.'

He lifted his forearm until it was vertical; from wrist to elbow, his thin suede jacket was black with blood. He looked at it unemotionally and then at the young man with the shot gun.

'You stupid little sod,' he said wearily.

It took time; it always does. These things start fast but finish very slowly – if ever. A bullet leaves a gun at around a thousand feet a second, and it starts a file that they keep going until long after you're dead, just in case somebody wants to check back to that night when…

By five o'clock things had settled down a bit. Charles and I had been to the hospital and I'd come back; the other lad was down at the local nick talking over his past and future with a chief inspector. All I had on the far side of the dining-room table was a detective sergeant, name of Keating.

He had my statement – two long, laborious pages of the police prose that makes every action sound so mundane and planned. Even mine, almost.

' "Mrs Fenwick seemed worried at the news I told her and asked me to spend the night at Kingscutt Manor to protect her," ' he quoted. Then looked up. 'Is that correct, sir?'

I nodded dully; I felt tired and stiff and the casualty ward had smeared my back with something that itched like a forest fire.

'You do realise that the defence will get a big laugh from this in court, sir?'

I shrugged again. 'I doubt it. They'll dodge the whole issue of why I was here.'

He was a stocky, broad-shouldered type with the sort of gut detectives get in their forties through too much 'observing' in pubs. Normally, his face would have been stolid and impassive; at this hour, expressions kept slipping on or off and he had to pull the pieces together again.

He said, 'Why do you think that, sir?'

'Because any argument about why I was here keeps bringing us back to Paul Mockby. I say it was because I expected his goons to come around, and sure enough around comes his chauffeur, at least. He doesn't want that argument, and who d'you think's paying for the defence – Father Christmas?'

'Who pays for a defence isn't something we can bring out in court.'

'Sure. That'll be why he does it. Have you got hold of Mockby yet?'

The new expression went on like a slide in a projector: I'm-only-a-sergeant-and-I-only-work-here. 'I just wouldn't know about that, sir. Coming back to your statement,… The question of why you had a gun with you, the Mauser – that could come up.'

'Same answer – for Mockby. I brought a gun because I thought Mockby would etcetera and etcetera and so on. It's licenced, anyway.'

He nodded; he'd seen the licence. He'd still got the gun, if it came to that, him or one of his mates. All neatly labelled and tied up in a polythene bag and the spent cases in other bags and the three bullets being dug patiently out of the woodwork of the hallway outside.