Reginald Hill - The Long Kill

He stood at the window and looked out to the intersection. Jacob needed no special plan. Tai would have his usual armed escort. It was only fifty yards to the apartment block’s only entrance. If he survived sixty seconds after pulling the trigger, he would be a very lucky man.

No. He corrected himself. A very unlucky man.

He didn’t mind dying if that was the price to pay for the colonel’s death. His attack at Nguyet’s apartment had been suicidal.

But he felt a sudden reluctance to die for the man called Jacob and the mysterious forces behind him.

Despite his aching body, the whisky was making him drowsy. There were still two hours to go and he dare not risk sleep. He pulled on trousers and a shirt and went down into the street.

He strolled aimlessly, ignoring the city’s crowded and varied street life which on first arrival had so fascinated him. The beggars, the girls selling flowers, the vendors of books and pictures and ornaments, the street urchins, the workmen in battered felt hats with never-ending, never-removed cigarettes in their lips, the hire-car drivers, the shoe-shine boys, none of these could interest him any more. Only once, when among the steady stream of svelte and graceful Vietnamese women passing in and out of the fashionable shops, he imagined he glimpsed Nguyet, did he show any animation. But even as he pressed forward crying her name, he knew he was wrong.

And he had been wrong even to have loved her.

He had loved his father and he had deserted him.

He had loved his mother and she had died.

He had been willing for the want of any other object to transfer his love to his stepfather, but he had rejected him.

In the Army, at university, he had been popular, active, successful, but he had not made the mistake of allowing anyone too close. When he got the chance to come to this exotic, distant place, there had been no ties at home to make him hesitate.

And here, as if the bitter rules which must guide his life in England did not apply, he had relaxed once more and taken Nguyet into the deepest and most secret places of his soul.

Now she had paid the price.

He stopped so suddenly that other pedestrians bumped into him. But these polite and gentle people showed no irritation or curiosity. He realized he was outside the Hotel de la Paix, one of the city’s many monuments to the French colonial dream. Without conscious decision, he went into the crowded lobby and made his way up the stairs to the top floor. Letting his instinct guide him, he turned left and walked to the end of the corridor. There was a bathroom here. He opened the door and went in.

It was a high airy room. A posse of cockroaches scuttled beneath the high-sided cast-iron bath at his entry. Painfully, he clambered up on the side of the bath and, disturbing another huge cockroach on the dusty windowsill, opened the high narrow window.

It gave him a crow’s-eye view straight down the boulevard. There, somewhere between three and four hundred yards away, was the intersection where the colonel’s jeep would be stopped in just over an hour’s time.

He got down off the bath and went to the door. There was a key on the inside. He removed it, went out, and locked the door behind him.

On his way back down the boulevard, he was even less conscious of his surroundings as he carefully paced out the distance. Three hundred and twenty-five yards. Back in his flat, he packed the few belongings he wanted to take with him in a small grip, slipped a small pair of field glasses he used for bird-spotting into his pocket and repacked the rifle in its box.

He arrived back at the hotel at quarter to six. Approaching one of the hire-car drivers he told him he would be leaving for the airport in about fifteen minutes and gave him the grip to look after. It was Nguyet who had taught him this lesson about most of her people. Trust given without hesitation was nearly always repaid in full.

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