The Gun Seller - Страница 2

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

I’ve been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand, but when you’ve had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has ‘HATE’ tattooed on one hand, and ‘HATE’ on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing the little things in life. Like not being in prison.

I was contemplating these and related matters, and starting to think of all the hot countries I’d never got around to visiting, when I realised that that noise - that soft, creaking, shuffling, scraping noise - was definitely not coming from my heart. Nor from my lungs, nor from any other part of my yelping body. That noise was definitely external.

Someone, or something, was making an utterly hopeless job of coming down the stairs quietly.

I left the Buddha where it was, picked up a hideous alabaster table lighter and moved towards the door, which was also hideous. How can one make a hideous door? you may ask. Well, it takes some doing, certainly, but believe me, the top interior designers can knock off this kind of thing before breakfast.

I tried to hold my breath and couldn’t, so I waited noisily. A light switch flicked on somewhere, waited, then flicked off. A door opened, pause, nothing there either, closed. Stand still. Think. Try the sitting-room.

There was a rustle of clothing, a soft footfall, and then suddenly I found I was relaxing my grip on the alabaster lighter, and leaning back against the wall in something close to relief. Because even in my frightened, wounded state, I was ready to stake my life on the fact that Nina Ricci’s Fleur de Fleurs is just not a fighting scent.

She stopped in the doorway and looked around the room. The lights were out, but the curtains were wide open and there was plenty of light coming in from the street.

I waited until her gaze fell on Rayner’s body before I put my hand over her mouth.

We went through all the usual exchanges dictated byHollywood and polite society. She tried to scream and bite the palm of my hand, and I told her to be quiet because I wasn’t going to hurt her unless she shouted. She shouted and I hurt her. Pretty standard stuff, really.

By and by she was sitting on the hideous sofa with half a pint of what I thought was brandy but turned out to be Calvados, and I was standing by the door wearing my smartest and best ‘I am psychiatrically A1’ expression.

I’d rolled Rayner on to his side, into a kind of recovery position, to stop him from choking on his own vomit. Or anyone else’s, if it came to that. She’d wanted to get up and fiddle with him, to see if he was all right - pillows, damp cloths, bandages, all the things that help to make the bystander feel better - but I told her to stay where she was because I’d already called an ambulance, and all in all it would be better to leave him alone.

She had started to tremble slightly. It started in the hands, as they clutched the glass, then moved to her elbows and up to her shoulders, and it got worse every time she looked at Rayner. Of course, trembling is probably not an uncommon reaction to discovering a mixture of dead person and vomit on your carpet in the middle of the night, but I didn’t want her getting any worse. As I lit a cigarette with the alabaster lighter - and yes, even the flame was hideous - I tried to take in as much information as I could before the Calvados booted her up and she started asking questions.

I could see her face three times in that room: once in a silver-framed photograph on the mantelpiece, with her in Ray Bans, dangling from a ski-lift; once in a huge and terrible oil portrait, done by someone who can’t have liked her all that much, hanging by the window; and finally, and definitely the best of all, in a sofa ten feet away.

She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, with squareshoulders and long brown hair that waved and cheered as it disappeared behind her neck. The high, round cheek-bones implied Orientalness, but that disappeared as soon as you reached her eyes, which were also round, and large, and bright grey. If that makes any sense. She was wearing a red silk dressing-gown, and one elegant slipper with fancy gold thread across the toes. I glanced around the room, but its mate was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she could only afford one.

She cleared some husk from her throat. ‘Who is he?’ she said.

I think I’d known she was going to be American before she opened her mouth. Too healthy to be anything else. And where do they get those teeth?

‘His name was Rayner,’ I said, and then realised that this sounded a little thin as an answer, so I thought I’d add something. ‘He was a very dangerous man.’

‘Dangerous?’

She looked worried by that, and quite right too. It was probably crossing her mind, as it was crossing mine, that if Rayner was dangerous, and I’d killed him, then that, hierarchically-speaking, made me very dangerous.

‘Dangerous,’ I said again, and watched her closely as she looked away. She seemed to be trembling less, which was good. Or maybe her trembling had just fallen into sync with mine, so I noticed it less.

‘Well… what is he doing here?’ she said at last. ‘What did he want?’

‘It’s difficult to say.’ Difficult for me, at any rate. ‘Maybe he was after money, maybe the silver…’

‘You mean… he didn’t tell you?’ Her voice was suddenly loud. ‘You hit this guy, without knowing who he was? What he was doing here?’

Despite the shock, her brain seemed to be coming along pretty nicely.

‘I hit him because he was trying to kill me,’ I said. ‘I’m like that.’

I tried a roguish smile, then caught sight of it in the mirror over the mantelpiece and realised it hadn’t worked.

‘You’re like that,’ she repeated, unlovingly. ‘And who are you?’

Well now. I was going to have to wear some very soft shoes at this juncture. This was where things could suddenly get a lot worse than they already were.

I tried looking surprised, and perhaps just a little bit hurt. ‘You mean you don’t recognise me?’

‘No.,

‘Huh. Odd. Fincham. James Fincham.’ I held out my hand. She didn’t take it, so I converted the movement into a nonchalant brush of the hair.

‘That’s a name,’ she said. ‘That’s not who you are.’

‘I’m a friend of your father’s.’

She considered this for a moment. ‘Business friend?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of.’ She nodded. ‘You’re James Fincham, you’re a sort of business friend of my father’s, and you’ve just killed a man in our house.’

I put my head on one side, and tried to show that yes, sometimes it’s an absolute bugger of a world.

She showed her teeth again.

‘And that’s it, is it? That’s your CV?’

I reprised the roguish smile, to no better effect. ‘Wait a second,’ she said.

She looked at Rayner, then suddenly sat up a little straighter, as if a thought had just struck her.

‘You didn’t call anybody, did you?’

Come to think of it, all things considered, she must have been nearer twenty-four.

‘You mean…’ I was floundering now.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘there’s no ambulance coming here. Jesus.’

She put the glass down on the carpet by her feet, got up and walked towards the phone.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘before you do anything silly…’

I started to move towards her, but the way she spun round made me realise that staying still was probably the better plan. I didn’t want to be pulling bits of telephone receiver out of my face for the next few weeks.

‘You stay right there, Mr James Fincham,’ she hissed at me. ‘There’s nothing silly about this. I’m calling an ambulance, and I’m calling the police. This is an internationally approved procedure. Men come round with big sticks and take you away. Nothing silly about it at all.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I haven’t been entirely straight with you.’ She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

She narrowed her eyes.

‘What the hell do you mean "not entirely straight"? You only told me two things. You mean one of them was a lie?’ She had me on the ropes, there’s no question about that. I was in trouble. But then again, she’d only dialled the first nine.

‘My name is Fincham,’ I said, ‘and I do know your father.’

‘Yeah, what brand of cigarette does he smoke?’

‘Dunhill.’

‘Never smoked a cigarette in his life.’

She was late-twenties, possibly. Thirty at a pinch. I took a deep breath while she dialled the second nine.

‘All right, I don’t know him. But I am trying to help.’

‘Right. You’ve come to fix the shower.’

Third nine. Play the big card. ‘Someone is trying to kill him,’ I said.

There was a faint click and I could hear somebody, somewhere, asking which service we wanted. Very slowly she turned towards me, holding the receiver away from her face. ‘What did you say?’

‘Someone is trying to kill your father,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t know who, and I don’t know why. But I’m trying to stop them. That’s who I am, and that’s what I’m doing here.’

She looked at me long and hard. A clock ticked somewhere, hideously.

‘This man,’ I pointed at Rayner, ‘had something to do with it.’