I wasn't looking for a chance to be a hero, but I heard his feet going up the next flight and I went up the first flight of stairs two at a time. I had rubber-soled shoes. He was making so much noise that he probably couldn't hear me. But as I halted at the next dark landing, his footsteps halted too. In the lexicon of hand-to-hand fighting, going up a dark staircase against a shotgun is high on the list of 'don't-evers'.
I was badly placed. Did he see me or did he guess where I was? He moved across the landing, aimed down the staircase, and pulled the trigger. There was a bang and a flash and the sound of him running. That was nasty; he was trying to kill me now that his warning shot had gone unheeded. Bang! Jesus Christ! Another blast. I felt that one and I jumped back frightened and disoriented. For a moment I thought there must be two of them, but that was just a manifestation of my fear. So was the indigestible lump in my stomach.
I kept still, my heart pounding and my face hot. It was pitch dark except for a glimmer of light escaping from under the door of the office on the floor below me. I fancied I could see a pale blur where he was leaning over the balustrade trying to catch a glimpse of me. He must have taken the woollen mask off; too hot, I suppose. I kept very still, my shoulders pressed flat against the wall, and waited to see if he would do something even more stupid. Come on, come on, come on! Soon the police sirens would be heard and I'd be facing an audience outside in the road. On the other hand, so would he.
Sweat dribbled down my face, but my mouth was dry and rough like sandpaper. It was only with some effort that I breathed slowly and silently. The Department would gloss over the man I'd shot downstairs, especially if I wrote the report to make it sound as if I was protecting Bret. Protecting highly placed top-floor staff at London Central was not something the Department wanted to discourage. But they would not gloss over the inconvenience of untangling me from the clutches of the Metropolitan Police. Particularly not when our present relationship with the Home Office was decidedly turbulent.
Ah . . . keeping very still paid off! This was him. He leaned forward and the glint of light from the hall below caught his forehead. I am not a vindictive man, but I was frightened and angry. I wasn't going to let some hoodlum dynamite one of our cars and push a shotgun under my nose and try to kill me like they'd killed Ted Riley. This one wasn't going to slip away into the night. I raised my gun slowly and took careful aim. Maybe he saw me or the movement of the gun. He ducked back as I started to squeeze the trigger. Too late. I stayed very still, gun uplifted. I counted to ten and I was lucky. My inactivity encouraged him to lean forward again, this time more cautiously, but not cautiously enough. I pumped two shots into him. The silenced gun twisted in my hand and its two thuds were followed by a scream and a crash and the sound of a door banging, as he tumbled back into a room on the landing above me. They must have been using a room here. Maybe one, maybe all of them, had been upstairs waiting for us. That's why we got no warning from our men positioned across the street.
For a moment I hesitated. I wanted to look at their hideout, but time was pressing and the consequences too serious. I ran downstairs, through the office — knocking the cashbox to the floor as I went — and pushed open the swing door into the launderette. Coins and paper money scattered over the floor; perhaps that would convince the cops it was a bungled robbery. It was blindingly bright under the fluorescent lights after the darkness of the stairwell, bright and steamy. I half closed my eyes to try to retain some of their adjustment as I went out onto the street.
The street was lit by the flames from the car. I saw a third man now. He was also dressed in a pea jacket. He was astride a motorbike and got it started as I brought the gun up and fired. But he was quick. And he was strong enough to swing the heavy bike round in a tight curve and open the throttle to roar away. I chanced one more shot at him, but after that I could see him only as a dark smudge against the fronts of the houses. Too dark, too much deflection and too much chance of putting a few rounds into someone's bedroom. So I went back into the launderette to see what Bret was doing.
Bret was doing nothing except holding his bundled-up laundry bag tight under his arm and watching the masked boy bleeding bright red frothy blood. The boy was still clamped over the washing machine, holding it tight as if he was trying to move it to another place. His feet were wide apart and there was blood on the white enamel, blood on the glass, and blood mingling with the spilled soapy water that had leaked onto the floor.
'He's had it,' I said. 'Let's go, Bret.' I stuffed my gun back into my overcoat pocket. Bret was in shock. I gave him a short jab in the ribs to bring him back into the real world. He blinked and shook his head like a boxer trying to clear his brain. Then he got the idea and ran after me to where my car was parked on the corner.
'Stay in the car,' I said, opening the door and pushing him into the front seat. 'I've got to look at the others.'
Bret was still holding the bag with the money and the laundry. He was like a man in a trance. As he settled into the car seat, the bag was on his knees and he had his arms round it tight, as if it was a body. Across the road the Ford Escort in which Stinnes and the minder had arrived was still burning, although the flames were now turning to black smoke as the tyres caught fire. 'He's here,' said Bret, meaning Stinnes.
'Shit,' I said. Because, to my amazement, Bret was right. Stinnes had survived the bomb under the car. He was standing by the door of my Rover waiting to be let in. 'Get in the back seat.' His minder was standing close to him. It was only when they were awkwardly climbing into the back seat that I noticed they were handcuffed together. A minder that cuffs himself to his subject is a minder who takes no chances, but he'd saved Stinnes from certain death. Craig was huge and muscular; shackled to Craig, even King Kong would have to go where Craig went.
I started the car and pulled away before there was any sign of a police car. I suppose that respectable part of Hampstead doesn't attract a big police presence at three o'clock on a Tuesday morning. 'What the hell happened?' I asked.
'I saw them coming,' said Craig. They were amateurs, real amateurs.' He was very young, no more than twenty. 'So I put the cuffs on and we got out.' He had a simple outlook: most good minders are like that. And he was right; they'd behaved like amateurs, and that puzzled me. They'd even missed Craig and Stinnes escaping from the car. Amateurs. But the KGB didn't use amateurs in their hit teams and that worried me. We passed a police car at Swiss Cottage. It was doing about seventy on the wrong side of the road, with the blue light flashing and the siren on. They were doing it the way they'd seen it done on late-night TV.
By this time Bret was coming back to life. 'What was that you were saying, about how they would arrive very nervous?' he said. His voice was shaky; suddenly he'd experienced life at the sharp end of the Department and he was shocked.
'Very funny, Bret,' I said. 'Does that crack come before you thank me for saving your life or afterwards?' From behind us I heard young Craig coughing to remind us that the rear seats were occupied by people with ears.
'Saving my life, you son of a bitch?' said Bret in hysterical anger. 'First you shoot, using me as a shield. Then you run out, leaving me to face the music.'
I laughed. That's the way it is being a field agent, Bret,' I said. 'If you'd had experience or training, you would have hit the deck. Better still, you would have taken out that second bastard instead of leaving me to deal with all of them.'
'If I'd had experience or training,' said Bret menacingly, 'I would have read to you that section of the Command Rules that applies to the use of firearms in a public place.'
'You don't have to read it to
me
, Bret,' I said. 'You should have read it to that bastard who came at us with the sawn-off shotgun. And to the one who tried to part my hair when I went after him upstairs.'
'You killed him,' said Bret. He was still breathing heavily. He was rattled, really rattled, while I was pumped with adrenalin and ready to say all kinds of things that are better left unsaid. 'He bled to death. I watched him.'
'Why didn't you give him first aid?' I said sarcastically. 'Because that would have meant letting go your four grand? Is that why?'
'You could have winged him,' Bret said.
'That's just for the movies, Bret. That's just for Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. In the real world, no one is shooting guns out of people's hands or giving them flesh wounds in the upper arm. In the real world you hit them or you miss them. It's difficult enough to hit a moving target without selecting tricky bits of anatomy. So don't give me all that crap.'
'We left him to die.'
'That's right. And if you had followed me upstairs with the shotgun I kicked over to you and tried to give me a little cover, you would have seen me kill another of those bastards.'
'Is it going in your report?' said Bret.
'You're damn right it's going in my report. And so is the way you stood there like a goddamned tailor's dummy when I needed backup.'
'You're a maniac, Samson,' said Bret.
Erich Stinnes leaned forward from the back seat and said softly, 'That's the way it is, Mr Rensselaer. What Samson did was just what I would have done. It's what any really good professional would have done.'
Bret said nothing. Bret was clutching his bag and staring into space lost in his own thoughts. I knew what it was; I'd seen it happen to other people. Bret would never be quite the same again. Bret was no longer with us; he'd withdrawn into some inner world into which none of the stinking realities of his job would be allowed to intrude. Then suddenly he spoke, softly, as if just voicing his thoughts: 'And it was Sheldon he really loved. Not me: Sheldon.'
'Well, I don't want any of that in it,' said Dicky. 'It's not a report, it's a diatribe.'
'Whatever you want to call it, it's the truth,' I said. We were sitting side by side in the drawing room of the Cruyers' home. Dicky was wearing his 'I Love New York' sweatshirt, jeans, and jogging shoes, with those special thick white socks that are said to lessen the shocks to the spine. We'd been watching the TV news to see if there was anything about the Hampstead shooting: there wasn't. The gas was hissing in the simulated coal fire and now the TV was displaying a rather unattractive foursome in punk outfits. For a moment Dicky's attention was distracted by them. 'Look at those caterwauling imbeciles,' he said. 'Are we working our guts out just to keep the West safe for that sort of garbage?'
'Not entirely,' I said. 'We're getting paid as well.'
He picked up the remote control and reduced the pop group to a pinpoint of light that disappeared with a soft plop. Then he took up my draft report again and pretended to read it afresh, but actually he was just holding it in front of his face while he thought about what to say next. 'It's your version of the truth,' he said pedantically.
'That's the only one I've got,' I said.
Try again.'
'It's
anyone's
version of the truth,' I said. 'Anyone who was there.'
'When are you going to get it through your thick head that I don't want your uncorrupted testimony? I want something that can go to the old man and not get me into hot water.' He tossed the draft of my report onto the table beside him. Then he scratched his curly head. Dicky was worried. He didn't want to be in the middle of a departmental battle. Dicky liked to score his victories by stealth.
I leaned across from the armchair and picked up my carefully typed sheets. But Dicky gently took them from my hand. He folded diem up and stuffed them under a paperweight that was handy on the other side of him. 'Better forgotten, Bernard,' he said. 'Start again.'
'Perhaps this time you'd tell me what you want me to say,' I suggested.
'I'll draft something for you,' said Dicky. 'Keep it very short. Just the main essentials will be sufficient.'
'Have you seen Bret's report?' I said.
'There was no report from Bret; just a meeting. Bret had to give a brief account of everything that's happened since he took over the Stinnes business.' Dicky smiled nervously. 'It wasn't the sort of stuff upon which careers are built.'
'I suppose not,' I said. An account of everything that had happened since Bret took responsibility for Stinnes would be one of unremitting disaster. I wondered how much of the blame Bret had unloaded onto me.
'It was decided that Stinnes should go back into Berwick House immediately. And Bret has to keep the old man informed of everything he intends to do about him.'
'Berwick House? What's the panic? Everyone says the interrogation was going well since we moved him.'
'No reflection on you, Bernard. But Stinnes was nearly killed. If it hadn't been for that fellow Craig, they'd have got him. We can't risk that again, Bernard. Stinnes is too precious.'