What if, Grice wondered, it’s another burglary? Someone with a copied set of keys, a skeleton? But then the man-the weight of his steps suggested that, yes, it was a man-went into where they knew the kitchen to be and they heard the faint click of a cupboard being closed.
Grabianski signaled towards Grice: while whoever had come in was making whatever it was in the kitchen, there was time for them to descend the stairs, get out the way they’d come in.
Now it was Grice who was indecisive, but a hand to his shoulder propelled him forwards and down. They were three rises from the foot of the stairs when Hugo Furlong, his plane rerouted to East Midlands Airport and within easy reach of a friendly bed for the night, wandered through from the kitchen. He was spooning raspberry jam from a jar, just about the only edible thing he’d been able to fancy and find.
All three stared at one another.
Hugo Furlong stared at the two intruders, who, after looking hard and quizzically at each other, stared back at him.
“Don’t …” Grabianski began to say.
The jar slid between Furlong’s fingers and crashed on the parquet floor, raspberry juice and shattered glass. For some seconds the spoon stuck out from Furlong’s mouth; anything less than silver, he would have bitten it right through.
Grice made a move towards him and Hugo Furlong turned fast and smacked his head against a raised wooden pillar, hard. He cried out and rocked on his heels, clutching at the pillar as he slid towards the ground.
“Move!” Grice shouted, grabbing at Grabianski’s arm.
But Grabianski was leaning towards Hugo Furlong, drawn by the muffled sounds emerging from the crumpled body.
“Now!”
Grabianski shrugged him off. Down on one knee beside Furlong, careful not to kneel in raspberry jam, he took hold of him by the arms and turned him over. Blood ran freely from a cut alongside the right eyebrow, but it wasn’t the blood that Grabianski was concerned with. More worrying was the sudden paleness of his face, his lack of consciousness.
“We’re out!” called Grice. “As of now.”
Grabianski struggled with the knot of Hugo Furlong’s tie, fingers too fast and fumbling, forced himself to slow down, prise his fingernail beneath the silk.
“What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?”
“He needs help,” Grabianski said. Even though his hands were less than steady, his voice was strangely calm.
“Help? We’ll be the ones who need help.”
“He seems to be having some kind of heart attack.” Grice pushed his arms around Grabianski from behind and hauled him to his feet, not easy with such a big man. “Listen,” Grice said, the manner of explaining to a recalcitrant child, “we are getting out of here this minute. We do not want to take any more risk than necessary. No fault of our own, we’re already in trouble enough. Right?”
Grabianski seemed to nod.
“Good. We’re going.”
“What about him?” Grabianski was glancing back over his shoulder.
“He’s no concern of ours.”
“I think he’s stopped breathing,” Grabianski said.
That morning, the fourth morning in a row, Hugo had sat down to what some restaurants still described as a traditional English breakfast. Right up to and including the fried bread. He had spent the previous two days-and most of the evenings-attending a sales conference in Glasgow. All the reasoning that dictated orange juice, bran flakes, at most a couple of slices of wholemeal toast, went out of the window as soon as he caught the familiar smell of bacon crisping at the edges, the spit and splutter of frying eggs. Besides, wasn’t that what everyone else was having?
What Hugo Furlong was having, right now, on the polished wooden flooring of his not-yet-fully-occupied new house, was a heart attack.
“Come on,” said Grice.
Grabianski continued to unbutton the man’s shirt, the pain in his head gone now, disappeared as he struggled to remember what he had read one damp afternoon, a magazine he had been leafing through while waiting to have a new exhaust fitted in a quick-fit garage in Walsall.
“Leave him.”
Clothes loosened, Grabianski began to search for a pulse; pressed his thumb as hard against the inside of the wrist as he dared and there was nothing. He shifted his position and felt alongside the neck. No pulse. Not even a whisper.
Grabianski got up and moved around the body, straightening the legs, pulling the arms back down to the sides.
“Call an ambulance,” he said.
“You’re joking!”
Grabianski pointed down. “Does this look like a joke?”
“Sure. It looks like a fucking joke to me. That’s exactly what it looks like.”
“You’re not going to call an ambulance,” Grabianski said, back on his knees, “then get over here and give a hand.”
Grice watched as Grabianski took hold of the man’s head-as carefully as if it were some vase that might crack, never mind the blood that was collecting there, smudging his hand-took hold of the head and tilted it back.
“A cushion!” Grabianski sang out.
“What about it?”
“Get me a cushion.” He wasn’t sure if that was right, but took the one that Grice almost reluctantly handed him and squeezed it behind Hugo Furlong’s shoulder blades, the back of his neck.
“Now what’re you doing?” said Grice with a strange sort of fascination. Grabianski was opening the man’s mouth like he was a dentist.
“Clearing the airway.”
To Grice it sounded like something to do with pirate radio.
“Shit!” Grabianski exclaimed.
“What’s up?”
“He’s got false teeth.”
“His age, what else d’you expect? Forty-five, fifty, you expect it. I’ve got an upper set, none of them mine. Don’t you?”
There were a lot of fillings in Grabianski’s head, but every tooth was his own. Brush with salt his grandmother had told him, salt and warm water, every day. These lower dentures had been jolted loose by Hugo’s fall and were sideways across his mouth, pushing up against the palate. Finger and thumb, Grabianski eased them out and shook them a little before laying them aside.
“Jesus!” Grice complained. “That’s disgusting.”
“You’d rather he died?”
“Of course, I’d rather he died. He saw us, didn’t he? He’s not another one you can talk into calling us a couple of niggers. He’s going to pull through this, help some police artist with a photofit, there we are flashed up all over the country on Crimewatch. He’s dying, let him die.”
Grabianski wasn’t listening.
Still on his knees, he straightened the rest of his body, brought both hands level with his face, the left locked around the wrist of the right, which was shaped into a fist.
“What the hell …?” Grice began. He was wondering if what he was watching was some kind of primitive Polish prayer.
Grabianski brought his fist down into the center of Hugo’s chest with all the force he could muster, striking a couple of inches to the left of the sacrum.
“Jesus!” Grice shouted again. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Hugo’s body, the upper half of it, had lifted forward with the impact of the blow, a bolt of air expelled from the lungs. But when Grabianski checked for a pulse, there was still nothing. He shifted closer to the head, pinched the nose tight and lowered his lips over Hugo’s mouth.
“I’m going to throw up,” said Grice, as much to himself as either of them. The one on his back wasn’t hearing too well, anyway.
“Pump his chest,” said Grabianski urgently.
“What?”
“Pump his chest.”
“Hey, you’re Dr. Kildare here, not me.”
“Okay,” Grabianski swiveled on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, one hand going in that damned jam and picking up a splinter of glass for his troubles. “Get round there, give him some mouth to mouth.”