“Oh, Christ. Gillespie? Is that you?”
“It’s me, yeah.”
I felt the tension flood out of me. “Jesus. Did you have to wait in the dark? I could have filleted you.”
“To be honest I fell asleep. But I didn’t want to leave a light on in case you got scared and thought the ungodly were waiting for you. Which is why we left our car up at the post office.”
“How the hell did you get in?” I was still crouched, but now leaned my back against the door jamb.
“Stuart Callaghan picked the lock of the front door. He’s good at things like that.” Gillespie was moving cautiously across the dark room. He had been sitting in the old settee in the bay window and now he shuffled toward the hall door beside which Sarah Sing Tennyson had put the main light switch.
“So what the hell are you doing here?” I eased the filleting knife back into its sheath.
“We need to know about the boat, Rebel Lady? And about the money on board her.” He sounded very disapproving, as though it was bitterly unfair of me to have deceived him.
“How the hell did you find out about Rebel Lady?” I asked.
“It’s our job to find things out,” he said in a pained voice, then he found the switch and suddenly the room was filled with light. Gillespie must have been cold for he was wearing one of the yellow plastic rain-slickers that had been hanging in the hallway.
“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked him.
“The police told us you were in residence. A guy called Ted Nickerson?”
“I assume you’re not alone?” I asked him.
“No. Callaghan is upstairs. I decided one of us would wait for you while the other slept. But I didn’t mean us both to fall asleep.” He yawned, then walked to the table where he had left his cellular telephone. “You look kind of bushed,” he said. “What happened?”
“I just drove ten hours there and ten hours back to be stiff-armed by a girl. I thought I was in love with her.”
“Ah.” He seemed embarrassed by my revelation and uncertain how to respond. “I’ll just report that you’ve surfaced,” he said and picked up his telephone.
I was still leaning against the kitchen door and Gillespie was pressing a number into the telephone when he suddenly coughed and looked up at me with a puzzled expression.
At least I think he coughed. It was hard to tell because at the same time the whole room was shockingly filled with the sound of a gunshot and the splintering crash as the bullet shattered a pane of the bow window behind Gillespie. The CIA man jerked forward and I realized the cough was the sound of the air being punched from his lungs by the violence of the bullet’s strike. He staggered, but managed to stay upright. The bullet which had hit him had been deflected and weakened by the window glass. He blinked. I was taking a breath to shout at him to get down when a second bullet, fired through the broken window and thus undetected and unchecked, struck him in the back, and this time Gillespie was hurled violently forward and I saw a vent of bright blood mist the room’s center, then he crashed to the floor and I heard the air sigh from his lungs as he slid forward on the polished oak boards. His cellular telephone spun into the kitchen where it lodged against the rubbish bin.
I edged back into the kitchen shadows. Gillespie was not moving. I could just see his back. Two bullet holes. The first shot had hit him high on the left shoulder, the second must have shattered his spine. There was the faintest trickle of blood; a surprisingly small amount considering the sudden spray that had reddened the living room’s air. I could see some blood on the floor, and more on the edge of the table that concealed my carbine.
Callaghan was surely awake now? Two bullets? The sound of the gunshots was reverberating in my ears. The marksman had to be in the marshes beyond my terrace. Should I stay where I was, or try to run into the dark? Or should I try to fetch the gun hidden under the table? But to reach the gun would mean going into the light that had made Gillespie a target. I slid the knife free again. It was a feeble weapon in the face of this night’s savagery, but the best to hand.
A footstep sounded outside the house. Not by the kitchen, but beyond the bow window. Someone was on the deck. Christ, I thought, but the bastard is coming inside to make sure of his work! I edged back out of the wash of light which came from the living room and I thought I saw a shadow at the far window. A black shadow. II Hayaween? Please God, I prayed, but let this not be il Hayaween. Maybe the shadow was just my imagination? Then the shadow moved, grunted. The gunman was looking through the window to see what his bullets had accomplished, but Gillespie’s body had slid across the floor and was half hidden from the window by the heavy table.
I gripped the filleting knife’s cord-wrapped handle. The killer was working with a high velocity rifle, so what chance did I have if he came indoors? None. What had Sarah Sing Tennyson said? Never piss a psychopath off, but put him down fast. I needed an ammonia squirt, not a damned fish-gutting knife.
The shadow had gone. Maybe I should run for it. No, not with the killer still outside. So wait, I told myself, wait.
Gillespie’s hands made small scratching noises as his fingers contracted into claws. That was not a sign of life, but a natural process as the body relaxed in death. The wind at the broken window stirred the brown drapes.
Footsteps sounded sudden and loud on the steep stairs from the bedrooms. The stairs, built in the nineteenth century, were pitched far more steeply than twentieth-century building regulations would allow and the hurrying Callaghan tripped on them, stumbled, then hit his shoulder against the wall at the bottom. “Shit!” he swore, then shouted. “Mr. Gillespie? Sir? Are you there, sir?”
I sat utterly still.
“Jesus Christ!” Callaghan had come into the living room. He could not see me for I was deep in the alcove beside the stove and Callaghan was staring at Gillespie. “Jesus Christ!” he said again, and whirled round, dragging his gun from his shoulder holster. He was wearing a shirt and trousers, but no jacket, tie or shoes. He must have been sleeping upstairs, and now he had woken to nightmare.
“Jesus!” He was in shock. He saw the broken window and ran toward it, then sensed that danger might lie on the other side so ran back to the room’s center, then he changed his mind again and went back to the window where, like a cop in a movie, he flattened himself against the drapes so he could peer round the corner into the salt darkness. He stood there, muttering to himself. I knew I would have to announce my presence, but I had to do it very carefully or else he would whirl round and shoot at my voice. He was twitchy as hell. I took a breath, readied myself to speak, when suddenly he turned, gasping, and I heard the rifle fire, its sound dreadfully loud in the confines of the house, and in the very same instant Callaghan fired back and I saw the muzzle flame of his pistol bright against the dark window.
Callaghan fired a second time, but the second pull on his trigger was merely a reflexive spasm of his fingers as he went down. He had been hit. I had seen the rifle bullet jar his chest like a seismic shock, and I saw the life flit out of him in that very instant and I knew that the gunman was a marksman of genius for he had exploded Callaghan’s heart with a single lethal shot.
Callaghan slumped to the floor. His second bullet had struck the ceiling to leave a bright splinter of raw wood protruding from a beam.
There was silence.
The killer was in the house. He had come into the house for what? Probably to determine the outcome of his night’s work. So in a second or two he would turn over Gillespie’s body and find he had killed the wrong man. He had surely been after me, no one else.