All of them at times had borne arms, but I judged Evelyn in her jewels and grooming and forceful opinions to be most trigger happy. She, of them all, I feared most at my back.
I said to Michael, turning in the sitting-room to face him, ‘Why the artillery? What’s the point?’
‘Letters in German.’
I said, ‘What letters?’
Even Robin Darcy didn’t know exactly, I saw. If Kris hadn’t told him about his joke on Oliver Quigley, the others probably wouldn’t have known the German letters existed.
Probably... but nothing was certain in their mixed-up world.
Michael said, ‘Who did you sell those letters to?’
Shit, I thought. I said again, ‘What letters?’
Darcy said to me, ‘Tell him for your own good.’
I thought only that the conversation, if one could call it that, was on many levels unsatisfactory. They wanted one thing, and I another. My turn. Plunge in.
I said to Amy, ‘How did your horse run at Calder races on Saturday?’
I might as well have thrown a bomb myself. Shock waves visibly ran down Amy’s shooting arm until the round black hole at the end of the barrel pointed to the floor instead of my navel. Her intense reaction proved satisfactorily to me that she too used racecourses as trading posts. The long list that I had sent to Kensington had been of dates and places where, as an owner, Amy had cover. The lists had been, in my mind, one of the possibilities awaiting proof. After this, I thought, John Rupert and Ghost might know where to look.
Robin Darcy stiffened.
Michael Ford flexed his awesome muscles.
Evelyn walked in with the uniformed chauffeur-bodyguard-general purpose help. No one introduced him, though the others called him Arnold. He no longer wore the baseball cap or showed any sign of being a servant, and I wouldn’t have recognised him if I hadn’t watched him smoking a whole packet of cigarettes for nearing two hours.
Arnold, in his black shirt, wore his pistol bolstered under his left arm with straps like braces to hold its weight.
Brought up from childhood in a no hand-guns culture, I’d never fired a shot, and had never before regretted it, but in the Darcy house I felt naked. To go bare-handed into a gunfight promised a short cut to the hearse.
Evelyn carried, of course, her weapon of yesterday, presumably now refilled with bullets. It would be pointless to ask her to lower the rising temperature of threat in the room when she was more likely with her loud menacing voice to stoke things up.
Only Robin Darcy, at the moment unarmed, made anxious attempts at common sense.
Michael Ford’s opening attitude of belligerence had increased as if self-generating. He bunched his muscles repeatedly until it seemed it was solely for destruction’s sake that he had developed them. Those descriptive words ‘spoiling for a fight’ flickered across my own pacific mind and I sought automatically for body language that would defuse him.
The Perry Stuart of his grandmother’s cape-coat, however, thought cringing to be not much of an option. Whatever Michael read of involuntary defiance in my face, it only enraged him more.
Amy, who seemed to read her husband as clearly as the Racing Post, quite obviously put her money on the champ, not just to win but to deter any thought I might have had of taking him on again afterwards. She was smiling. She likes to see him fight, I thought. She’s aroused by it. She would have howled for blood in the Coliseum.
‘Go on, Michael,’ she urged him, ‘make him tell you what he really did with those German orders. You can’t let him get away with it. Chop him up, Michael.’
None of them bar Robin Darcy showed any wish, or indeed any ability to discuss anything, including the German letters, except at the point of a waving firearm. They violently invented gruesome threats (but not about alligators) until, encouraged and wound up by noise and shouting from the others, Michael’s core of basic lawlessness let go like an avalanche, at first beginning in a slow slide and then pouring itself out at an increasing speed until its momentum couldn’t be stopped.
In Michael Ford terms, an avalanche meant a full heavy attack with bunched fists and with lifting his victim clean off the floor and throwing him against sharp-edged furniture to the accompaniment of cheering from his wife.
Evelyn and Arnold applauded.
Only my host was silent.
My efforts at lessening Michael’s onslaught by punching where I could, at dodging and at kicking or crashing his head on the wall weren’t enough. I couldn’t ever at the best of times have beaten him at his own professional skill.
He took his time. He was deliberate. He made every contact count.
At one point when I’d escaped from him across the room, and he was pausing to take breath, I rolled on Evelyn’s best rug and kicked Darcy’s feet from under him. I pulled his head down by the hair, his ear to my mouth, and I said clearly but intensely, and with no little desperation, ‘Open the terrace door and go to bed.’
I saw his eye-widening astonishment before Michael came roaring back from his breather, and with increasing mindless urging from his cohorts set about proving again the pulping potential of his muscles and it seemed that he himself was unleashing his maximum power simply because he had so few opportunities for it in real life.
Exhausted defeat was already a close certainty, and I was on my knees, both in fact and metaphorically, when Darcy reached the heavy sliding glass doors to the terrace. I couldn’t by then have pulled even one of those open myself at any speed, but when I saw Robin Darcy yank a huge glass panel aside against friction and heard the grate of the door’s gliders, when I heard the waves down below on the shore and smelled the salt air, when a way out of being kicked to extinction lay there for the taking, then from somewhere I scraped up every vestige of resilience uneaten by myco-bugs, and I rolled under Michael’s hammering foot and crawled a yard like an infant and thrust every enfeebled sinew into panic action... and I was out through the glass door and halfway across the terrace before they began with shouts to follow.
I stumbled as if inebriated down the stone staircase from terrace to pool, and untidily fell rather than dived into the water, horrified by the weakness that made a futility of my efforts to swim at even half of my normal speed in my own natural element.
If I’d hoped the one-sided fight would end at that point, I was wrong. Michael Ford’s appetite merely changed direction. He decided against following me fully clothed into the water but instead snatched his gun back from Amy and shot at me, the bullets splashing with appalling heat a great deal too close.
The prospect of a dead well-known meteorologist in a private pool in Florida, a body moreover plugged with bullets from a registered gun, still seemed not to deter Michael, nor get it through the thick skulls of Michael’s pack that his success would be their time in jail.
I no longer tried swimming in fast circles to avoid straight lines from his barrel. I could no longer work out lines of refraction. I simply clung in wretched feebleness to the bar round the inside of the top of the pool and I shrank into the too-small shadow of the tiled overhang while Michael whooped with undiminished bloodlust and, having no success from where he stood, galloped round the pool to get at me from the other side.
The water slowed the bullets’ speed, but not enough. Refraction as a really useful shield in water worked better the deeper the target, as the bent rays of light made the target appear where it was not. If one shot at the apparent victim, one would miss the real one. Deep water... I gulped air and swam downwards, and the bullets missed, but Odin hadn’t taxed my lungs more.