The dawn had come. I stood at the door smoking a cigar. Red sky, streaks of crimson against blue and white. It was really average. You get the same blue-on-cream in those Portuguese vases, quite nice. I couldn't finish my smoke. The robin was singing, rolling up his feathery sleeves for the day's battles.
Indoors I ran a bath, thinking, This is where I clouted Sheila that time Tinker rang up about Field. I would do my favorite breakfast, fried cheese in margarine and an apple cut into three and fried in the same pan. Three slices of bread. Tea. Heaven knows how, but I managed to eat it all, with the radio going on about politics and me trying to sing with the interlude music like a fool. I banged the dishes with a spoon, pretending I was a drummer in a band. Don't people do daft things?
I'd never forget my alarm again. The doors locked, I repaired the window. Outside I ran some meshwire around the edge and put new bolts on the inside of all the windows. The day promised fine with a watery sun.
The bath water had cooled enough by the time that job was done. I soaked, working out my chain of suppositions.
Suppose somebody had killed Eric Field for the Judas pair. Suppose then he had learned that I'd managed to pick up the one possible gadget missing from the most costly unique set of Sinters the antique world could ever dream of—a small case-hardened instrument with all the features of a Durs accessory. It had after all been probably chucked into the apothecary box from ignorance to up that particular crummy article's price, so it was definitely a hangover from Seddon's sale of Eric Field's effects. Continuing the idea, suppose then he'd seen me come from Seddon's, followed me here to the cottage. He'd have seen me give Sheila the instrument by the war memorial, seen her put it in her handbag. And the town war memorial's as private as Eros in Piccadilly. Adrian and Jane had passed, Muriel and her tame priest were there. It could be anybody, he or she, seen or unseen.
Maybe he'd waited outside all night.
Then, seeing us depart, he'd broken in, searching, failed to find the Durs instrument, taken the carriage clock as a blind, and, seeing Sheila's letters, guessed wrongly that she still had the instrument in her handbag. Perhaps he'd assumed I realized its importance and was too worried to have it about. So he'd sprinted off to London after her and pushed her under the train when perhaps she'd suddenly realized he was stealing her handbag. Or he'd just pushed her, and in the subsequent uproar picked up her handbag, escaping because of our splendid public's tradition of keeping out of trouble. Now she was dead. I had to say it, dead.
It was heavy in my hand, bulbous in my palm. It could have been a straight screwdriver except that it bent at right angles about the middle of the shaft. Two additional flanges served to catch on some projection, perhaps near a sear spring in the flintlock. I got the impression it slotted into rather than onto something, but it was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Despite my ignorance, I was certain it was the object for which Sheila had been killed.
I was dried and in my priest hole by nine o'clock. I was nervous, because I was going to kill somebody.
Who, I didn't know. Nor where, nor when, nor in what circumstances.
But I knew how.
He would get nothing but the best, the very best Lovejoy could manage. Price no object.
I had a small amount of black powder—smoky gunpowder— in a pistol flask belonging to the Barratt guns. They wouldn't do. Percussion, after all. Let's do it properly. I began to go over the contents of the shelves.
Now, Lovejoy's no killer. I love these flinters the way I love Bilston enamels and jades, as examples of supreme craftsmanship. I don't like weapons because they're weapons. Only maniacs love them because they kill. During one of these tiresome wars we used to have I was conscripted and put into uniform. We were stationed on a snowy hillside in the East and given some field guns to shoot. The trouble was, an army on the opposite hillside had guns of their own and kept trying to kill us by shooting back. For me, I'd just as soon we all kept quiet, but the general feeling was that we ought to keep firing. I couldn't see what it was all about. Our hillside had nothing but a few trees, and from what little I could see of their hillside they were just as badly off. It was a waste of time, in addition to which I was frightened to death. But now I began to wish I'd taken more notice of the bare essentials during training.
The Barratts wouldn't do, so could the Nocks? Samuel Nock had made special holster and pocket flinters swan-necked in the French manner, but occasionally deviated into singles made in a special utilitarian style. I had a pair of double-barreled side-by-side flinters of his making. They really were precious to me, so I included them as possibles. A Brown Bess, heavy as hell, wouldn't do. The space might be too confined when I came to it, and forty-odd inches of massive barrel might prove cumbersome. Also, he was going to die slowly if the opportunity offered a choice; the Land Pattern might help him on his way too precipitately. We had matters to discuss. Reluctantly I put it aside.
The Adams revolving long arm was gone to Dick. That left me with two Eastern jezail guns, flintlock of course, the Adams pocket weapon, an elegant gold-inlaid La Chaumette pinfire weapon with a folding trigger, a Durs air gun you have to pump up, a Cooper blunderbuss, an early Barbar flintlock brass-barreled blunderbuss good enough to eat, a lonely Henry Nock dueler I'd been trying to match with its missing partner for twelve years, and last but not least the beautiful Mortimer weapons acquired that terrible day from Dick's boatyard. The Mortimers it was.
I melted a piece of lead bar over a spirit lamp and poured it from the pan into the bullet mold, crushing the brass handles firmly to avoid pocking the bullet surface with bubbles. Twelve attempts it took before I got two perfect spheres of dulled lead. After cooling them, I polished both in a leather cloth until they were almost shiny.
The black powder I poured into the pistol flask. It was set correctly on the dispensing nozzle, so I cleaned inside the barrels with a swab of cloth screwed onto the wrong end of the ramrods. All this is easier said than done with white linen gloves on, but you must never leave fingerprints on a flinter. It ruins the browning after some years, and actually precipitates real rust even on the best Damascus barrel. The barrels cleaned, I poured the dose of powder into each, and forced the bullets in after tamping the powder down. It was hard work getting them to the bottom of the breech but I managed it. After that, a soft wad of cloth torn from a handkerchief down each barrel to keep the bullets in. Then a squirt of powder into each flashpan, bringing back the cocks to the half-cock position where the triggers wouldn't work them and clapping the steel closed, and all was lovely.
I replaced them in their mahogany case, pulling the safety catch into the halt position and dusting them off. They looked priceless, stylish, graceful, wondrous in their red-felted boxwood recesses among the accessories. Every item fitted snugly. Even the case itself was brilliantly designed, a product of an age of skilled thinkers.
There was one more thing they looked—lethal, maybe even murderous.
And that really pleased me, because I was going to blow some fucking bastard's brains out.
Chapter 11
I'll be frank.
Before this the business had been a bit unreallike. You know the sort of thing—income tax rebates or these insurance benefits you get if ever you reach ninety. My attitude I suppose was one of blissful pretense. Sheila always said I pretended too much; "romancing," she called it. The Judas affair had previously been somehow at a distance, even though I'd been involved in setting up a search for the pistols through the trade. I suppose there was some excuse, since you can't believe in a Martian in Bloomsbury in quite the same way you might believe in the Yeti or Nessie. I'd paid lip service of sorts to the Judas pair idea. If they were mythical, well, O.K., I would spend time chasing a myth. If the bloke that had killed two people for those precious things believed in their existence, so would I. Funny, but my mind began to work clearer now I believed.