Elizabeth squirmed on the sharp point of his concentration.
It was like being at school again, but not as one of the teachers.
"He killed those men for you, Miss Loftus—for your sake, not for self-defence— for you."
"Yes—"
"No! You don't understand because you can't, not because you don't want to—I'll grant that. But I'm going to rectify that. So just listen."
Elizabeth licked her lips.
"It was partly my fault. I told Mitchell this was just a routine job—no problems, no danger, just routine. So after he'd talked to you at the fête and arranged to visit you he could very well have gone off to the nearest pub to fortify himself for a boring evening."
He was trying to wound her now, thought Elizabeth. And he was succeeding.
"But being Paul Mitchell ... for which you should be thankful, Miss Loftus ... he didn't leave it at that—he decided to look around just to make sure everything was all right, even if it was just routine."
She felt the knife turn.
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"So then he saw . . . something . . . which made it not routine
— something which frightened him, because he didn't expect it."
Something? There was too much that she couldn't remember
—
"So then he had a problem. Because the first thing he had to do was to phone for back-up—for help . . . which he did."
Audley nodded. "But help was at least thirty minutes away, and he got to thinking that maybe you didn't have thirty minutes—maybe you didn't have any minutes at all." He paused, and as the pause lengthened she realised that he was letting it elongate deliberately, to give her time to remember what she had been trying to forget. "So what should he have done then, Miss Loftus?" Shorter pause. "Go and knock at the front door, like a Christian?" Pause. "If he was wrong—no harm done." Pause. "But if he was right . . . then he was in trouble too." Pause—unendurable pause. "Because he didn't have a gun, Miss Loftus—he isn't 'licensed to kill', because no one is, contrary to popular legend. Not even policemen—
they're not supposed to kill, except in very special and well-established extremities. And you certainly weren't an extremity—you were just a guess, Miss Loftus."
He was hammering Miss Loftus like a dentist drilling without any pain-killer—
"So he went round the back, and he was very lucky there—"
Don't say "Miss Loftus" again, prayed Elizabeth—
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"—because there was a look-out man at the back, but the man was careless." Audley shook his head. "He was very lucky
—and the look-out man was very careless ... So then he had one dead man on his hands—and having a dead man on one's hands makes one sick . . . would you believe that, Miss Loftus? It makes you sick—sick to the stomach. Do you know what a dead man looks like? Do you know how his body reacts to being dead? Would you like the details?"
She couldn't even shake her head—she didn't want to, but she couldn't anyway.
"So now he had a gun. But he also had another problem, because there are only two rules for that sort of situation: you either run like hell or you go on like hell, SAS-style, before the other side knows what's happening." This time he neither nodded nor shook his head, he just looked at her. "And you never really know what you're going to do then until it happens—the question has to be asked each time, and you never know whether you were right until afterwards, which can be too late. So don't ask me what I would have done—I've a sneaking suspicion that I might have run, and justified it by thinking of my wife and child after—but you know what he did—"
Yes, she knew—or she knew now, anyway—
"He went on. And he shot the big one in the kitchen—in the kitchen, and in the leg, and then in the lung . . . and finally in the spine, Miss Loftus." He still just looked at her. "They think he's going to die too ... although Mitchell doesn't know dummy3
—he still thinks he only killed two men, not three . . . But when he asks me—as he surely will—I shall have to be as brutally frank with him as I am being with you, Miss Loftus."
Brutally frank was what he was determined to be: she hated him for it, but she couldn't stop him, any more than Paul Mitchell could have stopped in the kitchen—she understood that now.
"He had one bullet left then. But he probably wasn't counting by then—he was probably too scared to count his shots by then, and the SAS rule is to keep moving—it's like the old house-clearing discipline in the war: once you're in the house you must go through it like a dose of salts, that was the rule—
if you stop, you're dead. So he didn't stop."
"Please, Mr Audley—"
"I haven't finished. The last bit is the best: he killed your little man with a single shot, right through the heart—a professional couldn't have done better than that, Miss Loftus
—with a snap shot. But that's the shot which may get him into most trouble, unfortunately."
He let her think about it this time, until she could formulate the obvious question. "But—why?"
"Because the little man wasn't armed. He had a scalpel in his pocket—an adjustable typographical scalpel. But that was all he had." Audley shook his head sadly. "And that won't look good on the report . . . apart from the fact that we'd have liked to have talked to him, and now we can't." His voice dummy3
became gentler again. "It was an accident, of course. But it won't look good."
"But. . . but he couldn't have known . . ."
"That's what we'll be arguing, certainly. And with your supporting statement—and the gun—we ought to be able to manage 'Justifiable homicide', with a bit of luck," agreed Audley. "There's a button on the wall there—by the bed . . .
Would you press it please, Miss Loftus."
Elizabeth rose shakily, and stepped over the Sunday papers, and pressed the button.
"Thank you," said Audley politely.
She sat down again, and waited, and tried to think coherently.
He had done it deliberately, of course—all of it, intentionally and with deliberate brutality designed to shock her. But, deliberately or not, he had succeeded: he had shackled her to Paul Mitchell for ever, with unbreakable chains of obligation.
The door opened, and Paul was there in the doorway—and she didn't know where to look, with the way she must look, sans the slightest advantage of make-up, and her hair every which-way, and the old dress which Humphrey Aske had offered her yesterday, when it hardly seemed to matter what she looked like.
"It is customary to knock, Mitchell," snapped Audley testily.
"Have you brought the box? And the form?"
Paul Mitchell hefted a suitcase on to the bed, snapping the dummy3
catches but leaving the lid closed. Then he felt inside his breast-pocket and produced a folded document.
"This is an Official Secrets form, Miss Loftus." Audley unfolded the document and handed it to Elizabeth. "Sign it at the bottom there—"
"But read it first, Elizabeth," said Paul Mitchell.
"Shut up, Mitchell," said Audley. "Just give her a pen."
Elizabeth took the form from Audley and the pen from Paul Mitchell.
"Sign it, Miss Loftus," said Audley.
"You're signing away your rights," said Paul. "Once you've signed, they can shut you up and throw away the key."
"She's not stupid." Audley gestured towards the form. "After what you've done, she knows she hasn't got any rights—
except maybe the right to be shot by you, Mitchell. Sign it, Miss Loftus." He paused. "And the copy underneath—sign that too."