'I'm not going to kill you yet,' Raven said.' Maybe I won't kill you if you keep quiet and do what I say. This Sir Marcus, he's your boss?'
'An old man,' Mr Davis protested, weeping beside the waste-paper basket.
'He wants to see you,' Raven said. 'We'll go along.' He said, 'I've been waiting days for this—to find the two of you. It almost seems too good to be true. Get up. Get up,' he repeated furiously to the weak flabby figure on the floor.
Mr Davis led the way. Miss Connett came down the passage carrying a slip of paper. She said, 'I've got the trains, Mr Davis. The best is the three-five. The two-seven is really so slow that you wouldn't be up more than ten minutes earlier. Then there's only the five-ten before the night train.'
'Put them on my desk,' Mr Davis said. He hung about there in front of her in the shining modern plutocratic passage as if he wanted to say good-bye to a thousand things if only he had dared, to this wealth, this comfort, this authority; lingering there ('Yes, put them on my desk, May') he might even have been wanting to express at the last some tenderness that had never before entered his mind in connection with 'little girls'. Raven stood just behind him with his hand in his pocket. Her employer looked so sick that Miss Connett said, 'Are you feeling well, Mr Davis?'
'Quite well,' Mr Davis said. Like an explorer going into strange country he felt the need of leaving some record behind at the edge of civilization, to say to the next chance comer, 'I shall be found towards the north' or 'the west'. He said, 'We are going to Sir Marcus, May.'
'He's in a hurry for you,' Miss Connett said. A telephone bell rang. 'I shouldn't be surprised if that's him now.' She pattered down the corridor to her room on very high heels and Mr Davis felt again the remorseless pressure on his elbow to advance, to enter the lift. They rose another floor and when Mr Davis pulled the gates apart he retched again. He wanted to fling himself to the floor and take the bullets in his back.
The long gleaming passage to Sir Marcus's study was like a mile-long stadium track to a winded runner.
Sir Marcus was sitting in his Bath chair with a kind of bed-table on his knees. He had his valet with him and his back to the door, but the valet could see with astonishment Mr Davis's exhausted entrance in the company of a medical student in a gas-mask. 'Is that Davis?' Sir Marcus whispered. He broke a dry biscuit and sipped a little hot milk. He was fortifying himself for a day's work.
'Yes, sir.' The valet watched with astonishment Mr Davis's sick progress across the hygienic rubber floor; he looked as if he needed support, as if he was about to collapse at the knees.
'Get out then,' Sir Marcus whispered.
'Yes, sir.' But the man in the gas-mask had turned the key of the door; a faint expression of joy, a rather hopeless expectation, crept into the valet's face as if he were wondering whether something at last was going to happen, something different from pushing Bath chairs along rubber floors, dressing and undressing an old man, not strong enough to keep himself clean, bringing him the hot milk or the hot water or the dry biscuits.
'What are you waiting for?' Sir Marcus whispered.
'Get back against the wall,' Raven suddenly commanded the valet.
Mr Davis cried despairingly, 'He's got a gun. Do what he says.' But there was no need to tell the valet that. The gun was out now and had them all three covered, the valet against the wall, Mr Davis dithering in the middle of the room, Sir Marcus who had twisted the Bath chair round to face them.
'What do you want?'Sir Marcus said.
'Are you the boss?'
Sir Marcus said, 'The police are downstairs. You can't get away from here unless I—' The telephone began to ring. It rang on and on and on, and then ceased.
Raven said, 'You've got a scar under that beard, haven't you? I don't want to make a mistake. He had your photograph. You were in the home together,' and he glared angrily round the large rich office room comparing it in mind with his own memories of cracked bells and stone stairs and wooden benches, and of the small flat too with the egg boiling on the ring. This man had moved further than the old Minister.
'You're mad,' Sir Marcus whispered. He was too old to be frightened; the revolver represented no greater danger to him than a false step in getting into his chair, a slip in his bath. He seemed to feel only a faint irritation, a faint craving for his interrupted meal. He bent his old lip forward over the bed-table and sucked loudly at the rim of hot milk.
The valet suddenly spoke from the wall. 'He's got a scar,' he said. But Sir Marcus took no notice of any of them, sucking up his milk untidily over his thin beard.
Raven twisted his gun on Mr Davis. 'It was him,' he said. 'If you don't want a bullet in your guts tell me it was him.'
'Yes, yes,' Mr Davis said in horrified subservient haste, 'he thought of it. It was his idea. We were on our last legs here. We'd got to make money. It was worth more than half a million to him.'
'Half a million!' Raven said. 'And he paid me two hundred phoney pounds.'
'I said to him we ought to be generous. He said: "Stop your mouth."'
'I wouldn't have done it,' Raven said, 'if I'd known the old man was like he was. I smashed his skull for him. And the old woman, a bullet in both eyes.' He shouted at Sir Marcus, 'That was your doing. How do you like that?' but the old man sat there apparently unmoved: old age had killed the imagination.'The deaths he had ordered were no more real to him than the deaths he read about in the newspapers. A little greed (for his milk), a little vice (occasionally to put his old hand inside a girl's blouse and feel the warmth of life), a little avarice and calculation (half a million against a death), a very small persistent, almost mechanical, sense of self-preservation: these were his only passions. The last made him edge his chair imperceptibly towards the bell at the edge of his desk. He whispered gently, 'I deny it all. You are mad.'
Raven said, 'I've got you now where I want you. Even if the police kill me,' he tapped the gun, 'here's my evidence. This is the gun I used. They can pin the murder to this gun. You told me to leave it behind, but here it is. It would put you away a long, long time even if I didn't shoot you.'
Sir Marcus whispered gently, imperceptibly twisting his silent rubbered wheels, 'A Colt No .7. The factories turn out thousands.'
Raven said angrily, 'There's nothing the police can't do now with a gun. There are experts—' He wanted to frighten Sir Marcus before he shot him; it seemed unfair to him that Sir Marcus should suffer less than the old woman he hadn't wanted to kill. He said, 'Don't you want to pray? You're a Jew, aren't you? Better people than you,' he said, 'believe in a God,' remembering how the girl had prayed in the dark cold shed. The wheel of Sir Marcus's chair touched the desk, touched the bell, and the dull ringing came up the well of the lift, going on and on. It conveyed nothing to Raven until the valet spoke.' The old bastard,' he said, with the hatred of years, 'he's ringing the bell.' Before Raven could decide what to do, someone was at the door, shaking the handle.
Raven said to Sir Marcus, 'Tell them to keep back or I'll shoot.'
'You fool,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'they'll only get you for theft. If you kill me, you'll hang.' But Mr Davis was ready to clutch at any straw. He screamed to the man outside, 'Keep away. For God's sake keep away.'
Sir Marcus said venomously, 'You're a fool, Davis. If he's going to kill us anyway—' While Raven stood pistol in hand before the two men, an absurd quarrel broke out between them. 'He's got no cause to kill me,' Mr Davis screamed. 'It's you who've got us into this. I only acted for you.'