The valet began to laugh. 'Two to one on the field,' he said.
'Be quiet,' Sir Marcus whispered venomously back at Mr Davis. 'I can put you out of the way at any time.'
'I defy you,' Mr Davis screamed in a high peacock voice. Somebody flung himself against the door.
'I have the West Rand Goldfields filed,' Sir Marcus said, 'the East African Petroleum Company.'
A wave of impatience struck Raven. They seemed to be disturbing some memory of peace and goodness which had been on the point of returning to him when he had told Sir Marcus to pray. He raised his pistol and shot Sir Marcus in the chest. It was the only way to silence them. Sir Marcus fell forward across the bed-table, upsetting the glass of warm milk over the papers on his desk. Blood came out of his mouth.
Mr Davis began to talk very rapidly. He said, 'It was all him, the old devil. You heard him. What could I do? He had me. You've got nothing against me.' He shrieked, 'Go away from that door. He'll kill me if you don't go,' and immediately began to talk again, while the milk dripped from the bed-table to the desk drop by drop. 'I wouldn't have done a thing if it hadn't been for him. Do you know what he did? He went and told the Chief Constable to order the police to shoot you on sight.' He tried not to look at the pistol which remained pointed at his chest. The valet was white and silent by the wall; he watched Sir Marcus's life bleeding away with curious fascination. So this was what it would have been like, he seemed to be thinking, if he himself had had courage … any time... during all these years.
A voice outside said, 'You had better open this door at once or we'll shoot through it.'
'For God's sake,' Mr Davis screamed, 'leave me alone. He'll shoot me,' and the eyes watched him intently through the panes of the gas-mask, with satisfaction. 'There's not a thing I've done to you,' he began to protest. Over Raven's head he could see the clock: it hadn't moved more than three hours since his breakfast, the hot stale taste of the kidneys and bacon was still on his palate: he couldn't believe that this was really the end: at one o'clock he had a date with a girclass="underline" you didn't die before a date. 'Nothing,' he murmured, 'nothing at all.'
'It was you,' Raven said, 'who tried to kill...'
'Nobody. Nothing,' Mr Davis moaned.
Raven hesitated. The word was still unfamiliar on his tongue. 'My friend.'
'I don't know. I don't understand.'
'Keep back,' Raven cried through the door, 'I'll shoot him if you fire,' He said, 'The girl.'
Mr Davis shook all over. He was like a man with St Vitus's dance. He said, ' She wasn't a friend of yours. Why are the police here if she didn't... who else could have known...?'
Raven said, 'I'll shoot you for that and nothing else. She's straight.'
'Why,' Mr Davis screamed at him, 'she's a policeman's girl. She's the Yard man's girl. She's Mather's girl.'
Raven shot him. With despair and deliberation he shot his last chance of escape, plugged two bullets in where one would do, as if he were shooting the whole world in the person of stout moaning bleeding Mr Davis. And so he was. For a man's world is his life and he was shooting that: his mother's suicide, the long years in the home, the race-course gangs, Kite's death and the old man's and the woman's. There was no other way; he had tried the way of confession, and it had failed him for the usual reason. There was no one outside your own brain whom you could trust: not a doctor, not a priest, not a woman. A siren blew up over the town its message that the sham raid was over, and immediately the church bells broke into a noisy Christmas caroclass="underline" the foxes have their holes, but the son of man... A bullet smashed the lock of the door. Raven, with his gun pointed stomach-high, said, 'Is there a bastard called Mather out there? He'd better keep away.'
While he waited for the door to open he couldn't help remembering many things. He did not remember them in detail; they fogged together and formed the climate of his mind as he waited there for the chance of a last revenge: a voice singing above a dark street as the sleet felclass="underline" They say that's a snowflower a man brought from Greenland, the cultivated unlived voice of the elderly critic reading Maud: Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief, while he stood in the garage and felt the ice melt at his heart with a sense of pain and strangeness. It was as if he were passing the customs of a land he had never entered before and would never be able to leave: the girl in the café saying, 'He's bad and ugly...', the little plaster child lying in its mother's arms waiting the double-cross, the whips, the nails. She had said to him, 'I'm your friend. You can trust me.' Another bullet burst in the lock.
The valet, white-faced by the wall, said, 'For God's sake, give it up. They'll get you anyway. He was right. It was the girl. I heard them on the 'phone.'
I've got to be quick, Raven thought, when the door gives, I must shoot first. But too many ideas besieged his brain at once. He couldn't see clearly enough through the mask and he undid it clumsily with one hand and dropped it on the floor.
The valet could see now the raw inflamed lip, the dark and miserable eyes. He said, 'There's the window. Get on to the roof.' He was talking to a man whose understanding was dulled, who didn't know whether he wished to make an effort or not, who moved his face so slowly to see the window that it was the valet who noticed first the painter's platform swinging down the wide tall pane. Mather was on the platform, but the detective had not allowed for his own inexperience. The little platform swung this way and that; he held a rope with one hand and reached for the window with the other; he had no hand free for his revolver as Raven turned. He dangled outside the window six floors above the narrow Tanneries, a defenceless mark for Raven's pistol.
Raven watched him with bemused eyes, trying to take aim. It wasn't a difficult shot, but it was almost as if he had lost interest in killing. He was only aware of a pain and despair which was more like a complete weariness than anything else. He couldn't work up any sourness, any bitterness, at his betrayal. The dark Weevil under the storm of frozen rain flowed between him and any human enemy. Ah, Christ! that it were possible, but he had been marked from his birth for this end, to be betrayed in turn by everyone until every avenue into life was safely closed: by his mother bleeding in the basement, by the chaplain at the home, by the shady doctor off Charlotte Street. How could he have expected to have escaped the commonest betrayal of alclass="underline" to go soft on a skirt? Even Kite would have been alive now if it hadn't been for a skirt. They all went soft at some time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard, Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly, absent-mindedly, with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in his loneliness: the Trooper and Mayhew. They had all thought at one time or another that their skirt was better than other men's skirts, that there was something exalted in their relation. The only problem when you were once born was to get out of life more neatly and expeditiously than you had entered it. For the first time the idea of his mother's suicide came to him without bitterness, as he reluctantly fixed his aim and Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.
Chapter 8
1