"Evening, Vic, a Cortina and a Nova out there, lights on. The time you close this place up, they'll be dead in the batteries…"
Old Vic had his mouth hanging open. The jukebox was playing.
"… Know whose they are?"
He turned.
He smiled affably. They were scattered around the back bar and they all stared at him. He knew them all… old Brennie, Poaching, convictions going back 48 years, last time done under the Armed Trespass Act of 1968… Fran, nothing ever proved, should have been, and would be… Billy and Zap both for Receiving and Handling lead off a church roof in Frome…
Zack, Larceny and Aggravated Assault, gone inside for it…
K e v, once breathalysed for an eighteen-month ban, twice in court for Driving without Insurance, fined… Johnny, still on probation for Vandalism, smashing up the bus shelter… He knew them all, and he smiled warmly to each in turn. Normally, every other time that he came into the pub, his ritual visits, he took a bit of banter. Coexistence, wasn't it? He was local, they were local. Normally, there was banter that didn't go way over.
Desmond didn't mind the banter… Not a bloody sound in the back bar of the pub to mix with the God-awful noise of the juke box. Old Brennie looking at his flies, Fran at the smoke-stained ceiling, Billy and Zap in their beer and caught in mid-sentence, Zack in his fag packet, Kev rooted with the handful of coins he was going to feed into the jukebox, Johnny blushing because he was the youngest and the one who always ended with the rap.
He saw the feathers on Fran's jersey. He didn't care, bigger game around than pheasants off the estate, and she'd only be making 75 pence a bird off old Vic, and that was plucked.
He knew them all. They were the flotsam of the village and they were the strength of the village, they were the heart of it…
He saw the young man.
He saw the young man, and then behind the young man he saw the stooping figure with the heavy-frame spectacles and the curled black hair receding and the sports jacket that was a half size too small. He saw the young man.
The young man gazed back into his face. Every last one of them other than the young man seemed to cower away from him, even Fran who was wild was back on her heels. Not the young man.
He saw the tan. He saw the short-cut fair hair. He saw the eyes that were bright with anger at him. There was no fear in that face. He had seen the photograph.
They had shown it him the first day that he had been assigned to the posting in the village up the lanes. It had been a good photograph.
He saw the metalled handle of the pistol bulging out from the young man's belt.
He looked into the face of Colt.
The jukebox died.
The silence suffocated the back bar of the pub.
He knew it was Colt.
Desmond had been to the Ashford Police Training College. At Ashford they taught a young constable how to look after himself if he were trying to break up a fight outside a pub at closing time, how to intervene in a domestic row, how to tackle a fleeing thief.
He had been good on unarmed combat. Not firearms, though, they didn't teach firearms. Guns were for the zombie men who guarded the Northern Ireland politicians who had their gentry farms in the county, and for the squads that were detailed to protect the Royals when they came to open a new annexe in the hospitals of the local market towns. He knew sweet nothing about confronting an armed man. He was into the back bar, halfway across it towards the bar counter. Couldn't just turn, not on his bloody heel, like nothing had happened, and walk out. At the Police Training College they had said that if guns were involved then there were no heroes required, whistle up on the radio and get scarce till the professionals arrived. He had no radio. He could not turn back for the door. He saw the hand of Colt on his hip and close to the handle of the pistol.
No, he wasn't a hero… It was his instinct for survival.
He was a vertigo man on the cliff top.
He lunged.
If he had not tried to prise out the truncheon from his slim hip pocket as he went forward…
If he had watched both hands and not the pistol handle in Colt's belt…
He was launched when he knew that the heel of Colt's hand
… not the pistol, not the bullet… was the threat.
Razor fast, the heel of the hand, rising at his throat.
There was the ripple shock through Colt's wrist and the length of his forearm. The heel of his hand took the centre point of the police constable's neck. And the policeman went down. He did not stagger or topple, he went down like a dropped sack of potatoes.
There was the gasp, in unison, all around Colt.
It was not what he had wanted to do. He had not wanted to shoot the American who was stumbling in confusion across the path of the fusillade aimed at a man who wrote vitriol from abroad against the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.
Nor had he wanted to break the bones and the faces of two army deserters coming in desperation to a camp site to steal a jeep. Nor had he wanted to throttle the life from the gross bum boy who had tried to roll a backpacker sleeping rough alongside the road to Freemantle. He stood rock still, and his weight was forward on the balls of his feet as if the police constable still offered a threat to him.
They all stared at him.
He looked into the faces of old Vic and his Fran, and old Brennie, and of Billy and Zap, and Zack, and Kev and Johnny.
He saw their fear, and he saw the terror that collapsed the face of Dr Bissett who backed away to the far corner of the back bar.
The words came…
"Christ, you screwed it now."
" N o call for that."
"What you done that for?"
" W e live here, Colt… "
He stood his ground. He was the one who never panicked. He was the one who would never be taken. He stood straight and tall and the police constable was prone at his feet. He saw the shoulders of the police constable heave up as the spasm muscles tried to find breath for the lungs down the passage of the damaged windpipe. He was 200 yards from his home. Running, like he could run because he was fit, he could have gone to the front door of his home, the Manor House, in a half of a minute.
He heard the creak of the door behind him… Zap gone.
Had he come to the village for money? Had he come home to see his father the one last time, and to see his mother who was dead for the one last time? There was the movement to his right flank. Pathetic bastards. The dross of the village, gone nowhere, met nobody, seen nothing… Kev sneaking through the door.
Bissett whimpered, like a dog waiting to be kicked, he thought, in the far corner of the bar.
From Warminster they had little call to come to the village. The village was a backwater. The convoy of police cars, four of them, and nine policemen had been delayed in the yard at the back of the Warminster police station for more than 35 minutes while the numbers were made up, and while the Duty Inspector fumed at the failure of Communications to raise the local man. They came into the village. Their orders were to seal the one road running through the village at each end, and to maintain a discreet watch on the Manor House, and to do nothing if they saw the bastard because he had had a handgun at Heathrow and because the firearms unit was being helicoptered from London. They saw the police car parked beside the goalposts of the football pitch.
The lead car stopped. The Sergeant was still examining the car when there was the thud of the footfall of the two running youths.
"Heh, you, stop there. You seen Desmond?"
Kev stammered, " B e in the pub… in there… "
Oh, was he, by Christ… The Sergeant grimaced… A bloody earful coming young Master Desmond's way, using his work transport to get out on the piss, with his wile saying over the telephone that he was gone on patrol. In the pub, by Christ.