“It isn’t,” Suffield barked. “It’s nothing for you to know anything about.” He backed up toward the fireplace so as to keep both Forrester and Spode conveniently in his view. Ronnie circled behind him and reached the couch and Suffield spoke to her as if they were alone together in the room: “We’ll have to make it look like an accident.”
“No!”
“Stop it. Don’t get hysterical. We’ve got to think, you know that.”
“We’re not going to kill anyone, Les.”
“Then tell me how else to do it. Just tell me that.”
“I don’t know. But there must be something.”
“We haven’t got time.”
Ronnie said with rueful despondency, “You fool, Les. We should have destroyed the letter without anyone knowing.”
“How? He wasn’t about to let me go get it. Anyway they’ve got to be silenced now—they know too much, they can identify us, our cover’s blown and the only way we can get it back is to kill them.”
“But it’s not Alan’s fault! You’re the one who gave it away!”
“You’re being irrational, Ronnie. It makes no difference whose fault it is, it’s done. We’ve got to undo it. There’s too much at stake.”
“I forget what they say,” she said. “… You can’t make scrambled eggs without murdering people, isn’t that it? I won’t go through with it, Les. I won’t be a part of murder—not again. You can keep on forever explaining to me why it’s necessary but I’m all through listening to arguments that prove lies are true and murder is respectable and people are nothing.”
Suffield murmured, “You’d like to find a way out of it where nobody gets hurt. That’s the same thing as trying to stick a pin in a balloon gradually. It can’t be done, Ronnie.”
Forrester understood that as senseless as it all seemed, Suffield was going to kill him. Forrester’s eyes swiveled quickly toward Top Spode, and Top nodded almost imperceptibly. Forrester turned toward Suffield and started talking, to draw Suffield’s attention. “I don’t know what this is all about but if you’re going to kill us I think we deserve to know why. If you—”
“What comfort will it be when you’re dead? It won’t make the slightest difference,” Suffield said, but his florid frown had come around squarely to face Forrester. “Jesus, do you think I like this? But you and this God damned sleuth have stumbled into something and there are too many lives at stake; we just can’t afford the slightest whisper of suspicion.”
Ronnie’s mouth was curled. “You’ve always had that genius, Les, for doing something inexcusable and then dreaming up high-sounding justifications to fit it. Listen to me—all we need to do is lock them up and gag them, make sure they can’t get loose before tomorrow night; we’ll all be out of reach in a little over thirty hours—we only need to make sure Alan and Jaime don’t raise the alarm before the thing is done. After that the whole world will know what happened and it won’t matter what Alan knows about us. We’ll be gone, disappeared.”
“No good,” Suffield said. “The world will know what happened but it can’t be allowed to find out how it happened. If the truth came out you could have total global war on your hands.”
“My God, aren’t we going to have that anyway?”
“You’re talking too much, Ronnie. You’re only nailing the lids on their coffins.”
There was rain. It struck the flagstones outside and began to steam. Ronnie said, “If we’re going to be stranded here until the flash floods subside then we’ve got time to think of another way.”
“There is no other way.”
“There has to be. Do that much for me, Les—let me have the time.”
In the corner of his vision Forrester saw Top Spode close his fist around the heavy glass ashtray on the table beside the window but in that instant the storm burst like a bomb. The thunderclap drew Suffield’s attention involuntarily toward the window. Suffield whipped around and spoke from a semi-crouch, pistol leveled:
“Get away from it, Jaime.”
Fragmented lightning licked across the sky and metal in the hill rocks brought it down, fizzling and streaking, reflected in the windows. Thunder shattered the quiet with ear-splitting explosions; rain battered the shingles as if someone had dumped it out of airplanes in tank loads. The sky was dark and wild; Suffield spoke crisply and Ronnie went around turning on lights. “Go behind him,” Suffield adjured. “Don’t get between him and my gun.”
Spode was by the window and when Ronnie reached up under the shade of the lamp Suffield said, “Step back away from her, Jaime,” and wiggled the gun; and Spode, stepping aside, hooked his foot through the lamp’s trailing electric cord and stamped down. The lamp tumbled forward and when Ronnie dodged out of its way she came within reach: Spode grabbed her wrist, yanked her around into a hard embrace. He had her arm twisted behind her back; Forrester heard her tiny outcry.
Spode talked very fast. “Now drop that damned thing before I break her arm.”
In his anxiety Suffield had stepped forward; he shook his head, stubborn, weighing it, and finally he said, “I guess not, Jaime.”
Ronnie cried, “Les!” Her face was taut with pain. Suffield began to walk toward them. Spode reached around with his free hand, slid his grip down to Ronnie’s left hand, grabbed the middle finger and bent it back hard. “This goes first, Les.” Ronnie gave a broken sound of agony.
Suffield had crossed half the length of the room, bringing up the revolver and sighting carefully past Ronnie’s shoulder at Spode’s face, but Spode kept turning Ronnie in front of him. Forrester waited his chance and jumped Suffield, snapped both hands around the outstretched wrist and twisted in opposite directions with all the strength in his big fists.
The gun wobbled out of Suffield’s fingers and Suffield sucked wind through his teeth.
Suffield cracked the leather rim of his shoe against Forrester’s shin. Pain shot up Forrester’s leg. Suffield twisted out of Forrester’s grip and dived for the gun but Spode had thrown Ronnie aside and leaped forward: he butted Suffield in the kidney and the blow knocked Suffield against the brass-cornered coffee table. The table caught him behind the knees and he went over bringing the table down with a clatter of ashtrays and snapping wood.
Suffield’s fist closed around the broken table leg, its brass corner still attached. He turned on one knee wielding the massive leg like a club, swinging it in a wicked circle while Spode scooped up the revolver.
Forrester, swaying to get balance, saw it from the corner of his vision in the broken instant. The jagged club whistled toward Spode and because Spode’s weight was on one arm and one knee, Spode couldn’t parry, and there was only one thing left: Spode shot to kill because he didn’t have time not to.
The walls threw back stunning echoes of the explosion. The point-blank charge splintered bone fragments from Suffield’s forehead; Suffield’s mouth sagged with stupefaction and he toppled, grazing Spode’s shoulder with the club. The room was instantly filled with a cordite stink.
The fierce lightning of the thunderstorm crackled around the house. Forrester’s face was hot and prickly: his eyes felt sticky. Uselessly he kicked the bunched-up throw rug out of his path and knelt by Les Suffield, laying his finger along the man’s wrist to feel for a pulse. It stopped beating under his hand. He reached for the rug to pull it up over Suffield’s face.
Spode had turned to train the pistol on Ronnie. “I’d stand still.” Spode was sweating.
Ronnie stood quivering in every rigid limb. Her face seemed all bones and eyes—huge eyes. Her hair was lank with sweat and her voice was a hollow monotone from which everything alive had been sucked. “Go ahead. You may as well.”
“Nuts.”