Which he wouldn’t, Rice suspected, because he was honest. He didn’t like it when people disappeared money from the economy, from the government, not now when it was needed. Didn’t like it at all. Didn’t approve, and wouldn’t help. And now he was dead. Rice had no notion of how. A special gun. A compressed-air cannon and a block of ice. Or had the whole scene been staged?
He wondered if there was any way he would ever be able to prove it, or even say it aloud, and decided: probably not.
The driver reached out gently. “Don’t look, Tommy. You don’t need to see it coming. All right?”
And a scratchy female voice said: “Atten-shun! Officer on deck!”
The driver twitched but did not actually salute. The other man swayed slightly and appeared to have changed position without actually moving. Rice would have said—to a policeman, for example, if one should happen by—that the man was partly South-East Asian, except that he had a friend from Portsmouth with a Welsh mother who looked almost exactly the same, with black hair and a broad, pale face. Guessing ethnicities was a mug’s game, and one wise civil servants didn’t play. Part Gurkha? Or something more obvious? He was the assassin, quite obviously. The driver was just there to see it through.
The old lady strode over to stand by Rice. “All right, young’un?”
“Well—”
“A man of few words, I like that. Well, boys, is this a party, or what? Shall we adjourn to the pub and talk it out? Because we can’t have witnesses and such. Messy. Unless you fancy your chances?”
The driver laughed, and gestured to the assassin, who nodded. Two for one is fine, he seemed to say. If it must be done at all. Tom Rice looked at the old woman, and then looked again, harder. Mrs Mandel had called her Banister. It was utterly ridiculous to imagine. and yet, here she was.
“Edie Banister?” he asked incredulously.
She tutted. “In the file, was it? That’s a bit of a bugger, then. Well, yes. Edith J. Banister, Commander RN, Retired. At your service. And you,” she added, pointing to the assassin with her umbrella, “stay where you are or I’ll have you.”
The little man shrugged, and took one quick step forward. Edie Banister shifted slightly at the hip and shoulder, and he stopped. He stepped very deliberately from one foot to the other, and watched her closely. To Rice’s eye, nothing happened, but the little man’s eyes widened slightly, and he stepped back, then moved his heel to a new position. Edie snorted, and settled a little where she was. Rice could not have said exactly what she did, but she seemed abruptly more solid, as if she had just now properly arrived. The man nodded confirmation to himself, breathed in and out, and he too compressed and strengthened. Rice found himself edging away, as if there was a line between them which it might be dangerous to touch. He saw the driver, startled, do the same.
Edie Banister tutted like a disappointed headmistress, and Rice expected her to get heavier still in answer to the challenge. Instead, with no diminution of the focus which glinted in her, she became an absence. From one moment to the next, the unconscious sense of her he had had, the knowledge that she was standing next to him, simply vanished. He glanced over to reassure himself.
She had not moved. She was precisely where she had been. He turned back to the little man, and saw on his face an expression of shock. Rice felt a brief flash of sympathy.
“Get on with it,” the driver said.
The little man ignored him, his attention now wholly on Edie. He cleared his throat. “I had thought,” he said, “that I knew all of my father’s students.”
Edie sighed. “You probably do,” she said. “He hadn’t even been conceived when your great aunt taught me.”
The little man blinked, then nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I did not think. But,” his eyes flickered to her body, probing, “that would make you more than eighty.”
“Ueshiba,” Edie Banister observed blandly, “was known in late age to take on several senior students at a time, and win quite handily. No doubt his bones ached terribly the following day. Mine always do.” She extended a hand in a graceful arc, indicating her limbs. The fingers spread and regathered, like the feathers of an eagle’s wing.
The little man laughed in genuine appreciation, and stepped back. “No,” he said to the driver.
“What?”
“No. You must make another plan. I cannot help you.”
“Because she knew your bloody auntie?”
“No,” the little man said. “I would still fight her—although I think you have lied to me about what is happening here. I do not believe you are an honest man, any more. But in any case, she would win. She is better than me.” He shrugged. “I regret.”
The driver scowled and seemed about to argue, then dipped into his pocket and came out with what Rice identified with horror as an actual gun. British civilians in general have a superstitious fear of guns, because they are not part of the life of the nation. Guns are for soldiers and crooks.
“I’ll just fucking shoot her then, won’t I?” the driver was saying as he pointed the gun, and the phrase turned into a yelp of agony as something bright and shining slapped down hard on his wrist and went “bong”. The gun fell on the ground, the driver to one knee. The shining thing zipped and zigged and returned to the handle of Edie’s umbrella, and only in memory did Rice recognise it for a concealed weapon, a ribbon of metal perhaps eighteen-inches long.
“You just stay right there,” Edie told him.
“Wakizashi,” the little man said, seemingly à propos of nothing. Edie nodded, and glanced briefly over at him, then said “Fuck,” which struck Rice as rude until he realised she was now looking back at the driver, who had produced a second, smaller gun from his leg and was bringing it up.
Rice, feeling that something of the sort was called for, dragged her out of the way of the shot, and Edie squawked an exasperated yodel of “Oh, you silly sod!” The driver came to his feet and gave chase, firing again. Something plucked at Rice’s sleeve and he realised he had sustained an actual fleshwound. Edie Banister reversed course as if she had forgotten something, slipping back along the line of her footsteps, and the driver’s momentum carried him onto her. The gun went off and Edie Banister said “Fuck” again in an irritated voice and the driver said “Oh”. And everything was very still.
Rice realised he had been hiding behind his hands, and somewhat shamefacedly took them down and looked.
The bullet had caromed along the umbrella and ripped it apart, taking with it a two-inch piece of white steel which glinted in the gutter. The rest of Edie’s little sword was buried to the handle in the driver’s chest, and his eyes had a fish-on-a-slab look which Rice suspected meant he was no longer in residence.
For a moment, no one said anything. Edie looked at Rice and apparently considered giving him a bollocking, then changed her mind. She opened her mouth and Rice thought she might go with “Thank you”, but she didn’t, and shut it again. Rice looked at the body and at the alleyway and thought, gosh, my life is over. How odd.