A few spots of heavier rain splattered down. Nobbins turned up the collar of his fawn gabardine raincoat and walked on. He lived near by in a small bachelor flat in Knightsbridge, and had made a habit of walking in the park for an hour or so whenever he had an afternoon free. If it rained, he got wet: a trivial matter to a confirmed Loser, a man born — and a sardonic smile flickered briefly on his lips as the phrase occurred to him — born with a cardboard spoon in his mouth. And what was a spot of rain to a man who had just lived out six weeks in the shadow of The Squad? He had been through nobody-knew-what agonies of fear — always conscious that he might be exposed at any moment, never knowing when sentence would be passed on him, when the blow would fall, the final deadly shots ring out... He was like a man too afraid of heights even to ride upstairs in a double-decker bus, but who had walked the circus high wire, and had somehow, miraculously, survived. But it was on a note of failure that he had left The Squad behind him. He had been replaced. And now he felt slack and washed out. Failure again. Always the same story.
He walked on, his thoughts a bitter recapitulation spanning his whole life: and he cursed again the malignity of the fates which had condemned him to imprisonment in that small ineffectual body.
The black car was still moving near-silently at a slow walking pace, keeping the same relative position behind Nobbins and to the side of him. The driver, a raw-boned hard-faced Scot, put down the binoculars for which he had momentarily taken his eyes off the road.
“Aye, that’s him right enough.” He glanced backwards at the handsome tough-looking man behind him, a man with a shock of dark hair, longer side-whiskers than the general fashion, and a bandit’s moustache. “All right, Gascott. You know what to do.”
Gascott’s lips curled back briefly in a cursory smile which somehow combined anticipatory relish with a cold contempt for the two men in front, and he nodded once.
“Yes, Lembick. I know what to do. Bang bang bang.”
And Gascott laughed, a cold metallic laugh.
“Get on with it then!” Lembick snapped, his gorge rising quickly, as always with this cockily competent New Boy. Lembick fiercely resented Gascott’s superior assurance; and so did Cawber, the square and equally taciturn passenger beside him who was now nursing a cumbersome cine camera.
Cawber spoke.
“OK, let’s see if you’re as cool out there as you’re smart in here.”
The voice proclaimed Cawber’s New York origins, and the sentence was among the longest Gascott had heard him utter.
Gascott seemed totally at his ease, his relaxation as tangible as Lembick and Cawber’s tension. He took a long silencer out of his pocket and fitted it to the revolver with calm efficiency, almost caressing it into position until it settled home. The job took him just a few moments, yet the actions themselves seemed completely unhurried.
He let the gun swing around carelessly, till it pointed almost straight at the American’s ear.
“Nice long string of words, Cawber — for you!” he sneered. Gascott’s harsh yet cultured voice suggested both his ruthlessness and an army-officer background. “You’re getting almost fluent.”
Cawber caught the gun by its silencer and twisted it savagely aside. “Just remember, Gascott,” he growled. “We’ll be watching. And tonight” — he tapped the cine camera with a stubby forefinger — “so will Rockham. So you just better be sure and get it right.”
Gascott chuckled mirthlessly as he leaned over and flicked a lever on the cine camera.
“You’d better get your own end of it right. We wouldn’t want the film running backwards, would we? And don’t forget the telephoto lens — there’s a good little hoodlum.”
Gascott tucked the gun into a deep inside pocket of his dark raincoat; and even before Lembick had brought the car completely to a halt, he had opened the door and was gone.
Gascott was a man who had passed through many schools of violence, a man to whom sudden death was a far from unfamiliar experience, who had faced as well as delivered it down the barrels of many assorted guns. But only a few weeks before, he had known nothing of Lembick, or Cawber, or Rockham, and he might well have found it hard to believe that on this grey November afternoon he would be carrying out The Squad’s death sentence on Albert Nobbins.
Lembick and Cawber watched with viciously grudging approval as his tall figure crossed the grass with easy strides, in a course that made a shallow angle with the path along which Nobbins’ much shorter steps were taking him. It was Lembick and Cawber’s fierce hope that Gascott would fudge the job; but they had seen enough of him in training to be virtually certain they would be disappointed; and they festered with an impotent smouldering rancour at the thought of his growing prestige with Rockham.
“Smartass!”
Cawber spat out the words as he screwed a telephoto lens to the camera turret and wound down the car window. He rested the heavy camera on the window-ledge and squinted through the viewfinder, keeping Gascott’s long-striding form in the small centre square which represented the magnified field of view.
Gascott reached the path about twenty yards behind Nobbins, and rapidly began to close the gap. Lembick stopped the car and raised the binoculars to his eyes; Cawber started the camera.
Neither man heard the well-muffled shots, but Lembick saw the elongated revolver twitch three times in Gascott’s steady hand. With the first shot, Nobbins seemed to stop, as if there was something he had suddenly remembered; and then, as the other two shots went home, he crumpled, pitched forward on his face, and lay still.
Lembick continued to watch for a few moments as a dark stain slowly spread through Nobbin’s coat, just above the centre of his back. Then, with a further glance around to establish that none of the distant figures in the park who were nobly getting wet in the cause of canine indulgence had noticed anything untoward, he drove the car forward till it was level with Gascott.
And Gascott came back across the grass with the same long measured strides, no whit more hurried than before.
As soon as the tall gunman had eased himself back into the car, Lembick drove smartly away. Gascott unscrewed the silencer and put it back in his pocket.
“Any criticisms — gentlemen?” he said, giving the final word a satirical intonation that made it an insult.
“Nothing much wrong with that,” Lembick said shortly. The words seemed wrung from his lips. “A professional job, I’d say,” After a pause he added: “Are you quite sure he’s dead, though?”
“With three bullets through the heart, would you be planning your next year’s holiday — laddie?”
Lembick nodded, keeping himself under control with visible difficulty.
“All right, we know you’re a good shot,” he said harshly. “We’ve seen you on the range.”
Gascott turned to Cawber.
“What about Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion?” he rasped.
Cawber glowered.
“I guess you did a pretty good job. But you — you shoulda gotten closer.”
“But that would have been too easy. You know — unsporting!”
Gascott laughed his curiously loud metallic laugh, and Cawber and Lembick eyed him malevolently. He knew exactly the line of English gentlemanly phraseology calculated to incense them both.