“You damned well can,” I said. “You have to. Go out to the gate. If Brad comes, get him to toot the horn, then I’ll know you’re away and I’ll phone the police. If he doesn’t come... give him five minutes, then walk... walk and get a taxi. Promise?”
I picked up the kiyoga and fumbled with it, trying to concertina it shut. She took it out of my hands, twisted it, banged the knob on the carpet and expertly returned it closed to her pocket.
“I’ll think of you, and thank you,” I said, “every day that I live.”
“At four-twenty,” she said as if automatically, and then paused and looked at me searchingly. “It was the time I met Greville.”
“Four-twenty,” I said, and nodded. “Every day.”
She knelt down again beside me and kissed me, but it wasn’t passion. More like farewell.
“Go on,” I said. “Time to go.”
She rose reluctantly and went to the doorway, pausing there and looking back. Lady Knightwood, I thought, a valiant deliverer with not a hair out of place.
“Phone me,” I said, “one day soon?”
“Yes.”
She went quietly down the passage but wasn’t gone long. Brad himself came bursting into the room with Clarissa behind him like a shadow.
Brad almost skidded to a halt, the prospect before him enough to shock even the garrulous to silence.
“Strewth,” he said economically.
“As you say,” I replied.
Rollway had dropped his gun when he fell but it still lay not far from his left hand. I asked Brad to move it farther away in case the drug man woke up.
“Don’t touch it,” I said sharply as he automatically reached out a hand, bending down. “Your prints would be an embarrassment.”
He made a small grunt of acknowledgment and Clarissa wordlessly held out a tissue with which Brad gingerly took hold of the silencer and slid the gun across the room to the window.
“What if he does wake up?” he said, pointing to Rollway.
“I give him another clout with the crutch.”
He nodded as if that were normal behavior.
“Thanks for coming back,” I said.
“Didn’t go far. You’ve got a Volvo...”
I nodded.
“Is it the one?”
“Sure to be,” I said.
“Strewth.”
“Take my friend back to the Selfridge,” I said. “Forget she was here. Forget you were here. Go home.”
“Can’t leave you,” he said. “I’ll come back.”
“The police will be here.”
As ever, the thought of policemen made him uneasy.
“Go on home,” I said. “The dangers are over.”
He considered it. Then he said hopefully, “Same time tomorrow?”
I moved my head in amused assent and said wryly, “Why not?”
He seemed satisfied in a profound way, and he and Clarissa went over to the doorway, pausing there and looking back, as she had before. I gave them a brief wave, and they waved back before going. They were both, incredibly, smiling.
“Brad!” I yelled after him.
He came back fast, full of instant alarm.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just fine. But don’t shut the front door behind you. I don’t want to have to get up to let the police in. I don’t want them smashing the locks. I want them to walk in here nice and easy.”
20
It was a long dreary evening, but not without humor. M I sat quietly apart most of the time in Greville’s chair, largely ignored while relays of people came and efficiently measured, photographed, took fingerprints and dug bullets out of walls.
There had been a barrage of preliminary questions in my direction which had ended with Rollway groaning his way back to consciousness.
Although the police didn’t like advice from a civilian, they did, at mild suggestion, handcuff him before he was fully awake, which was just as well, as the bullish violence was the first part of his personality to surface. He was on his feet, trashing about, mumbling, before he knew where he was.
While a policeman on each side of him held his arms, he stared at me, his eyes slowly focusing. I was still at that time on the floor, thankful to have his weight off me. He looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, and in the same flat uninflected voice as before, called me a bastard, among other things not as innocuous.
“I knew you were trouble,” he said. He was still too groggy to keep a rein on his tongue. “You won’t live to see evidence, I’ll see to that.”
The police phlegmatically arrested him formally, told him his rights and said he would get medical attention at the police station. I watched him stumble away, thinking of the irony of the decision I’d made earlier not to accuse him of anything at all, much less, as now, of shooting people. I hadn’t known he’d shot Simms. I hadn’t feared him at all. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I might not act against him on the matter of cocaine. He’d been ready to kill to prevent it. Yet I hadn’t suspected him even of being a large-scale dealer until he’d boasted of it.
While the investigating activity went on around me, I wondered if it were because drug runners cared so little for the lives of others that they came so easily to murder.
Like Vaccaro, I thought, gunning down his renegade pilots from a moving car. Perhaps that was a habitual mode of cleanup among drug kings. Copycat murder, everyone had thought about Simms, and everyone had been right.
People like Rollway and Vaccaro held other people’s lives cheap because they aimed anyway at destroying them. They made addiction and corruption their business, willfully intended to profit from the collapse and unhappiness of countless lives, deliberately enticed young people onto a one-way misery trail. I’d read that people could snort cocaine for two or three years before the physical damage hit. The drug growers, shippers, wholesalers knew that. It gave them time for steady selling. Their greed had filthy feet.
The underlying immorality, the aggressive callousness had themselves to be corrupting; addictive. Rollway had self-destructed, like his victims.
I wondered how people grew to be like him. I might condemn them, but I didn’t understand them. They weren’t happy-go-lucky dishonest, like Pross. They were uncaring and cold. As Elliot Trelawney had said, the logic of criminals tended to be weird. If I ever added to Greville’s notebook, I thought, it would be something like “The ways of the crooked are mysterious to the straight,” or even “What makes the crooked crooked and the straight straight?” One couldn’t trust the sociologists’ easy answers.
I remembered an old story I’d heard sometime. A scorpion asked a horse for a ride across a raging torrent. Why not? said the horse, and obligingly started to swim with the scorpion on his back. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the horse. The horse, fatally poisoned, said, “We will both drown now. Why did you do that?” And the scorpion said, “Because it’s my nature.”
Nicholas Loder wasn’t going to worry or wonder about anything anymore; and his morality, under stress, had risen up unblemished and caused his death. Injustice and irony everywhere, I thought, and felt regret for the man who couldn’t acquiesce in my murder.
He had taken cocaine himself, that much was clear. He’d become perhaps dependent on Rollway, had perhaps been more or less blackmailed by him into allowing his horses to be tampered with. He’d been frightened I would find him out: but in the end he hadn’t been evil, and Rollway had seen it, had seen he couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut after all.
Through Loder, Rollway had known where to find me on Sunday afternoon, and through him he’d known where to find me this Wednesday evening. Yet Nicholas Loder hadn’t knowingly set me up. He’d been used by his supposed friend; and I hadn’t seen any danger in reporting on Sunday morning that I’d be lunching with Milo and the Ostermeyers or saying I would be in Greville’s house ready for Gemstones’ bids.