She wondered, for one broken instant, whether it was worthwhile calling Fleet’s attention to all the discrepancies he couldn’t possibly trim into his pattern. But that was no use; he didn’t expect a hundred per cent perfection, perhaps he wouldn’t even be happy without the residue of risk. Certainly he wouldn’t be deterred by it. No, there was nothing to be done here. What she had to do was be ready to seize the moment if it came, and make sure of getting through the doorway and into the trees.
It couldn’t be long now. She had done all the thinking she could do in approximately twenty seconds, though it had seemed an age. Now she rebelled at the silence. Nothing had a chance of happening successfully in this still, charged air; with a wind blowing through it there might be more hope.
“Do you mind if I have my handbag?” she said acidly, her bright stare hard and steady on Fleet’s face. “You guessed right, the grey one is mine. Your fellows have had everything out of it but the lining, so don’t be afraid I’ve got a bomb in it.”
It frees the tongue, knowing that what you say will make no difference, that buttering up the devil isn’t going to get you anywhere, and damning him to his face can’t do more than destroy you. Something else was stirring in the unexplored depths of her being, something never yet exercised in the serenity of family life, a pure personal fury that this man and his hangers-on should take it so insultingly for granted that no one could do anything against them, that guns called tunes, that lives were expendable like draughts in a game, and their proprietors would go quietly as lambs to the slaughter, just because the odds were against them. She cast one glance at Luke, and he was waiting for it with eyes flaring wide and aware. They conversed briefly, and were at one. Neither of them knew who was going to precipitate what was coming; both of them were playing by ear. But they understood the one weapon they had, their absolute unanimity. Whichever called, the other would respond; and they had no reservations, they trusted each other through and through. It was almost worth dying for that.
“Did you vet it?” asked Fleet lazily, without condescending to glance either at Bunty, who had addressed him, or at Blackie, whom he was now addressing.
“Yeah, there’s nothing, just women’s stuff.”
“I need a handkerchief,” said Bunty. “Not to weep into, in case that’s what you’re thinking. To blow my nose. There’s a smell in here. Queer, that, it was all right until you people arrived.”
“Give her her bag,” said Fleet, half-bored and half-amused.
It was on the bookcase, cheek by jowl with the sumptuous cream-coloured concoction Pippa had affected; and Blackie was sitting sprawled all over a high-backed chair close beside the bookcase, with Bunty diagonally to his left, and Luke diagonally to his right. He had his gun braced ready in his right hand, but his left was free to reach for the bag and toss it to Bunty. He did so, lazily and inefficiently, as if under protest.
It was a disdainful cast, an insult in itself, designed to fall short and make her stoop for her belongings. She could have caught the bag if she had cared to lean forward and stretch out her arms. Instead she sat with a straight back and a scornful face, her lips curled in detestation, and never moved a finger, but let it fall, with a dull plop and a rattle of small feminine arms within, just a yard from her feet. It lay innocently on one end of Louise Alport’s most beautiful rug, a Scandinavian piece in broken forms and muted colours. A long rug, it was; the other end reposed under Fleet’s hand-made shoe and Fleet’s wicker chair, tilted back lazily on its rear legs beside the table.
She looked down at the bag with a fine, considering smile, and her eyes travelled the length of the rug slowly, and measured the distance to the door, and the half-way mark in that five-yard journey, the console record player with the single brass candlestick and the Benares ashtray on top of it. Her eyebrows signalled amused disdain.
“I perceive,” she said, “that I am in the company of gentlemen. That’s always so satisfying.” And she leaned forward without haste, and stretched out a languid hand towards her property.
She moved slowly, because their eyes were too intently fixed upon her movements, she had to give Luke time for his own diversion; and as though she had whispered in his ear, he provided her with what she needed. He rose abruptly from his chair, whirled it about under the knee-hole of the desk, and took two rapid steps forward towards the bag, as if to pick it up and hand it to her, exasperated by his own impotence and their boorishness.
Attention swung upon him in an instant. Fleet dropped Pippa’s gun upon the table at his elbow, and picked up the Colt with the smoothness of a snake uncoiling. Blackie’s thin, sharp profile swung towards Bunty, the gun in his hand levelled and pointed, freezing upon Luke’s middle. Bunty said in a high, clear voice: “Don’t bother! I can stoop to conquer!”
She leaned from her place, both hands reaching for the handbag; but what she grasped, fingers clenched deep into the blessed long woollen pile, was the edge of the Scandinavian rug.
She tugged with all her heart and soul and venom and love. The rug surged across Louise Alport’s polished woodblock floor like a live thing, plucking the rear legs of Fleet’s chair irresistibly after it, an enthusiastic Sealyham tangling its boss in its lead and bringing him down with a shattering crash on his back.
The wicker chair screeched like a parrot, Fleet went over in a backward dive on his heavy shoulders, and his head hit the parquet with a most satisfying crunch. Attention swung back to Bunty like mad magic, and Blackie came out of his chair in a frantic leap, hesitant whether to pounce upon her, fire at her, or rush to salvage his boss. For one instant no one had time to spare for Luke, and though it was only an instant, it was enough. He plucked the granite paperweight out of his pocket, and hurled it into the light fixture with all his might—he had played cricket for his school and college as a fast bowler of erratic speed but deadly accuracy.
To Bunty, swept suddenly away out of reach of fear on a wave of exultant battle-madness that stemmed from somewhere very far back in her ancestry, the sequence of events was for ever crystal clear, though they all followed one another so rapidly as to be virtually simultaneous. The first thing was that Fleet was on his back, but still with the Colt in his hand, and all his resilient faculties gathering in his trigger-finger. The next was that she was on her feet, hands stretched up to the extreme of her reach, flourishing the rug. It was interposed between her body and the gunmen for an instant too brief to measure, but in its shelter she flung herself to one side, expecting the shot that would surely come. It came from Blackie, though she would have bet on Fleet. Fleet was always to surprise her. Even on his back, balance gone and senses momentarily disorientated, he made an instant decision, and it was at Luke he fired. The two shots stuttered like a double report, but between the two Bunty, hardly aware whether she was intact or not, had done the beautifully simple thing, and hurled the rug from her, to descend with all its woolly suffocation over the sprawling figure on the floor. Fleet’s shot, blanketed by Swedish blues and greens, foils to all that orange and white, burned a hole in the rug and went wild, plunking harmlessly into the wall.
And only then did Luke’s pebble hit the glowing fluorescent ring in the middle of the ceiling, hard and accurately at the point where the glass fitted into its plastic seal. A loud note of song, almost too high to be within human range, vibrated above their heads. There was a spitting explosion of brilliant, bluish radiance, like close lightning, and then a darkness like midnight and heavy rain, absolute darkness coruscating with piercing, infinitesimal points of sound, a rain of bitter ice. Fine particles of glass whispered down into hair and eyelids and folds of clothing. And on the instant all the lights in the house went out.