In a car I obviously couldn't lie flat on my stomach, the way I normally fired the Mauser. I could kneel, and I was more used to kneeling with the. 22. But when I knelt in the car I wouldn't have to support the rifle's weight… I could rest it on the door and shoot through the open window.
For better or worse I chose the Mauser. The stopping power was so much greater, and if I was going to do the job, it was best done properly. Also I could see the target clearly and it was near enough to make hitting it with the second shot a certainty. It was the first shot that worried.
A picture of Paul Arcady rose in my mind. 'Could you shoot the apple off his head, sir?' What I was doing was much the same. One slight mistake could have unthinkable results.
Committed, I wound down the rear window and then fitted the sleek three-inch round of ammunition into the Mauser's breech. I took a look at the target through the telescope, steadying that too on the window ledge, and what leapt to my eye was a bright, clear, slightly oblique close-up of a flat shallow box, fixed high up and to one side on the telegraph pole: grey, basically rectangular, fringed with wires leading off to all the nearby houses.
The junction box.
I was sorry for all the people who were going to be without telephones for the rest of that day, but not too sorry to put them out of order.
I lowered the telescope, folded the brown towel, and laid it over the door frame to make a non-slip surface. Wedged myself between the front and rear seats as firmly as possible, and rested the barrel of the Mauser on the towel.
I thought I would probably have to hit the junction box two or three times to be sure. 7.62 mm bullets tended to go straight through things, doing most of the damage on the way out. If I'd cared to risk shooting the junction box through the pole one accurate bullet would have blown it apart, but I would have to have been directly behind it, and I couldn't get there unobserved.
I set the sights to what I thought I would need for that distance, lowered my body into an angle that felt right, corrected a fraction for the breeze, and squeezed the trigger. Hit the pole, I prayed. High or low, hit the pole. The bullet might indeed go through it, but with the worst of its impetus spent.
7.62 calibre rifles make a terrific noise. Out in the street it must have cracked like a bull whip. In the car it deafened me like in the old days before ear-defenders.
I reloaded. Looked through the telescope. Saw the bullet hole, round and neat, right at the top of the grey junction box casing.
Allelujah, I thought gratefully, and breathed deeply from relief.
Lowered the sight a fraction, keeping my body position unchanged. Shot again. Reloaded. Shot again. Looked through the telescope.
The second and third holes overlapped, lower down than the first, and, maybe because I wasn't shooting at it directly face-on but from a little to one side, the whole casing seemed to have split.
It would have to do. It was all too noisy.
I put the guns and telescopes on the floor with the towel over them and scrambled through onto the front seat.
Started the engine, reversed slowly onto the road and drove away at a normal pace, seeing in the rear-view mirror a couple of inhabitants come out inquiringly into the street. The net curtains must all have been twitching, but no one shouted after me, no one pointed and said 'That's the man.'
And Angelo – what would he think? And Sarah – who knew the sound of a rifle better than church bells? I hoped to God she'd keep quiet.
Going out of Norwich I stopped for petrol and used the telephone there to ring Donna's number.
Nothing.
A faint humming noise, like wind in the wires.
I blew out a lungful of air and wondered with a smile what the repair men would say when they climbed the pole on the morrow. Unprintable, most like.
There were perhaps ways of interfering with incoming calls by technical juggling, by ringing a number, waiting for it to be answered, saying nothing, waiting for the receiver to be put down, and then not replacing one's own receiver, leaving the line open and making it impossible for the number to ring again. I might have trusted that method for a short while, but not for hours: and with some exchanges it didn't work.
Further along the road I again stopped, this time to tidy and reorganise the car. I returned the Mauser and the telescope to their beds in the suitcase in the boot, along with the 7.62 mm ammunition; then broke all my own and everyone else's rules and loaded a live. 22 round into the breech of the Anschtz.
I laid the towel on the back seat and rolled the Olympic rifle in it lengthways, and then stowed it flat on the floor behind the front seats. The towel blended well enough with the brown carpet, and I reckoned that if I didn't accelerate or brake or corner too fast, the gun should travel without moving.
Next I put four extra bullets into my right-hand pocket, because the Anschtz had no magazine and each round had to be loaded separately. After so many years of practice I could discharge the spent casing and load a new bullet within the space of two seconds, and even faster if I held the fresh bullet in my right palm. The two rifles were physically the same size, and I'd have taken the Mauser with its available magazine if it hadn't been for its horrific power in a domestic setting. The. 22 would kill, but not the people in the next house.
After that I juggled around a bit with the cassettes and their boxes and the glue and the bits I'd pinched from school, and finally drove on again, this time to Welwyn.
Harry Gilbert was expecting me. From the way he came bustling out of his house the moment I turned into his driveway he had been expecting me for a long time and had grown thoroughly tired of it.
'Where have you been? he said. 'Did you bring the tapes?'
He had come close to me as I emerged from the car, thrusting his chin forward belligerently, sure of his power over a man at a disadvantage.
'I thought you didn't approve of Angelo threatening people with your pistol,' I said.
Something flickered in a muscle in his face.
'There are times when only threats will do,' he said. 'Give me the tapes.'
I took the three tapes out of my pocket and showed them to him; the three tapes themselves, out of their boxes.
I said, 'Now ring Angelo and tell him to untie my wife.' ' Gilbert shook his head. 'I try the tapes first. Then I ring Angelo. And Angelo leaves your wife tied up until you yourself go to release her. That is the arrangement. It's simple. Come into the house.'
We went again into his functional office, which this time had an addition in the shape of a Grantley computer sitting on his desk.
'The tapes.' He held his hand out for them, and I gave them to him. He slotted the first one into the recorder which stood beside the computer and began to fumble around with the computer's typewriter-like keys in a most disorganised fashion.
'How long have you had that computer?' I said.
'Shut up.'
He typed RUN, and not surprisingly nothing happened, as he hadn't fed the program in from the cassette. I watched him pick up the instruction book and begin leafing through it, and if there had been all the time in the world I would have let him stew in it longer. But every minute I wasted meant one more dragging minute for Donna and Sarah, so I said, 'You'd better take lessons.'
'Shut up.' He gave me a distinctly bull-like glare and typed RUN again.
'I want Angelo out of that house,' I said,'so I'll show you how to run the tapes. Otherwise we'll be here all night.'
He would have given much not to allow me the advantage, but he should have done his homework first.
I ejected the tape to see which side we'd got, then re-inserted it and typed CLOAD "EPSOM". The asterisks began to blink at the top right hand corner as the computer searched the tape, but at length it found "EPSOM", loaded the Epsom program, and announced READY.