Why not? He had nothing left in the world to lose now. He was a murderer already and hadn’t he earned his moment with her, earned it with his love? Surely even her cold heart would not expect him to go to prison without even once knowing that for which he had sacrificed his life.
Peter turned away from the dead milkman and bounded up the stairs, all caution forgotten. He knew that the corpse could be discovered at any moment and the alarm raised. He knew that if he was to act it must be immediately. If he was to have time to force himself upon Polly and justify the life of incarceration that he faced then it must be now.
At the top of the stairs the door to Polly’s flat was closed as Peter had known it would be. He hurled his body against it, hammering with the fist of his left hand. In his right hand he still held the knife, his fingers clenched around the bloody hilt, sticky with his own blood and that of the milkman. Peter was no longer afraid of the American. He had killed once, he could kill again. The moment the door opened he would stab his hated rival and then force Polly to his will.
“Let me in, you slag!” he shouted. “You’ve let him do it to you! Why not let me?”
Inside the flat Jack leapt to the door. Whatever it was that was going on outside the noise would surely wake the whole house. There would soon be irate figures in the stairwell and one of them would be bound to ring the police. Jack had only moments in which to silence this new menace.
He flung open the door. Outside stood the Bug, knife in hand. Peter was caught momentarily by surprise, but then lunged forward with a shout of triumph. But the Bug was no more of a threat to Jack than if he truly had been a bug. Jack stepped neatly aside and Peter stumbled forward into the room. In some ways even this pathetic circumstance was a small triumph for Peter. He was inside Polly’s home for the very first time. He glanced round, trying to take it in, store it up, memorize more of Polly’s life.
But Peter had no more need of memories.
Jack raised his pistol and shot the Bug, as he intended to shoot Polly, straight between the staring, gaping eyes. Peter was dead before he hit the floor. Jack then turned back to Polly in order to complete his self-appointed mission.
But it was too late. The Bug had foiled Jack’s plan, providing Polly with a tiny window of opportunity in which to defend her life. For as Jack turned back towards her Polly was already reaching up to the head of her bed; her finger was already on the panic button. Instantly as she pushed it the room was filled with the noise of jangling bells and outside the open door the stairwell began to glow a jarring intermittent red as the alarm light installed there began to flash.
Jack met Polly’s eye, a surprised look upon his face.
“It’s connected to the police station!” Polly shouted, having to raise her voice in order to make herself heard above the jangling of the bells. “They’ll be here in two minutes at this time of night.”
Jack stood, gun in hand, and for the first time that night he seemed at a loss.
“Go, Jack!” Polly shouted. “Run, get out now!”
But it was too late to run. Jack had killed a man; the bloodied corpse lay at his feet and the forces of the law were almost upon him. Even now he could hear a faint siren amidst the shrieking of the bells. They would be in the street in moments. There was no escape. Yes, he had killed Peter in self-defence, but there would still have to be a police investigation. Even if Polly stood by him, and there was no reason why she should, even if she kept his terrible threat to her life to herself, the whole story of their past must eventually come out. Then would come the suspicions and the whisperings. Why had he been in her flat that night? Why had he been carrying a gun? Despite what Jack had said to Polly, it was not common practice for American soldiers to go about London armed. At the very best, Jack’s career would end in pathetic and contemptible disgrace, and at worst he would be imprisoned for manslaughter. What a mess.
Downstairs, a shrill woman’s voice joined the chorus of complaint now ringing round the building. The whole house had been aroused.
“Run, Jack!” Polly repeated desperately. “Get out! Get out now!”
He loved her more in that moment than he had ever loved her. He had tried to kill her and yet still she cared for him. Such was the power of love, love which he had denied all his life, love which he had tried that night to murder. But he had failed and it was love not him that would survive.
The police were at the front door now. In a moment they would be in the house.
“I love you, Polly,” said Jack, “but I don’t deserve you and I do not deserve the trust of my country. I have failed in my duty and brought disgrace and dishonour upon everything I care for.”
Then, like a Roman general of old, Jack fell upon his sword. He raised his gun to his head and pulled the trigger. As his body fell towards her Polly tried to scream but found that she had no voice. All that she could do as he came to rest on the floor before her was silently mouth his name.
57
Nibs and her husband had made an uneasy peace. She would stand by him, even lie for him, and in return he had promised that this sordid little affair would be his last. He tried to kiss her to say thank you but she was not yet ready for that.
They had just ordered coffee when a knock came at the door.
“I said we weren’t to be disturbed,” Nibs’ husband said as his principal private secretary entered the room.
“I’m extremely sorry, Mr President, but the State Department felt that you should know this. I’m afraid that we have bad news from London. General Jack Kent seems to have shot himself. It looks like some kind of sex thing. He was in the apartment of an Englishwoman. Another man is dead also. We have no further details at present.”
The president and the first lady were horrified. They had both known Jack quite well. Nibs in particular knew Courtney Kent and could only imagine how she was feeling.
“I’ll call Courtney,” she said and left the president with his aides.
“Jack Kent of all people,” the great commander said. “We were going to propose him for chairman of the joint chiefs.”
The president was truly sorry to hear the news, but he was a politician and already he could see that from a personal point of view there was an upside to this tragedy. Jack’s suicide would be enormously newsworthy, particularly if it did turn out that there was a sexual angle to the case. Anything that diverted attention from the president’s own problems was to be welcomed.
“In the meantime there are practical considerations,” the president added. “This is going to hit the army hard. We need to fill this gap and quickly, and, for Christ’s sake, can we please try to find a clean pair of hands.”
A few days later, to his utter shock and abject terror, General Schultz, Jack’s blundering, indecisive colleague, whose anonymous career had shadowed Jack’s for so many years, was appointed chairman of the joint chiefs. He had turned out to be the only senior officer in the armed forces who had never done anything that anybody considered suspect. The reason for this being, of course, that General Schultz had never done anything.
Two years later Schultz’s name would be spoken of as a potential presidential candidate for exactly the same reason.
“It isn’t a case of who’s most qualified these days,” the Washington powerbrokers had wearily to admit. “It’s a case of who’s least likely to be disqualified.”
58
Despite the dreadful memories of that violent night, Polly decided to stay on in her flat. At first she had intended to move. The image of the Bug’s corpse bleeding on her floor was not a pleasant one, but in the end she decided that the Bug had not managed to drive her out while he was alive and she was not going to let him do so now that he was dead. Besides, there was the memory of Jack to consider. He had died in that flat, and despite the awfulness of what he had planned Polly wanted to be the keeper of that memory.
