“Wait,” I cried. His arm dropped a fraction.
“Yes?” he said.
“Why do you need it back anyway?” I asked. “You must have more, hundreds more.”
“Why would I have hundreds?” he asked, clearly curious to learn how much I knew. What should I tell him? Did it matter?
“To put inside the horses,” I said. “Full of drugs.”
The effect was quite startling. He went very pale, and his hand shook a little.
“Who knows this?” he said in a higher pitch than usual.
“Everyone,” I said. “I told the police.” I didn’t expect this comment to save me; quite the reverse. But I hoped it might now be a quicker, less painful death.
“That was very careless of you,” he said, returning somewhat to his normal voice. “For that, you will die.” I was going to die anyway. No change.
He started to walk around behind me. Good, I thought, he is going to shoot me in the back of the head. Much cleaner, and much better not to see it coming. I would just be…gone.
As Komarov passed my shoulder, Caroline stepped through the open doorway and hit him squarely in the face with her viola. She swung the instrument through the air with both hands, using the neck and fingerboard as a handle. Such was the force of the blow that poor dear Viola was damaged beyond repair. Her neck was broken and her body shattered, but, more important for me, Komarov went down to the ground semiconscious. Caroline herself was both hyperventilating and crying at the same time.
“Quick,” I shouted at her, “get a knife.” She looked at me. “From the sideboard,” I shouted. “Top drawer, on the left.” She went straight to the sideboard and came back with a nice sharp, serrated steak knife. I didn’t usually give my customers steak knives, as I thought it was an admission that my steaks were tough, but we kept a few just in case. Thank goodness we did. Even so, Caroline had difficulty cutting through the tape around my wrist. But she managed out of sheer desperation, hurried along by the imminent reawakening of the terror at our feet.
Finally, she freed my left hand.
“Quick,” I said again. “Grab his gun and give it to me.”
Komarov had fallen, but he had not let go of his pistol completely. Caroline went down and grabbed it out of his hand just as he was beginning to recover. She gave it to me, smiled wanly and went on trying to free me from the chair. Suddenly, I remembered the explosive. Where was the remote-detonator switch? Was it in Komarov’s pocket?
Caroline sawed away at the tape around my legs, but she was too slow. Komarov was fully awake and watching, a line of blood running down from his nose, across his mouth and on down his neck. He put his hand up to his face and winced. I think Caroline must have broken his nose.
“Stay where you are,” I said, pointing the gun at him.
He leaned on the floor with his left elbow and put his right hand in his pocket.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” I said.
He pulled his hand out again, but I could see that he now held a small, flat black box with a red button in the center of it. Oh God, I thought, my legs. Would he push the switch? But he would surely kill himself as well. Should I shoot him? If I did, would he detonate the bomb? Would he detonate it if I didn’t?
I watched him, and I could sense that he was weighing up his options. If I had indeed told the police, his empire was about to come crashing down. Perhaps he could escape back to Russia or to South America, but maybe the escape routes had already been closed. Life imprisonment in a British jail would almost certainly mean just that, the rest of his life behind bars. There would be no parole for such an act of terrorism as the Newmarket bombing.
I quite suddenly sensed that he was going to do it. He was going to blow us all up and end it here.
I leaned down between my legs, grabbed the wires and pulled the cigarette-sized detonator out of the explosive. I threw it across the dining room. Komarov pushed the red button, but he was too late. The detonator exploded in midair with a harmless pop, like a very loud champagne cork exploding from the bottle.
Komarov looked cheated, and he was in a rage. He began to stand up.
“Stay where you are,” I repeated. He ignored me and rose to his knees. “I’ll shoot you,” I said. But he continued to rise.
So I shot him.
I was surprised how easy it was. I pointed the gun in his direction and squeezed the trigger. It wasn’t even as loud as I had expected, since the dining room was less confined than the lobby where Komarov had shot Richard.
The bullet caught him in the right leg, just above the knee. I hadn’t been aiming for his leg particularly. I was right-handed, but the cast had forced me to shoot with my left. I had simply pointed the gun at the middle of the target and fired. If I’d aimed at his leg, I would probably have missed. Komarov dropped the detonator switch, grabbed the wound with both his hands and fell back to the floor. Blood poured out of his leg, and I wondered if I had hit an artery. I didn’t particularly care about him, but he was ruining my dining-room carpet. I thought about shooting him again, in the head, to stop the bleeding. There had been so much blood-bright red, oxygenated blood. I decided to just let him bleed. At least the blood spilt here would not be from the innocent, and my carpet could be replaced.
Caroline was down on her knees behind me. She had finally cut through all the tape and I was free of the chair, so I went to her, keeping half an eye on Komarov and another half on the door from the kitchen. There were still George Kealy and Gary to contend with. Caroline cradled Viola in her arms and sobbed. It was only the four strings that were keeping the pegbox and the scroll attached to what remained of the body of the instrument. The neck and fingerboard had broken through completely, and the soundbox was cracked apart along its full length. The damage reflected the ferocity of the attack Caroline had made on Komarov. I was actually surprised that he had recovered from it as quickly as he had.
“Be careful, my darling,” I said. “There are still two of them about. I’m going to find them. Go to the office and call the police.”
“What shall I tell them?” she said, visibly in shock.
“Tell them there’s been a murder,” I said. “And the murderer is still here. That should bring them quickly.”
Caroline went through the lobby and into the bar beyond, gently carrying Viola’s remains in her arms.
Komarov was struggling to his feet. The bleeding from his leg had eased to a trickle, and I wondered if I should shoot him again. Instead, I grabbed him by the collar and thrust him ahead of me through the swinging door into the kitchen with the gun in the small of his back. If George Kealy was going to shoot me, he would have to miss his boss to do it. But the kitchen was empty. George and Gary must still be searching outside.
I pushed Komarov right across the kitchen and banged him up against the wall next to the stainless steel door of the cold-room. I bashed the back of his wounded leg with my knee, and he groaned. It felt good, so I did it again.
I used the lever handle to pull open the cold-room door and then I thrust Komarov in and sent him sprawling across the slatted wooden floor. The room was about ten feet square and seven feet high, with four food-filled wide stainless steel shelves running all around the walls, with a space about seven by four feet down the middle to walk. It had cost a fortune to install, but it had been worth every penny. I slammed the door shut. There was a push rod to open the door from the inside, to stop people getting trapped, and there was a place on the outside to affix a padlock, if desired. I didn’t have a padlock handy, so I slipped a foot-long metal kebab skewer through the hole, thereby imprisoning Komarov.
I went into the office to find Caroline standing by the desk, shaking. She was sobbing quietly and close to hysteria. I held her close to me and kissed her neck.
“Sit and wait here,” I said in her ear. “I have others to find.” I pushed her into a chair. “Did you call the police?” I asked her. She nodded.
I went back into the kitchen, and I could hear George Kealy outside the back door, shouting for Gary. I removed the skewer and held the gun up as I carefully reopened the cold-room. Komarov was still there, sitting on the wooden slats and leaning up against the bottom shelf. He looked up at me, but the broken nose, the bullet wound and the loss of blood had taken the fight out of him.
I could hear George coming back in through the scullery. So could Komarov.
