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.
In a darkness which he could navigate only from memory, Luke took a flying leap, and came down heavily with both feet on the threshing canvas backing of the Scandinavian rug. He had aimed for where he hoped Fleet’s solar plexus would be, but no part of Fleet was ever going to be where one expected to find it. Nothing else so big could ever have been so elusive. He had foreseen the line of attack, and rolled himself under the table, swinging clear of the mouthfuls of exquisitely-dyed long-pile wool that had threatened to smother him. From under the table he lunged in a round swipe, found Luke’s left foot, and gripped like an octopus. Luke lifted his right foot, and stamped it down with all his weight on the wrist of the hand that held him. There were no rules. He hadn’t even known, until he began, whether he could fight or not. He had never fought since he was about ten years old. He wanted to cry out to Bunty to run, but he dared not, for fear one of the enemy should divert his attention to her in time. Surely, surely she would take her chance now, as he had begged her.
And Bunty had meant to; but it must have been out of some misconception of what she was, for things turned out quite differently. She launched herself towards the doorway, made a long controlled sweep of her left hand along the wall, and found the brass candlestick on top of the record player. The rounded candle-holder fitted snugly into her hand. She gripped it firmly, even took time to settle it comfortably. There seemed to be no haste, the gale that carried her accommodated itself to the speed of events, and made everything seem easy and leisurely, as though these happenings took their time from her, and not she from them. She paced out without hindrance the remaining yards to the door, seized the handle and hurled the door wide open, so that the wooden panels shuddered against the rubber door-stop. But when she ran, it was because the darkness was already beginning to pale for her, and the direction in which she ran was back into the room, towards the shapeless melee in the twilight there. She did not think at all, except with her blood and her bones. Bunty had lost herself in the gale-force wind of her own instincts, which had never been loose like this before, and probably never would be again.
Fleet’s long arm heaved convulsively under Luke’s foot, and a grunting curse jerked from under the uncurling edge of the rug. Then the right hand that held the Colt hooked itself round Luke’s knees and brought him down in a crashing fall on top of his adversary. The moment of alarm was already over, and Fleet still wanted him alive, and if possible undamaged. A suicide should not have the grazes and bruises of a stand-up fight all over him, it tends to complicate the proceedings of the coroner’s court. Bunty, one hand extended to catch at Luke’s sleeve and guide him to the doorway, had a precarious hold on him when he fell, but the fall dragged him out of her grasp. She circled the two threshing bodies on the floor, and could not distinguish friend from enemy. But the third presence, still erect, was now visible as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. Blackie, too, was circling the wrestlers, and probing forward into the untidy struggle with his gun hand. And Blackie was not in his master’s secrets, and by the shape and the movement and the long, steady, hissing breath of him he meant to shoot the instant the chance offered.
A head and shoulders reared out of the tangle on the floor. Someone got a foot to the ground and laboured to pull clear and spring erect, and by the slightness and shape of the shadow emerging from shadows Bunty knew him for Luke. So did Blackie, and took a rapid step to one side to have his target well clear of Fleet’s bulk when he fired. The movement took him nearer to Bunty, who had hung for one appalled instant torn between grabbing at Luke’s arm to pull him clear, and hurling herself at the weaving manikin who threatened him.
She chose Blackie. The brass candlestick, swung underhand with all her strength and fury behind it, took him fairly and squarely on the point of the right elbow. The blow had been designed only to sweep his gun hand upwards, but by luck it did much more. It hit his funny-bone with a tingling shock that paralysed him to the fingertips. The gun was jerked out of his hand, and flew jarring across the parquet floor. He uttered a weird, sharp yelp of pain that trailed off into incoherent curses, and went groping lamely after his weapon across the floor, like a crippled spider, one arm dangling.
Bunty swung the candlestick back, startled and exhilarated by success, and struck blindly at Fleet. The blow was smothered in a thick shoulder that rolled aside and rode it almost casually, and then a hand grasped the base
