substance and very often gentlemen, too.
Still, they didn't ought to have treated that old farm the way they had, throwing the grenades through the windows and kicking in the doors, all shouting like savages.
Charlie knew he had shouted with the rest, and kicked too, but that had only been because he'd been angry, red, raging angry at being drilled and marched one way, then marched dummy2
another way, and forced to cower in ditches in terror of bombs and bullets, with never a chance to get his own back.
But it'd never do to kick in the door of the Old House, even the old kitchen door and even if it hadn't been solid seasoned oak, which he reckoned wouldn't reward anyone's boot. And anyway—she'd given him a key, he had it somewhere, thought Charlie confusedly, fumbling for reality in his mind while he searched his jacket with his free hand.
He had to get it right, just like the sergeant had taught him, making him repeat it until he had the meaning by heart:
And first he did get it right, with the key hardly scratching the keyhole it entered. But no amount of care could stop the lock clicking unmistakably, or the latch clattering or the hinges creaking—it was as though the whole door had turned against him, bit by bit, damn it.
Charlie clutched the twelve-bore against his chest and stood irresolutely, listening to the absolute silence of the house ahead of him.
It was a silence which confused him far more than it frightened him, until the memory of the flashing light in the upstairs room came back to him—the evidence of his own eyes.
The time had come to be noisy!
With a furious growl and in total darkness Charlie launched dummy2
himself across the kitchen. The first chair in his way went spinning; he banged into the edge of the table, driving it back so that it overturned another chair. But the table's position orientated him to the passage door. Three more skidding paces, hobnails skittering on the stone floor, brought him against it. Behind him something breakable crashed to the floor.
Four more paces took him down the passage to the foot of the stairs—the last footfall was muffled by the carpet with the eastern writing on it that his wife had told him never to put a boot on. Well, he'd got both boots on it now!
The tingling silence abruptly descended around him again.
And yet not a true silence any more, but the moment when the gamekeeper and the poacher sensed each other's presence in the same covert, the moment of held breath and stretched senses.
It had not been like this in the farmhouse, it had been just how the sergeant had wanted it, all noise and terror.
Charlie reached out for the light switch.
'I knows you're up there,' he said in a loud voice. 'You just come on down quiet, an' don't make no trouble. Police is comin'. So you just come on down.'
He clicked the switch.
There was bursting paper-bag noise—that had been the farmhouse noise he'd never been able to recall—and a hornet stung his ear.
dummy2
Same noise with same result: as the man at the head of the stairs sighted the pistol again, this time on Charlie's heart, Charlie shot him dead.
II
VILLARI'S MANNERS, OR more exactly his attitude towards those whom he considered inferior to himself, had not improved, that was evident.
First the fellow had idly fingered the files and envelopes on Boselli's desk, disarranging their mathematical relation to one another. Then he had admired himself in the little round mirror beside the door, patting the golden perfection of his hair and checking his flawless complexion. And then he had sauntered over to the window to gaze without apparent interest over the roofscape towards the Vittorio Emanuele monument. And finally, when he deigned at last to speak, he didn't even bother to turn round to face Boselli.
'Who's this guy Audley then?'
Boselli stared at the well-tailored back with hatred. If looks could kill he felt that his would have materialised into six inches of steel angled slightly upwards just beneath the left shoulder blade.
'Audley?' The anger blurred his voice.
'The guy you're getting steamed up about, yes.'
It was typical of Villari to use that aggravating and unfair dummy2
'you,' even though he'd come running across a heat-stricken Rome obediently enough himself. But then Villari had always known when to temper his native insolence with a shrewd instinct for the whims of his superiors. The feet that kicked the Bosellis of the world at every opportunity trod very carefully on the carpets of men like Raffaele Montuori.
'We're not getting steamed up.'
'So you're not getting steamed up—fine.' Villari moved across the airless room, back to the mirror again. 'You're not getting steamed up, but you're here.'
That 'here' carried the same disparagement as the earlier
'you,' turning Boselli's own beloved sanctuary, with its rows of battered steel cabinets and its signed portrait of John XXIII into an unspeakable slum.
