The Old Vengeful

'Those men?' He snapped up her mistake, then sank back into the armchair. 'Ah ... so he was right! You were resourceful enough to eavesdrop . . . On your hands and knees?'

Elizabeth stared at him.

'You left scuff-marks on the carpet—he noticed them.'

Audley nodded. 'Paul Mitchell's not just a fine scholar, he's got a sharp eye. For which you should be eternally grateful, Miss Loftus.'

'I said I was grateful.'

'So you did. But I don't think you're grateful enough, so I'm going to tell you exactly why you should be much more grateful.' He pinned her again with that fierce look of his.

'You see, you're wrong about Paul Mitchell, Miss Loftus . . .

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perhaps there are extenuating circumstances for that, I agree . . . but you are wrong about him, nevertheless—quite wrong.'

Elizabeth squirmed on the sharp point of his concentration.

It was like being at school again, but not as one of the teachers.

'He killed those men for you, Miss Loftus—for your sake, not for self-defence— for you.'

'Yes—'

'No! You don't understand because you can't, not because you don't want to—I'll grant that. But I'm going to rectify that. So just listen.'

Elizabeth licked her lips.

'It was partly my fault. I told Mitchell this was just a routine job—no problems, no danger, just routine. So after he'd talked to you at the fete and arranged to visit you he could very well have gone off to the nearest pub to fortify himself for a boring evening.'

He was trying to wound her now, thought Elizabeth. And he was succeeding.

'But being Paul Mitchell ... for which you should be thankful, Miss Loftus ... he didn't leave it at that—he decided to look around just to make sure everything was all right, even if it was just routine.'

She felt the knife turn.

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'So then he saw . . . something . . . which made it not routine

— something which frightened him, because he didn't expect it.'

Something? There was too much that she couldn't remember

—

'So then he had a problem. Because the first thing he had to do was to phone for back-up—for help . . . which he did.'

Audley nodded. 'But help was at least thirty minutes away, and he got to thinking that maybe you didn't have thirty minutes—maybe you didn't have any minutes at all.' He paused, and as the pause lengthened she realised that he was letting it elongate deliberately, to give her time to remember what she had been trying to forget. 'So what should he have done then, Miss Loftus?' Shorter pause. 'Go and knock at the front door, like a Christian?' Pause. 'If he was wrong—no harm done.' Pause. 'But if he was right . . . then he was in trouble too.' Pause— unendurable pause. 'Because he didn't have a gun, Miss Loftus—he isn't 'licensed to kill', because no one is, contrary to popular legend. Not even policemen—

they're not supposed to kill, except in very special and well-established extremities. And you certainly weren't an extremity—you were just a guess, Miss Loftus.'

He was hammering Miss Loftus like a dentist drilling without any pain-killer—

'So he went round the back, and he was very lucky there—'

Don't say 'Miss Loftus' again, prayed Elizabeth—

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'—because there was a look-out man at the back, but the man was careless.' Audley shook his head. 'He was very lucky

—and the look-out man was very careless ... So then he had one dead man on his hands—and having a dead man on one's hands makes one sick . . . would you believe that, Miss Loftus? It makes you sick—sick to the stomach. Do you know what a dead man looks like? Do you know how his body reacts to being dead? Would you like the details?'

She couldn't even shake her head—she didn't want to, but she couldn't anyway.

'So now he had a gun. But he also had another problem, because there are only two rules for that sort of situation: you either run like hell or you go on like hell, SAS-style, before the other side knows what's happening.' This time he neither nodded nor shook his head, he just looked at her. 'And you never really know what you're going to do then until it happens—the question has to be asked each time, and you never know whether you were right until afterwards, which can be too late. So don't ask me what I would have done—I've a sneaking suspicion that I might have run, and justified it by thinking of my wife and child after—but you know what he did—'

Yes, she knew—or she knew now, anyway—

'He went on. And he shot the big one in the kitchen—in the kitchen, and in the leg, and then in the lung . . . and finally in the spine, Miss Loftus.' He still just looked at her. 'They think he's going to die too ... although Mitchell doesn't know dummy3