Gunner Kelly

head. “Ye’ll not be takin‘ an honourable scar home to the Fatherland with that little scratch . . . if you should be so lucky, eh?”

The man was disappointingly nondescript. With that short unstylish haircut—almost cropped brush-like, iron- grey speckled with black—and the rounded blob of a nose in an expanse of leathery skin . . . skin not drawn tight enough to betray any memorable bone-structure beneath ... it was any face in a crowd. In fact, he had seen it before, not just in the inadequate enlargement Colonel Butler had supplied, but now—now that he saw it in that flesh—from his childhood recollections: it was any face in any crowd of British soldiers in the Rhine Army, substituting age and stone-sober suspicion for youth and beer-swilled truculence.

Kelly pointed. “That way, straight ahead . . . An‘ just so we understand each other, there’s no way out of this house that’s not locked or guarded—understand?”

Benedikt gave him Thomas Wiesehofer’s baffled frown, but with the sinking feeling that poor Thomas was already less than a skin-deep covering, with David Audley waiting for him.

But, to his surprise, there was only Miss Becky in the room beyond the door—a long, low-ceilinged room, bisected with a single huge dummy1

beam which made him want to stoop, the girl standing alone with her back to a great empty fireplace.

“Herr Wiesehofer—” She looked at him, then past him. “Michael?”

“Dr Audley not back then, Madam?” Kelly had experienced the same surprise, but without the need to conceal it.

“He should be here very soon.” She frowned uncertainly. “You think we should wait?”

“Not at all—‘tis no matter. We don’t need him to ask a simple question of the man.”

The expression on Miss Becky’s face suggested that Audley was exactly what she needed most. “I don’t know, Michael. David understands this better than we do.”

It was time for Thomas Wiesehofer to speak: “Fraulein— Miss . . .

Miss Maxwell-Smith—” More in bafflement than anger first, with anger in reserve: that was the right note “— Fraulein—I also do not understand this! I do not—”

“No!” Kelly snapped into life. “No—that’s not goin‘ to be the way of it at all!”

Benedikt turned toward him. Anger, then—?

“With your permission, Madam—” Kelly was just too quick for him “—we should ask this . . . gentleman . . . how he came to be night-walkin‘ in the spinney when honest folk are in their beds—

for a start.”

Anger—outrage— forward, then!

“What? W-what?” He spluttered his sudden loss of control.

dummy1

“Aye—what, indeed!” Kelly lifted a chin which was blue-grey with stubble. “What the devil were ye trespassin‘ on the lady’s land for? Answer me that now?”

“Trespassing?” Benedikt drew himself up to his full height, remembering the beam too late, but just missing it. “I wish to speak to the Police! I demand to speak to the Police!”

“The Police?” exclaimed Miss Becky.

“The Police, Fraulein—yes!” It was a rotten story he had ready-prepared for them—Kelly, for one, would never believe it. But that was all he had for this moment. “Yes.”

“Aaargh! Don’t you believe him! He tried that one on me—‘Is you the Poliss?’ he says. But I wasn’t havin‘ that one, by God!”

“But, Michael—”

“No, Madam! Leave this one to me.” Kelly’s voice softened, and he looked sidelong at Benedikt, half closing his eyes. “Am I the Poliss, then? No, I am not the Poliss—nor would I ever be. But I’ll tell you who I am, since ye ask.” He paused, reaching inside his jacket, to the waist-band. “I’m the fella with the gun, is who I am.”

Benedikt gaped at the pistol, as much for himself as for Thomas Wiesehofer, without need for any acting ability. With what he knew they were planning perhaps it should not surprise him so much, it was only one more straw in the wind. Yet in showing it to him now, the Irishman had proved his point dramatically, with no going back: shot- guns were no less lethal—probably more so in unskilled hands—but even in peaceful law-abiding England many thousands of ordinary citizens possessed shot-guns legitimately, dummy1

especially in the country areas like this. But an automatic pistol was something altogether different.

“God in heaven!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Oh-aye, ‘tis one of yours, surely.” The Irishman’s voice was matter-of-fact, as though it was a screwdriver in his hand. He didn’t point the pistol, he held it diagonally across his chest, the fingers of his free hand playing imaginary stops on its frame. “A very fine weapon. But you’d be knowing that well enough, of course.”

It was an old Luger—an old long-barrelled Luger, of the sort which had served in half the world’s armies at one time or another . . . and this one looked so worn that it could have served with most of them, starting even before Kelly himself was born, never mind Benedikt.

He measured the distance between them. Four metres and a long settee, high-backed and heavy-looking: that was too far and too much for any ambitious ideas. And sixty years might have slowed the man, but not sufficiently: age did not wither well-maintained weapons— fine well-maintained weapons . . . not enough, anyway, for him to try his luck with an old soldier.

“Yes.” Kelly nodded, eyeing him speculatively, almost slyly, as though he could read his prisoner’s mind. “It makes a difference, does a gun—like the Squire himself used to say, in the old days, even with our little pop-guns: ‘The gun, Michael,’ says he, ‘ ’tis the final argument of kings, which is the last argument of all‘—an’