If there was sound, there was life. “Mountjoy, it’s just me, Diamond.”
Reaching into the space ahead, he found the handrail of the staircase. “I’m unarmed. I want to help you.”
This time he was certain he heard something. Not a response. More the sound of someone whispering. He dared to hope again.
He located the first step and started climbing. “I’m coming up to you,” he said. “I’m not armed. I promised to come back and I have.” Steadily, scarcely pausing, he mounted the steps. At one point he froze when the whole staircase was made visible by a moving light, the rails casting long revolving shadows that threatened to give him vertigo. It was the searchlight beam scanning across the front of the building and it moved away just as suddenly.
The whispering upstairs-if that was what he had heard-had stopped since he had spoken.
The problem about going up a spiral staircase in darkness is that you lose all sense of direction. It was only when the handrail ended that he realized he’d reached the top. At a loss, he tried for a mental picture of the sixth floor plan; there was a landing at the top of the stairs, wasn’t there? There were three doors, each leading to a room, a segment of the heptagon.
Choose the right one, he thought grimly, and you must expect to look down a gun barrel.
“I’m at the top,” he said, wishing he sounded more in control. “In case you didn’t hear, this is Peter Diamond and I’m alone.”
He spread his arms. Where were the doors? One should be to the left, one ahead, one to the right. His outstretched fingers didn’t make contact with anything. Maybe the sensible thing was to wait for the searchlight to pan across this end of the building again.
No. He’d spoken. Mountjoy expected him now. To wait was just to plant suspicion of a trap.
He moved forward a step. His right hand touched a flat surface that moved away from him with the contact- certainly the door. He faced it and pushed. “Are you in here?”
They were not. There was a faint source of light from the window. The room was definitely empty. He could tell without stepping fully inside. To go in would be a mistake.
He stepped back into the corridor and groped for the door at the end. Both hands found it simultaneously. Like the other one, it was already standing slightly open. He expected that. They wouldn’t have wanted it closed. He pressed at it gently without saying anything this time. There was nothing sensible to be said. But he thought he heard an intake of breath.
He stood in the doorway, getting a strong sense that someone was very close. This room was darker than the other. The window space seemed to be screened in some way, because there was a faint semicircle of light at the top, but darkness below. Defensively, he moved his left foot against the base of the door. He tried to decide if the smell he was getting was the smell of unwashed clothes. After some days on the run, they’d be getting pungent. He swayed forward, steadied himself on the door frame and took another step.
There was a distinct scraping sound to his left, then a gasp, a voiced sound, and the voice was female.
He said, “Samantha?”
He stepped toward the source of the voice. His foot touched something soft, like fabric. Clothes? A blanket?
Abruptly the room was bathed in light. The searchlight beam thrust through the space at the top of the window and showed him two people pressed against the wall behind the door, one female and frightened, the other holding a gun. Except that the woman was Una Moon, the man G.B. and the gun a twin-barreled shotgun.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The searchlight moved off the turret. Through pitch black, Diamond spoke the same words he had been poised to say to John Mountjoy: “You can put down the gun. It’s me.” He was too staggered to think of anything else. But he didn’t doubt what he had seen. It wasn’t some trick of the imagination brought on by fumbling about in the dark and getting disorientated on the spiral stairs. He couldn’t have mistaken Una Moon’s pallid face and scraped-back hair ending in the plait; there was no way he could confuse her with Samantha Tott. And the man holding the shotgun couldn’t be anyone except G.B.; his whole physique was larger than Mountjoy’s.
Una spoke out of the darkness. “For God’s sake don’t panic, anyone. I’m going to switch on the torch.”
A beam picked out Diamond’s feet and cast a faint light over the rest of the room. He saw that G.B. had obeyed his order to the extent of slanting the gun across his chest, pointing it upward, though his finger still lingered around the trigger. The crusty everyone treated with awe stood beside Una like a kid caught truanting. They had been waiting in the room with their backs to the wall, hoping not to be discovered.
Diamond stared around the small room, getting his wits together. There were signs of recent occupation on the floor, a heap of blankets and a violin case. “You fired those shots?”
G.B. gave a nod.
“Both?”
Una said, “Yes. And he missed with both.”
“We don’t know that,” said G.B.
Una rounded on him with scorn. “Come on-where’s the gunman, then? I didn’t see him lying on the floor anywhere, did you?”
Diamond said, more as a statement than a question, “You were shooting at Mountjoy?”
Una was unfazed. She said fervently, as if she were going straight on with the diatribe she’d given him in the market cafe, “Someone had to rescue Sam, so I got hold of G.B. I couldn’t stand it any longer, knowing she was in here and you pigs were doing sod all about it.”
“That’s untrue,” said Diamond.
Una overrode the objection by saying, “Sam is one of us, and we stick together.”
“How did you get in?”
“Through a window. G.B. is a genius at opening up places. Nobody saw us. We were through the cellars and up the back stairs while you lot were still poncing about in the hotel lobby.”
“With the idea of what-taking on Mountjoy yourselves? Did you run into him?”
“We spotted him in the corridor, the skunk. We’d searched every room on the floor below this and were coming out of that one at the end, where Sam was seen on the balcony this afternoon. They weren’t in there anymore, but just at that minute we saw a movement at the far end. He stepped right across the corridor. It was him, no question, the scumbag, and G.B. should have blown his head off, but he missed, twice.”
Already reduced to a support role by the force of Una Moon’s invective, G.B. said in his own defense, “He was only in view for a couple of seconds, at most.”
Una explained, “We thought he ran upstairs, so we looked up here.”
G.B. said more firmly, “He was definitely up here not long ago. Look at this stuff. It’s Sam’s violin case. They were in this room.”
“And now you’ve scared him out of sight,” said Diamond.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“For one thing, I was trying to win his confidence and for another he could seriously harm the girl if he panics. You must be cuckoo, loosing off a shotgun.”
“He’s got a certificate for it,” said Una.
“A certificate to shoot people? How long have you been up here?”
“Half an hour. Three-quarters. How would I know?”
“Couldn’t you have left this to the professionals?” Diamond rebuked them. The doubts as to his own status didn’t cross his mind.
G.B. said positively, “With three of us, we can take him. No problem.”
“No, we cannot,” Diamond snapped back. “You fouled this up. Don’t you realize there are marksmen out there looking for a target? You wander about with a torch, waving a bloody shotgun. You’re lucky they haven’t picked you off already. Your horsing around is over for today.”
“And if we refuse?” said Una.
