He coughed. He thought that by coughing he could hurry Colt.
Colt looked at him, and there was the raffish, reckless smile.
Colt thrust the wad of money into his trouser pocket. He came to Bissett.
'It's your business, Colt, I know, but we've lost an awful amount of time.'
Colt said, 'Won't be much longer. I'm sorry, Dr Bissett, just a little bit longer… '
' W e don't have any more time to waste.'
'A few minutes only.'
'What on earth for…?'
A terrible sadness pinched Colt's face. ' T o go home.'
The heavy oak plank door of the back bar whined open.
18
The village constable stepped into the back bar of the pub.
Because he lived in the next village along, he was not seen in this community as often as he would have liked. Once a fortnight, at least that, he committed himself to spending an evening, whatever the weather, just walking through the village. It was nearly half past nine when he came into the back bar of the pub… He had been away from his car for an hour now. His car was parked, and locked securely, beside the football pitch and the play swings. He was quite unaware of the increasingly anxious radio traffic beamed from Warminster towards that car.
And, on the back seat of the car was his personal radio, gone down that morning, crossed wires or something broken in its innards, and ready to be taken to the Warminster stores in the morning for replacing.
Desmond nodded to old Vic, a good publican who kept a good house, a proper village pub. He thought old Vic didn't look well.
Being away from his car for an hour had been breaking pretty basic rules because he was out of radio contact all that time. He had called in on Mrs Williams to check that the new wire window-guards were ready to be erected on the shop next week, and he had knocked on the solicitor's door to remind him that his shotgun licence needed renewing, and as was his custom, he had stood for 15 minutes against the trunk of one of the big beech trees at the end of the Manor House drive until he had felt a sense of shame at prying on the world of the bereaved. He had been on his way back to his car when he had passed the pub car park and seen that two vehicles there had their lights still on.
The noise died around him. The talk, the chat, fled the back bar. O. K., O. K., so the local Law had wandered in, but it wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last. There was no call for them to be reacting like he was Inland Revenue… and old Vic looked fit to drop behind the bar counter.
'Evening, Vic, a Cortina and a Nova out there, lights on. The time you close this place up, they'll be dead in the batteries…'
Old Vic had his mouth hanging open. The jukebox was playing.
'… Know whose they are?'
He turned.
He smiled affably. They were scattered around the back bar and they all stared at him. He knew them all… old Brennie, Poaching, convictions going back 48 years, last time done under the Armed Trespass Act of 1968… Fran, nothing ever proved, should have been, and would be… Billy and Zap both for Receiving and Handling lead off a church roof in Frome…
Zack, Larceny and Aggravated Assault, gone inside for it…
K e v, once breathalysed for an eighteen-month ban, twice in court for Driving without Insurance, fined… Johnny, still on probation for Vandalism, smashing up the bus shelter… He knew them all, and he smiled warmly to each in turn. Normally, every other time that he came into the pub, his ritual visits, he took a bit of banter. Coexistence, wasn't it? He was local, they were local. Normally, there was banter that didn't go way over.
Desmond didn't mind the banter… Not a bloody sound in the back bar of the pub to mix with the God-awful noise of the juke box. Old Brennie looking at his flies, Fran at the smoke-stained ceiling, Billy and Zap in their beer and caught in mid-sentence, Zack in his fag packet, Kev rooted with the handful of coins he was going to feed into the jukebox, Johnny blushing because he was the youngest and the one who always ended with the rap.
He saw the feathers on Fran's jersey. He didn't care, bigger game around than pheasants off the estate, and she'd only be making 75 pence a bird off old Vic, and that was plucked.
He knew them all. They were the flotsam of the village and they were the strength of the village, they were the heart of it…
He saw the young man.
He saw the young man, and then behind the young man he saw the stooping figure with the heavy-frame spectacles and the curled black hair receding and the sports jacket that was a half size too small. He saw the young man.
The young man gazed back into his face. Every last one of them other than the young man seemed to cower away from him, even Fran who was wild was back on her heels. Not the young man.
He saw the tan. He saw the short-cut fair hair. He saw the eyes that were bright with anger at him. There was no fear in that face. He had seen the photograph.
They had shown it him the first day that he had been assigned to the posting in the village up the lanes. It had been a good photograph.
He saw the metalled handle of the pistol bulging out from the young man's belt.
He looked into the face of Colt.
The jukebox died.
The silence suffocated the back bar of the pub.
He knew it was Colt.
Desmond had been to the Ashford Police Training College. At Ashford they taught a young constable how to look after himself if he were trying to break up a fight outside a pub at closing time, how to intervene in a domestic row, how to tackle a fleeing thief.
He had been good on unarmed combat. Not firearms, though, they didn't teach firearms. Guns were for the zombie men who guarded the Northern Ireland politicians who had their gentry farms in the county, and for the squads that were detailed to protect the Royals when they came to open a new annexe in the hospitals of the local market towns. He knew sweet nothing about confronting an armed man. He was into the back bar, halfway across it towards the bar counter. Couldn't just turn, not on his bloody heel, like nothing had happened, and walk out. At the Police Training College they had said that if guns were involved then there were no heroes required, whistle up on the radio and get scarce till the professionals arrived. He had no radio. He could not turn back for the door. He saw the hand of Colt on his hip and close to the handle of the pistol.
No, he wasn't a hero… It was his instinct for survival.
He was a vertigo man on the cliff top.
He lunged.
If he had not tried to prise out the truncheon from his slim hip pocket as he went forward…
If he had watched both hands and not the pistol handle in Colt's belt…
He was launched when he knew that the heel of Colt's hand
… not the pistol, not the bullet… was the threat.
Razor fast, the heel of the hand, rising at his throat.
There was the ripple shock through Colt's wrist and the length of his forearm. The heel of his hand took the centre point of the police constable's neck. And the policeman went down. He did not stagger or topple, he went down like a dropped sack of potatoes.
There was the gasp, in unison, all around Colt.
It was not what he had wanted to do. He had not wanted to shoot the American who was stumbling in confusion across the path of the fusillade aimed at a man who wrote vitriol from abroad against the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.
