'Get going, creep,' he said; and disconnected.
Breathing space, I thought. Four hours before Angelo expected the message from his father. Instead of pressure mounting inexorably, dangerously, in that house, there would at worst, I hoped, be a bearable irritation, and at best a sort of de-fusing of suspense. They wouldn't for another four hours be strung up with a minute-to- minute expectation.
Before getting back into the car I opened the boot, took the telescope and the two rifles out of their non-jolt beds in the suitcase and wrapped them more vulnerably in the brown towel. Put them into the car on the brown upholstery of the back seat. Put the boxes of bullets beside them, also hidden by towel. Looked then at my fingers. No tremors. Not like in my heart.
I drove round into the road where the Keithly house stood and stopped at the kerb just out of sight of the net- curtained window. I could see the roof, part of a wall, most of the front garden – and Angelo's car in the driveway.
There weren't many people in the street. The children would be home from school, indoors having tea. The husbands wouldn't be back yet from work: there was more space than cars outside the houses. A peaceful suburban scene. Residential street, middle-income prosperous, not long built. An uncluttered street with no big trees and no forests of electricity and telegraph poles: new-laid cables tended to run underground for most of their journey, emerging only occasionally into the daylight. In the photograph of Peter's house, there had been one telegraph pole nearby with wires distributing from it to the individual houses all around, but not much else. No obstructions. Neat flat asphalt pavements, white kerbstones, tar-and-chipping roadway. A few neat little hedges bordering some of the gardens. A lot of neat green rectangular patches of repressed grass. Acres of net curtains ready to twitch. I-can-see-out-but-you-can't-see-in.
The first essential for pin-point rifle shooting was to know how far one was from the target. On ranges the distances were fixed, and always the same. I was accustomed to precisely three, four, and five hundred yards. To nine hundred and a thousand yards, both of them further than half a mile. The distance affected one's angle of aim: the longer the distance, the further above the target one had to aim in order to hit it.
Olympic shooting was all done at three hundred metres, but from different body positions: standing, kneeling and lying prone. In Olympic shooting also one was allowed ten sighters in each position – ten chances of adjusting one's sights before one came to the forty rounds which counted for scoring.
In that street in Norwich I was not going to get ten sighters. I could afford barely one,
No regular lines of telegraph poles meant no convenient help with measuring the distance. The front gardens, though, I reckoned, should all be of more or less the same width because all the houses were identical, so as inconspicuously and casually as possible I slipped out of the car and paced slowly along the street, going away from Peter's house.
Fourteen paces per garden. I did some mental arithmetic and came up with three hundred yards meaning twenty-two houses.
I counted carefully. There were only twelve houses between me and my target – say one hundred and seventy yards. The shorter distance would be to my advantage. I could reckon in general to hit a target within one minute of a degree of arc: or in other words to hit a circular target of about one inch wide at a hundred yards, two inches wide at two hundred, three inches wide at three hundred, and so on to a ten-inch dinner plate at a thousand.
My target on that evening was roughly rectangular and about four inches by six, which meant that I mustn't be further away from it than four hundred yards. The main problem was that from where I stood, even if I used the telescope, I couldn't see it.
An old man came out of the house against whose kerbstone I was parked and asked if I wanted anything.
'Er, no,' I said. 'Waiting for someone. Stretching my legs.'
'My son wants to park there,' he said, pointing to where my car was. 'He'll be home soon.'
I looked at the stubborn old face and knew that if I didn't move he would be staring at me through the curtains, watching whatever I did. I nodded and smiled, got into the car, reversed into his next-door driveway, and left the street by the way I'd come.
All right, I thought, driving around. I have to come into the street from the opposite end. I have to park where I can see the target. I do not, if possible, park outside anyone's house fully exposed to one of those blank-looking one-way viewing screens. I do not park where Angelo can see me. I count the houses carefully to get the distance right; and above all I don't take much time.
It's a cliche in movies that when an assassin looks through the telescopic sight, steadies the crossed lines on the target and squeezes the trigger, the victim drops dead. Quite often the assassin will perform this feat while standing up, and nearly always it will be with his first shot: all of which makes serious marksmen laugh, or wince, or both. The only film I ever saw that got it right was The Day of the Jackal, where the gunman went into a forest to pace out his distance, to strap his rifle to a tree for steadiness, to adjust his sights and take two or three trial shots at a head-sized melon before transferring it all to the place of execution. Even then, there was no allowance for wind – but one can't have everything.
I drove into the top end of Peter's road, with which I was less familiar, and between two of the houses came across the wide entrance gates to the old estate upon which the new estate had been built. The double gates themselves, wrought iron, ajar, led to a narrow road that disappeared into parkland, and they were set not flush with the roadway or even with the fronts of the houses, but slightly further back. Between the gates and the road there was an area of moderately well-kept gravel and a badly weathered notice board announcing that all the callers to the Paranormal Research Institute should drive in and follow the arrows to Reception.
I turned without hesitation onto the gravel area and stopped the car. It was ideal. From there, even with the naked eye, I had a clear view of the target. A slightly sideways view certainly, but good enough.
I got out of the car and counted the houses which stretched uniformly along the street: the Keithlys' was the fourteenth on the opposite side of the road and my target was one house nearer.
The road curved slightly to my right. There was a slight breeze from the left. I made the assessments almost automatically and eased myself into the back of the car.
I had gone through long patches of indecision over which rifle to use. The 7.62 bullets were far more destructive, but if I missed the target altogether with the first shot, I could do terrible damage to things or people I couldn't see. People half a mile away, or more. The. 22 was much lighter: still potentially deadly if I missed the target, but not for such a long distance.
In a car I obviously couldn't lie flat on my stomach, the way I normally fired the Mauser. I could kneel, and I was more used to kneeling with the. 22. But when I knelt in the car I wouldn't have to support the rifle's weight… I could rest it on the door and shoot through the open window.
For better or worse I chose the Mauser. The stopping power was so much greater, and if I was going to do the job, it was best done properly. Also I could see the target clearly and it was near enough to make hitting it with the second shot a certainty. It was the first shot that worried.
A picture of Paul Arcady rose in my mind. 'Could you shoot the apple off his head, sir?' What I was doing was much the same. One slight mistake could have unthinkable results.
Committed, I wound down the rear window and then fitted the sleek three-inch round of ammunition into the Mauser's breech. I took a look at the target through the telescope, steadying that too on the window ledge, and what leapt to my eye was a bright, clear, slightly oblique close-up of a flat shallow box, fixed high up and to one side on the telegraph pole: grey, basically rectangular, fringed with wires leading off to all the nearby houses.
The junction box.
I was sorry for all the people who were going to be without telephones for the rest of that day, but not too sorry to put them out of order.
I lowered the telescope, folded the brown towel, and laid it over the door frame to make a non-slip surface. Wedged myself between the front and rear seats as firmly as possible, and rested the barrel of the Mauser on the towel.
I thought I would probably have to hit the junction box two or three times to be sure. 7.62 mm bullets tended to go straight through things, doing most of the damage on the way out. If I'd cared to risk shooting the junction box through the pole one accurate bullet would have blown it apart, but I would have to have been directly behind it, and I couldn't get there unobserved.
I set the sights to what I thought I would need for that distance, lowered my body into an angle that felt right,
