The man paused and drew in so sharp a breath that it gagged in his throat. His hand stretched out for a glass of water, and he drank.
Fletcher's voice came tinnily into the room through an extension loud-speaker on the desk. 'We haven't seen a sign of him since he went into the wood. I think he might have got past us.'
The man at the desk shook with fury. He began to whisper again with a rough burring rasp.
'If he escapes, you'll pay for it. You'll pay, I tell you. I want him dead. I want him smashed. You can do what you like with him. Use those chains to good purpose, and the spiked knuckles. Tear him to pieces. If he lives it will be the end for all of us, remember that.' The whisper rose in tone to a thin sound like a strangled shriek. 'Rip his guts out- smash- destroy-'
He went on for some time elaborating on the way I should be killed, until it was clear that his mind was very nearly unhinged.
Abruptly I had heard enough. I opened the door wide, and put my hand on the light switch, and pressed it down. The room was suddenly brilliantly flooded with light.
The man at the desk whirled round and gaped at me.
'Good evening, Uncle George,' I said softly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
His eyes scorched with hate. The vacuous expression was torn away, the hidden personality now out in the open and as mean and savage as any crocodile. He was still Kate's amusing Uncle George in corpulent outline and country-gentleman tweeds, the Uncle George who had written for boys' magazines and taken his wife to matinees, but the face was the one which had had a knife stuck into Joe Nantwich and had urged a bloodthirsty mob to tear me to bits.
His hand snaked out across the desk and came up with a gun. It was a heavy, old-fashioned pistol, cumbersome, but deadly enough, and it was pointing straight at my chest. I resolutely looked at Uncle George's eyes, and not at the black hole in the barrel. I took a step towards him.
Then it came, the instant on which I had gambled my safety.
Uncle George hesitated.
I saw the flicker, the drawing back. For all his sin, for all the horror he had spread into the lives of others, he had never himself committed an act of violence. When he had delivered his threatening warning to me on the telephone on the very morning that I went to stay in his house, he had told me that he hated even to watch violence; and in spite of, or perhaps because of, his vicarious pleasure in the brutalities of primitive nations, I believed him. He was the sort of man, I thought, who liked to contemplate atrocities he could never inflict himself. And now, in spite of the fury he felt against me, he couldn't immediately, face to face, shoot me down.
I gave him no time to screw himself up. One fast stride and I had my hand on his wrist. He was trying to stand up. Too late he found the power to kill and squeezed the trigger; but the bullet smashed harmlessly into the wall. I bent his arm outwards with force, and twisted the gun out of his grasp. His muscles were soft and without strength, and he didn't know how to fight.
I flung him back hard into his chair, knocking the wind out of him, and then I reached over and switched off his microphone. I wasn't anxious that either the police or the taxi-drivers should overhear what I was going to say.
There was a crackle as I brushed against his coat. I pulled it open. A folded piece of brown paper protruded from an inner pocket, and I tugged it out and spread it open on the desk. He was gasping for breath and didn't try to stop me. I read what was on it.
Joe's address.
I turned it over. In one corner on the other side, scribbled carelessly as if someone were not sure of the spelling and had used the nearest piece of paper to try them out on, were the words:
Chichen Itza; Chitchen Itsa Chitsen
Not chickens, not Chichester. Chichen Itza. I had the vaguest memory of having heard it before. It was the name of an emperor I thought; and it meant nothing to me, nothing. Yet Joe had died for it.
I left the paper on the desk, and hoped that the police would find it useful.
The hysteria had drained out of Uncle George. He looked suddenly ill and old, now that his day was done. I could summon no compassion for him, all the same: but then it was not regard for Kate's uncle that had brought me into the Marconicar office, but love for Kate herself.
'The police will be here in less than a minute,' I said, speaking slowly and distinctly. He shifted in his seat and made a sharp helpless gesture with his pudgy hands. I went on, 'They have been listening in to what you have been saying on the radio.'
Uncle George's eyes widened. 'Twenty-three,' he said, with a remnant of anger. 'Twenty-three hasn't answered my last few calls.'
I nodded. I said, 'You will be charged with incitement to murder. Gaol for life, at least.' I paused. 'Think,' I said with emphasis. 'Think of your wife. You did it all for her, didn't you, so that she could go on living in the luxury she was used to?' I was guessing, but I felt sure it was true, and he didn't deny it.
'You have shielded her from reality too long,' I said. 'What will it do to her, if you are arrested and tried, and maybe hanged?'
Or to Kate either, I added hopelessly to myself.
Uncle George listened and stared at me, and slowly his gaze fell to the pistol I still held in my hand.
'It's quicker,' I said.
There was a short silence.
Very faintly in the distance I heard an alarm bell. Uncle George heard it too. He looked up. He hated me still, but he had come to the end of the line, and he knew it.
'The police,' I said. The bell grew perceptibly louder.
I took the three steps across to the door, turned, and tossed the gun back into Uncle George's lap. As his stubby fingers fumbled and clutched it I went through the door, closed it, and ran down the stairs. The front door was still open. I hurried through that and pulled it shut behind me. The police alarm bells were no longer ringing.
In the shadow of the building I slipped along into the dark porch of the next-door house; and I was only just in time. Two police cars slowed, crawled, and halted in front of the Marconicar building.
Over in the Olde Oake caf‚ the lights were out. The plump waitress had gone home.
There had been no sound from upstairs. I shivered, struck by the horrifying thought that Uncle George, having already screwed himself once to pull the trigger, might just possibly shoot a policeman instead of himself. With the gun I had so thoughtfully given back to him.
As the doors of the police cars slammed open and the black figures poured out I took the first step towards them to warn them that their quarry was armed. But Uncle George's devotion to Aunt Deb's interests remained steadfast after all. I thought that the single crashing shot in the room behind the neon sign was the best thing he had ever done for her sake.
I waited for a few minutes in my dark doorway, and while I stood there a small crowd began to collect on the pavement, drawn by the noise of the shots and the presence of the police cars. I slipped unhurriedly among them, and after a little while walked quietly away.
Round two or three turnings I found a telephone box and stepped inside, feeling in my pocket for coins. The calls to Lodge had taken all my small change, and for a moment I looked blankly at the threepenny piece and two halfpennies which were all I could dredge from my trouser pocket. Then I remembered my cosh. I untied the sock, tipped some of the pennies out on to my hand, pushed four of them into the slot, and asked the operator for Pete's number.
He answered at the second ring.
He said, 'Thank God you've rung. Where the hell have you been?'
'Touring Sussex.'
'And where's Admiral?'
