a care — you shouldn’t be allowed to move stones, you bloody imbeciles-’ and a man backed down the hall past the doorway, one side of a chest of drawers in his arms, then another man at the other end.
And then the third man came, his eyes on the two who were carrying the dresser.
Satterlee was tall, very solid but with a heavy gut; his hair was dark, almost black, his face red from shouting, sun-and wind-burned. He looked into the parlour as he was passing; his eyes took in the four of them, and he recognized Denton just as Denton recognized him. Neither had any doubt. Denton didn’t need to see more than the eyes and the forehead.
Satterlee reached into the right rear pocket of his trouser; Denton was putting his hand into the overcoat, then closing it on the Colt and feeling the pistol catch in the fabric as he tried to draw it out. Satterlee by then had his hand out, a dark shape in it that, with a flick, became a heavy-bladed knife.
The girl screamed. She ran towards her father. She shouted. ‘Papa, don’t!’
Denton, wrestling with the pistol, trying to tear it loose from the pocket, still had part of his brain respond to the words:
Whatever Satterlee had intended — to kill Denton, probably, to eliminate the only one who could connect him with the attack — he was momentarily frustrated by his daughter. She reached with both hands for the hand that held the knife (knowing? having reason to fear it?), managing to catch his arm; she was saying, almost crooning, ‘Please, Papa, no-’ over and over, as if with this voice she was able to quiet him.
Satterlee shoved her with his forearm, then wrenched himself free of her and tried to turn; she tried again to grab him. Denton, trying to tear the pistol out of his coat, missed what happened next but saw only the result, a spurt of red that spattered the floor and the wall as the girl spun away; then he heard her scream and, behind him, the screams, all alike and repeated as if by a machine, from the woman in the chair.
Satterlee looked at him. His eyes were manic, enraged. He might have come at Denton then, but the Colt was at last coming free, the curve of the handle visible above the pocket, Denton’s thumb cocking the single-action hammer. Satterlee in one grab pulled Janet Striker to him; the shoulder of her coat and dress ripped with the violence of the movement, and then he was dragging her out of the room and she was screaming at Denton. Satterlee shouted at somebody in the corridor; there was a crash and a male scream.
Denton had the pistol out and crossed the parlour in two strides, saw down the hall the two workmen, one on the floor, blood on the wall, Janet Striker being pushed out of the back door. He tried to run down the hall, jumped over the fallen man, cannoned off the narrow doorframe at the back and fell to one knee as he failed to see the step down from the house to the rubble outside. When he was up again, Satterlee was forty feet away, dragging Janet Striker, who was struggling with him, trying to punch and kick him and failing.
‘Satterlee!’
Denton put himself into a sprint. There was no way Satterlee could outrun him if he held on to the woman. Denton ran wide of their path, meaning to swing around him and come in at an angle where he could have a shot, but Satterlee looked back and in one move — the man was powerful and fast — swung Mrs Striker against him and held her there as a shield. He had the fingers of his left hand wound in her hair and her head pulled cruelly back; the knife was against her throat, and already a thin ribbon of blood was trickling down.
‘Get off!’ Satterlee shouted at him. ‘Back off or I’ll kill her!’
Denton stopped. He raised the pistol.
Satterlee ducked his head behind Mrs Striker’s. His voice came, heavy and dangerous, ‘Throw down that pistol, or I’ll kill her now!’
‘Kill her, and I’ll kill you.’
Satterlee pulled her head back still farther. Mrs Striker had hooked her left hand inside the arm of the hand that held the knife, but there wasn’t a hope that she could keep the knife from slashing her throat. Denton’s mind raced through possibilities — shoot one of Satterlee’s feet, his shoulder — but none would stop him from killing her.
‘Throw the gun down or I’ll do it!’
The cleared field stretched behind Satterlee to the line of trees, still white with frost despite the low morning sun. Not another figure was in sight.
He had been holding the gun at arm’s length since Satterlee had swung around to face him. The front sight was steady on the point where some part of his head might appear. Denton thought that he needed only a fraction of a second, two inches of skull. He waited. His own breathing quieted. If somebody could go around Satterlee from behind-
But nobody would. Denton knew what Satterlee would do next, and he wouldn’t wait much longer. He’d slash her throat and run, risking the bullet. And she’d be dead.
‘Janet-’ he called.
Her head was pulled back again. Satterlee shouted, ‘I’m going to bloody kill her!’
Denton thought about risking a shot close enough to graze her and hit Satterlee, but he couldn’t. And Satterlee would react automatically; the knife would do its work no matter what. He kept the pistol level, aimed, ready.
The sound that Janet Striker made was like an animal growl that rose to a scream, like some big cat that went from menace to hysteria in a single cry. The scream was purely the triumph of the body over pain: she had moved her left hand from Satterlee’s arm to the razor-sharp blade of the knife, which she grasped as if it were a lifeline, at the same time twisting her head down and away into the blade against Satterlee’s hold so that Denton heard hair rip from her scalp.
Blood covered her fingers. Satterlee roared and pulled the knife, through her fingers and down, and then blood flowed from her face and her throat, but she had given Denton his fraction of a second and his two inches of skull.
He pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty
‘They’ve put off the inquest on Mulcahy.’
‘I’d have kept my promise to be there, Munro. If this hadn’t happened.’
It was past one in the afternoon. They were sitting in a room in the East Ham police station, overcoats on against the dead, damp chill of the place. Munro was sitting by a scarred wood table, from time to time rapping his knuckles on it in either frustration or impatience.
‘You might have told us,’ he said.
‘There wasn’t time.’
‘You ought to have told us.’ Munro rapped with his knuckles. ‘More tea?’ When Denton shook his head, Munro looked at the third man in the room, an aristocratic face above an impeccable suit and a fur-collared overcoat. ‘Sir?’
‘Thank you, no.’ He was, as Denton had to keep reminding himself, Denton’s lawyer — sent out by his publisher as soon as they could gear themselves up to action.
‘I don’t like being treated like the criminal in the thing,’ Denton said.
‘You are the criminal in the thing. Until we prove otherwise. ’
The solicitor cleared his throat. Munro looked at him, shrugged. The man of law said, ‘I think you would be wise, Sergeant, not to slander Mr Denton.’
‘I’m here as a friend, Sir Francis, not as a copper.’
The long, lawyerly face — similarities to some horses in the nose and upper lip — smiled, and he said, ‘Once a copper, always a copper. You must be careful what you say.’
Munro shrugged again. He hugged himself, poured some now cold tea from the brown earthenware pot that sat on the unpainted table. He sipped and made a face, then rapped on the wood. ‘Guillam had a fit when he heard.’
‘Good.’
‘He’s raving about prosecution, or was when I saw him at the Yard. Georgie wants to make super, I told
