Send Superintendent West

“I still can’t tell you anything more.”

“If you don’t know, who does?” Gissing asked, and kept his voice casual

Roger shrugged.

“Who does?” repeated Gissing, and he spoke as if Roger wasn’t in the room, seemed to have lost interest. “I have to find out what Marino knows, now. Who can tell me? Lissa Meredith?”

The name came questioningly and was an obvious guess. Roger, half prepared for it, showed no reaction, but his heart leapt; could she be in the kind of danger he was in now?

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “She said Marino kept her in the dark. She just has to try to calm Shawn down.”

“Would she tell you what she knew?” Gissing asked flatly. It was almost as if he were convinced that Roger had told the truth. Could he be? No, it was too easy, he was fooling, he would switch back to threat and menace in a moment. “Maybe not. What about Carl Fischer?”

“Who?”

“Doctor Fischer.”

“Oh,” said Roger. “I don’t know much about him. He’s a friend of Shawn’s as well as a doctor attached to the Embassy.”

“Attached nothing, he’s over here with Shawn now. Carl Fischer and the Meredith girl are trying to smooth him down, hoping to get him back to England. They haven’t a chance. Do you think they have a chance?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Roger wished the man would move, wished the stare from those dark eyes wasn’t so intense. He wanted to get up. Gissing crowded him, now. He was inviting an assault. It would be easy. A toecap cracking against his knee, a spring, a savage blow over the head, but — two men standing in the doorway.

Then a bell rang, blasting the quiet. It was no ordinary bell, but a harsh, strident warning. It made Gissing back away and swing round, it made the two men exclaim, it gave Roger a chance he wasn’t likely to get again. The bell wrenched their thoughts away from him, put alarm into them.

McMahon and Jaybird leapt out of sight.

17

DARK NIGHT

IT was only a lightning flash of time. Gissing stared at the doorway, the bell clanging, the men scrambling towards another door — then he moved back, his right hand dropped to his pocket, he actually started to say:

“Don’t mo —”

Roger slid forward in his chair, hooked the man’s feet from under him, sent him crashing. Gissing’s hand came from his pocket, the side that lay uppermost. Farther away, footsteps sounded like a stampede. Gissing lashed out with his foot, his hand went back to his pocket. Roger snatched at the ankle as the foot swung past him, caught hold, heaved Gissing’s leg backwards. The man gasped with pain. Roger let him go, bent down and knocked the hand away from his pocket. Gissing hadn’t any fight left.

Roger’s fingers touched cold steel. He drew out the gun. He saw Gissing’s face twisted, heard only the man’s harsh breathing, but knew the other threat might return. He turned the gun in his hand, struck Gissing on the base of the skull, heard the soughing breath as unconsciousness came. He turned the gun again, looked towards the doorway, and saw the drapes move.

He fired.

The bullet tore through the drapes, a man grunted and pitched forward into sight.

Throughout all this the bell was still clanging.

The falling man had a gun in his right hand but no control over it. Roger went forward. The gun fell at his feet, and he kicked it away. The man hit the floor with a heavy thud, and didn’t move. He wouldn’t move again by himself, Roger knew. He must have been crouching, and the bullet had hit him in the temple. It was a small, clean hole, and the blood hadn’t started to ooze out

Gissing unconscious, a dead man, and the helpless boy downstairs.

Suddenly the bell stopped. It was as if agonizing pressure had been eased from Roger’s ears.

If he could get that boy —

He heard a shot, and thought it came from outside. Footsteps thudded, their sound dulled by the closed windows; then more footsteps, nearer now and coming from the rooms through which Roger had been brought. Two men at least were approaching, and luck couldn’t last. He opened a door at the far end of the room. Another, just a gauze-filled wooden frame, was immediately beyond it The footsteps drew nearer inside the house, farther away outside. Roger unhooked the catch of the outer door, and found himself on a wide verandah lit only by the light from the room.

He heard a shout: “Get him!” A shot barked from behind him, and he heard the bullet bite into the door-frame. He swung right, jumped down the verandah steps and rushed towards the beckoning darkness. More shots barked as he raced blindly over the grass, but he wasn’t hit Against the grey sky he could see the dark outline of the spiked tops of trees. Some way off these trees offered shelter. His footsteps seemed to thump out a call. “Here I am, here I am: He could hear the others running, and looked up at the tops of the trees and wondered how far away they were, and whether he could reach them. He was breathing hard, but didn’t feel panic, just unnatural calm. Then he heard two more shots, farther away, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the flashes. He was running at right angles to that spot.

Brushing against a bush, he felt a branch hard against his shoulder, and ducked; another branch plucked at his hair. So he had reached the trees. He sensed rather than saw the straight trunks and the low branches. The men behind him were blundering through the undergrowth. They hadn’t gathered their wits yet, but soon they would