Nothing. He had to move. The last light from the motorbike was dying down. He had not memorized the contours of the room's poor furniture, and it was slipping back into darkness. He crossed to the door pausing, breath held, as he caressed a stool with his shin, felt it move almost imperceptibly, bent and stilled it before it scraped on the stone floor — then he opened the door very slowly, anticipating the protest of its hinges. Silence. He breathed out in a controlled, choked way, then stepped out into the short passage to the front door. He closed his eyes because he could see nothing, and listened again. But he could hear only the beginnings of the blood moving in his head, like the rustle of the sea in a shell. He opened his eyes again, knowing he dare not open the door. A silenced Luger would end it in a moment.
Upstairs. He placed his foot on the first of the narrow steps, let it take his weight, then raised his other foot. One at a time, very slowly, he moved up the short flight, resting his weight gently on every one, anticipating the betraying squeak. At the head of the stairs, he listened. One bedroom upstairs, and a storeroom. He listened, the German more omnipresent now in his imagination, more skilled and deadly with every passing minute in which he remained hidden.
Noise—?
A mouse scurrying somewhere, over his head, the swift patter of its paws loud in the continuing silence of the cottage. He smiled dismissively and with relief, though the noise persisted after the mouse had presumably vanished. Could he dismiss the noise?
He cocked his head, listening back down the stairs, beginning to wonder whether he had not made an error in retreating upstairs. He had done the obvious. He listened for a window, or a door; knowing all the time that the German was using
McBride could not help the tremor that was starting in his left leg, or the nerveless sensation which had begun in his fingertips.
The mouse moved again over his head, startling him, his breath loud and ragged. He pushed open the first of the two doors at the head of the stairs — it creaked, and he scrabbled to stop it, the creak loudening and going on like an uncontrollable yawn. He felt drawn to follow it, into the bedroom. He'd forgotten the creak of the bedroom door, and cursed himself for his error.
His nose was beginning to run with tension, he wanted to sniff and dare not. He began to fumble for his handkerchief, and the emptiness of his pockets — his unarmed state — as he searched for it, further unnerved him. Gun, knife he had used on Rourke, throat-wire, unarmed combat — which?
The German suddenly possessed a hundred ways of killing him, and McBride remembered the clumsy, half- beaten way he had fended off the thug in the yard behind the hotel, and the tremor in his leg became more pronounced.
He backed into a corner of the small bedroom, next to the window, an instinctive retreat. The darkness of the rainy, moonless night was almost complete, but gradually the vague shapes of the bed, the chest, the mirror echoing the paler square of the window next to him, the basin and jug, the now open door, emerged. He pressed his back against the wall, feeling the dampness of his fear down his spine, round the waistband of his trousers. He was growing cold, forcing himself to remain still, to listen.
The house was humming in his ears now, the silence gone on too long for him to hear anything quieter than a whisper. The German was patient, patient enough to reduce his opponent to impotence before he made a move.
His hand got colder.
The window had been closed when he entered the bedroom, not just now, earlier when he had made his search—
No, now, when he entered the room.
Mouse-feet above his head.
The window slid noiselessly up. The German had prepared an escape-route, easing the window on his arrival. Now he was coming back in.
McBride saw the arms, in the same grey mackintosh from the hotel, the white hands, as the window was pulled very slowly, very gently, upwards.
His first reaction was to run. The German was lying on the roof, easing up the window. Then he would drop into the room—
McBride felt the room, the rest of the cottage, close as a bandage around his head, a thong drying out and pressing the brain. He wanted to get out, get away. The bottom half of the sash-window was up almost as much as it would go.
He stepped away from the wall, saw the arms and hands stiffen in surprise, sensed the German's face only a couple of feet above his own.
His left leg quivered uncontrollably.
Below the window there was a rising bank of grass behind the cottage and a heap of rotting straw becoming manure along with the kitchen peelings. He'd almost tripped into it on his search, before he found Rourke.
Microseconds. The hands moving gently, slowly and aquatically, away from the window. The cold air reaching his skin like lava, creeping. The metronome in his left leg at a different tempo—
One breath, then he jumped through the window, head protected by his hands, body flung outwards, turning over, feet coming down to be caught by the manure-heap, sucking him in, the pieces of the shattered window-frame landing beside him, banging painfully against his left arm, glass clinging in his hair and clothing and his hands, a voice swearing in German a long way off, his first stumbling footstep out of the manure, lurching forward so that he fell against the bank of wet grass with the momentum of the jump still moving him.
The click above him, the shift of a body, someone standing up as he rolled onto his back and saw a figure outlined against the almost black of the clouds. He rolled to one side, flame at the corner of one retina like a thin pencil-mark, the absorption of the bullet by the ground something that he could feel through the cheek which rested against the bank. Then he pushed himself upright and ran to the shelter of the angle of the cottage wall.
He wanted to do nothing but breathe in, but he choked off the desire for air, listening now to the unguarded movements on the roof. The German thought he was panicked, would move into the open at the front of the house, running away—
He heard the German moving over the angle of the roof, his foot scraping on the slates, one shirting slightly. McBride's leg was still, his hands firm, his heart racing but under control.
A slate fell down the sloping roof, snapped with a hideously loud noise on the paved path between the cottage and the outhouse. Then silence from the roof, and McBride fed on the guessed-at mood of the German, suddenly unnerved in his turn. And he did not know McBride was unarmed.
Minutes. Then the first movement, a quick stutter of footsteps across the now treacherous slates, the drop to the path on the other side of the house, and the silence again — all advantage canceled. The German knew he had not run, but lurked in the shadow of the cottage, as he now did himself.
And he had a gun.
Which way? He knew the direction of McBride's dash for cover, knew his approximate location.
Which way?
McBride eased silently around the cottage until he reached the front door. He paused, listening again, then opened the door quickly, banging it back against the passage wall, then slamming it shut again.
He retreated then as quickly as he could, back to the angle of the building.
He'd seen the German's outline. His threat was compacted into a frame of medium build dressed in a grey mackintosh. He was the man called 'cousin Mike' in Clonakilty, nobody more than that.
He listened as the German came round the corner of the cottage towards the front door. He heard his footsteps pause, undecided, trying to assess the element of bluff. He was less than ten feet away — nearer seven, maybe eight at most. The cottage shrank — it was three paces from McBride to the German.
He had to look now.
The German, boot raised to kick open the door — as McBride had hoped, off-balance and gun on the far side
