Night of Error. Desmond Bagley

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t make a sound as he fell the three floors into the alley and it seemed a long time before I heard the dull thump as he hit the ground.

      I looked down into the darkness and saw nothing. I was conscious of the trembling of my hands as they gripped the steel rail. There was a scurry of footsteps and I turned to see Geordie darting down the stairs. ‘Leave them,’ I shouted. ‘They’re armed!’

      But he didn’t stop and all I heard was the thud of his feet as he raced down the staircase.

      The tall thin man who lived in the next flat came out in a dressing gown. ‘Now, what’s all this?’ he asked querulously. ‘A chap can’t listen to the radio with all this racket going on.’

      I said, ‘Phone the police. There’s been an attempted murder.’

      His face went white and he looked at my arm. I looked down and saw blood staining the edges of a slit in the sleeve of my jacket. I couldn’t remember being knifed and I felt nothing.

      I looked back up at him. ‘Well, hurry,’ I yelled at him.

      A gunshot echoed up the stairwell and we both started.

      ‘Christ!’

      I clattered down the stairs at top speed, all three flights, and came across Geordie in the foyer. He was sitting on the floor staring at his fingers in amazement – they were red with welling blood.

      ‘The bastard shot me!’ he said incredulously.

      ‘Where are you hit, for God’s sake?’

      ‘In the hand, I think. I don’t feel anything anywhere else, and he only fired one shot.’

      I looked at his hand. Blood was spurting from the end of his little finger. I began to laugh, an hysterical sound not far from crying, and went on until Geordie slapped my face with his unwounded hand. ‘Pull yourself together, Mike,’ he said firmly. I became aware of doors slamming and voices upstairs but as yet nobody had ventured down into the foyer itself, and I sobered suddenly.

      ‘I think I killed one of them,’ I said emptily.

      ‘Don’t be daft. How could you kill a man with your fist?’

      ‘I knocked him off the fire escape. He fell from the third floor.’

      Geordie looked at me closely. ‘We’d better go and have a look at that.’

      ‘Are you all right?’ We were both bleeding freely now.

      He was wrapping his finger in a handkerchief which promptly turned bright red. ‘I’m okay. You can’t call this a mortal wound,’ he said dryly. We went out into the street and walked quickly round to the alley into which the fire escape led. As we turned the corner there was a sudden glare of light and the roar of an engine, together with the slamming of a car door.

      ‘Look out!’ yelled Geordie and flung himself sideways.

      I saw the two great eyes of headlamps rushing at me from the darkness of the alley and I frantically flattened myself against the wall. The car roared past and I felt the wind of it brush my trousers, and then with a squeal of hard-used tyres it turned the corner and was gone.

      I listened to the noise of the engine die away and eased myself from the wall, taking a deep shaky breath. In the light of the street lamp on the corner I saw Geordie pick himself up. ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen next.’

      ‘This lot aren’t ordinary burglars,’ said Geordie, brushing himself down. ‘They’re too bloody persistent. Where’s this fire escape?’

      ‘A bit further along,’ I said.

      We walked slowly up the alley and Geordie fell over the man I had knocked over the edge. We bent down to examine him and, in the faint light, we could see his head. It was twisted at an impossible angle and there was a deep bloody depression in the skull.

      Geordie said, ‘No need to look any further. He’s dead.’

      IV

      ‘And you say they were speaking Spanish,’ said the Inspector.

      I nodded wearily. ‘As soon as we went into the flat someone shouted, “Look out!” and then I was in the middle of a fight. A bit later on another man shouted, “Get out of here; don’t shoot – use your knives.” I think it was the man I knocked off the fire escape.’

      The Inspector looked at me thoughtfully. ‘But you say he was going to shoot you.’

      ‘He’d lost his knife by then, and I was going for him.’

      ‘How good is your Spanish, Mr Trevelyan?’

      ‘Pretty good,’ I said. ‘I did a lot of work off south-west Europe about four years ago and I was based in Spain. I took the trouble to learn the language – I have a flair for them.’

      The doctor tied a neat knot in the bandage round my arm and said, ‘That’ll hold it, but try not to use the arm for a while.’ He packed his bag and went out.

      I sat up and looked about the flat – it was like a field dressing station in a blitzed area. I was stripped to the waist with a bandaged arm and Geordie sported a natty bandage on his little finger. He was drinking tea and he held out his finger like a charlady at a garden party.

      The flat was a wreck. What hadn’t been broken by the burglars had been smashed during the fight. A chair with no legs lay in the corner and broken glass from the front of my bookcase littered the carpet. A couple of uniformed constables stood stolidly in the corners and a plain clothes man was blowing powder about the place with an insufflator.

      The Inspector said, ‘Once again – how many of them were there?

      Geordie said, ‘I had two on my hands at one time.’

      ‘I had a go at two,’ I said. ‘But I think that one of them had a bash at Geordie first. It’s difficult to say – it happened so fast.’

      ‘This man you heard – did he say “knife” or “knives”?’

      I thought about that. ‘He said “knives”.’

      The Inspector said, ‘Then there were more than two of them.’

      Geordie said unexpectedly, ‘There were four.’

      The Inspector looked at him with raised eyebrows.

      ‘I saw three men in the car that passed us. One driving and two getting in in a hurry. With one dead in the alley – that makes four.’

      ‘Ah yes,’ said the Inspector. ‘They would have one man in the car. Tell me, how did you come to get shot?’

      A smile touched Geordie’s lips. ‘How does anyone get shot? With a gun.’ The Inspector recognized a touch of overexcitement and said dryly, ‘I mean, what were the circumstances?’

      ‘Well, СКАЧАТЬ