A Gun for Sale (24 page)

‘Who’s Sir Marcus?’

‘My boss.’ Something about the open door of his secretary’s room disturbed him with the idea that anyone could enter that way. He was no longer in a hurry, he wasn’t busy any more, he wanted companionship. He said, ‘You aren’t in any hurry. Take that thing off, it must be stuffy, and have a glass of port.’ On his way to the cupboard he shut the inner door and turned the key. He sighed with relief, fetching out the port and the glasses, ‘Now we are
really
alone, I want to tell you about these hiccups.’ He poured two brimming glasses, but his hand shook and the port ran down the sides. He said, ‘Always just after a meal …’

The muffled voice said, ‘The money …’

‘Really,’ Mr Davis said, ‘you are rather impudent. You can trust
me
. I’m Davis.’ He went to his desk and unlocked a drawer, took out two five-pound notes and held them out. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘I shall expect a proper receipt from your treasurer.’

The man put them away. His hand stayed in his pocket. He said, ‘Are these phoney notes, too?’ A whole scene came back to Mr Davis’s mind: a Lyons’ Corner House, the taste of an Alpine Glow, the murderer sitting opposite him trying to tell him of the old woman he had killed. Mr Davis screamed: not a word, not a plea for help, just a meaningless cry like a man gives under an anaesthetic when the knife cuts the flesh. He ran, bolted, across the room to the inner door and tugged at the handle. He struggled uselessly as if he were caught on barbed wire between trenches.

‘Come away from there,’ Raven said. ‘You’ve locked the door.’

Mr Davis came back to his desk. His legs gave way and he sat on the ground beside the waste-paper basket. He said,
‘I’m
sick. You wouldn’t kill a sick man.’ The idea really gave him hope. He retched convincingly.

‘I’m not going to kill you yet,’ Raven said. ‘Maybe I won’t kill you if you keep quiet and do what I say. This Sir Marcus, he’s your boss?’

‘An old man,’ Mr Davis protested, weeping beside the waste-paper basket.

‘He wants to see you,’ Raven said. ‘We’ll go along.’ He said, ‘I’ve been waiting days for this – to find the two of you. It almost seems too good to be true. Get up. Get up,’ he repeated furiously to the weak flabby figure on the floor.

Mr Davis led the way. Miss Connett came down the passage carrying a slip of paper. She said, ‘I’ve got the trains, Mr Davis. The best is the three-five. The two-seven is really so slow that you wouldn’t be up more than ten minutes earlier. Then there’s only the five-ten before the night train.’

‘Put them on my desk,’ Mr Davis said. He hung about there in front of her in the shining modern plutocratic passage as if he wanted to say good-bye to a thousand things if only he had dared, to this wealth, this comfort, this authority; lingering there (‘Yes, put them on my desk, May’) he might even have been wanting to express at the last some tenderness that had never before entered his mind in connection with ‘little girls’. Raven stood just behind him with his hand in his pocket. Her employer looked so sick that Miss Connett said, ‘Are you feeling well, Mr Davis?’

‘Quite well,’ Mr Davis said. Like an explorer going into strange country he felt the need of leaving some record behind at the edge of civilization, to say to the next chance comer, ‘I shall be found towards the north’ or ‘the west’. He said, ‘We are going to Sir Marcus, May.’

‘He’s in a hurry for you,’ Miss Connett said. A telephone bell rang. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s him now.’ She pattered down the corridor to her room on very high heels and Mr Davis felt again the remorseless pressure on his elbow to advance, to enter the lift. They rose another floor and when Mr Davis pulled the gates apart he retched again. He wanted to fling himself to the floor and take the bullets in his back.
The
long gleaming passage to Sir Marcus’s study was like a mile-long stadium track to a winded runner.

Sir Marcus was sitting in his Bath chair with a kind of bed-table on his knees. He had his valet with him and his back to the door, but the valet could see with astonishment Mr Davis’s exhausted entrance in the company of a medical student in a gas-mask. ‘Is that Davis?’ Sir Marcus whispered. He broke a dry biscuit and sipped a little hot milk. He was fortifying himself for a day’s work.

‘Yes, sir.’ The valet watched with astonishment Mr Davis’s sick progress across the hygienic rubber floor; he looked as if he needed support, as if he was about to collapse at the knees.

‘Get out then,’ Sir Marcus whispered.

‘Yes, sir.’ But the man in the gas-mask had turned the key of the door; a faint expression of joy, a rather hopeless expectation, crept into the valet’s face as if he were wondering whether something at last was going to happen, something different from pushing Bath chairs along rubber floors, dressing and undressing an old man, not strong enough to keep himself clean, bringing him the hot milk or the hot water or the dry biscuits.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Sir Marcus whispered.

‘Get back against the wall,’ Raven suddenly commanded the valet.

Mr Davis cried despairingly, ‘He’s got a gun. Do what he says.’ But there was no need to tell the valet that. The gun was out now and had them all three covered, the valet against the wall, Mr Davis dithering in the middle of the room, Sir Marcus who had twisted the Bath chair round to face them.

‘What do you want?’ Sir Marcus said.

‘Are you the boss?’

Sir Marcus said, ‘The police are downstairs. You can’t get away from here unless I –’ The telephone began to ring. It rang on and on and on, and then ceased.

Raven said, ‘You’ve got a scar under that beard, haven’t you? I don’t want to make a mistake. He had your photograph. You were in the home together,’ and he glared angrily round the large rich office room comparing it in mind with his
own
memories of cracked bells and stone stairs and wooden benches, and of the small flat too with the egg boiling on the ring. This man had moved further than the old Minister.

‘You’re mad,’ Sir Marcus whispered. He was too old to be frightened; the revolver represented no greater danger to him than a false step in getting into his chair, a slip in his bath. He seemed to feel only a faint irritation, a faint craving for his interrupted meal. He bent his old lip forward over the bed-table and sucked loudly at the rim of hot milk.

The valet suddenly spoke from the wall. ‘He’s got a scar,’ he said. But Sir Marcus took no notice of any of them, sucking up his milk untidily over his thin beard.

Raven twisted his gun on Mr Davis. ‘It was him,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want a bullet in your guts tell me it was him.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Davis said in horrified subservient haste, ‘he thought of it. It was his idea. We were on our last legs here. We’d got to make money. It was worth more than half a million to him.’

‘Half a million!’ Raven said. ‘And he paid me two hundred phoney pounds.’

‘I said to him we ought to be generous. He said: “Stop your mouth.”’

‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ Raven said, ‘if I’d known the old man was like he was. I smashed his skull for him. And the old woman, a bullet in both eyes.’ He shouted at Sir Marcus, ‘That was your doing. How do you like that?’ but the old man sat there apparently unmoved: old age had killed the imagination. The deaths he had ordered were no more real to him than the deaths he read about in the newspapers. A little greed (for his milk), a little vice (occasionally to put his old hand inside a girl’s blouse and feel the warmth of life), a little avarice and calculation (half a million against a death), a very small persistent, almost mechanical, sense of self-preservation: these were his only passions. The last made him edge his chair imperceptibly towards the bell at the edge of his desk. He whispered gently, ‘I deny it all. You are mad.’

Raven said, ‘I’ve got you now where I want you. Even if the police kill me,’ he tapped the gun, ‘here’s my evidence. This is
the
gun I used. They can pin the murder to this gun. You told me to leave it behind, but here it is. It would put you away a long, long time even if I didn’t shoot you.’

Sir Marcus whispered gently, imperceptibly twisting his silent rubbered wheels, ‘A Colt No. 7. The factories turn out thousands.’

Raven said angrily, ‘There’s nothing the police can’t do now with a gun. There are experts –’ He wanted to frighten Sir Marcus before he shot him; it seemed unfair to him that Sir Marcus should suffer less than the old woman he hadn’t wanted to kill. He said, ‘Don’t you want to pray? You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Better people than you,’ he said, ‘believe in a God,’ remembering how the girl had prayed in the dark cold shed. The wheel of Sir Marcus’s chair touched the desk, touched the bell, and the dull ringing came up the well of the lift, going on and on. It conveyed nothing to Raven until the valet spoke. ‘The old bastard,’ he said, with the hatred of years, ‘he’s ringing the bell.’ Before Raven could decide what to do, someone was at the door, shaking the handle.

Raven said to Sir Marcus, ‘Tell them to keep back or I’ll shoot.’

‘You fool,’ Sir Marcus whispered, ‘they’ll only get you for theft. If you kill me, you’ll hang.’ But Mr Davis was ready to clutch at any straw. He screamed to the man outside, ‘Keep away. For God’s sake keep away.’

Sir Marcus said venomously, ‘You’re a fool, Davis. If he’s going to kill us anyway –’ While Raven stood pistol in hand before the two men, an absurd quarrel broke out between them. ‘He’s got no cause to kill me,’ Mr Davis screamed. ‘It’s you who’ve got us into this. I only acted for you.’

The valet began to laugh. ‘Two to one on the field,’ he said.

‘Be quiet,’ Sir Marcus whispered venomously back at Mr Davis. ‘I can put you out of the way at any time.’

‘I defy you,’ Mr Davis screamed in a high peacock voice. Somebody flung himself against the door.

‘I have the West Rand Goldfields filed,’ Sir Marcus said, ‘the East African Petroleum Company.’

A wave of impatience struck Raven. They seemed to be disturbing some memory of peace and goodness which had been on the point of returning to him when he had told Sir Marcus to pray. He raised his pistol and shot Sir Marcus in the chest. It was the only way to silence them. Sir Marcus fell forward across the bed-table, upsetting the glass of warm milk over the papers on his desk. Blood came out of his mouth.

Mr Davis began to talk very rapidly. He said, ‘It was all him, the old devil. You heard him. What could I do? He had me. You’ve got nothing against me.’ He shrieked, ‘Go away from that door. He’ll kill me if you don’t go,’ and immediately began to talk again, while the milk dripped from the bed-table to the desk drop by drop. ‘I wouldn’t have done a thing if it hadn’t been for him. Do you know what he did? He went and told the Chief Constable to order the police to shoot you on sight.’ He tried not to look at the pistol which remained pointed at his chest. The valet was white and silent by the wall ; he watched Sir Marcus’s life bleeding away with curious fascination. So this was what it would have been like, he seemed to be thinking, if he himself had had courage … any time … during all these years.

A voice outside said, ‘You had better open this door at once or we’ll shoot through it.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Mr Davis screamed, ‘leave me alone. He’ll shoot me,’ and the eyes watched him intently through the panes of the gas-mask, with satisfaction. ‘There’s not a thing I’ve done to you,’ he began to protest. Over Raven’s head he could see the clock: it hadn’t moved more than three hours since his breakfast, the hot stale taste of the kidneys and bacon was still on his palate: he couldn’t believe that this was really the end: at one o’clock he had a date with a girl: you didn’t die before a date. ‘Nothing,’ he murmured, ‘nothing at all.’

‘It was you,’ Raven said, ‘who tried to kill …’

‘Nobody. Nothing,’ Mr Davis moaned.

Raven hesitated. The word was still unfamiliar on his tongue. ‘My friend.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand.’

‘Keep back,’ Raven cried through the door, ‘I’ll shoot him if you fire.’ He said, ‘The girl.’

Mr Davis shook all over. He was like a man with St Vitus’s dance. He said, ‘She wasn’t a friend of yours. Why are the police here if she didn’t … who else could have known …?’

Raven said, ‘I’ll shoot you for that and nothing else. She’s straight.’

‘Why,’ Mr Davis screamed at him, ‘she’s a policeman’s girl. She’s the Yard man’s girl. She’s Mather’s girl.’

Raven shot him. With despair and deliberation he shot his last chance of escape, plugged two bullets in where one would do, as if he were shooting the whole world in the person of stout moaning bleeding Mr Davis. And so he was. For a man’s world is his life and he was shooting that: his mother’s suicide, the long years in the home, the race-course gangs, Kite’s death and the old man’s and the woman’s. There was no other way; he had tried the way of confession, and it had failed him for the usual reason. There was no one outside your own brain whom you could trust : not a doctor, not a priest, not a woman. A siren blew up over the town its message that the sham raid was over, and immediately the church bells broke into a noisy Christmas carol : the foxes have their holes, but the son of man … A bullet smashed the lock of the door. Raven, with his gun pointed stomach-high, said, ‘Is there a bastard called Mather out there? He’d better keep away.’

While he waited for the door to open he couldn’t help remembering many things. He did not remember them in detail; they fogged together and formed the climate of his mind as he waited there for the chance of a last revenge: a voice singing above a dark street as the sleet fell:
They say that’s a snowflower a man brought from Greenland
, the cultivated unlived voice of the elderly critic reading
Maud: Oh, that ’twere possible after long grief
, while he stood in the garage and felt the ice melt at his heart with a sense of pain and strangeness. It was as if he were passing the customs of a land he had never entered before and would never be able to leave: the girl in the café saying, ‘He’s bad and ugly …’, the little plaster child lying in its mother’s arms waiting the double-cross, the whips,
the
nails. She had said to him, ‘I’m your friend. You can trust me.’ Another bullet burst in the lock.