So now all was revealed. Or was it? A great deal that had puzzled me was now explained, but there were several things which still didn’t make any kind of sense.
She voiced one of them for me. ‘One thing I can’t understand. What were you supposed to do once you got your hands on me?’
Take you to Hoffer. He’s meeting us himself on the Beflona road.’
‘Didn’t he expect me to say anything to you? Weren’t you supposed to notice when you got here that I wasn’t the slave of Serafino’s passion that he made out?’
Which had been worrying me for some time and yet I could think of no possible explanation except for the one she offered me herself a moment later.
‘Which takes us back to square one,’ she said. The only logical explanation. That you dropped in to finish me off along with Serafino and his men. Then my step-father goes to the police, wringing his hands, giving them some story about how he’s been afraid for my life and didn’t dare seek official help before, but now he can’t go on. The police make an official search and find what’s left of us.’
‘Wouldn’t they want to know who was responsible?’
There are several groups in the mountains just like Serafino and his men, and there’s no love lost.’ She shrugged. ‘It would be reasonable to suppose that one of them was responsible. All very sad, but nice and tidy for my stepfather. When you think of it, it is the only explanation that makes any kind of sense.’
Her hand started to bring up the Beretta again. It was her eyes that warned me and the sudden, pinched look about the mouth, not that I was particularly alarmed.
I came up in an unnecessarily spectacular spring, got my shoulder to her knees and had her on her back in a moment. Once on top, the war was over, although a certain amont of wriggling continued until I clamped a knee across each of her arms.
I held up the Beretta and slipped the safety catch. ‘It just won’t fire until you do that. Try again.’
I dropped it on her chest, got up and turned my back on her. I lit another cigarette, an ostentatious bit of theatricality and when I turned again she was standing staring at me in bewilderment, the Beretta swinging loosely from one hand and pointing directly into the ground.
‘But it still doesn’t make sense,’ she said.
She was right-it didn’t. The only thing which filled her true circumstances was that we had been sent to kill her and we had not.
Or had we…?
It was suddenly cold and my throat went dry. No, it wasn’t possible and I tried to push the thought away from me. Burke would never have stood still for a thing like that.
In any case, I wasn’t allowed to take it any further. Someone jumped on my back, an arm clamped around my throat and down I went.
Someone once said that God made some men big and some small and left it to Colonel Colt to even things up. As a philosophy where violence is con-cerned, it’s always appealed to me and like most rela-tively small men, I’ve never been much good at the hand-to-hand stuff.
The arm about my throat was doing a nice, efficient job of cutting off the air supply. I was choking, there was a roaring in my ears. Somewhere the girl was shouting and then he made the mistake of moving posi-tion and I managed an elbow strike to his privates.
It was only half a target and there wasn’t much zip behind it, but it was enough. I was released with a curse, rolled over twice and fetched up against a holly-oak tree.
Not that it did me much good. My head went back with a crack and the muzzle of a rifle was shoved into the side of my neck.
TWELVE
the M.I..30 calibre is the semi-automatic rifle that got most American infantrymen through the Second World War, which meant that the one which was about to blow a hole in me now had been around for quite a while. On the other hand, it had obviously been cared for like a lover. The stock was polished, the gunmetal shone with oil and the whole thing looked as lethal as anyone could wish, just like the man who was holding it, Serafino Lentini.