This copy may or may not have been innocuous, depending upon your interpretation of the reason for its savagely multilated state, but as a Bible as such it was a complete failure because the hole that had been smoothly scooped out from its centre extended almost the entire width of the book: the hole itself was about the size and shape of a large fig. I examined several more Bibles from the same row. all had the same hollowed out centre, obviously machine-made. Keeping one of the mutilated copies to one side, I replaced the other Bibles as I had found them and moved towards the door opposite the one by which I’d entered the narrow room. I opened it and pressed the light switch.
The First Reformed Church, I had to admit, had certainly done their level and eminently successful best to comply with the exhortations of the avant-garde clergy of today that it was the Church’s duty, to keep abreast with and participate in the technological age in which we live. Conceivably, they might have expected to be taken a degree less literally, but then unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection, which appeared to be what had happened in this case: this room, which took up nearly half the basement area of the church, was, in fact, a superbly equipped machine shop.
To my untrained eye, it had everything — lathes, milling machines, presses, crucibles, moulds, a furnace, a large stamping machine and benches to which were bolted a number of smaller machines whose purpose was a mystery to me. One end of the floor was covered with what appeared to be brass and copper shavings, for the main part lying in tightly twisted coils. In a bin in one corner lay a large and untidy heap of lead pipes, all evidently old, and some rolls of used lead roof sheathing. Altogether, a highly functional place and one clearly devoted to manufacture: what the end products were was anyone’s guess for certainly no examples of them were lying around.
I was half-way along the room, walking slowly, when I as much imagined as heard the very faintest sensation of sound from about the area of the doorway I’d just passed through: and 1 could feel again that uncomfortable tingling sensation in the back of my neck: someone was examining it, and with no friendly intent, from a distance of only a very few yards.
I walked on unconcernedly, which is no easy thing to do when the chances are good that the next step you take may be anticipated by a .38 bullet or something equally lethal in the base of the skull, but walk I did, for to turn round armed with nothing but a hollowed-out Bible in my left hand — my gun was still in my belt — seemed a sure way of precipitating that involuntary pressure of the nervous trigger-finger. I had behaved like a moron, with a blundering idiocy for which I would have bawled out anyone else, and it looked very much as if I might pay the moron’s price. The unlocked main door, the unlocked door leading to the basement, the access free and open to anyone who might care to investigate bespoke only one thing: the presence of a quiet man with a gun whose job it was not to prevent entry but to prevent departure in the most permanent way. I wondered where he had been hiding, perhaps in the pulpit, perhaps in some side door leading off the stairs, the existence or otherwise of which I’d been too careless to investigate.
I reached the end of the room, glanced slightly to my left behind the end lathe, made a slight murmur of surprise and stooped low behind the lathe. I didn’t stay in that position for more than two seconds for there seemed little point in postponing what I knew must be inevitable: when I lifted the top of my head quickly above the lathe, the barrel of my silenced gun was already lined up with my right eye.
He was no more than fifteen feet away, advancing on soundless rubber moccasins, a wizened, rodent-faced figure of a man, with a paper-white face and glowing dark-coal eyes. What he was pointing in the general direction of the lathe in front of me was far worse than any .38 pistol, it was a blood-chilling whippet, a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun sawn off at both barrels and stock, probably the most lethally effective short-range weapon ever devised.
I saw him and squeezed the trigger of my gun in the same moment, for if anything was certain it was that I would never be given a second moment.
A red rose bloomed in the centre of the wizened man’s forehead. He took one step back, the reflex step of a man already dead, and crumpled to the floor almost as soundlessly as he had been advancing towards me, the whippet still clutched in his hand. I switched my eyes towards the door but if there were any reinforcements to hand they were prudently concealing the fact. I straightened and went quickly across the room to where the Bibles were stored, but there was no one there nor was there in any of the booths in the next room where George was still lying unconscious across his table.
I hauled George none too gently from his seat, got him over my shoulder, carried him upstairs to the church proper and dumped him unceremoniously behind the pulpit where he would be out of sight of anyone who might glance in casually from the main door, although why anyone should take it into his head to glance in at that time of night I couldn’t imagine. I opened the main door and glanced out, although far from casually, but the canal street was deserted in both directions.
Three minutes later I had the taxi parked not far from the church. I went inside, retrieved George, dragged him down the steps and across the road and bundled him into the back seat of the taxi. He promptly fell off the seat on to the floor and as he was probably safer in that position I left him there, quickly checked that no one was taking any interest in what I was doing and went back inside the church again.
The dead man’s pockets yielded nothing except a few homemade cigarettes which accorded well enough with the fact that he had obviously been hopped to the eyes when he had come after me with the whippet. I took the whippet in my left hand, seized the dead man by the collar of his coat — any other method of conveying him from there would have resulted in a blood-stained suit and this was the only serviceable suit I’d left — and dragged him across the basement and up the stairs, closing doors and putting out lights as I went.
Again the cautious reconnaissance at the church main door, again the deserted street. I dragged the man across the street into what little cover was offered by the taxi and lowered him into the canal as soundlessly as he would doubtless have lowered me if he’d been a bit handier with the whippet, which I now lowered into the canal after him. I went back to the taxi and was about to open the driver’s door when a door of the house next to the church swung wide and a man appeared, who looked around uncertainly and then made his way across to where I was standing.
He was a big, burly character dressed in what appeared to be some kind of voluminous night-gown with a bathing wrap over it. He had rather an impressive head, with a splendid mane of white hair, a white moustache, a pink-cheeked healthy complexion and, at that moment, an air of slightly bemused benevolence.
‘Can I be of help?’ He had the deep resonant modulated voice of one obviously accustomed to hearing quite a lot of it. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘What should be wrong?’
‘I thought I heard a noise coming from the church.’
‘The church?’ It was my turn to look bemused.
‘Yes. My church. There.’ He pointed to it in case I couldn’t recognize a church when I saw one. ‘I’m the pastor. Goodbody. Dr Thaddeus Goodbody. I thought some intruder was perhaps moving around — ‘
‘Not me, Reverend. I haven’t been inside a church for years.’
He nodded as if he weren’t at all surprised. ‘We live in a godless age. A strange hour to be abroad, young man.’
‘Not for a taxi-driver on the night shift.’
He looked at me with an unconvinced expression and peered into the back of the taxi. ‘Merciful heavens. There’s a body on the floor.’
‘There isn’t a body on the floor. There’s a drunken sailor on the floor and I’m taking him back to his ship. He just fell to the floor a few seconds ago so I stopped to get him back on his seat again. I thought,’ I added virtuously, ‘that it would be the Christian thing to do. With a corpse, I wouldn’t bother.’