by Dick Francis
I drove around into the road where the Keithly house stood and stopped at the curb just out of sight of the net-curtained window. I could see the roof, part of a wall, most of the front garden . . . and Angelo’s car in the driveway.
There weren’t many people in the street. The children would be home from school, indoors having tea. The husbands wouldn’t be back yet from work: there was more space than cars outside the houses. A peaceful suburban scene. Residential street, middle-income prosperous, not long built. An uncluttered street with no big trees and no forests of electricity and telegraph poles: new-laid cables tended to run underground for most of their journey, emerging only occasionally into the daylight. In the photograph of Peter’s house there had been one telegraph pole nearby with wires distributing from it to the individual houses all around, but not much else. No obstructions. Neat flat asphalt pavements, white curbstones, blacktop roadway. A few neat little hedges bordering some of the gardens. A lot of neat green rectangular patches of repressed grass. Acres of net curtains ready to twitch. I-can-see-out-but-you-can’t-see-in.
The first essential for pinpoint rifle shooting was to know how far one was from the target. On ranges the distances were fixed, and always the same. I was accustomed to precisely three, four, and five hundred yards. To nine hundred and a thousand yards, both of them farther than half a mile. The distance affected one’s angle of aim: the longer the distance, the farther above the target one had to aim in order to hit it.
Olympic shooting was all done at three hundred meters, but from different body positions: standing, kneeling and lying prone. In Olympic shooting also one was allowed ten sighters in each position—ten chances of adjusting one’s sights before one came to the forty rounds which counted for scoring.
In that street in Norwich I was not going to get ten sighters. I could afford barely one.
No regular lines of telegraph poles meant no convenient help with measuring the distance. The front gardens though, I reckoned, should all be of more or less the same width because all the houses were identical, so as inconspicuously and casually as possible I slipped out of the car and paced slowly along the street, going away from Peter’s house.
Fourteen paces per garden. I did some mental arithmetic and came up with three hundred yards meaning twenty-two houses.
I counted carefully. There were only twelve houses between me and my target: say one hundred and seventy yards. The shorter distance would be to my advantage. I could reckon in general to hit a target within one minute of a degree of arc: or in other words to hit a circular target of about one inch wide at a hundred yards, two inches wide at two hundred, three inches wide at three hundred, and so on to a ten-inch dinner plate at a thousand.
My target on that evening was roughly rectangular and about four inches by six, which meant that I mustn’t be farther away from it than four hundred yards. The main problem was that from where I stood, even if I used the telescope, I couldn’t see it.
An old man came out of the house against whose curb I was parked and asked if I wanted anything.
“Er, no,” I said. “Waiting for someone. Stretching my legs.”
“My son wants to park there,” he said, pointing to where my car was. “He’ll be home soon.”
I looked at the stubborn old face and knew that if I didn’t move he would be staring at me through the curtains, watching whatever I did. I nodded and smiled, got into the car, backed up into his next-door driveway, and left the street by the way I’d come.
All right, I thought, driving around. I have to come into the street from the opposite end. I have to park where I can see the target. I do not, if possible, park outside anyone’s house fully exposed to one of those blank-looking one-way viewing screens. I do not park where Angelo can see me. I count the houses carefully to get the distance right; and above all I don’t take much time.
It’s a cliché in movies that when an assassin looks through the telescopic sight, steadies the crossed lines on the target and squeezes the trigger, the victim drops dead. Quite often the assassin will perform this feat while standing up, and nearly always it will be with his first shot: all of which makes serious marksmen laugh, or wince, or both. The only film I ever saw that got it right was The Day of the Jackal, where the gunman went into a forest to pace out his distance, to strap his rifle to a tree for steadiness, to adjust his sights and take two or three trial shots at a head-sized melon before transferring it all to the place of execution. Even then there was no allowance for wind—but one can’t have everything.
I drove into the top end of Peter’s road, with which I was less familiar, and between two of the houses came across the wide entrance gates to the old estate upon which the new houses had been built. The double gates themselves, wrought iron, ajar, led to a narrow road that disappeared into parkland, and they were set not flush with the roadway or even with the fronts of the houses, but slightly farther back. Between the gates and the road there was an area of moderately well-kept gravel and a badly weathered notice board announcing that all callers to the Paranormal Research Institute should drive in and follow the arrows to Reception.
I turned without hesitation onto the gravel area and stopped the car. It was ideal. From there, even with the naked eye, I had a clear view of the target. A slightly sideways view certainly, but good enough.
I got out of the car and counted the houses which stretched uniformly along the street: the Keithlys’ was the fourteenth on the opposite side of the road and my target was one house nearer.
The road curved slightly to my right. There was a slight breeze from the left. I made the assessments almost automatically and eased myself into the back of the car.
I had gone through long patches of indecision over which rifle to use. The 7.62 bullets were far more destructive, but if I missed the target altogether with the first shot, I could do terrible damage to things or people I couldn’t see. People half a mile away, or more. The .22 was much lighter: still potentially deadly if I missed the target, but not for such a long distance.
In a car I obviously couldn’t lie flat on my stomach, the way I normally fired the Mauser. I could kneel, and I was more used to kneeling with the .22. But when I knelt in the car I wouldn’t have to support the rifle’s weight; I could rest it on the door and shoot through the open window.
For better or worse I chose the Mauser. The stopping power was so much greater, and if I was going to do the job it was best done properly. Also I could see the target clearly and it was near enough to make hitting it with the second shot a certainty. It was the first shot that worried.
A picture of Paul Arcady rose in my mind. “Could you shoot the apple off his head, sir?” What I was doing was much the same. One slight mistake could have unthinkable results.
Committed, I wound down the rear window and then fitted the sleek three-inch round of ammunition into the Mauser’s breech. I took a look at the target through the telescope, steadying that too on the window ledge, and what leaped to my eye was a bright, clear, slightly oblique close-up of a flat shallow box, fixed high up and to one side on the telegraph pole: gray, basically rectangular, fringed with wires leading off to all the nearby houses.
The junction box.
I was sorry for all the people who were going to be without telephones for the rest of the day, but not too sorry to put them out of order.
I lowered the telescope, folded the brown towel, and laid it over the door frame to make a nonslip surface. Wedged myself between the front and rear seats as firmly as possible, and rested the barrel of the Mauser on the towel.
I thought I would probably have to hit the junction box two or three times to be sure. The 7.62mm bullets tended to go straight through things, doing most of the damage on the way out. If I’d cared to risk shooting the junction box through the pole one accurate bullet would have blown it apart, but I would have to have been directly behind it, and I couldn’t get there unobserved.
I set the sights to what I thought I would
need for that distance, lowered my body into an angle that felt right, corrected a fraction for the breeze, and squeezed the trigger. Hit the pole, I prayed. High or low, hit the pole. The bullet might indeed go through it, but with the worst of its impetus spent.
7.62-caliber rifles make a terrific noise. Out in the street it must have cracked like a bullwhip. In the car it deafened me like in the old days before ear-defenders.
I reloaded. Looked through the telescope. Saw the bullet hole, round and neat, right at the top of the gray junction box casing.
Allelujah, I thought gratefully, and breathed deeply from relief.
Lowered the sight a fraction, keeping my body position unchanged. Shot again. Reloaded. Shot again. Looked through the telescope.
The second and third holes overlapped, lower down than the first, and maybe because I wasn’t shooting at it directly face on, but from a little to one side, the whole casing seemed to have split.
It would have to do. It was all too noisy.
I put the guns and telescope on the floor with the towel over them and scrambled through onto the front seat.
Started the engine, reversed slowly onto the road and drove away at a normal pace, seeing in the rearview mirror a couple of inhabitants come out inquiringly into the street. The net curtains must all have been twitching, but no one shouted after me, no one pointed and said, “That’s the man.”
And Angelo . . . what would he think? And Sarah . . . who knew the sound of a rifle better than church bells? I hoped to God she’d keep quiet.
Going out of Norwich I stopped for gas and used the telephone there to ring Donna’s number.
Nothing.
A faint humming noise, like wind in the wires.
I blew out a lungful of air and wondered with a smile what the repairmen would say when they climbed the pole on the morrow. Unprintable, most like.
There were perhaps ways of interfering with incoming calls by technical juggling, by ringing a number, waiting for it to be answered, saying nothing, waiting for the receiver to be put down, and then not replacing one’s own receiver, leaving the line open and making it impossible for the number to ring again. I might have trusted that method for a short while, but not for hours: and with some exchanges it didn’t work.
Farther along the road I stopped again, this time to tidy and reorganize the car. I returned the Mauser and the telescope to their beds in the suitcase in the trunk, along with the 7.62mm ammunition; then I broke all my own and everyone else’s rules and loaded a live .22 round into the breech of the Anschütz.
I laid the towel on the backseat and rolled the Olympic rifle in it lengthways, and then stowed it flat on the floor behind the front seats. The towel blended well enough with the brown carpet, and I reckoned that if I didn’t accelerate or brake the corner too fast, the gun should travel without moving.
Next I put four extra bullets into my righthand pocket, because the Anschütz had no magazine and each round had to be loaded separately. After so many years of practice I could discharge the spent casing and load a new bullet within the space of two seconds, and even faster if I held the fresh bullet in my right palm. The two rifles were physically the same size, and I’d have taken the Mauser with its available magazine if it hadn’t been for its horrific power in a domestic setting. The .22 would kill, but not the people in the next house.
After that I juggled around a bit with the cassettes and their boxes and the glue and the bits I’d pinched from school, and finally drove on again, this time to Welwyn.
Harry Gilbert was expecting me. From the way he came bustling out of his house the moment I turned into his driveway he had been expecting me for a long time and had grown thoroughly tired of it.
“Where have you been?” he said. “Did you bring the tapes?”
He had come close to me as I emerged from the car, thrusting his chin forward belligerently, sure of his power over a man at a disadvantage.
“I thought you didn’t approve of Angelo threatening people with your pistol,” I said.
Something flickered in a muscle in his face.
“There are times when only threats will do,” he said. “Give me the tapes.”
I took the three tapes out of my pocket and showed them to him; the three tapes themselves, out of their boxes.
I said, “Now ring Angelo and tell him to untie my wife.”
Gilbert shook his head. “I try the tapes first. Then I ring Angelo. And Angelo leaves your wife tied up until you yourself go to release her. That is the arrangement. It’s simple. Come into the house.”
We went again into his functional office, which this time had an addition in the shape of a Grantley computer sitting on his desk.
“The tapes.” He held his hand out for them, and I gave them to him. He slotted the first one into the recorder which stood beside the computer and began to fumble around with the computer’s typewriterlike keys in a most disorganized fashion.
“How long have you had that computer?” I said.
“Shut up.”
He typed RUN, and not surprisingly nothing happened, as he hadn’t fed the program in from the cassette. I watched him pick up the instruction book and begin leafing through it, and if there had been all the time in the world I would have let him stew in it longer. But every minute I wasted meant one more dragging minute for Donna and Sarah, so I said, “You’d better take lessons.”
“Shut up.” He gave me a distinctly bull-like glare and typed RUN again.
“I want Angelo out of that house,” I said, “so I’ll show you how to run the tapes. Otherwise we’ll be here all night.”
He would have given much not to allow me the advantage, but he should have done his homework first.
I ejected the tape to see which side we’d got, then reinserted it and typed CLOAD “EPSOM”. The asterisks began to blink at the top righthand corner as the computer searched the tape, but at length it found “EPSOM”, loaded the Epsom program, and announced READY.
“Now type RUN and press ‘ENTER’,” I said.
Gilbert did so, and immediately the screen said:WHICH RACE AT EPSOM?
TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS “ENTER”.
Gilbert typed DERBY, and the screen told him to type the name of the horse. He typed in “ANGELO”, and made the same sort of fictional replies Ted Pitts and I had done. Angelo’s win factor was 46, which must have been the maximum. It also said quite a lot about Gilbert’s estimate of his son.
“How do you get Ascot?” he said.
I ejected the tape and inserted the first side of all. Typed CLOAD “ASCOT”, pressed “ENTER”, and waited for READY.
“Type RUN, press ‘ENTER’,” I said.
He did so, and at once gotWHICH RACE AT ASCOT?
TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS “ENTER”.
He typed GOLD CUP and looked enthralled by the ensuing questions, and I thought that he’d played with it long enough.
“Telephone Angelo,” I said. “You must surely be satisfied that this time you’ve got the real thing.”
“Wait,” he said heavily. “I’ll try all the tapes. I don’t trust you. Angelo was insistent that I shouldn’t trust you.”
I shrugged. “Test what you like.”
He tried one or two programs on each of the sides, finally realizing that CLOAD plus the first five letters of the racecourse required, inserted between quotation marks, would unlock the goodies.
“All right,” I said at length. “Now call Angelo. You can run the programs all you like when I’ve gone.”
He could find no further reason for putting it off. With a stare to which his own natural arrogance was fast returning he picked up one of the telephones, consulted a note pad beside it, and dialed the number.
Not surprisingly he didn’t get through. He dialed again. Then, impatiently, again. Then, muttering under his breath, he tried one of the other telephones with ditto nil results.
“What is it?” I said.
“The number doesn’t ring.”
“You must be dialing it wrong,” I said. “I’ve got it here.”
I fished into my jacket pocket for my diary and made a show of fluttering through the leaves. Came to the number. Read it out.
“That’s what I dialed,” Gilbert said.
“It can’t be. Try again.” I’d never thought of myself as an actor but I found it quite easy to pretend.
Gilbert dialed again, frowning, and I thought it time to be agitated and anxious.
“You must get through,” I said. “I’ve worried and rushed all day to get those tapes here, and now you must call Angelo, he must leave my wife.”
In experience of command he had tough years of advantage, but then I was too accustomed to having to control wily opponents, and when I took a step toward him it was clear to both of us that physically I was taller and fitter and quite decisively stronger.
He said hastily, “I’ll try the operator,” and I fidgeted and fumed around him in simulated anxiety while the operator tried without success and reported the number out of order.
“But it can’t be,” I yelled. “You’ve got to call Angelo.”
Harry Gilbert simply stared at me, knowing that it was impossible.
I cut the decibels a shade but looked as furious as I could and said, “We’ll have to go there.”
“But Angelo said—”
“I don’t give a damn what Angelo said,” I said forcefully. “He won’t leave that house until he knows you’ve got the tapes, and now it seems you can’t tell him you have. So we’ll bloody well have to go there and tell him. And I’m absolutely fed up with all this buggering about.”
“You can go,” Gilbert said. “I’m not coming.”
“Yes you are. I’m not walking up to that house alone with Angelo inside it with that pistol. He said I was to give the tapes to you, and that’s what I’ve done, and you’ve got to come with me to tell him so. And I promise you,” I said threateningly, warming to the part, “that I’ll take you with me one way or another. Knocked out or tied up or just sitting quietly in the front seat beside me. Because you’re the only one Angelo will listen to.” I snatched up the cassettes lying beside the computer. “If you want these tapes back you’ll come with me.”
