by Mike Ripley
I’m not a bad shot, but I was outgunned from the start. I had to put my faith in local conditions and a lifetime’s study of human behaviour. If I was wrong, that learning curve stopped here.
I raised the air pistol and made sure the safety was off. That was about all I was sure of. I didn’t even know how many slugs the thing fired.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Hadyn Rees look at me in bewilderment, as he saw me aiming not at him, but, as it must have seemed to him, up into the night sky.
It took two shots to put out the nearest streetlight. Then three to put out the next.
Rees watched in wonderment, not understanding what I was doing, but then he didn’t know Hampstead, did he?
Gunfire in the streets? No problem. Some vandal smashes a streetlight and – hey – the Neighbourhood Watch wakes up.
And they did by the time I’d smashed the third one. (Got it in one that time.)
Two houses set their burglar alarms off and a siren began to sound – that would be the Dunmores, I guessed. They would have the local police on speed dial.
I shot at a fourth lamp, but it was an ambitious distance and I missed.
By that time, though, there were lights coming on and somebody waving a torch and the obligatory ‘Clear off, you hooligans’ being shouted.
Rees slammed the boot and dived for the driver’s door.
The engine revved and he was gone.
I put the air pistol down by the side of my leg and turned to walk down the drive. To all intents and purposes, I had been a concerned citizen coming out to see what all the noise was about.
I took precisely one pace and walked into Amy, who hadn’t taken my advice at all.
‘You should have gone inside like I said.’
She grinned. ‘Take orders from somebody who couldn’t hit the side of a barn from ten feet?’
‘That last one was a difficult shot, and it’s dark, in case you hadn’t noticed. All the street lights round here seem to be faulty.’
‘Bet you I could hit it.’
‘What you got to bet with?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ she said, and her voice dropped a tone.
I looked over my shoulder. The neighbours were milling around in their doorways. In the far distance I could hear a police siren – but that meant nothing in London.
I handed Amy the pistol.
‘Go for it,’ I said.
Three days later, there was an item on the local news that the London Eye had suspended operations whilst a body, beloved to be a suicide, had been found bobbing up against Hungerford Bridge. Police believed it was a man they were seeking in connection with charges pending in west Wales.
But that night, much later that night, Amy confessed.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a couple of days, weeks in fact. But this business with Keith and then Rees ...’
‘There’s something else?’
I sat up in bed. Bolt upright.
‘Yes, there is.’
‘Go on, then. Do your worst. Stun me.’
She did.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Being right about her putting on weight suddenly seemed little consolation.
When I didn’t say anything, she said: ‘You okay with that?
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘You know me. I love surprises.’
About The Author
Mike Ripley is the author of 16 novels, including the Angel series which have twice won the Crime Writers’ Association Last Laugh Award for comedy. He was the co-editor of the legendary Fresh Blood anthologies, a scriptwriter for BBC TVs Lovejoy and served as the Daily Telegraph’s crime fiction critic for ten years. He currently writes a regular column for the popular Shots crime and thriller e-zine (www.shotsmag.co.uk) and regularly talks on crime fiction at libraries and festivals.
After 20 years of working in London, he decamped to East Anglia and became an archaeologist. He was thus one of the few crime writers who regularly turned up real bodies.
In 2003, at the age of 50, he suffered a stroke and regained the use of his left hand and arm by bashing out a book on an old portable typewriter on the kitchen table. He now works part-time for the charity Different Strokes and is the author of Surviving A Stroke (White Ladder Press, 2006).
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