Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “And in summer?”

  “Hot. Too hot.” She sounded resigned. “I don’t know. I guess I won’t renew the lease. This was an experiment. I always wanted to live in the country, and I thought once David and I were divorced that it would be a real good time to do it, but it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not one of my carrots came up, not one! And the deer ate all the lettuce and the bean bushes had bugs and there were worms in the tomatoes.”

  “That’s why God made supermarkets.”

  She laughed. Then looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” We were standing beside my pick-up. I had only just arrived, and we were both feeling awkward, and I guessed she was regretting her impulsive agreement to let me visit her. I was nervous, and the ten-hour drive from Cape Cod had given me too much time to anticipate the failure of this meeting. I wanted to fall in love with Kathleen, maybe I had half convinced myself that I was already in love with her, and I had even half convinced myself that it was not simply because she was her sister’s ghost. I had not been truthful about my reasons for visiting, but instead had told her I had business in Washington and could I perhaps take the chance of dropping by? She had hesitated, then agreed, and now I asked her once more why she was apologising to me. “Why?”

  “For agreeing to help those people. Who were they?”

  “You didn’t know them?” I asked.

  “Not really.” She turned away. “That’s why you came, right? To find out about them?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I had come because I wanted to resurrect Roisin in her sister.

  “You want to walk?” Kathleen asked.

  “Sure.”

  “If you go five miles down that track you come to the Chesapeake Bay.” She pointed eastwards. “I had this idea that in summer I’d bike down there and have lazy days on the water.”

  “You and a million mosquitoes, right?”

  She nodded. “And the ticks.” She led me to the road and we walked slowly towards the small town. The landscape was very flat, accentuating the sky and reminding me of Flanders. “It was the girl who came to me, Sarah Sing Tennyson?” Kathleen said. “She said you’d thrown her out of the house, and that she wanted to get inside to rescue her paintings, and that if I took you for a walk then she knew she’d be safe.” Kathleen blushed slightly. “She was very persuasive.”

  “I can imagine.” I kicked a dry pine cone ahead of me. “I wonder how she found you?”

  “That was easy. You remember I hired a private detective to find out about you? Well he visited the house when she was there, and I guess he and she talked. But she never told me she was taking men with her, or that they planned to beat you up. I couldn’t believe it!” Her voice rose in innocent protest as she remembered the violence. “I phoned the police!”

  “I know, thank you.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They locked me up for a while.”

  “Who were they?”

  “They were from Ireland,” I told her.

  “So what happened?”

  I shrugged. “They were looking for something. And when I told them where it was, they let me go.”

  She looked up at me. “I felt badly. I didn’t feel badly when I agreed to help Sarah Tennyson, because I thought she was being real straight and you’d been a pig to me in Belgium and I thought I’d enjoy getting back at you. But you were different on Cape Cod.”

  I walked in silence for a few paces. The bushes beside the road looked dead and dry, the meadows were pale. “I wanted to tell someone the truth,” I said, “and I’d decided to trust you.”

  She nodded, then laughed as she realised that I had trusted her when she had been deceiving me, and vice versa. She bit her lip. “What fools we all are.”

  “I thought that after so many years of lies it would be a change to tell the truth,” I explained, “like giving up smoking, or going off the booze.”

  “And is it a change?” she asked.

  “It makes life less complicated.”

  “Like I thought small-town life would be, only it isn’t really less complicated, there’s just less of it. This is it.” She nodded at the main street. “Two churches, a town office, a bank, feed store, convenience store, coffee shop, and a post office. The movie house closed down, the service station moved to Route Five, but you can buy gas from Ed’s feed store if he really likes you and his son isn’t watching.”

  “What’s wrong with Ed’s son?”

  “He’s in the State Police and he can’t stand his dad, not since his mom told him about his dad’s fling with Mary Hammond who used to deliver the mail before Bobby Evans’s dog bit her leg and it went septic. The leg not the dog.”

  “And you like living here?” I asked.

  “I hate it.”

  We both laughed. “And you’re too stubborn to admit you’ve made a mistake,” I challenged her, “because you’re so like Roisin.”

  “Am I like Roisin?” she asked. We had stopped in the main street and were facing each other. “Am I really?”

  “Yes. In looks, anyway.”

  She frowned. “Does that make it hard for you?”

  I hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes.”

  “Don’t,” she told me. She was frowning.

  “Don’t?” It seemed the world trembled on an edge, and I knew it was not going to fall my way. I had built a dizzying scaffold impossibly high and had dared to think she would want to share it with me.

  “I’ve got a guy, Paul,” Kathleen said gently. “He teaches school in Frederick.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said, but I had meant it, and she knew I had meant it, and suddenly I felt such a fool and just wanted to be out of this damn chicken town.

  “He’s a good man,” she went on.

  “I’m sure he is.” I felt as though my dizzying scaffold was collapsing all around me in splintering poles.

  “Let’s have a coffee,” she said, and we sat in the coffee shop and she told me about her trip to Europe, and about her adventures in Dublin and Belfast, but I was not really listening. I did a good job of pretending to listen; I smiled at the right places, made intelligible comments, but inside I was desolate. I was alone. Roisin was gone for ever. I had thought she could be clawed back from the past, out of her Beka’a grave, but it was not to be.

  “I hope you found out what you wanted to know,” Kathleen told me when we walked back to the truck.

  “I did, thanks.”

  “I guess you won’t see Sarah Sing Tennyson again?”

  “I guess not.”

  She put her hand on my sleeve when we reached the truck. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

  Me too, I thought, me too. “Good luck with the teacher.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” She smiled. “Good luck in Washington, eh?”

  “Sure,” I said, “sure,” and drove back to Cape Cod.

  It was past one o’clock when I reached the house. It was a dark night and the moon was hidden by high flying clouds. I was too tired to open the garage so I just left the truck on the clam-shell turnabout then walked to the kitchen door. I was weary and I was disgusted with myself. I had made a fool of myself. Dear God, I thought, but I had really believed I could fall in love with a ghost. I unlocked the door, pushed into the kitchen, and froze. I could smell tea. It was not an overpowering smell, just an aroma, but unmistakable. Tea.

  My MI carbine was hidden in the living room so, for a weapon, I pulled out my fish-filleting knife that had a wicked sharp blade and then, very slowly, I edged towards the living-room door.

  It was jet dark in the house. I could hear the wind and the eternal beat of the far waves, and I could still smell tea. Had Sarah Sing Tennyson dared come back here? I had an idea that women drank more tea than men, but the Irish also drank tea, so had Herlihy sent someone to kill me after all? I reached the living-room door. For a second I contemplated turning on the light, then decided that darkness was probably a better friend than the sudden dazzle of the elect
ric bulb.

  I pressed down the door lever, crouched, and pushed the door open. It swung into the living room’s darkness. I was crouched low, the knife in my right hand. The MI was hidden four paces from me, held by strips of duct tape to the underside of the long table. I was gauging just how long it would take me to free the weapon when a man’s voice sleepily spoke my name. “Shanahan?” The voice came from my right.

  My heart leaped in panic, but I managed to stay still and to say nothing.

  “Shanahan?” the man said again, and this time I heard the fear in his voice. I suspected he had been dozing and was now scared of what the darkness had brought into this cold room. “I’m going to turn a light on, OK?” the man said, and I suddenly recognised the voice of my CIA interrogator.

  “Oh, Christ. Gillespie? Is that you?”

  “It’s me, yeah.”

  I felt the tension flood out of me. “Jesus. Did you have to wait in the dark? I could have filleted you.”

  “To be honest I fell asleep. But I didn’t want to leave a light on in case you got scared and thought the ungodly were waiting for you. Which is why we left our car up at the post office.”

  “How the hell did you get in?” I was still crouched, but now leaned my back against the door jamb.

  “Stuart Callaghan picked the lock of the front door. He’s good at things like that.” Gillespie was moving cautiously across the dark room. He had been sitting in the old settee in the bay window and now he shuffled towards the hall door beside which Sarah Sing Tennyson had put the main light switch.

  “So what the hell are you doing here?” I eased the filleting knife back into its sheath.

  “We need to know about the boat, Rebel Lady? And about the money on board her.” He sounded very disapproving, as though it was bitterly unfair of me to have deceived him.

  “How the hell did you find out about Rebel Lady” I asked.

  “It’s our job to find things out,” he said in a pained voice, then he found the switch and suddenly the room was filled with light. Gillespie must have been cold for he was wearing one of the yellow plastic rain-slickers that had been hanging in the hallway.

  “How did you know I’d be here?” I asked him.

  “The police told us you were in residence. A guy called Ted Nickerson?”

  “I assume you’re not alone?” I asked him.

  “No. Callaghan is upstairs. I decided one of us would wait for you while the other slept. But I didn’t mean us both to fall asleep.” He yawned, then walked to the table where he had left his cellular telephone. “You look kind of bushed,” he said. “What happened?”

  “I just drove ten hours there and ten hours back to be stiff-armed by a girl. I thought I was in love with her.”

  “Ah.” He seemed embarrassed by my revelation and uncertain how to respond. “I’ll just report that you’ve surfaced,” he said and picked up his telephone.

  I was still leaning against the kitchen door and Gillespie was pressing a number into the telephone when he suddenly coughed and looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

  At least I think he coughed. It was hard to tell because at the same time the whole room was shockingly filled with the sound of a gunshot and the splintering crash as the bullet shattered a pane of the bow window behind Gillespie. The CIA man jerked forward and I realised the cough was the sound of the air being punched from his lungs by the violence of the bullet’s strike. He staggered, but managed to stay upright. The bullet which had hit him had been deflected and weakened by the window glass. He blinked. I was taking a breath to shout at him to get down when a second bullet, fired through the broken window and thus undeflected and unchecked, struck him in the back, and this time Gillespie was hurled violently forward and I saw a vent of bright blood mist the room’s centre, then he crashed to the floor and I heard the air sigh from his lungs as he slid forward on the polished oak boards. His cellular telephone spun into the kitchen where it lodged against the rubbish bin.

  I edged back into the kitchen shadows. Gillespie was not moving. I could just see his back. Two bullet holes. The first shot had hit him high on the left shoulder, the second must have shattered his spine. There was the faintest trickle of blood; a surprisingly small amount considering the sudden spray that had reddened the living room’s air. I could see some blood on the floor, and more on the edge of the table that concealed my carbine.

  Callaghan was surely awake now? Two bullets? The sound of the gunshots was reverberating in my ears. The marksman had to be in the marshes beyond my terrace. Should I stay where I was, or try to run into the dark? Or should I try to fetch the gun hidden under the table? But to reach the gun would mean going into the light that had made Gillespie a target. I slid the knife free again. It was a feeble weapon in the face of this night’s savagery, but the best to hand.

  A footstep sounded outside the house. Not by the kitchen, but beyond the bow window. Someone was on the deck. Christ, I thought, but the bastard is coming inside to make sure of his work! I edged back out of the wash of light which came from the living room and I thought I saw a shadow at the far window. A black shadow. II Hayaween? Please God, I prayed, but let this not be il Hayaween. Maybe the shadow was just my imagination? Then the shadow moved, grunted. The gunman was looking through the window to see what his bullets had accomplished, but Gillespie’s body had slid across the floor and was half hidden from the window by the heavy table.

  I gripped the filleting knife’s cord-wrapped handle. The killer was working with a high velocity rifle, so what chance did I have if he came indoors? None. What had Sarah Sing Tennyson said? Never piss a psychopath off, but put him down fast. I needed an ammonia squirt, not a damned fish-gutting knife.

  The shadow had gone. Maybe I should run for it. No, not with the killer still outside. So wait, I told myself, wait.

  Gillespie’s hands made small scratching noises as his fingers contracted into claws. That was not a sign of life, but a natural process as the body relaxed in death. The wind at the broken window stirred the brown drapes.

  Footsteps sounded sudden and loud on the steep stairs from the bedrooms. The stairs, built in the nineteenth century, were pitched far more steeply than twentieth-century building regulations would allow and the hurrying Callaghan tripped on them, stumbled, then hit his shoulder against the wall at the bottom. “Shit!” he swore, then shouted. “Mr Gillespie? Sir? Are you there, sir?”

  I sat utterly still.

  “Jesus Christ!” Callaghan had come into the living room. He could not see me for I was deep in the alcove beside the stove and Callaghan was staring at Gillespie. “Jesus Christ!” he said again, and whirled round, dragging his gun from his shoulder holster. He was wearing a shirt and trousers, but no jacket, tie or shoes. He must have been sleeping upstairs, and now he had woken to nightmare.

  “Jesus!” He was in shock. He saw the broken window and ran towards it, then sensed that danger might lie on the other side so ran back to the room’s centre, then he changed his mind again and went back to the window where, like a cop in a movie, he flattened himself against the drapes so he could peer round the corner into the salt darkness. He stood there, muttering to himself. I knew I would have to announce my presence, but I had to do it very carefully or else he would whirl round and shoot at my voice. He was twitchy as hell. I took a breath, readied myself to speak, when suddenly he turned, gasping, and I heard the rifle fire, its sound dreadfully loud in the confines of the house, and in the very same instant Callaghan fired back and I saw the muzzle flame of his pistol bright against the dark window.

  Callaghan fired a second time, but the second pull on his trigger was merely a reflexive spasm of his fingers as he went down. He had been hit. I had seen the rifle bullet jar his chest like a seismic shock, and I saw the life flit out of him in that very instant and I knew that the gunman was a marksman of genius for he had exploded Callaghan’s heart with a single lethal shot.

  Callaghan slumped to the floor. His second bullet ha
d struck the ceiling to leave a bright splinter of raw wood protruding from a beam.

  There was silence.

  The killer was in the house. He had come into the house for what? Probably to determine the outcome of his night’s work. So in a second or two he would turn over Gillespie’s body and find he had killed the wrong man. He had surely been after me, no one else.

  So what would he do? Flee? Or search the house? Either way I knew I should move. Get out! Into the dark wetlands where this lethal marksman could not see me. Yet to move would be to make a noise and attract his attention. Christ! Why had I not hidden the carbine in the truck? I tensed myself ready to move, but fear kept me still. If I gave the man a half-second to react I would be dead because this assassin was good, very good.

  Then I heard an odd scraping noise from the far end of the living room. I was unsighted, nor did I intend to move and see just what was making the noise. Was the man dragging Callaghan’s body away?

  Then there was a terrible splintering crash, and a moan, then silence. I waited. The cold wind sighed at the broken window and I could smell the bitter smell of propellant in the house.

  “Oh, fock,” said the voice, and groaned.

  I moved. Very slowly. First I stood, then I took a half-pace forward so I could see into the living room.

  And there he was; slumped against the far wall. He had collapsed and his rifle had fallen a couple of feet from his right hand. He was wearing a black sweater, black trousers, black leather gloves, black shoes and a black balaclava helmet which showed only his eyes and mouth. The black sweater and trousers seemed to glisten at his belly, and I realised that Stuart Callaghan, with his first dying shot, had badly wounded the killer.

  He saw me and his hand twitched towards the rifle, but the movement gave him a spasm of pain. He cursed, not in anger, but in resignation. “Oh, fock,” he said again.

  “Hello, Seamus.” I crossed the room and kicked his rifle away, then stooped and picked up Callaghan’s fallen automatic.