Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  From the floor, Daphne said, ‘I’ve been in many amateur dramatic productions and my experience is, as Sod’s Law, or maybe it’s God’s Law, states, something always goes wrong. What do we do then?’

  ‘Improvise,’ said Ellie. ‘Anything else.’

  Feenie said, ‘One suggestion. I am normally totally opposed to drug abuse in any form, but I think on this occasion a little artificial stimulus to our perceptions and reactions might be useful.’

  She stooped, dipped a finger into the spilled coke put it to her nose, and sniffed. Then, taking a handful, she went round the others like a priestess round her acolytes, offering each of them it in turn.

  Mrs Stonelady shook her head, but all the others partook.

  Ellie sniffed long and deep.

  It felt good. She felt good.

  She looked down. She looked good.

  Her breasts were firm, her nipples engorged.

  She said, ‘I shall wound every man, no man shall wound me.’

  Then, screaming hysterically, she opened the door and staggered outside.

  xx

  Liberata liberata

  It was like stepping into a black hole.

  She must have got used to the light coming through the huge window in the main chamber, adjusting as it thickened with the onset of evening and the storm. By contrast the anteroom through which they had entered the pavilion was in darkness, accentuated rather than diluted by the dull grey square of the window in the door.

  The door.

  The door that led to the outside world.

  It would be easy to open it and run free into the night. The storm would make it almost impossible for them to find her. She could salve her conscience by sticking her head back into the big chamber and inviting the others to follow. Except of course that two were wounded and Kelly Cornelius was in the hands of Jorge and Big Ajax.

  Curiously, these pros and cons didn’t enter her mind in the form of a debate. There was never a second when she seriously considered escape. Perhaps it was the coke, perhaps her own adrenalin, but the only reason she thought about them at all was that, in stark contrast to the darkness around her, her brain was lit with the clarity of a tropical noon.

  Nor did her thoughts occupy any significant portion of time. She didn’t need either thought or sight to register that the anteroom and the kitchen were empty, and she was staggering down the steps into the cellar, sobbing and wailing, without the slightest perceptible physical pause.

  There was light down here, shed by a pair of hurricane lamps, the kind of light sought by horror-film directors for dungeon scenes, and there was enough horror here for the most gothic of tastes.

  The low ceiling room was full of boxes and chests, presumably containing the arms that Popeye had sold to Chiquillo. Across one of these lay Kelly Cornelius, naked, her face and body pied with blood, her arms twisted above her head by Big Ajax while Jorge knelt before her with his pistol barrel thrust deep between her legs.

  Don’t react, Ellie told herself. You’re in shock, you’ve got nothing left for anyone else, you’re so deep in shock you’ll even ask animals like these for assistance.

  Jorge had dragged the pistol out of Kelly’s body and was pointing the bloodstained muzzle at Ellie.

  ‘Help me…’ she sobbed, ‘oh help…he’s gone mad…please…please…please help…or he’ll kill everyone…’

  Jorge looked for a moment like he might think it wasn’t such a bad idea. Then he started jabbering in Spanish so rapid she couldn’t pick out more than the odd pronoun, and came towards her, pushing at her with his weapon. Behind him, Big Ajax hauled Kelly to her feet. Ellie was able to register with relief that she still had enough strength to take a couple of staggering paces before Jorge spun her round and prodded her back towards the stairs.

  So far so good, she told herself. But the big test was yet to come. Daphne was probably right, Sod’s or God’s Law would be invoked and something was bound to go wrong – Wendy might miss, Feenie might not be able to cope with Jorge as easily as she thought – and as the only able-bodied woman available (Mrs Stonelady didn’t count and Daphne could hardly be expected to hurl Little Ajax’s bulk to one side and join the fray), she had to be ready to lend a hand wherever it was most needed.

  What would happen if Sod and God combined and everything went wrong she didn’t care to contemplate.

  They were back up the stairs, Jorge was pushing her through into the viewing chamber and the show was on the road.

  It looked good, she thought, not without a soupçon of self-congratulation; in fact, it looked just like she’d envisaged it, a disaster zone – the ripped coke package trailing powder over the floor – Wendy cowering against the wall next to Novello with her wounded leg prominently displayed – Mrs Stonelady sitting as still and as harmless as a garden gnome – and Feenie looking about two hundred years old, teetering in helpless protest over the pièce de résistance of Daphne (what a trouper!) screaming and thrashing under the bulk of Little Ajax which she was flinging around in a facsimile of frenetic fornication which Ellie suspected was well outside his range in life.

  And Jorge’s reactions were straight out of her script too. With a high-pitched cry of rage he threw Ellie aside and ran to the couple on the floor, where he began beating Little Ajax over the head with his gun.

  Ellie moved to the centre of the room to make sure she wasn’t interfering with Wendy’s line of fire. But when she looked towards the woman, she didn’t see a gun, only a look of anguished frustration on her face. A glance over her shoulder revealed the cause. Big Ajax was standing as precisely on his allocated spot as an old pro actor on his chalk mark, but he had his arms wrapped around Kelly and was pressing her hard against his body, clearly enjoying this chance to cop a feel. If she were anything like as good as she claimed to be, surely Wendy would have no difficulty in putting a bullet into that broad skull, thought Ellie. At the same time, she could see how the idea of missing and blowing a hole in the person you were trying to rescue might give even the crackest of shots a moment of self-doubt.

  But it was now or never. Jorge’s rage could not blind him much longer to the fact that even a sexually absorbed Little Ajax ought to be showing just a little more response to having his head beaten to a pulp.

  Ellie glowered at Wendy and hissed, ‘Do it!’

  The woman began to withdraw the gun from behind the recumbent Novello.

  And at that moment, like the sound from without a tilt-yard which announces the arrival of a new contender to enter the lists, a horn blared, long and hard, and light poured through the anteroom window and spilled over into the viewing chamber.

  It was the truck horn and headlights. Luis and Popeye were back. The odds had swung against them dramatically.

  There was a moment when they might still have done it. If Wendy had shot Big Ajax… if Feenie had attacked Jorge… but they both froze, waiting for the other. Then the horn sounded again and Big Ajax, still with his arms round Kelly, retreated into the anteroom and the moment was past.

  The only plus was Daphne, who must be a wow in her local dramatic society, thought Ellie.

  Sensing Jorge’s attack on Little Ajax’s head was winding down, and seeing puzzlement replacing anger on his face, she had let out one huge last scream, rolled the body off her and scrabbling to her knees sobbed, ‘Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, you’ve killed him, I think you’ve killed him, thank you,’ then hurled herself at the dead man, beating his face with her fists in a marvellous simulacrum of fury.

  The Cojo felt Little Ajax’s pulse, dropped the limp hand in disgust and turned to snarl, ‘Es muerto,’ at Big Ajax in the anteroom. That got his attention. There was a pause, then a crash as the big man let Kelly slump to the floor. Now he was unprotected as he strode back into the viewing chamber, but the clear shot offered was useless as Jorge had moved away from Feenie to check just how much of his precious coke had been lost from the grip.

  Outside the horn was sounding a third
blast. It went on even longer this time before it fell silent.

  Big Ajax stooped, grunting with the effort, to check Little Ajax out. It was rather touching really. Perhaps they were related. Daphne kept up her posthumous attack on his head. Another house point to the archdeacon’s daughter. It wasn’t a good idea to let either of these two get close enough to that end of Little Ajax to work out how he’d actually died. But Big Ajax was no respecter of female priorities, or maybe he knew something about Little Ajax’s sexual proclivities that no one else did.

  He pushed Daphne aside and stooped to examine his comrade’s head and neck. When he rose his gaze went slowly round the room, then he stepped close to the window to take a look at the pattern of bullet strikes.

  He knows something’s wrong, thought Ellie as the big man turned from the window and let his gaze move systematically over the room once more.

  Oh shit! He’s looking for the gun!

  Now his own weapon was raised and ready and as he moved to join Jorge, he was keeping everyone in the room in plain sight.

  The two men began to speak together, or rather Big Ajax spoke and Jorge listened, anger returning to his features.

  Thank you Sod and God, raged Ellie. Just for once couldn’t you have stayed out of things and let us mortals sort our fates out by ourselves?

  At that moment they heard the outside door open and Popeye’s voice said, ‘Oh Jesus, Mary mother of God.’

  He’s seen Kelly, thought Ellie. Perhaps the sight of what Jorge’s done to her will get him on our side. She felt a new stirring of hope and moved slightly so that through the doorway she could see the two new arrivals stooping over the bloodstained figure on the floor. They spoke together then, to her surprise, it was Popeye who straightened up and came into the viewing chamber. Behind him she could see a rear view of the baseball-capped figure of Luis still stooping. He was taking his coat off to make a pillow, then peeling his shirt off also to wrap around Kelly. This unexpected concern from the Cojo turned her stirring of hope into a positive tremor. If they were both horrified by what Jorge had done to Kelly, maybe…

  Popeye was so wet he’d have made a drowned rat look dry. So much water was still cascading off his coat he could have modelled for one of those stormcloud symbols on the weather forecast. But there was nothing stormy in his demeanour.

  He looked at Jorge, smiled broadly, and said, ‘You look like you’ve been having fun. Me, I’ve just been getting wet. Jesus, but a man could drown out there standing up. I swear the ground’s boggier than Connemara and I was just telling Luis here that I reckon we could be in trouble when we’ve got the truck fully loaded.’

  Ellie’s hope died away. Not even a token remonstrance about the treatment meted out to his ‘niece’! All the bastard was worried about was his sodding drugs.

  Why should she have expected more? Popeye was a realist. Jorge was calling the shots here, and with that little psycho, she guessed there would be only one outcome. She should have taken her chance to run. Being loyal to the others had made her feel good but she saw now it meant being disloyal to Rosie and Peter. There had to be priorities, and just because the two most important people in her life were away and safe didn’t mean she was entitled to act exactly as she wanted, perhaps not even in the pages of her fictions. Hostages to fortune weren’t just a man’s prerogative. And it was now small consolation to think that Smartass Novello had been right and this after all had been her own adventure, nothing to do with Peter’s job, and all the trouble tracking to their door was down to little old Ellie.

  And yet she could not see how she might have acted differently.

  She noticed that Jorge was looking at Popeye with speculative surprise. As if he hadn’t expected to see him return? If Popeye got that message too… but she was grasping straws.

  Jorge made a dismissive gesture and returned his attention to Big Ajax who was still talking.

  When at last he fell silent, Jorge slowly raised his weapon, holding it at arm’s length, and moving towards Feenie till it was almost touching her head.

  ‘Luis, get yourself in here,’ he called. ‘Now, ladies, the one who has the gun has three seconds to hand it over or you start dying, the oldest first. Uno… dos…’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ screamed Daphne at Wendy Woolley. ‘Either give him the gun or shoot the bastard!’

  And at the same moment, Luis came through the door.

  Or rather the man wearing Luis’s baseball cap came through the door.

  His appearance hit Ellie with shock.

  Beneath the long peak of the cap she saw a narrow hollow-cheeked face with a thin moustache. She knew she’d seen it before but that wasn’t the source of the shock.

  Naked to the waist, having used his outer garments to minister to Kelly, his torso was skinny to the point of emaciation with a long half-healed wound running along the lower right ribcage.

  And he had breasts.

  Not large, scarcely bigger than a couple of Cox’s pippins, but definitely indisputably breasts.

  Jesus Christ, it’s St Uncumber come to save us! thought Ellie.

  And as if that was indeed her purpose, with an animal cry of rage, the ambiguous newcomer hurled herself at Jorge.

  She had a gun in her hand. Perhaps it jammed. Or perhaps her anger was such as could not be satisfied except by direct physical contact. If that was the case, she might have paid dear if Feenie hadn’t seized the opportunity offered by Jorge’s distraction to grab the man’s gun hand and twist the little finger till it broke with a crack like a dry twig.

  Jorge screamed, the gun fell, and then the avenging fury was on him, driving him back against the window beyond which the storm blustered and raged as if in frustration at being debarred from the mortal struggle within.

  At the same time, Popeye had produced a pistol and started firing at Big Ajax.

  The Irishman didn’t look at home with the weapon and in fact seemed to be firing with his eyes shut. But such a large target was hard to miss and most of his rounds seemed to strike home, till Big A.’s chest was a cirque of blood.

  Yet still he stood there, showing no pain, like that Balder, son of Odin, whose mother Frigga obtained from all things, stone and metal and wood, a promise that they would never hurt her son, save only the mistletoe which in the end killed him.

  He was, though, finding it difficult to bring his own weapon to bear. Each time his huge right hand tried to raise it, he took another shot from Popeye and the muzzle remained pointing harmlessly down. Then the Irishman’s gun fell silent.

  All this took only a few seconds, yet to Ellie it seemed as drawn out as the climactic shoot-out scene in one of those spaghetti westerns Peter loved to watch on the telly.

  And now, as Popeye desperately began to search his pockets for more ammunition, Big Ajax finally brought his gun up to waist level, the wavering barrel trembled to a halt, and his trigger finger began to squeeze the trigger.

  With a scream of something, she didn’t know what, and with no conscious thought at all, Ellie flung herself forward, scooping up en route the splintered leg of the chair Little Ajax had wrecked, and drove it into the bloody target of the gunman’s chest.

  It must have been mistletoe. He went over backwards at the merest touch and lay quite still.

  She stood over him, feeling shock and triumph in equal parts, then looked around.

  Crazy laughter tried to struggle up from her belly at what she saw. The two wounded women, Shirley and Wendy, huddled against the wall – Daphne, her clothes torn and dishevelled, curled up like a woodlouse behind the protective bulk of Little Ajax’s corpse – St Uncumber wrestling with Jorge in front of the storm-beaten window with Feenie hovering over them, like some demented harpie waiting to snatch her prey – Mrs Stonelady still sitting in a corner like a curious garden gnome – and herself, naked to the waist, triumphing over her fallen foe with a bloody stake in her hand – it was like the climax of some crazy gothic movie – Reservoir Maenads, co-directed by Taranti
no and Ken Russell.

  But it wasn’t over yet. And it still might not end happy ever after.

  For Uncumber was losing. Whatever deeply felt emotion fuelled her hate, it wasn’t enough to compensate for long the weakness caused by her unhealed wound and the deprivations suffered by her emaciated body.

  As Ellie watched, the Cojo punched her hard in the throat and drove her off him, flinging her backwards, and her flailing arms caught at Feenie and brought her crashing down too.

  Now Jorge rolled to the side and came up clutching his gun.

  Ellie had no doubt of his intention now. No more Mr Nice Guy, he was simply going to kill them all.

  She looked desperately at Popeye, but his search for new ammo had been in vain.

  She screamed her fury once more at Sod/God for letting them get so close.

  Then from the corner of her eye she saw Wendy Woolley finally draw the hidden gun from behind poor pale Shirley Novello, take aim, and fire.

  Upright, unwounded, in the unthreatening depths of the security practice range, she might have been a crackshot.

  Here she was just good enough to get close, and close got you no cigar.

  The bullet missed Jorge’s head by a fraction small enough to make him flinch before it flattened itself against the window.

  Then he smiled and levelled his weapon down at Feenie and St Uncumber.

  Cue God or Sod, thought Ellie desperately. Only direct divine intervention can save us now.

  And behind Jorge, Mungo Macallum’s precious reinforced glass which had hitherto withstood all that man or nature could throw at it, decided that this last bullet was a bullet too far.

  The storm outside, as if sensing this weakness and tired of being upstaged by the battle within, hurled its full force at the crazing glass. It bent, it bulged, it broke with an explosion which seemed to rumble forever like a huge cannonade, and with a scream that didn’t need a Greek poet or pantheon of gods to make it sound triumphant, the raging wind and the turbulent sea came in.