The Gun Seller

by Hugh Laurie

  I ran through the cupboards first, trying to guess whether a sizeable chunk of Sarah's clothes had gone. There were a few empty hangers here and there, but not enough to indicate an orderly departure to a far-away place.

  The dressing-table had a scattering of pots and brushes on it. Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.

  The drawers of the dressing-table contained more of the same. All the tools and lubricants necessary to keep a modern Formula 1 woman on the road. But definitely no file.

  I closed them all and walked through to the adjoining bathroom. The silk dressing-gown Sarah had worn when I first saw her was hanging on the back of the door. There was a toothbrush in the rack over the basin.

  I walked back through to the bedroom and looked around, hoping for a sign of something. I mean, not an actual sign -1 wasn't expecting an address scrawled in lipstick on the mirror - but I'd hoped for something, something that should have been there and wasn't, or shouldn't have been there and was. But there was no sign, and yet something was wrong. I had to stand in the middle of the room and listen for a while before I realised what it was.

  I couldn't hear the two lambs talking. That was wrong. They ought to have plenty of things to say to each other. After all, I was Dalloway, and Dalloway was a new element in their lives; they should have been talking about me.

  I crossed to the window and looked down into the street. The door of the Ford was open, and it looked like the whisky lamb's leg sticking out of it. He was on the radio. I got the phone out of bed and put it back on the hook, and as I did so I automatically opened the draw of the bedside-table. It was a small drawer, but it seemed to contain more than the rest of the room. I rummaged through the packets of paper tissues, the cotton-wool, the paper tissues, the pairs of nail scissors, the half-eaten bar of Suchard chocolate, the paper tissues, the pens, the tweezers, the paper tissues, the paper tissues - do women eat these fucking things or what? - and there, at the bottom of the drawer, nestling on a bed of paper tissues, was a heavy bundle wrapped in a strip of chamois leather. Sarah's fetching little Walther TPH. I popped out the magazine and checked the slot down the side. Full.

  I slipped the gun into my pocket, took another deep breath of Nina Ricci, and left.

  Things had changed amongst the lambs since I'd last spoken to them. Definitely for the worse. The front door was open, Micky was leaning against the wall next to it with his right hand in his pocket, and I could see Whisky standing on the steps outside, looking up and down the street. He turned when he heard me on the stairs.

  'Nothing,' I said, and then remembered I was supposed to be American. 'Not a goddamn thing. Shut the door will you?'

  'Two questions,' said Micky.

  'Yeah?' I said. 'Make it fast.'

  'Who the fuck is Dave Carter?'

  There didn't seem to be much point my telling him that Dave Carter had been under-sixteen fives champion at school, and that he'd gone on to work for his father's electrical engineering company in Hove. So I said, 'What's the second question?'

  Micky glanced across at Whisky, who'd come up to the door and got himself very much in the way of my exit.

  'Who the fuck are you?'

  'Dalloway,' I said. 'Want me to write it down for you? What the hell is the matter with you guys?' I slipped my right hand into my pocket and saw Micky's right hand move in his. If he decided to kill me, I knew I would never even hear the shot. Still, I'd managed to get my hand into my right pocket. Just a pity that I'd put the Walther in the left. I brought my hand out again, slowly, with my fist closed. Micky was watching me like a snake.

  'Goodwin says he's never heard of you. He never sent anybody. Never told anybody we were here.'

  'Goodwin is a lazy son-of-a-bitch who's way out of his depth,' I said, irritably. 'What the hell has he got to do with it?'

  'Nothing at all,' said Micky. 'Want to know why?'

  I nodded. 'Yes, I want to know why.'

  Micky smiled. He had terrible teeth. 'Because he doesn't exist,' he said. 'I made him up.'

  Well, there you are. I'd been Looped. As ye sew, so shall ye knit.

  'I'm going to ask you again,' he said, starting towards me. 'Who are you?'

  I let my shoulders slump. The game was up. I held my wrists out in front of me in a 'handcuff me, officer' gesture.

  'You want to know my name?' I said.

  'Yeah.'

  The reason they never heard it was because we were interrupted by an ear-drum-splitting howl of incredible intensity. The sound bounced off the floor and ceiling of the hallway and came back twice as strong, rocking the brain and blurring the eyes.

  Micky winced and backed away along the wall, and Whisky started to lift his hands to his ears. In the half second they gave me, I ran for the open door and hit Whisky in the chest with my right shoulder. He bounced back and fell against the railings, as I turned left and took off down the street at a speed I hadn't travelled at since I was sixteen. If I could get twenty yards away from the Airweight, I'd have a chance.

  To be honest, I don't know if they fired at me. After the unbelievable sound from Ronnie's little brass canister, my ears were in no state to process that kind of information.

  All I know is they didn't rape me.

  Eleven

  There is no sin except stupidity.

  OSCAR WILDE

  Ronnie took us back to her flat off the King's Road, and we drove past it a dozen times in each direction. We weren't checking for surveillance, just looking for a place to park. This was the time of day when Londoners who own cars, and that's most of them, pay heavily for their indulgence - time stands still, or goes backwards, or does some fucking thing that doesn't correspond with the ordinary rules of the universe - and all those TV commercials showing sexy sportsters being flung about deserted country roads start to irritate you a little. They don't irritate me, of course, because I ride a bike. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.

  When she'd finally managed to squeeze the TVR into a space, we discussed taking a taxi back to her flat, but decided that it was a nice enough evening and we both fancied the walk. Or rather, Ronnie fancied the walk. People like Ronnie always fancy the walk, and people like me always fancy people like Ronnie, so we each put on a stout pair of walking legs and set off. On the way, I gave her a brief account of the Lyall Street session, and she listened in rapt near-silence. She hung on my words in a way that people, particularly women, don't usually hang. They usually let go, twist their ankle in the fall, and blame me for it.

  But Ronnie was different somehow. Different because she seemed to think that I was different.

  When we finally made it back to her flat, she unlocked the front door, stood to one side, and asked, in a strangely little-girl voice, if I wouldn't mind going in first. I looked at her for a moment. I think perhaps she wanted to gauge how serious the whole thing was, as if she still wasn't quite sure of it or me; so I put on a grim expression and went through the flat in what I hoped was a Clint Eastwoody sort of a way - pushing open doors with my foot, opening cupboards suddenly -while she stood in the corridor, her cheeks spotted with red.

  In the kitchen, I said, 'Oh God.'

  Ronnie gave a gasp, and then ran forward and peered round the door-jamb.

  'Is this bolognese?' I said, and held up a wooden spoonful of something old and badly misjudged.

  She tutted at me and then laughed with relief, and I laughed too, and we suddenly seemed like very old friends. Close, even. So obviously, I had to ask her.

  'When's he coming back?'

  She looked at me, and blushed a little, then went back to scraping bolognese from the saucepan.

  'When's who coming back?'

  'Ronnie,' I said. I moved round until I was more or less in front of her. 'You're very well put together, but you do not take a size forty-four chest. And if you did, you wouldn't take it i
n a lot of identical pin-stripe suits.'

  She glanced towards the bedroom, remembering the cupboards, and then went to the sink and started to run hot water into the pan.

  'Drink?' she said, without turning round.

  She broke out a bottle of vodka while I threw ice-cubes over the kitchen floor, and eventually she decided to tell me that the boyfriend, who, as I think I could probably have guessed, sold commodities in the City, didn't stay at the flat every night, and when he did he never got there before ten. Honestly, if I'd had a pound for every time a woman has told me that, I'd have at least three by now. The last time it happened, the boyfriend came back at seven o'clock - 'He's never done that before,' - and hit me with a chair.

  I deduced from her tone, and from her words too, that the relationship was not going as swimmingly as it might and, in spite of my curiosity, I thought it probably best to change the subject.

  As we settled ourselves on the sofa, with the ice-cubes making sweet music inside the glasses, I started to give her a slightly fuller version of events - starting with Amsterdam, and ending with Lyall Street, but leaving out the bit about helicopters and Graduate Studies. Even so, it was a goodish yarn, with plenty of derring-do, and I added some derring-didn't-really-but-it-sounds-good, just to keep up her glowing opinion of me. When I'd finished, she wrinkled her brow slightly.

  'But you didn't find the file,' she asked, looking disappointed.

  'Nope,' I said. 'Which doesn't mean it isn't there. If Sarah really wanted to hide it in the house, it would take a team of builders about a week to search the place properly.'

  'Well, I went over the gallery, and there's definitely nothing there. She's left some paperwork around, but it's all just work stuff.' She went over to the table and opened her briefcase. 'I did find her diary, if that's any good.'

  I don't know if she was serious about this. She must have read enough Agatha Christies to know that finding diaries is almost always good.

  But maybe not Sarah's. It was a leather-bound A4-sized affair, produced by a cystic fibrosis charity, and it didn't tell me much about its owner that I couldn't have guessed. She took her work seriously, lunched a little, didn't put circles instead of dots above her 'i's, but did doodle cats when she was on the phone. She hadn't made many plans for the months ahead, and the last entry simply said 'CED OK 7.30'. Looking back over the previous weeks, I saw that CED had also been OK three times before, once at 7.30 and twice at 12.15.

  'Any idea who this is?' I said to Ronnie, showing her the entry. 'Charlie? Colin? Carl, Clive, Clarissa, Carmen?' I dried up on women's names beginning with 'C.

  Ronnie frowned.

  'Why would she write a middle initial?'

  'Beats me,' I said.

  'I mean, if the name's Charlie Dunce, why not write CD?'

  I looked down at the page.

  'Charlie Etherington-Dunce? God knows. That's your patch.'

  'What's that supposed to mean?' She was surprisingly quick to take offence.

  'Sorry, I just mean . . . you know, I imagine you pass the time of day with double-barrelled sorts . . . ' I tailed off. I could see Ronnie didn't like this.

  'Yes, and I've got a poncy voice, and a poncy job, and my boyfriend works in the city.' She got up and went to pour herself another vodka. She didn't offer me one, and I had the definite feeling that I was paying for someone else's crimes.

  'Look, I'm sorry,' I said. 'I didn't mean anything by it.'

  'I can't help the way I sound, Thomas,' she said. 'Or the way I look.' She took a belt of vodka and kept her back to me.

  'What's to help? You sound great, you look even better.'

  'Oh, shut up.'

  'In a minute,' I said. 'Why are you so cross about it?'

  She sighed and sat down again.

  'Because it bores me, that's why. Half the people I meet never take me seriously because of the way I talk, and the other half only take me seriously because of the way I talk. Gets on your nerves after a while.'

  'Well, I know this is going to sound pretty oily, but I take you seriously.'

  'Do you?'

  'Of course I do. Incredibly seriously.' I waited a bit. 'Doesn't bother me that you're a stuck-up bitch.'

  She looked at me for a longish moment, in the course of which I started to think that maybe I'd got it wrong, and she was about to throw something. Then suddenly she laughed, and shook her head, and I felt a lot better. I hoped she did.

  At about six o'clock the phone rang, and I could tell from the way Ronnie held the receiver that it was the boyfriend announcing his arrival time. She stared at the floor and said yeah a lot, either because I was in the room, or because their relationship had reached that stage. I picked up my jacket and carried my glass through to the kitchen. I washed and dried it, in case she forgot to, and was putting it back in the cupboard when Ronnie appeared.

  'Will you call me?' She looked a bit sad. Perhaps I did, too.

  'You bet,' I said.

  I left her chopping onions in preparation for the commodity broker's return, and let myself out of the flat. Apparently the arrangement was that she made supper for him, and he made breakfast for her. Considering Ronnie was the sort of person to call a couple of grapefruit segments a major blow-out, I suspect that he'd got the better of the deal.

  Honestly. Men.

  A cab took me along the King's Road into the West End and by half past six I was loitering outside the Ministry of Defence. A couple of policemen watched me as I paced up and down, but I'd armed myself with a map and a disposable camera, and was taking pictures of pigeons in a gormless enough way to put their minds at rest. I'd had a lot more suspicion from the shopkeeper when I asked him for a map and said I didn't care which town it was of,

  I'd made no other preparations for the trip, and I certainly hadn't wanted to have my voice logged on any incoming call to the Ministry. I was taking a chance on my reading of O'Neal as a swot and, from my first reconnaissance, it looked as if I'd got it right. Seventh floor, corner office, O'Neal's midnight oil was burning brightly. The regulation net curtains that hang in the windows of all 'sensitive' government buildings might defeat a telephoto lens, but they can't stop light from showing in the street.

  Once upon a time, in the heady days of the Cold War, a twit in one of the supervising security branches had decreed that all 'targetable' offices should leave their lights on twenty-four hours a day, to prevent enemy agents from tracking who was at work where, and for how long. The idea was greeted at the time with nods of the head and pats on the back and many a murmured 'that fellow Carruthers will go a long way, mark my words' - until, that is, the electricity bills started flopping on to the mats of the relevant finance sections, whereupon the idea, and Carruthers, had been shown the door pretty smartly.

  O'Neal emerged from the main door of the Ministry at ten minutes past seven. He gave a nod to the security guard, who ignored him, and stepped out into the Whitehall dusk. He was carrying a briefcase, which was odd - because nobody would have let him out of the building with anything more important than a few sheets of lavatory paper - so maybe he was one of those strange people who use a briefcase as a prop. I don't know.

  I let him get a few hundred yards away from the Ministry before I started after him, and I had to work hard to keep my pace down, because O'Neal walked peculiarly slowly. One might have thought that he was enjoying the weather, if there'd been any to enjoy.

  It wasn't until he crossed The Mall and started to speed up that I realised he'd been promenading; playing the part of the Whitehall tiger on the prowl, master of all he surveyed, privy to mighty secrets of state, any one of which would blow the socks off the average gawping tourist if he or she but knew. Once he'd stepped out of the jungle and on to the open savannah, the act wasn't really worth bothering with, so he walked normally. O'Neal was a man you could feel sorry for, if you had the time.

  I don't know why, but I'd expected him to go straight home. I'd imagined a terraced house in Putney, where a long
suffering wife would feed him sherry and baked cod and iron his shirts while he grunted and shook his head at the television news, as if every word of it had an extra, darker, meaning for him. Instead, he skipped up the steps past the ICA, into Pall Mall and the Travellers Club.

  There was no point in my trying anything there. I watched through the glass doors while O'Neal asked the porter to check his pigeon-hole, which was empty, and when I saw him shrug off his coat and move into the bar I judged it safe to leave him for a while.

  I bought chips and a hamburger from a stall on the Haymarket and wandered a while, chewing as I went, watching people in bright shirts shuffle in to see musical shows that seemed to have been running for as long as I'd been alive. A depression started to drift down on to my shoulders as I walked, and I realised, with a jolt, that I was doing exactly the same thing as O'Neal - looking on my fellow man with a weary, cynical, 'you poor saps, if only you knew' feeling. I snapped myself out of it and threw the hamburger in a bin.

  He came out at half past eight, and walked up the Haymarket to Piccadilly. From there he carried on up Shaftesbury Avenue, then took a left turn into Soho, where the tinkle of theatre-going chatter gave way to the bassier throbs of chic bars and strip joints. Huge moustaches with men hanging off the back loitered about in doorways, murmuring things about 'sexy shows' as I passed.

  O'Neal was also being hustled by the doormen, but he seemed to know where he was going and didn't once turn his head to the advertised wares. Instead, he jinked left and right a few times, never looking back, until he reached his oasis, The Shala. He turned and walked straight in.

  I kept going until the end of the street, dawdled for a minute, then headed back to admire The Shala's intriguing facade. The words 'Live', 'Girls', 'Erotic', 'Dancing' and 'Sexy' were painted round the door in a random fashion, as if inviting you to try and make a sentence out of them, and there were half-a-dozen faded snaps of women in their underwear pinned up in a glass case. A girl in a tight leather skirt lolled in the doorway, and I smiled at her in a way that said I was from Norway and yes, The Shala looked like just the place to refresh oneself after a hard day being Norwegian. I could just as easily have yelled that I was coming in there right now with a flamethrower, I doubt whether she would have batted an eyelid. Or could have batted it, under the weight of all that mascara.