* * *
In the back street, one person wouldn’t hear the blast at all and that person was Cookie Hughes, who’d made what would prove to be the single fully successful run of the night, back to his bed where he cowered beneath the sheet. He’d been with the others when the single shot from the classic Beretta Model 1934 automatic pistol rang out. He’d seen, over the rooftops, the flash of light from the Quiet Man’s flash-banger and he’d heard Beau’s triumphant cheer. And he’d taken to his heels.
The fact that none of the others had tried to stop him, he took as a sign of their approval. Not that he needed anyone’s approval. Nor did Beau the Bum who, on hearing the second shot, redoubled his efforts with the ropes and thought thoughts very similar to those of Riff and the Quiet Man and the Duke - to stop him now, they’d have to kill him!
After the Shot
In the bedroom of the Duchy, the Duchess blinked with surprise. She was flat on her back on the floor. Something - (that noise! What on earth had it been?) - had knocked her heels over head off her stool!
“Ralph?” she said tentatively and heard not a thing - not even her own voice.
“Ralph?”
All her ears brought her was the enormous, continuing reverberation of the explosion. Her eyes, however, discovered a pool of light moving across the ceiling. And beneath it, rising from a position level with her own, the brilliant halogen arc of her husband’s head lamp - presumably still attached to her husband’s head. She looked back to the ceiling and followed the pool as it crept to the architrave, slipped down onto the wall and finally settled on a grapefruit-sized hole that had appeared in the bedroom wall.
“Oh!” she thought. “Well that’s going to be a nuisance!”
A moment later, she herself became the centrepiece of the pool of light. Not an entirely unpleasant experience. She tugged feebly at the hem of her nightie and smiled.
“Holy White Man, Enid!” the Duke was hollering over her. She couldn’t hear a word of it, nor could she see the contortions of his face behind the flare of light. “You cocked it! I didn’ tell you to cock it!”
She added a nod to the smile, assuming it would mollify any concerns he might have and, “Yes yes,” she whispered. “I’m fine. Just resting for a moment. You carry on, dear.” And she reached up to pat the light.
Truth to tell, she was a little grateful when he left the room, left her in peace. A fine man, but a little intense by times. What she liked to think of as ‘a handful’. She folded her hands on her breast and closed her eyes.
Happily, she couldn’t hear the barrage of dog noise that the detonation had re-ignited somewhere in the house. Less happily she, like the Duke, failed to remember that the ancient shotgun’s second chamber was also loaded. And that the hammer she’d so diligently cocked still hovered menacingly over the remaining shell.
Neville the Less Page 66