Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,123

the other end. ‘I think that’s my phone.’

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘George Kealy,’ said the voice. ‘Is that you, Max?’

‘Yes, George,’ I said. ‘You left your phone in the gents.’

‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘Stupid fool. Sorry. I’ll come and get it if that’s OK.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But we’ll be locked so knock on the front door.’

‘Will do,’ he said, and hung up.

Richard came back in to report that all the customers had now gone and he was going too. ‘Oh,’ he said, turning back, ‘Jacek is still here, he wants a word with you. He’s waiting for you in the kitchen.’

‘Tell him to go home,’ I said. ‘I’ll see him in the morning.’

‘OK,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘I’ve already told him that once but he seemed very intent on waiting.’

‘Well, tell him again,’ I said. ‘He’s to go home now.’ I had no intention of going alone into the kitchen with Jacek there. I wasn’t at all sure I could trust him.

‘OK,’ he said again. ‘I’ll tell him.’

‘Come back to tell me when he’s gone,’ I said. ‘And, Richard, please make sure he leaves completely.’ I knew that Jacek rode a bicycle to and from his digs in the town. ‘Check he leaves on his bike.’

Richard looked at me somewhat strangely but nodded and went out.

There was a loud knock on the front door.

I went out into the entrance lobby between the bar and the dining room. I looked through the window into the car park. As expected, it was George Kealy. I had his phone in my hand.

I unlocked the door but it wasn’t George Kealy’s foot that crashed it open, sending me reeling backwards. It was another man, and he held an automatic pistol in his hand and he was pointing it right between my eyes. Mr Komarov, I presumed.

‘George tells me that you’re a very difficult man to kill, Mr Moreton,’ he said, advancing through the door.

CHAPTER 20

I retreated from the door into the entrance lobby. Komarov and George Kealy followed.

Richard came out of the dining room carrying a tray of dirty glasses from the last table. Komarov and I saw him at the same instant and, before I had a chance to shout a warning, Komarov swung the gun round and shot him. The noise of the report in the enclosed space was startling and I jumped. A crimson star appeared on the front of Richard’s white shirt, and there was a slight look of surprise on his face as he pitched forward. The bullet had caught him in the centre of his chest and I was convinced he was dead before he hit the floor. The metal tray he had been holding clattered noisily to the floor and all the glasses shattered, sending hundreds of fragments in all directions across the stone tiles.

The gun came unerringly back to point at me and I thought that this was it. He would surely kill me just as easily. Why shouldn’t he? He had tried twice before, why not a third time? The anger that I had channelled into my survival in my burning cottage rose again in me. I wasn’t going to just die without a fight.

Komarov saw the anger in me and read my intentions. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said in almost perfect English with just a hint of his native Russian accent that made the ‘think’ sound like ‘sink’.

I stood my ground and looked at him. He was a thick-set man in his mid-fifties, of about average height, with a full head of thick grey hair, well coiffured. I realized I knew him from before. He had been George and Emma Kealy’s guest here at the Hay Net the first Saturday after the bombing. I remembered that George had called Emma to go. ‘Peter and Tanya are waiting,’ he had said. Peter and Tanya, George Kealy’s friends, were actually Pyotr and Tatiana Komarov, smugglers, bombers and murderers.

I found it difficult to believe that George was not the friendly regular customer I knew so well. I looked at him but he didn’t seem to be embarrassed one bit by my predicament. He didn’t even appear shocked by what his friend had done to my head waiter. I continued to stare at him but he refused to look me in the eye. He simply appeared determined and resigned to the necessity of such actions.

‘I am going to kill you,’ Komarov said to me. I didn’t doubt it. ‘But before I do,’ he went on, ‘I