Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,128
learn how much I knew. What should I tell him? Did it matter?
‘To put inside the horses,’ I said. ‘Full of drugs.’
The effect was quite startling. He went very pale and his hand shook a little.
‘Who knows this?’ he said in a higher pitch than his usual tone.
‘Everyone,’ I said. ‘I told the police.’ I didn’t expect this comment to save me; quite the reverse. But I hoped it might now be a quicker, less painful death.
‘That was very careless of you,’ he said, returning somewhat to his normal voice. ‘For that you will die.’ I was going to die anyway. No change.
He started to walk around behind me. Good, I thought, he is going to shoot me in the back of the head. Much cleaner and much better not to see it coming. I would just be… gone.
As Komarov passed my shoulder, Caroline stepped through the open doorway and hit him squarely in the face with her viola. She swung the instrument through the air with both hands, using the neck and fingerboard as a handle. Such was the force of the blow that poor dear Viola was damaged beyond repair. Her neck was broken and her body shattered, but, more importantly for me, Komarov went down to the ground semi-conscious. Caroline herself was both hyperventilating and crying at the same time.
‘Quick,’ I shouted at her. ‘Get a knife.’ She looked at me. ‘From the sideboard,’ I shouted. ‘Top drawer on the left.’ She went straight to the sideboard and came back with a nice sharp, serrated steak knife. I didn’t usually give my customers steak knives as I thought doing so was an admission that my steaks were tough, but we kept a few, just in case. Thank goodness we did. Even so Caroline had difficulty cutting through the tape around my wrist. But she managed out of sheer desperation, hurried along by the imminent reawakening of the terror at our feet.
Finally, she freed my left hand.
‘Quick,’ I said again. ‘Grab his gun and give it to me.’
Komarov had fallen but he had not let go of his pistol completely. Caroline went down and grabbed it out of his hand just as he was beginning to recover. She gave it to me, smiled wanly, and went on trying to free me from the chair. Suddenly I remembered the explosive. Where was the remote-detonator switch? Was it in Komarov’s pocket?
Caroline sawed away at the tape round my legs but she was too slow. Komarov was fully awake and watching, a line of blood running from his nose, across his mouth, and on down his neck. He put his hand up to his face and winced. I think Caroline must have broken his nose.
‘Stay where you are,’ I said, pointing the gun at him.
He leaned on the floor with his left elbow and put his right hand in his pocket.
‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ I said.
He pulled his hand out again, but I could see that he now held a small flat black box, with a red button in the centre of it. Oh God, I thought, my legs. Would he push the switch? But he would surely kill himself as well? Should I shoot him? If I did, would he detonate the bomb? Would he detonate it if I didn’t?
I watched him and I could sense that he was weighing up his options. If I had indeed told the police, his empire was about to come crashing down. Perhaps he could escape back to Russia or to South America, but maybe the escape routes had already been closed. Life imprisonment in a British jail would almost certainly mean just that, the rest of his life behind bars. There would be no parole for such an act of terrorism as the Newmarket bombing.
I quite suddenly sensed that he was going to do it. He was going to blow us all up and end it here.
I leaned down between my legs, grabbed the wires and pulled the cigarette-sized detonator out of the explosive. I threw it across the dining room. Komarov pushed the red button but he was too late, the detonator exploded in mid-air with a harmless pop like a very loud champagne cork exploding from a bottle.
Komarov looked cheated, and he was in a rage. He began to stand up.
‘Stay where you are,’ I repeated. He ignored me and rose to his knees. ‘I’ll shoot you,’ I said. But he continued to rise.