Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,130
the bottom shelf. He looked up at me but the broken nose, the bullet wound and the loss of blood had taken the fight out of him.
I could hear George coming back in through the scullery. So could Komarov.
‘George,’ he tried to shout, but it was little more than a croak.
I simply stepped behind the door and held it open as far as I could. I sensed, more than saw, George come into the kitchen and walk over to the cold-room. His gun appeared around the edge of the door then withdrew as he spotted Komarov inside. Then he walked in and I slammed the door shut behind him. I quickly replaced the skewer.
I heard George pushing the rod to try to open the door, but the skewer held it closed with ease. He fired the gun but there were about three inches of insulation between the stainless steel sides of the door and there was no chance of a bullet from a handgun penetrating that.
Now I only had Gary to deal with.
It took me a while to find him. He was leaning against one of the trees on the far side of the car park. He was no trouble. In fact, he wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone ever again, except perhaps to an undertaker. A fish filleter was embedded in his chest the full length of its thin, eight-inch razor-sharp blade. There was virtually no blood, just a slight trickle from the corner of his mouth. The knife looked to have pieced his heart and had probably stopped it beating almost instantly.
Who, I wondered, had done that? Surely not George Kealy. He wouldn’t have had the strength.
I spun around. There must be someone else here.
Caroline suddenly screamed from inside and I hared across the car park, back into the building via the scullery door, and through the kitchen. She was standing wide-eyed in the centre of the office, and she was not alone.
Jacek was standing in front of her, and he, too, was bleeding. Large drops of blood dripped continuously from all the fingers of his left hand on to the wooden floor below and made a bright red pool by his foot. Would this bloodletting ever end? I raised the gun but it wasn’t needed. Before I could say anything, he dropped to his knees and slowly rolled over on to his back. He had been shot in the shoulder.
Jacek, the man I hadn’t trusted, the kitchen porter of whom I had believed there was more to than met the eye, had been one of the good guys all the time, and he had undoubtedly saved my life.
The police arrived in the end. And an ambulance. Caroline had indeed called the emergency number but she had apparently been too shocked to make herself understood properly. The operator had finally traced the call and dispatched help.
First Jacek, then Caroline were conveyed to hospital. I was assured by the paramedics that they would be fine but that both would definitely be admitted overnight. Caroline was suffering badly from shock and, it appeared, would again miss out on her stay at the Bedford Lodge Hotel.
The police who had arrived in the first patrol car had no real idea how to proceed and, it seemed to me, they spent most of their time winding blue and white plastic POLICE – DO NOT CROSStape around everything while they waited for reinforcements.
I tried to leave in the ambulance with Caroline but was prevented from doing so by a policeman who took a break from his taping long enough to insist that I stay at the restaurant to make a statement.
So, instead, I went through the office and the bar to the lobby. Richard was still lying face down on the stone floor. I moved some of the glass fragments and kneeled down next to him. I was sure he was dead but I felt his left wrist just to make sure. There was no pulse and his skin was already noticeably cold to the touch. How could such a thing happen to my caring, reliable, head waiter? I knelt there for a while, resting my hand on his back as if I could give him some comfort in death, until one of the policemen came in and told me to please leave.
The police reinforcements, when they finally arrived, took the form of some senior plainclothes detectives, a firearms squad and the bomb-disposal team from the Army.