He opened the bag he’d brought with him and picked out a pre-prepared disposable syringe which he described briefly, sticking the needle into me, as a painkiller. After that he sorted out a surgical dressing in a sterile wrapping. The same as for Dorothea, I thought. He checked his watch to give the injection time to work, then tore off the wrapping and positioned the dressing ready inside my shirt and with his left hand tugged on the protruding handle of the knife.
I didn’t budge and in spite of the injection it felt terrible.
‘I can’t get enough leverage from this angle,’ Robbie said. He looked at O’Hara. ‘You’re strong,’ he said. ‘You pull it out.’
O’Hara stared at him, and then at me.
‘Think of moguls,’ I said.
He smiled twistedly and said to Robbie, ‘Tell me when.’
‘Now,’ Robbie said, and O’Hara grasped the knife’s handle and pulled until the blade came free.
Robbie quickly put the dressing in place and O’Hara stood as if stunned, holding in disbelief the object that had caused me such trouble.
‘Sorry,’ Robbie said to me.
I shook my head, dry mouthed.
O’Hara laid the knife on the kitchen table, on the discarded wrapping from the dressing, and we all spent a fairly long silence simply looking at it.
Overall it was about eight inches long, and half of that was handle. The flat blade was almost three inches wide at the handle end, tapering to a sharp point. One long side of the triangular blade was a plain sharp cutting edge: the other was wickedly serrated. At its wide end the blade extended smoothly in co a handle which had a space through it big enough to accommodate a whole hand. The actual grip, with undulations for fingers to give a better purchase, was given substance by bolted-on, palm-width pieces of dark, richly-polished wood: the rest was shiny metal.
‘It’s heavy,’ O’Hara said blankly. ‘It could rip you in half.’
A stud embellishing the wider end of the blade bore the one word, ‘Fury’.
I picked up the awful weapon for a closer look and found it was indeed heavy (more than half a pound, we soon found, when Robbie weighed it on Dorothea’s kitchen scales) and, according to letters stamped into it, had been made of stainless steel in Japan.
‘What we need,’ I said, putting it down, ‘is a knife expert.’
‘And what you need first,’ Robbie said apologetically, ‘is a row of staples to stop the bleeding.’
We took off all my protective layers for him to see what he was doing and he presently told me consolingly that the point of the blade had hit one of my ribs and had slid along it, not slicing down into soft tissue and through into the lung. ‘The rib has been fractured by the blow but you are right, and lucky, because this injury should heal quite quickly.’
‘Cheers,’ I said flippantly, relieved all the same. ‘Maybe tomorrow I’ll get me a bullet-proof vest.’
Robbie mopped a good deal of dried blood from my skin, damping one of Dorothea’s tea towels for the purpose, then helped me into my one relatively unharmed garment, the wind-proof jacket.
‘You look as good as new,’ he assured me, fitting together the bottom ends of the zip and closing it upwards.
‘The mogul won’t notice a thing,’ O’Hara agreed, nodding. ‘Are you fit enough to talk to him?’
I nodded. It was necessary to talk to him. Necessary to convince him that the company’s money was safe in my hands. Necessary to confound all suggestion of ‘jinx’.
I said, ‘We do, all the same, have to find out just who is so fanatical about stopping the film that he – or she – will murder to achieve it. It’s possible, I suppose, that the knife was meant only to frighten us, like yesterday’s dagger, but if I hadn’t been wearing the protectors…’
‘No protection and an inch either way,’ Robbie nodded, ‘and you would likely have been history.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘if we take it that my death was in fact intended, I absolutely must find out who and why. Find it out among ourselves, I mean, if we’re not bringing in the police. Otherwise…’ I hesitated, then went on, ‘… if the reason for the attack on me still exists, which we have to assume is the case, they – he or she or they – may try again.’
I had the feeling that the thought had already occurred to both of them, but that to