No sign of him now. No sign of the cook or the little scullery maid either.
He went into the house and heard a mumble of voices coming from the dining room upstairs. Through the open doorway he could see Nellie sitting at the table, calmly turning over her cards. She caught sight of Niven and gave an imperceptible shake of her head. He was put on guard and entered the room warily.
“Mr. Coker,” Azzopardi said. He was holding a gun, the barrel casually resting on the table and pointing in the direction of Nellie. A Luger. A Parabellum. From the Latin, meaning “always prepared for war.” Niven had seen enough of them in his time. The rusty box, he noticed, was also on the table.
“The mice and the ring,” Nellie said to Azzopardi, unfazed by the circumstances she found herself in. “Dishonest promises.”
“How true,” Azzopardi said.
Niven nodded at the box and asked, “Is something wrong?”
* * *
—
It seemed that Azzopardi had taken his precious box to a jeweller in Hatton Garden, intending to finally cash in his ill-gotten loot. He knew the jeweller from before the war, when he had dealt discreetly in the more valuable kind of goods, never questioning their source.
The contents of the box, the jeweller told him sadly, were nothing more than baubles—paste-and-glass replicas of the originals. “Fakes.”
“Very good fakes,” Nellie murmured.
Niven stared at his mother in amazement. He had thought she might have lost her fire, but she was blazing. She’d had the brass neck to try to palm off counterfeit goods with no regard to the consequences. “A thief,” Azzopardi said.
“Stealing from a thief,” Nellie countered. “Seems fair to me.”
Where were the originals? “I don’t have them,” Nellie said stoutly. “I sold them and invested the money. Stocks and shares. It would take weeks to get it back, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
Why, Niven puzzled, had she replaced the jewellery with fakes?
“Good question,” Azzopardi said.
“As insurance against this day, of course,” she said. Nellie had always been good at playing the long game. “I saw it in the cards,” she added, a piece of nonsense that was the final straw for Azzopardi. He raised the Luger, cocked it and aimed it at Nellie’s head.
“Everything all right here, Mrs. Coker?” Hawker asked loudly, appearing boldly in the doorway with the aim of disrupting this tableau.
Azzopardi’s aim twitched towards Hawker. The shot was deafening, the noise ricocheting around the inside of Niven’s skull. For a brief second he found himself back on the battlefield. Part of the ornamental plasterwork fell from the ceiling and plaster dust snowed down on Hawker, immobile now on the carpet.
Niven dived swiftly on Azzopardi and knocked his bulk to the floor and the Luger was sent skidding across the floor. Azzopardi was all blubber. Niven banged his opponent’s head off the floor several times, as it seemed to be the simplest way of putting him out of action. Nonetheless, as soon as Niven was on his feet, Azzopardi was too, coming towards him like a lumbering bear intending to crush him in its arms. Niven took up a boxer’s stance, ready for the fight, but then another deafening shot rang out and the bear dropped.
Nellie was holding the Luger. It looked ridiculously big in her hands. Plaster continued to shower down on their heads. When in God’s name had his mother learnt to handle a gun? （Deer-stalking in the Highlands with her father, apparently.） Niven knelt beside Azzopardi and felt for his pulse, although his eyes were glassy and a great red stain was spreading on his white dress shirt.
Hawker, ghostly with plaster dust, struggled to sit up, surprised to find that he was alive and only winged by the shot. “Christ,” he said with feeling.
“All right?” Nellie said to him.
He supposed that would be all the thanks he would get from her.
* * *
—
Landor was called for and he produced men who were easily bribed into hauling Azzopardi’s carcase away. They drove it out to Canvey Island in a builder’s van, where they launched him into the river on an outgoing tide, far beyond the reach of the Dead Man’s Hole.
And for That Minute a Blackbird Sang
After he parted from Gwendolen, Frobisher’s mind was so befuddled by the kiss she had bestowed on him outside the Sphinx that when he crossed Long Acre he failed to see the lorry bearing down on him. It had come from Spalding, bound for Covent Garden, and when it braked it shed some of its load—cabbages that rolled into the road like heads from the guillotine.