The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [142]
Then the man stopped, causing a shudder to run out in all directions. He was standing directly beneath the bridge’s central light, looking now at the two figures held together by a razor-sharp piece of worked meteor. Deliberately, he removed his hat and set it atop the handrail. His hair was a tumble of straw, his eyes green even in lamp-light, and in his left hand was a small rubber ball.
He bounced it once, caught it without looking, and spoke. “Are you the father?”
I could not believe what I was seeing: Goodman was walking openly down the length of the bridge, simply asking to be shot. I took a step out of the shadows, feeling the careful clockwork of Mycroft’s plan stutter and grind.
No, oh Goodman, no, please don’t.
What were they saying?
“You want me to shoot him?” said the voice from the motorcar.
“No,” said the man with the knife. “Let us avoid gunfire if we can.”
His question unanswered, the green eyes shifted to look farther down the roadway. The small man raised his voice to ask, “Is he the father?”
When Holmes, too, gave no reply, the figure stepped away from the railing. Three others reacted instantaneously.
“Stop!” West snapped, over Buckner’s voice asking, “You sure you don’t want me to shoot?”
“He’s a poor bloody simpleton, for heaven’s sake,” Holmes shouted.
The blond man stepped down from the wide footway, and stopped. He bounced and caught the ball a couple of times, looking intently at the prisoner. “You’re the father. Estelle’s father.”
Damian jerked, oblivious to the knife cutting into his skin. Estelle—who was this man?
“Yes,” he said. It came out half-strangled, but it came out.
The green eyes beamed at him as if the word were a gold trophy. The eyes were young and fearless and full of mischief; the eyes were older than the hills.
“I really think you should let me shoot—”
“Enough!” West barked. He recognised the small man now: the bandleader, the wife’s pet woodsman, caretaker of the estate in Cumbria. “Buckner, get out and keep these two in place while I get rid of this.”
The motorcar door opened and the driver stepped out, turning his gun on the two tall men, prisoner and soon-to-be prisoner. His boss rapidly crossed the roadway until he was standing face to face with the bothersome drunkard. “You,” he said. “Be gone.”
“Ha!” Goodman’s response was a laugh. “Yes, I am gone, and I return. But you?”
West moved before the last word had left Goodman’s mouth.
Goodman made a sound, and looked down at the blood spilling across the front of his shirt.
The moment the masked figure moved towards Goodman, I began to run, knowing I would be too late, knowing I had to try. I sprinted down the impossibly long bridge, and saw the Green Man stagger back, his shirt-front going instantly dark. He tripped on the footway, going to one knee then recovering to move, doubled over, towards the railing. He laid his chest across the metal (for an instant, the image of Estelle flashed through my mind, draped across the tree-round foot-stool before Mr Robert’s fireplace). One leg rose, painfully slow, and a heel crawled its way across the railing, to hook onto the far side. His arms embraced the wide iron, and then he rolled, and vanished into the darkness beyond.
He was gone.
Four men watched the blond man stagger back. They heard the small cry when his belly touched the iron railing, but he kept moving, onto the wide rail, moving like a wounded animal crawling to its hole.
The blond man rolled over, and disappeared.
There was no splash. West, knife in his hand, waited. He swivelled, making certain that the two men stood where they were and that his man was on guard, then walked over to the side, sticking his head over the railing to look.
And a hand came up, as if born of the bridge, or the night. A hand that had led lost souls through the woods and drunk tea with a child and loaded men onto the bed of an ambulance. A hand that raised up and wrapped around the back of Peter James West’s head.
Holmes took one step forward, thinking only of