Macbeth

They hadn’t imagined it would be Duff in the role of witness to what was about to happen, but one of the more perplexed and frightened overnight guests they had placed in neighbouring rooms, such as Malcolm. But now Duff was here he was impossible to ignore.

‘In here, darling,’ Macbeth said. ‘You too, Duff.’

He pushed them into Duncan’s room and closed the door. Took his service pistol from the holster on his trouser belt. ‘Listen carefully now. The door was locked and there was no sign of a break-in. The only person who has a master key to this room is Jack...’

‘And me,’ said Lady. ‘I think so anyway...’

‘Apart from that, there’s only one possibility.’ Macbeth pointed to the door to the adjacent room.

‘His own bodyguards?’ Lady said in horror and put a hand to her mouth.

Macbeth cocked his gun. ‘I’m going in to check.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Duff said.

‘No, you won’t,’ Macbeth said. ‘This is my business, not yours.’

‘And I choose to ma—’

‘You’ll choose to do what I tell you, Inspector Duff.’

Macbeth initially saw surprise in Duff’s face. Afterwards it slowly sank in: the head of Organised Crime outranked the head of Homicide.

‘Take care of Lady, will you, Duff?’

Without waiting for an answer Macbeth opened the door to the guards’ room, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The bodyguards were still in their chairs. One of them grunted; perhaps the fire alarm was penetrating the heavy veil of drugs.

Macbeth struck him with the back of his hand.

One eye half-opened, its gaze floated around the room and landed on Macbeth. It remained there before gradually taking in his body.

Andrianov registered that his black suit jacket and white shirt were covered with blood, then he felt that something was missing. The weight of his gun in its holster. He put a hand inside his jacket and down into the holster, where his fingers found instead of his service pistol cold sharp steel and something sticky... The bodyguard removed his hand and looked at it. Blood? Was he still dreaming? He groaned, a section of his brain received what it interpreted as signals of danger, and he desperately tried to collect himself, automatically looked around, and there, on the floor beside his chair he saw his gun. And his colleague’s gun, beside the chair where he lay, apparently asleep.

‘What...’ Andrianov mumbled, looking into the muzzle of the gun held by the man in front of him.

‘Police!’ the man shouted. It was Macbeth. The new head of... of... ‘Hold the guns where I can see them or I’ll shoot.’

Andrianov blinked in his confusion. Why did it feel as if he was lying in a bog? What had he taken?

‘Don’t point that gun at me!’ Macbeth shouted. ‘Don’t...’

Something told Andrianov that he shouldn’t reach for the gun on the floor. The man in front of him wouldn’t shoot him if he sat still. But it didn’t help. Perhaps all the hours, days, years as a bodyguard had created an instinct, a reaction which was no longer steered by will, to protect without a thought for your own life. Or perhaps that was just how he was and why he had applied to work in this branch of service.

Andrianov reached out for the gun, and his life and reasoning were interrupted by a bullet that bored through his forehead, brain and the back of the chair and didn’t stop until it met the wall with the golden-thread wallpaper that Lady had bought for a minor fortune in Paris. The explosion sent a convulsion through his colleague’s body, but he never managed to regain consciousness before he too got a bullet through the forehead.

Duff made for the door as the first shot went off.

But Lady held him back. ‘He said you—’

A second shot rang out, and Duff freed himself from her grasp. Ripped open the door and charged in. And stood in the middle of the floor looking around. Two men, each in a chair with a third eye in his forehead.

‘Norse Riders,’ Macbeth said, putting the smoking gun back in its holster. ‘Sweno’s behind this.’

There was shouting and banging on the corridor door.

‘Let them in,’ Macbeth said.

Duff did as he was told.

‘What’s going on?’ Malcolm gasped, out of breath. ‘Heavens above, are they...? Who...?’

‘Me,’ said Macbeth.

‘They pulled their guns,’ Duff said.

Malcolm’s eyes jumped in bewilderment from Duff back to Macbeth. ‘On you? Why?’

‘Because I was going to arrest them,’ Macbeth said.

‘What for?’ Lennox asked.

‘Murder.’

‘Sir,’ Duff said, looking at Malcolm, ‘I’m afraid we have bad news.’

He could see Malcolm’s eyes narrowing behind the square glasses as he leaned forward like a boxer bracing himself for the punch he wouldn’t see yet sensed was on its way. Everyone turned to the figure that had appeared in the doorway to the next room.

‘Chief Commissioner Duncan is dead,’ Lady said. ‘Stabbed with a knife while he was sleeping.’

The last sentence made Duff automatically turn towards Macbeth. Not because it said anything he didn’t already know, but because it was an echo of the same sentence uttered early one morning in an orphanage so many years ago.