A smooth bastard, am I? Then youd better call me Jacob, hadnt you, Mr Collins? And am I official? No, Im so unofficial, I scarcely exist, do I? Come here a moment, will you?
He went to the window. Laboriously the injured man climbed out of bed and followed. His flat was in a small block on a side street off the Boulevard Charner, one of Saigons main thoroughfares, choked now as nearly always during the day with cycles, motor-scooters, cars and trucks. The man who called himself Jacob pointed to the intersection.
At precisely six oclock this afternoon, Colonel Tai will be going down the boulevard in his jeep. He will be held up there by a slight accident, right at that corner. How far is it? About fifty yards, would you say? An easy shot for a man who was his regimental and university rifle champion, wouldnt you say?
How the hell do you know that? Who are you?
Nobody. Jacob if you like, but I prefer nobody. What do you think, Mr Collins? Could you pull a trigger? One that wouldnt fall off this time?
He didnt have to think.
Oh yes, he said. I could pull a trigger.
Jacob contemplated him for a moment.
Yes, I think you could, he said softly. Goodbye, Mr Collins.
He left so abruptly that there was no time to ask further questions.
An hour later there was a gentle tap at the door.
When he opened it, there was no one there. But against the wall stood a long cardboard box with the name and trademark of a well-known brand of vacuum cleaner on it.
He took it into the flat and opened it.
It contained a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, old, but beautifully maintained. The magazine was full.
He went to the window and looked out. Fifty yards. From this distance he could not miss. The thought of squeezing the trigger and seeing Tais head burst open in a shower of blood and brains filled him with such a passion of hate that he had to sit down till the weakness in his legs passed away. He had a bottle of whisky in his case, bought at Heathrow eight months earlier and still unopened.
He opened it now and drank from the bottle. It did him good. He drank again. After a while the drink calmed the wildness in him and his mind began to function again. He knew beyond all doubt he was going to kill Tai, but he now let his thoughts dwell on the mysterious Jacob. Saigon in the autumn of 1963 was awash with rumour. Self-immolation by Buddhist monks; acts of sabotage by God knows who; arrest without trial by Government forces; the sacking of the Saigon pagodas; all these had fuelled the perennial rumour of an imminent anti-Diem coup. Perhaps most significant of all was the withdrawal of American support, signalled in a variety of ways.
Tais assassination by a Westerner would be just another such signal. That the assassin was English, not American, would mean nothing to the native populace, but it would enable the Americans to claim total innocence. Jacob was probably paying off some debt to the CIA.
But for the full effect of the assassination to be felt it would have to be known that the killer was a Westerner. And there was only one way of advertising that.
He stood at the window and looked out to the intersection. Jacob needed no special plan. Tai would have his usual armed escort. It was only fifty yards to the apartment blocks only entrance. If he survived sixty seconds after pulling the trigger, he would be a very lucky man.
No. He corrected himself. A very unlucky man.
He didnt mind dying if that was the price to pay for the colonels death. His attack at Nguyets apartment had been suicidal.
But he felt a sudden reluctance to die for the man called Jacob and the mysterious forces behind him.
Despite his aching body, the whisky was making him drowsy. There were still two hours to go and he dare not risk sleep. He pulled on trousers and a shirt and went down into the street.
He strolled aimlessly, ignoring the citys crowded and varied street life which on first arrival had so fascinated him. The beggars, the girls selling flowers, the vendors of books and pictures and ornaments, the street urchins, the workmen in battered felt hats with never-ending, never-removed cigarettes in their lips, the hire-car drivers, the shoe-shine boys, none of these could interest him any more. Only once, when among the steady stream of svelte and graceful Vietnamese women passing in and out of the fashionable shops, he imagined he glimpsed Nguyet, did he show any animation. But even as he pressed forward crying her name, he knew he was wrong.
And he had been wrong even to have loved her.
He had loved his father and he had deserted him.
He had loved his mother and she had died.
He had been willing for the want of any other object to transfer his love to his stepfather, but he had rejected him.
In the Army, at university, he had been popular, active, successful, but he had not made the mistake of allowing anyone too close. When he got the chance to come to this exotic, distant place, there had been no ties at home to make him hesitate.
And here, as if the bitter rules which must guide his life in England did not apply, he had relaxed once more and taken Nguyet into the deepest and most secret places of his soul.
Now she had paid the price.
He stopped so suddenly that other pedestrians bumped into him. But these polite and gentle people showed no irritation or curiosity. He realized he was outside the Hotel de la Paix, one of the citys many monuments to the French colonial dream. Without conscious decision, he went into the crowded lobby and made his way up the stairs to the top floor. Letting his instinct guide him, he turned left and walked to the end of the corridor. There was a bathroom here. He opened the door and went in.
It was a high airy room. A posse of cockroaches scuttled beneath the high-sided cast-iron bath at his entry. Painfully, he clambered up on the side of the bath and, disturbing another huge cockroach on the dusty windowsill, opened the high narrow window.
It gave him a crows-eye view straight down the boulevard. There, somewhere between three and four hundred yards away, was the intersection where the colonels jeep would be stopped in just over an hours time.
He got down off the bath and went to the door. There was a key on the inside. He removed it, went out, and locked the door behind him.
On his way back down the boulevard, he was even less conscious of his surroundings as he carefully paced out the distance. Three hundred and twenty-five yards. Back in his flat, he packed the few belongings he wanted to take with him in a small grip, slipped a small pair of field glasses he used for bird-spotting into his pocket and repacked the rifle in its box.
He arrived back at the hotel at quarter to six. Approaching one of the hire-car drivers he told him he would be leaving for the airport in about fifteen minutes and gave him the grip to look after. It was Nguyet who had taught him this lesson about most of her people. Trust given without hesitation was nearly always repaid in full.
REGINALD HILL
THE LONG KILL
Copyright
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Methuen 1986 under the authors pseudonym Patrick Ruell
Copyright © Patrick Ruell 1986
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007334841
EBook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007389186
Version: 2015-09-17
Epigraph
I was a fell destroyer
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Keep Reading
About the Author
By Reginald Hill
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Jaysmith was a firm advocate of the cerebral approach.
He always shot at the head.
The head he was shooting at this bright autumn morning was a noble one even when viewed through an Adjustable Ranging Telescope at 1,250 metres. An aureole of near-white hair surrounded a tanned leathery face in which the crinkles of humour seemed at least to equal the furrows of care. It was the head of an ageing man, seventy at a guess, who must surely now be reckoning that he was going to be allowed to slip naturally from life in the fullness of his years. Another minute would teach him the error of such confidence, and also the error of whatever lust for power, pleasure, or political change, had put him at the end of Jaysmiths rifle.
Still, there were worse ways to die than suddenly, in your garden, looking across the peaceful fields of St-Johns-in-the-Vale to the swell of the eastern fells, drinking a cup of coffee and feeling the warmth of a September sun on your November skin.
The old man lit another Caporal. He was practically a chain smoker. This, thought Jaysmith, was the last link in his chain. He began to make his final checks.
He had worked out five possible lines of fire on the OS 1:25,000 sheet before leaving London. Two of them he had discarded on his first slow drive along the valley the previous Sunday. Two more had failed his strict on-the-ground examination. The last was the longest, but that didnt bother him. He preferred the long kill, the longer the better. And with his equipment, his meticulous preparation and, above all, his accuracy, distance had never posed any difficulty. That was why he was the best.