Running Blind by Desmond Bagley

Author:Desmond Bagley [Bagley, Desmond]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007304745
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 2009-06-25T16:53:52.546000+00:00

III

The next day seemed very long.

At breakfast Sigurlin read the paper and suddenly said, 'Well, well! Someone tied up the cable transport on the Tungnaa just the other side of Hald. A party of tourists was stranded on the farther side for several hours. I wonder who could have done that?'

'It was all right when we came across,' I said blandly. 'What does it say about the tourists? Anyone hurt?'

She looked at me speculatively across the breakfast table. 'Why should anyone be hurt? No, it says nothing about mat.'

I changed the subject quickly. 'I'm surprised that Elin is still asleep.'

Sigurlin smiled. 'I'm not. She didn't know it, but she had a sleeping draught last night. She'll be drowsy when she wakes and she won't want to jump out of bed.'

That was one way of making sure of Elin. I said, 'I noticed your garage was empty - don't you have a car?'

'Yes. Gunnar left it at the stables.'

'When will he be back?'

'In two days - providing the party doesn't get saddle-sore.'

'When I go to Geysir I'd just as soon not use the Land-Rover,' I said.

'You want the car? All right - but I want it back in one piece.' She told me where to find it. 'You'll find the key in the glove locker.'

After breakfast I regarded the telephone seriously and wondered whether to ring Taggart. I had a lot to tell him but I thought it would be better to let it go until I heard what Jack Case had to say. Instead I went out to the Land-Rover and cleaned Fleet's rifle.

It really was a good tool. With its fancy hand-grip and free-style stock it had obviously been tailor-made to suit Fleet, whom I suspected of being an enthusiast. In every field of human endeavour there are those who push perfection to its ultimate and absurd end. In hi-fi, for example, there is the maniac who has seventeen loud-speakers and one test record. In shooting there is the gun nut.

The gun nut believes that there is no standard, off-the-shelf weapon that could be possibly good enough for him and so he adapts and chisels until he finally achieves something that looks like one of the more far-out works of modern sculpture. He also believes that the ammunition manufacturers know damn-all about their job and so he loads his own cases, carefully weighing each bullet and matching it with an amount of powder calculated to one-tenth of a grain. Sometimes he shoots very well.

I checked the ammunition from the opened box and, sure enough, found the telltale scratches from a crimping tool. Fleet was in the habit of rolling his own, something I have never found necessary, but then my own shooting has not been of the type necessary to get a perfect grouping at x-hundred yards. It also explained why the box was unlabelled.

I wondered why Fleet should have carried as many as fifty rounds; after all, he was a good shot and had brought us to a standstill with one squeeze of the trigger.

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