Lucius the Club | Page 5

little script for me. And one day, when our man was having lunch with some key clients, at a rather expensive restaurant, I marched in with Mama behind me.
The restaurant had a stone floor - it must have been fashionable that year - and my stick clicked on it as I crossed the room in my dot-and-carry-one fashion.
We were an odd pair, Mama and I, and everybody stopped talking and watched as we neared the table. Then I tossed a pile of bank accounts in among the wine glasses and vegetables.
'Barrington,' I said - I think his name was Barrington, but it's a long time ago - 'Barrington, you've been stealing money from my mother. The total sum nicked is ￡1,545.' Or whatever. 'You've got three days to pay it back, or your professional association will hear about it, and I will do my best to have you disbarred.'
And then Mama and I walked out.
Well, as you can imagine, this caused a bit of a stir, and Soho talked of nothing else for two whole days.
The next morning, Barrington was round with a certified banker's cheque and a fluent line in babble, but we just took the money and told him to fuck off.
'That was brains, you see, Lucius,' Mama told me. 'That proved you've got brains. And that was stage one. This time, we're going to have to prove you've got balls.'
*
Ah yes. Balls. That really was the central point.
It was one thing to decide, in a cold-blooded and logical manner, that you really could not tolerate blackmail. And it was easy to rule out going to the police, or paying the blackmailer - which just left killing the greedy bastard. It was easy to reach that conclusion. But did I have the balls to do it? That was what was worrying me.
Overnight, I didn't sleep at all well, and I didn't fancy breakfast much. I was beginning to feel that tightness in the scrotum, and the sick, vomity feeling in my stomach that signals a nasty attack of the doubts.
I should have known, mind you, that there would always be trouble. Jack had warned me, after the accountant affair.
'You did well there, Lucius,' he told me. We met by chance on Piccadilly and he took me into the Ritz for coffee. 'Handled yourself well. But be warned. That won't be the last problem you have, and it won't be the worst.'
'Oh?' I said. 'Why so?'
'Because your mother mixes with bad company. All her father's old friends. Some of the biggest crooks in London are men she calls Uncle. And when you mix an attractive woman with hard men like that, what you get is trouble.'
So I can't say I wasn't told.
Anyway, I put Grandad's rather frightening weapon back in its oily towel, packed it in an overnight bag, and went down to Sussex on the train.
When I got to The Farm, I went out into the wood at the back and tried the gun out.
Quite frankly I very nearly wet myself the first time I fired it. The gun looked all right. But it was old. God only knew how old, or how long it had sat there in the cellar.
Eventually I managed to summon up enough courage to pull the trigger, and no disaster ensued, so I carried out a series of tests. I tried out cartridges with various sizes of shot, at various distances from the target, and made quite a mess of several old tree trunks. I learnt how to brace myself against the recoil, and how to control the muzzle flip.
These tests decided me that whoever had doctored the weapon knew what they were doing. They had made it short enough to be easily concealed under a mac or an overcoat, but the barrel was still long enough to ensure that the shot did not disperse too widely. And a tight shot pattern is what you want, if you're going to kill someone. The idea is to blow a fatal hole in him. You don't want to hit him with a hundred separate pinpricks, otherwise he's just going to walk home and dab on some Dettol.
By the end of the afternoon I was clear that my weapon of choice would do the job. I knew what kind of cartridge to put in the gun, and how far away from the target I needed to be. I knew that the gun would kill someone.
All I needed now was courage.

*
On the way home in the train I thought about that, and I decided that perhaps I might have what it took after all. I came to that conclusion because of my experiences at school.
Jack must have pulled a few strings to get me into Follington, because they like their boys to be one hundred per cent