The wolf had risen half up and Jago saw the wound, dark-rimmed, pink at the heart.
The barrel was up. The light was steady. The shadow thrown by the wolf’s head was still. First, the flash. Then the puff of the fumes from the barrel, and the crash of the shot. It toppled.
The range was too great. Not a killing shot. The wolf would have been hit by a spray of pellets. The beam leaped off the animal, climbed and seemed to wash the rim of the rock that was in front of Jago’s head. He might have been seen and might not and— The beam found the beast.
Jago thought the second shot, from the other barrel, was about to be fired. He was in darkness again. He supposed it would be like the death of a friend. He had no friends who had died. His mother was estranged from her parents, and he didn’t know if they were alive or dead. The wife of a director in the City had died in hospital. No one had met her, but her husband received notes of sympathy from his colleagues. He felt for the wolf, and tears welled. He had the tyre wrench in his fist, tightly held. The wolf was upright. There was blood on its face and chest. Jago thought the animal was blinded. It seemed not to know what to do, where to go. It went forward, seemed to grope with its front paws, and fell. Jago heard stones and rocks spiral down with it.
It came to rest.
Still the dogs lacked courage. It was a dozen paces in front of them. They circled it. It seemed barely to have the strength to turn its head to face them. They barked at it. Marcantonio came close, the shotgun aimed, wary . . .
An English class: a young teacher, fresh from training college, had made them read from Tennyson, ‘The Revenge’. An Elizabethan galleon had happened across a Spanish fleet, had been overwhelmed by cannon fire and was surrounded, gunpowder exhausted, most of the crew dead or maimed. Jago remembered a line of a survivor, who sees the Spanish circling them: ‘But they dared not touch us again, for they feared we still could sting.’ Neither the dogs nor Marcantonio went close to the wolf. Jago stood up to his full height.
He had enough blow-back from the torch to see Marcantonio.
It was a target. At the school, discuses had been thrown, hammers and javelins lobbed. He had thrown stones on the beach when his mother had taken him to Southend or Clacton. Now he hurled the tyre iron. It would have been the moment at which Marcantonio’s finger left the trigger guard for a close-range shot.
He saw it arc away, watched its flight and saw it strike.
There was an explosion. The light failed. The dogs stopped barking. The tyre iron had hit the boy, who had dropped the torch and pressed on the trigger. The second barrel had fired.
A light went on inside the ground floor.
Then another, brighter. The kitchen door opened. Enough light now spilled out for Jago to see what he had done. He gaped. Marcantonio was on his side, blood pooling from the upper part of his body – his head or his throat. The shotgun was still in his hand.
Jago stood to his full height, and the first warmth of the new day was on his face.
‘Mamma’s within five metres of him – barefoot and in her dressing-gown,’ Fabio murmured.
Ciccio pressed the keys and they had a live connection. The night intensifier had burned out. Sufficient light from the house came through the window and the kitchen door. They had hesitated for a moment, then snatched a link to an operations room in the basement of a barracks on the outskirts of Reggio Calabria. There was never pandemonium when a link came into a communications area, which was as quiet and unemotional as air-traffic control, but a senior man would now be reading over a shoulder. He’d have a phone at his ear and would be warning his own superiors.
‘The indications are that Marcantonio, grandson, has a self-inflicted wound, seemingly fatal. A confused run-up. He’d sat out through most of the night, semi-concealed with a sawn-off shotgun. A disturbance on the hill between his position and ours alerted him. Birds taking off. A flashlight identified a wolf – correct, a wolf. He fired one barrel at it, at maximum range. The wolf went down, fell, landed by Marcantonio – sorry, that’s Mike/ Alpha Charlie, and—’
‘I already have that.’
‘It’s getting complicated. Just listen. Don’t send yet. Something hit him. He dropped the flashlight and the weapon fired. I don’t know what hit him, but there’s an object near to his left foot – a spanner, wrench, iron bar. How did that get to hit him? You hearing me?’
‘Sure.’
‘It isn’t the beach at Tropea here and it isn’t Sunday afternoon. Few people could have thrown a piece of metal at him. Only one person I know of.’
‘Just one.’
‘I don’t send that?’
‘If you do, you’ll open the can, shake out the worms and they’ll crawl every-fucking-where. Keep going.’
Fabio did so. ‘Mamma reacts – that is, Mike/Charlie reacts. She kneels. It’s like the old movies, the Mafia woman, the street, the corpse, the blood. You didn’t send that?’