Trouble had found him a couple of times anyway during their years together. The first time was just a chance sighting. A young American who had seen him once as a child in New York had been sent to serve an apprenticeship with casino operators in England and had spotted him at the horse races in Brighton with Meg and two of her friends. The next time was about ten years later, when an American boss named Frank Tosca had tried to inflate his reputation with the Mafia families by showing that his men could find and kill even the professional murderer who had been known as “the Butcher’s Boy.” Both times Michael had done the only thing he could—kept himself and Meg alive, and then made the person who had ordered his death realize, if only for a second, that he had made a terrible mistake.
Meg’s Yorkshire party was one of the few times of the year when Michael could not be absent, hidden, or anonymous. He was Meg’s husband, one of the hosts of the festivities that he dreaded. When Meg declared this year’s party a success, he agreed, but what he meant was that he had not attracted much attention, had not had many personal conversations, and had not made himself memorable. There had also been no accidents, injuries, or illnesses at the party that would have forced him to deal with any authorities, now or later.
He and Meg stayed up that night until the caterers had cleaned the kitchen, packed their remaining supplies, and departed; the party rental people had loaded their trucks with all their furniture, appliances, tents, and decorations, and driven off safely; and all the extra helpers, parking attendants, and others had been paid and then cleared out. When Michael locked the doors and went up to bed with Meg, he felt a profound sense of relief. The damned Yorkshire party was over for another year.
But it wasn’t. It was not until later that night, when Michael and Meg were asleep, that the final four visitors arrived.
Michael heard the sound from downstairs and identified it instantly. One of the leaded-glass panes of the windows along the side of the great hall had been pried out and slipped, and he heard it smash on the stone floor with a musical sound. He touched Meg’s arm and whispered, “Wake up. Something’s happening downstairs.”
He stood up and remembered that he had locked the pistol he’d brought from Bath in the trunk of their Jaguar so that it wouldn’t be where guests or temporary workers could stumble on it, and at the end of the evening he’d neglected to bring it upstairs.
He got out of bed, put on the clothes he’d taken off at bedtime, stepped into the old smoking room down the hallway, and went to the gun cabinet that had belonged to Meg’s great-grandfather. The guns displayed behind the glass doors were beautiful pieces of workmanship. His hand skipped past the three Purdey shotguns. They were each worth over £100,000. The two Holland and Hollands beside them were worth more. He had once used the Westley Richards with the single trigger and the barrel selector switch on top, so he chose it. This intruder was probably just an incompetent burglar who had cased the house during the party, and if so, Michael wouldn’t have to fire the weapon anyway.
He slipped the gamekeeper’s bag containing shotgun shells off its hook and over his shoulder and opened the gun to insert two shells. He moved down the hall away from the grand staircase and hurried to the back stairs, which had been used by the maids in the old days. He descended quietly, emerged in the kitchen, and stepped into the dining hall.
He saw two men at the window. They had already reached through the empty frame where they had removed the glass and had disengaged the latch. Now they were climbing in.
Schaeffer moved along the inner wall across from the windows until he was abreast of the one they had opened. One of the men looked up and saw him, so Michael said, “What are you doing here? Are you lost?”
The man crouched and aimed a pistol at him. Michael pulled the trigger of the antique shotgun. It roared, and the man was swept backward, as though swatted by an invisible hand.
The second man aimed his pistol at Michael, so Michael selected the other barrel. The shotgun roared again, and that man jerked backward and collapsed onto the floor in a lazy dive.
Michael heard the sound of running feet toward the open window. He ran to the first man’s body, pulled off his hooded rain jacket, put it on himself, then laid the antique shotgun across the second man’s chest. He lay down on his side with the man’s watch cap tugged down on his head and checked the man’s pistol by touch. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and the rectangular shape of its slide told him that it was a Glock. The safety was incorporated into the trigger mechanism, so he wouldn’t have to search for a catch.
The third man ran to the open window and stepped to one side so he could see the three bodies in the moonlight. He quickly chose the man with the shotgun across his chest, assuming he was Michael, and fired a round into the man’s head.
In a single quick motion, Michael half turned, raised the Glock, and fired it upward into the underside of the man’s jaw.
He stood up, picked up the second man’s pistol, put it in the pocket of the coat he’d taken, and then climbed out the open window.
The grass beside the manor house was wet with dew, and in the moonlight he could see the three men’s shoe prints on it. They clearly had come across the lawn from the direction of the woods on the south side of the estate near the gate.
He looked closely at the wet grass, and once he was in the open, he could see that the feet had not been walking. They had been trotting. It made him think there must have been a time issue. If they had just driven onto the estate, they should have been able to park and walk as slowly and quietly as they wished.
So time must be tight. That meant they must have concocted some sort of idiotic alibi that required them to come here and kill him while their alibi time was ticking. With beginners, the alibi was usually a ticket to a movie or a sports event, something that would not require an actual person to stand up in front of the cops and lie for him.
They had certainly been amateurish. They hadn’t been difficult to kill, and their plan seemed to have been no more than to put themselves in his house while he was asleep and assume that made him practically dead to start. There had to be a car parked somewhere. No, it could be more than that. Anybody who wanted him dead would be an American, and Americans might have an English driver.
He supposed the three were the current generation of American bosses’ idea of professionals. Someone had sent them to England to take him out after all these years. Somebody—maybe a British contact—should have realized that they were not the best choice for driving a long distance over the English countryside at high speed in the dark, getting themselves to Meg’s Yorkshire house, and driving themselves back in time to save their alibi. So somewhere on the property would be a fast car and maybe an English driver. He hoped that if the driver existed, he hadn’t heard the difference between the shotgun blasts and the pop of a pistol. But Schaeffer hadn’t fired the shotgun outdoors, so the thick old stone walls might have muffled the sound a bit.