I waved him back out into the hall. Rickard had to come out somewhere and I didn’t want it to be behind us.

Sweeping a jug of water and a glass off a wheeled table, I stepped up onto the bed, careful not to touch the woman, using the table to steady myself as I reached into the dark space. Hooking my left forearm over a roof beam, I hauled myself up with the power of that one arm. I needed the other free for my gun. It was like doing a one-handed chin-up at the gym, and I could feel the strain throughout my entire body, but I ignored it as I searched the crawl space for any sign of Rickard. It was too dark to see anything clearly, but I caught an impression of movement a good distance away. Animal, spook or contract killer, I shot at it.

My bullet didn’t kill Rickard. That was instantly evident from the bullets that slammed against the beams next to me. The flash of his pistol marked his position more easily than did the dull cracks emitted from the suppressor. Vectoring in on the flashes, I held my nerve and took aim. I fired three rounds in quick succession. My reward was a throaty yell and the sound of something crashing down into the room below me. Quickly I lowered myself beneath the hung ceiling, but all that was scattered on the floor were more of the tiles and bits of aluminum framework. A boot was hanging from the new hole in the ceiling, but even as I looked Rickard tugged it back up inside the roof space. There then followed a dull rumble as he scrambled away.

I powered up into the attic, squirming so that I bent forward over a joist beam, then swung my legs up and balanced there for a second. My night vision was beginning to kick in and the space didn’t look as impenetrable now. I could make out arched beams above me and a sequence of horizontal joists that had formed the original support structure for an earlier ceiling. It was like being in the upturned hull of a ship.