Ed’s ear was still singing, but he jostled his way out of Shearson’s study, and down the passage, and across the living area. He barked his shin against a chrome coffee-table, and swore under his breath, but Della reached back and tugged at his sweatshirt to get him moving.

Calvin Muldoon popped out from a door beside the staircase, his pump-gun raised, his face white with surprise. Della snatched at the barrel of the gun, missed her grip, but chopped Muldoon in the kidneys with a short, vicious stroke of her right hand. Muldoon folded, and Ed hit him again, straight in the mouth. The gun dropped to the wooden floor with a clatter, and Ed reached down to pick it up.

‘Shearson!’ gasped Della. ‘He’s our only way out!’

Ed wasn’t sure what she meant, but he hauled himself up the staircase after her, and pelted along the landing just behind her, and they skated along the last few feet together and collided with Shearson’s double door at the same moment.

Della jiggled the door handle, but the doors were locked.

‘Shall I blow the lock off?’ asked Ed.

Della snapped her head around and stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t shoot locks off with a rifle! All you get is noise and smoke and bullets flying in all directions.’

‘Oh,’ said Ed, disappointed. ‘They always do it in the movies.’

‘In the movies they don’t have solid cedarwood doors.’

Behind them, Calvin Muldoon was already up off the floor and coming up the stairs. Ed turned around and pointed the pump-gun at him, along the length of the landing.

‘You come any nearer and I’ll blow your head off!’ he shouted, in what he hoped was a convincing tone of voice. Muldoon raised his hands, but still kept on coming, in a slow and sidling kind of a walk.

Just then, across on the other side of the landing, Peter Kaiser’s bedroom door opened, and there was Peter himself, in a white T-shirt with PK embroidered on it, and white shorts.

‘What the hell goes on here?’ he said, irritably.

Ed swung the pump-gun around and fired. There was an ear-splitting bang, and an Indian tapestry that was hanging only two feet away from the open door of Peter’s bedroom was ripped into black ribbons. Peter slammed his door shut instantly, and locked it.

While Ed was distracted, Calvin Muldoon tried to make a silent rush up the landing on tippy-toes, but Ed whipped the gun back around just in time, and levelled it at Muldoon’s head with an expression of such fierceness that the poor man was brought up short, teetering on his toes.

‘I warned you,’ Ed told him, harshly. Muldoon backed off, his hands raised high.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. Take it easy. I was only doing my job.’