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Back The Firemaker Save as PDF
Chapters (23)
  1. Cover
  2. About Peter May
  3. By Peter May
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. PROLOGUE
  8. CHAPTER ONE
  9. CHAPTER TWO
  10. CHAPTER THREE
  11. CHAPTER FOUR
  12. CHAPTER FIVE
  13. CHAPTER SIX
  14. CHAPTER SEVEN
  15. CHAPTER EIGHT
  16. CHAPTER NINE
  17. CHAPTER TEN
  18. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  19. CHAPTER TWELVE
  20. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  22. EPILOGUE
  23. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Quietly he slipped down the hall and carefully opened the door to Old Yifu’s bedroom. The snoring rumbled on, undisturbed. It would take something approaching ten on the Richter scale to waken his uncle once asleep. Li looked at his face, lying at a slight angle on the pillow, mouth open, and felt a wave of love and affection for him. Those bushy eyebrows were still pushed up quizzically on his forehead. For all his experience of life, of tragedy and struggle, there was still an innocence about him, emphasised somehow by the repose of sleep. His face was remarkably unlined, almost childlike. And for a moment, Li had second thoughts. Then he steeled himself. Uncle Yifu would never know, and what he did not know could not hurt him. He crouched down and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. At the right hand side, at the back, was the shoe box Old Yifu had kept there for years. Li lifted it out and took off the lid. Inside, on a bed of carefully arranged tissue, lay his old service revolver from Tibet and a box of cartridges. Somehow he had succeeded in hanging on to them over the years, and kept them now as a souvenir. He had only ever fired the revolver in practice, he told Li once, and had never ever pointed it at another human being. Whatever else he might have inherited from his uncle, Li knew that he did not possess his even temperament, his sense of compassion. There was anger and a latent violence in Li, which he strove always to control. But tomorrow, he knew, he was going to ease back a little on that control and take a short cut of which neither his uncle, nor the authorities, would approve.

He lifted the revolver out of its box and slipped it into the holster. It fitted like a glove, almost as if the two had been designed one for the other. He counted out six rounds and dropped them in his pocket. Quietly, he replaced the lid of the box and returned it to its place at the back of the drawer and slid the drawer shut. As he stood up, his uncle turned over, and the snoring stopped. Li held his breath. But a deep grunt signalled its restart, and Old Yifu rumbled on in blissful ignorance of his nephew’s presence. Li drifted silently out of the room, gently closing the door behind him.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

Wednesday Morning