Read Online Merryll Manning Is Dead Lucky by Johm Howard Reid - Free Book Online Page A

doing something the easy way – or the way everyone else would perform a similar task – so he held the magnifier steady in his right hand while he moved the photo up, down and across with his left.
        Yes, even the very sight of the man I found disturbing and unnerving.
        But he, of course, was thoroughly unperturbed. Throwing the photo across to me, like a professor to a student, he asked, “What do you make of this, Manning?”     
        It was an Ancient Egyptian comic strip. I could no longer decipher the hieroglyphics in the balloons, but the pictures painted some joker drinking down cupfuls of wine while giving out pearls of spurious advice. I decided to ignore it. “You saw the quiz show?” I asked.
        “Why should I? Past events don’t interest me.”
        “The immediate past, you mean?”
        “Precisely.”
        “Yet you remember our last meeting?”
        He laughed. “Still carry a few scars, do you?” he crowed in Italian. “I can whip you again. Any day!”
        “I don’t mean our fight in Egypt,” I replied in English. “I mean the little chat we had in the TV canteen the other night.”
        “ Che peccato! I have already forgotten it.”
        I indicated a pile of blank 2x3 file cards on his desk. “Why distribute your love letters to people in the show? You have been warned and all that sort of stuff. Perhaps you will remember that ?” And with that phrase and from this moment on, our entire conversation was carried on in Italian.
        “So you saw them? So they showed them to you – the great detective?” He smiled broadly.
        “Yes.”
        “And what was the great detective’s advice?”
        “I told them the author was a psycho.”
        He was pleased as Punch. “Excellent! I bet that frightened them?”
        “Yes, you scared them. Didn’t do you too much good though.”
        “You saw what happened. I almost won!”
        “You’ve no-one but yourself to blame for your loss. As usual, you became too confident.”
        “Look who’s talking!”
        “I don’t need to frighten people or place them at a disadvantage,” I insisted. “I can win on my own terms.”
        Dune-Harrigan stood up and came towards me. The years had treated his body kindly. The rough, bald head was always ugly – now more so than ever – but there was still power in those great arms and those brawny hands.
        The professor used to wrestle – not those fake, well-rehearsed comedy turns you see on TV – but the real stuff. In a headlock, he could break your neck. He’d once picked me up like a bag of chaff, held me over his head and thrown me twenty feet. No excuse. He was just showing off.
        “And yet you come to me?” he asked.
        I didn’t understand him. “ Io non comprendo .”      
        “You won. I lost. I was eager to seek you out. Yet you come to me?”
        He’d walked around and was now well behind me. I had to turn my head. “I don’t like being shot at – with arrows or pens!”
        He was fumbling with the door. “What are you nattering about?”
        “Brunsdon’s bow. He wants it back.”
        Dune-Harrigan locked the door and held up the key before dropping it into his pocket. “I can’t fathom what you’re going on about,” he said. “All I know is that I’m going to thrash you. And then perhaps you will run away again – for another thirty years. Perhaps they will then give the prize to the runner-up.”
        My blood froze, but I stood my ground and faced him. Five times he’d wrestled me thirty years ago, and won every time – but he wouldn’t dare try it again? He was a bully, an egomaniac, but no fool. He was trying to scare me witless. That was his way. But I wasn’t about to let him know he was succeeding. Not a backward step! Not a single twitch of fear! Instead, I called his bluff: “Give me Brunsdown’s bow and open