The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

moon as it tracked its way across the south-east Asian sky behind thick layers of broken cloud. It was hard to say how long Hau had been gone. Each minute seemed as eternal as the night itself.

At first, Ny heard nothing, but she felt Serey’s grip tighten around her arm and tensed. Then sudden fear gripped them both as the front door crashed open and heavy footsteps staggered up the hall. A gross, misshapen shadow loomed in the doorway. For a moment it stood quite still before lurching forward and falling to the floor, unfolding and dividing as it did so, into two. One half hit the floor with a sickening thud. The other remained crouched, heaving and issuing a sound like the bark of torn bellows. A smaller figure appeared in the door behind them. Serey let out a gasp and rushed to pull the boy to her breast. There was no drawing away this time, no standing on masculine dignity. It was a child’s sobs that she felt tearing at the young chest.

‘What happened?’ Ny stood in uncertain isolation in the centre of the room.

‘It’s my fault,’ Hau sobbed. ‘All my fault.’

‘No.’ Serey tightened her grip on him, but he pulled away.

‘I took his luck. He gave me his luck and they killed him,’ he wailed.

‘For fuck’s sake, someone get the fire going! I can’t see a goddam thing!’ McCue was ripping the blood-soaked clothing from Elliot’s chest.

The first flames sent their shadows dancing around the walls. Elliot’s white skin was touched with blue. The bullet had torn through his chest just below the left shoulder, miraculously missing bone, and coming out cleanly through his armpit. But that had left a mess of torn muscle and flesh. McCue shook his head.

‘He’s lost too much blood. And a wound like this won’t stay clean for long.’ He slumped back against the wall and took out a crushed pack of cigarettes with shaking hands.

‘What you going do?’ Ny asked, her eyes burning with fear and concern.

‘Nothing.’

Serey said, ‘We must dress the wound.’

‘No point, lady! He’s a dead man.’

‘He will be if you don’ do nothing!’ Ny’s voice rose in pitch.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ McCue threw his cigarettes on the floor. ‘He’s going to die! Sometimes you just have to accept it! He would. He knows.’ He pulled himself up on to his knees and drew out his pistol. There was something close to hysteria in his voice as he pressed the barrel against Elliot’s temple. ‘He’d do it. I mean, you saw him. He didn’t give a shit, why should I?’ He tensed, his face a mask, as he squeezed on the trigger with a trembling finger.

Hau’s confusion and consternation propelled him towards the figure kneeling as if in prayer, but Ny held his arm. ‘Your friend had . . .’ she searched desperately in her memory for the word ‘. . . cancer.’ It seemed strange on her tongue, innocuous, just a word. Yet the effect on McCue was electrifying. He turned wild eyes on her.

‘What kind of shit is that?’

She nodded towards Elliot. ‘He tell me. Mistah Slattery come here to die. He had something bad inside him. Growing. A sickness.’ She fought to recall Elliot’s words, words spoken on a dark night on the Great Lake that might now save his life. ‘He going to die anyway, even if no one shoot him.’

The fire in McCue’s eyes seemed suddenly extinguished, his finger relaxed on the trigger and he allowed his hand to drop, the pistol trailing loosely at his side. But he remained kneeling, limp and exhausted, like a man whose prayers for release have not been answered, and whose faith in God is shaken.

Hau unclipped the chain at his neck and knelt beside McCue, leaning forward across the prone figure of Elliot to return the St Christopher to its rightful place. He looked up at his mother.

‘If I give him back his luck, maybe he won’t die.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sarit hovered nervously near the arrivals door. Half a dozen cigarette ends lay about his feet, his crumpled white suit grey from the ash of countless others. He dabbed with a grubby yellow handkerchief at the sweat running down his brown face, gathering in the wrinkles and dripping from the ends of his meagre moustache. The evening flight was half an hour late, and his agitation had been increased five minutes earlier by the arrival of two uniformed police officers who stood now smoking and chatting idly by the door

When at length he spotted the face he had been waiting for among the passengers off the London flight, it was with a mixture of relief and trepidation.

‘Mistah Blaih. So pleased to see you again.’ He smiled effusively and shook the big Scotsman’s hand. ‘I got car waiting.’ And he steered the conspicuously European face quickly out to the taxi rank, and the anonymity of the night.

‘Sorry if you’ve been waiting long, Sarit. The bloody flight was late, then there was all that palaver coming through customs. You got the gear?’

‘Oh, yes. Best there is.’ Sarit opened the door of the taxi. ‘Where to?’ He slipped in beside Blair.

‘Just take us into the city. We’ll drive about for a bit.’

Sarit gave clipped instructions to the driver.

‘What about the girl? What did you find out?’

Sarit mopped his face and sat back. ‘Difficult, Mistah Blaih, very difficult. Bangkok dangerous place since Tuk running things.’

Blair found his wallet and slipped out a few notes. ‘Course it is, Sarit. Better, though, to eat half a loaf in fear than have no bread at all, eh?’

Sarit spread thin lips across nicotine-stained teeth, in what he imagined was a smile. ‘Sure, Mistah Blaih, sure.’ He took the notes and rubbed them gently between his fingers, as if he thought they might be printed on rice paper and crumble before he could spend them.

‘So?’

‘They say he tried to have Mistah Elliot killed. But nobody know if he succeed.’ Blair felt the skin stretch tightly across his face, but