George bore down on him.
“Don’t…” Crispin said, and squirmed against the wall like a beetle pinned alive to a hoard.
“Get your hands up,” George said, and rammed the gun hard into Crispin’s chest.
A zigzag of brilliant lightning streaked through the window. Thunder sounded like a trunk being moved in an attic. Above the crash of the thunder came another sound—a sharp crack, like the breaking of dry wood magnified many times. A wisp of smoke rose in the air: it smelt of gunpowder.
In that moment of sound George felt the gun in his hand kick like a live thing, and it jumped out of his hand onto the floor. He became conscious of two things: a tight, deep- throated scream from Cora, and a curious red mess on the wall where Crispin had been standing.
Slowly, his eyes travelled from the red stain down the wall, past the sideboard, to the floor. Crispin lay huddled up, as if the bones in his legs had been broken. There was a red stain on the front of his white and blue dressing-gown.
A voice came to George, as if someone were shouting in a tunnel. He heard the voice, but the words meant nothing to him. It’s all right, he said to himself. This has happened to you hundreds of times before. All you’ve got to do is to hang on and wait. You’ll wake up in a moment. Someone was shaking him. A strident voice was shrieking at him. "You fool! You fool! You stupid, bloody fool!" Something hard hit him in the face, and he shivered. Something inside his head exploded into fire and darkness, and just before the darkness he felt a sharp flash of nausea. He staggered, clutched at nothing, recovered his balance and groped with blind fingers.
The shock left him after a while.
Cora was speaking again. She was speaking softly.
“You did it,” she was saying. “We don’t touch murder. That’s something we don’t stand for. We didn’t tell you to shoot him. We only wanted you to frighten him.”