Chapter 4E

Richard, Tuesday 9th March, afternoon
Before I have a chance to regain some semblance of mental balance after my phone call with Suzie, Silas bursts in and then stops and stares around him with a kind of mock curiosity.
“What's that bloody great hole in your wall, Richard?”
“It's a bloody great hole in the wall. What did you want?”
“How did that get there?”
“Jesus Christ! Since when am I accountable to you for every piece of DIY I cock up? I tried to put some shelves up.” I'm not sure I'm making the story sound convincing – it's the first time I've told it and I haven't practised.
“Looks more like what you'd get if you fired a shotgun at it.”
Then to my astonishment he starts accusing me of stealing his gun and then hiding it behind his filing cabinet. I suppose there shouldn't really be anything surprising about that, considering that I did steal his gun and then hide it behind his filing cabinet – and, for that matter, I did fire it at the wall in between, although the effect was not what Silas is looking at now. I'm almost tempted to ask Silas if he knows what shotguns do to plasterboard, but it would be too risky a strategy.
I manage to retain the moral high ground thanks to Silas's complete lack of awareness (despite everything that policewoman must have told him) of quite how serious an infringement it was to bring the gun onto university premises in the first place – I point this out to him when he tells me I'm not supposed to put up shelves myself in a university room.
It's just as well for me, really, that he is so ill acquainted with the basics of safety and legality when it comes to firearms – I have no idea where I'd have got hold of a gun for the morning if he wasn't such an idiot. He also isn't anywhere near guessing what I was doing with it, which makes it a lot easier to get rid of him.
“Are you honestly trying to tell me I stole your gun, used it to blow a massive hole in the wall of my office in the middle of the night, and then hid it behind your filing cabinet? Do you think I'm completely mad?”
“I'm beginning to wonder,” he harrumphs. “You're up to something, I know you are.”
And he walks off. Far too many people have been telling me I'm up to something. Two to be precise – under normal circumstances that would probably not be too many, but the situation is altered by their being right.
I go and examine the hole. The plasterboard lying in the storeroom on the other side is still riddled with unnatural round perforations. I walk round to try to do something about it, spend a pointlessly long time looking for the key to the storeroom, and eventually get in and stomp on the debris until I reckon it would take a talented forensic expert to spot the holes. Mind you the plaster is now mixed in with little pellets of shot and the room looks a state. All this was a bit of bad planning, but then I didn't expect to be sticking a gun in my mouth on Friday morning – I was rather overtaken by events. You can't always plan things the way you want when you have to rely on an opportunity to steal a gun. I decide I can't be bothered to sweep up now, it'll have to wait.
Sticking a gun in my mouth was, as I think I have mentioned, terrifying. I banged my fist down on the button and then released my breath as I opened my eyes to see the number one on the LCD display which I'd rigged up to show the number of attempts I'd survived – one doesn't mean much, I could have just got lucky. Still trembling, I pressed the button again with my eyes open to register the green light flashing, and then, suddenly unable to bear the suspense, stabbed at it repeatedly. I stopped, took the gun out of my mouth, wiped the sweat away and breathed deeply to calm my racing heartbeat. The display said 7 – that represents less than a one per cent chance of survival.
It was at that point that I realised I had no control experiment to compare my results to – no way to be sure the equipment wasn't just malfunctioning. So I walked round to the far side of the gun, reached over and pressed the button again. Green light. I pressed it again and nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of the gun firing. It was far louder than I could have imagined and it made the complex of tiny holes in the wall which led indirectly to Silas's present suspicions, and sent dust flying everywhere. Shit, I thought.
I'm still not sure how I'm going to cover it up, although the DIY shelving story seems to be working so far. I will probably have to pay for the repairs and accept a certain amount of ridicule for being a silly ivory-tower boy who doesn't know what you can and can't do with plasterboard. I'll have to sweep up in there before anyone notices the lead shot though.
The worst bit was reloading the gun (it took long enough to work out how to load it the first time) and carrying on – one per cent is enough to satisfy a social-sciences statistician, but this is hard physics and I wouldn't be completely happy with shorter odds than one in a billion. That's thirty or so on the clock. What is more, I then needed to shoot away another few dozen tiny pieces of the wall once I was finished, just to check I hadn't broken it.