I"ll never know what made me do it. I"ll never know why I reacted with what I can only regard now, looking back on it, as incredible swiftness. The split second that elapses between the downward sweep of the enemy club and the reflex up-flinging of your arm in defence-that was all the time it took me to react. It was automatic, instinctive, without any thought in the world-but there must have been thought behind it, an instantaneous form of reasoning below the level of awareness that didn"t have time to be transmitted to the surface mind in the form of conscious thought, for I did the one thing in the world that offered the only, the slenderest, the most desperate hope of survival.
Even as the ampoule came spinning through the air and I could see there was no chance on earth of its being intercepted, my hands were reaching out for the barrel of cider on the trestle by my side, and the tinkling of the shattered ampoule was still echoing in shocked silence in that tiny little room when I smashed down the barrel with all the strength of my arms and body exactly on the spot where the gla.s.s had made contact. The staves split and shattered as if they had been made of the thinnest ply and ten gallons of cider gurgled and flooded out over the wall and floor.
"More cider," I shouted. "More cider. Pour it on the floor, down the side of the wall, spray it through the air above where that d.a.m.ned ampoule landed. For G.o.d"s sake don"t splash any cider on yourselves. Hurry! Hurry!"
"What the h.e.l.l is all this in aid of?" Hardanger demanded. His normally ruddy face was pale and set and uncomprehending, but for all that he was already carefully tipping a small vat of cider on the floor. "What will this do?"
"It"s hygroscopic," I said quickly. "The botulinus, I mean. Seeks out water in preference to air every time, it has a hundred times the affinity for hydrogen that it has for nitrogen. You heard the General speak of it this evening."
"This isn"t water." Hardanger objected almost wildly. "This is cider."
"G.o.d help us!" I said savagely. "Of course it"s cider. We haven"t got anything else here. I don"t know what the effect, the affinity will be. For the first time in your life, Hardanger, you"d better start praying that an alcohol has a high water content." I tried to lift another, smaller cask but gasped and dropped it as a sharp spear of agony struck at the right side of my chest. For one terrible second I thought the virus had struck, the next I realised I must have displaced my strapped broken ribs when I hurled that barrel through the air. I wondered vaguely whether a broken rib had pierced the pleura or even a lung, and then forgot about it: in the circ.u.mstances, it hardly mattered any more.
How long to live? If some of the botulinus virus had escaped into the atmosphere, how long before the first convulsions? What had Gregori said about the hamster when we"d been talking outside number one lab yesterday? Fifteen seconds, yes, that was it, fifteen seconds for the Satan Bug and about the same for botulinus. For a hamster, fifteen seconds. For a human being? Heaven alone knew, probably thirty seconds at the most. At the very most. I stooped and lifted the portable lamp from the floor.
"Stop pouring," I said urgently. "Stop it. That"s enough. Stand high: if you want to live, stand high. Don"t let any of that cider touch your shoes, touch any part of you, or you"re dead men." I swung the lamp round as they scrambled high to avoid the amber tide of cider already flooding rapidly across the stone floor, and as I did I could hear the police engine of the Jaguar starting up. Gregori taking off with Henriques and Mary towards the realisation of his megalomaniac"s dream, secure in the knowledge that he was leaving a charnel house behind.
Thirty seconds were up. At least thirty seconds were up. No one twitching yet, far less in convulsions. More slowly this time, I played the lamp beam over each and every one of us, starting at strained staring faces and moving slowly down the feet. The beam steadied on one of the two constables whose clothes had been taken.
"Take off your right shoe," I said sharply. "It"s been splashed. Not Not with your hand, you b.l.o.o.d.y idiot! Ease it off with the toe of the other shoe. Superintendent, the left arm of your jacket is wet." Hardanger stood very still, not even looking at me, as I eased the jacket at the collar and slid it down carefully over arms and hands before dropping it to the floor. with your hand, you b.l.o.o.d.y idiot! Ease it off with the toe of the other shoe. Superintendent, the left arm of your jacket is wet." Hardanger stood very still, not even looking at me, as I eased the jacket at the collar and slid it down carefully over arms and hands before dropping it to the floor.
"Are we-are we safe now, sir?" the sergeant asked nervously.
"Safe? I"d rather this d.a.m.ned place was alive with cobras and black widow spiders. No, we"re not safe. Some of this h.e.l.lish toxin will escape to the atmosphere as soon as the first of those splashes on the wall or floor has dried up- there"s water vapour in the air, too, you know. My guess is that as soon as any of these splashes dry up we"ll all have had it inside a minute."
"So we get out," the General said calmly. "Fast. Is that the idea, my boy?"
"Yes, sir." I glanced quickly round. "Two barrels on either side of the door. Two more in line with them and a bit back. Four men standing on those and swinging the cider-press between them. I can"t do it, something"s wrong with my ribs. That press must weigh three hundred pounds if it weighs an ounce. Think four of you could do it, Superintendent?"
"Think we can do it?" Hardanger growled. "I could do it myself, with one hand, if it meant getting out of this place. Come on, for G.o.d"s sake, let"s hurry."
And hurry they did. Manreuvring casks into position while having to stand on others was no easy trick, more especially as all the casks were full, but desperation and the fear that borders on overmastering panic gives men ability to perform feats of strength that they can never afterwards understand. In less than twenty seconds all four barrels were in position and, in another twenty, Hardanger, the sergeant and two constables, a pair on each side of the heavy ponderous cider-press, were starting on their back swing.
The door was made of solid oak, with heavy hinges to match and a draw-bar on the outside, but against that solid battering ram propelled by four powerful men with their lives at stake it might as well have been made of plywood: the shattered door was smashed completely off its hinges and the wine-press, released at the last moment, went cartwheeling through the doorway into the darkness beyond. Five seconds later the last of us had followed the cider-press.
"That farmhouse," Hardanger said urgently. "Come on. They"ve probably got a telephone."
"Wait!" There was twice the urgency in my voice. "We can"t do that. We don"t know that we"re not carrying the virus on us. We may be bringing death to all that family. Let"s give the rain time to wash off any virus that may be sticking to the outside."
"d.a.m.n it, we can"t afford to wait," Hardanger said fiercely. "Besides, if the virus didn"t get us in there it"s a certainty it won"t get us now. General?"
"I"m not sure," the General said hesitantly. "I rather think you"re right. We"ve no time--"
He broke off in horror as one of the unclothed constables, the one whose shoe had been splashed by the cider, screamed aloud in agony, the scream deepening to a tearing rasping coughing moan: clutching hands clawed in a maniac frenzy at a suddenly stiffened straightened neck where the tendons stood out whitely like quivering wires: then he toppled and fell heavily to the muddy ground, silent now, the nails of his fingers tried to tear his throat open. His crew-mate, the other uniformless constable, made some sort of unintelligible sound, moved forward and down to help his friend, then grunted in pain as my arm hooked around his neck.
"Don"t touch him!" I shouted hoa.r.s.ely. "Touch him and you"ll die too. He must have picked up the toxin when he brushed his shoe with his hand then touched his mouth. Nothing on earth can save him now. Stand back. Keep well clear of him."
He took twenty seconds to die, the kind of twenty seconds that will stay with a man in his nightmares till he draws his last breath on earth. I had seen many men die, but even those who had died in bullet and shrapnel-torn agony had done so peacefully and quietly compared to this man whose body, in the incredibly convulsive violence of its death throes, twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. Twice in the last shocking seconds before death he threw his racked and tortured body clear off the ground and so high in the air that I could have pa.s.sed a table beneath him. And then, as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun, it was all over and he was no more than a strangely small and shapeless bundle of clothes lying face downwards in the muddy earth. My mouth was kiln-dry and full of the taste of salt, the ugly taste of fear. twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. Twice in the last shocking seconds before death he threw his racked and tortured body clear off the ground and so high in the air that I could have pa.s.sed a table beneath him. And then, as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun, it was all over and he was no more than a strangely small and shapeless bundle of clothes lying face downwards in the muddy earth. My mouth was kiln-dry and full of the taste of salt, the ugly taste of fear.
I can"t say how long we stood there in the heavy cold rain, staring at the dead man. A long time, I think. And then we looked at each other, and each one of us knew what the others were capable of thinking only one thing. Who was next? In the pale wash of light from the lamp I still held in one hand, we all stared at each other, one half of our senses and minds outgoing and screwed up to the highest pitch of intensity and perception to detect the first signs of death in another, the other half turned inwards to detect the first signs in themselves. Then, all at once, I cursed savagely, perhaps at myself, or my cowardice, or at Gregori or at the botulinus virus, I don"t know, turned abruptly and headed for the byre, taking the lamp with me, leaving the others standing there round the dead man in the rain-filled pitchy darkness like darkly-petrified mourners at some age-old heathen midnight rites.
I was looking for a hose and I found one almost immediately. I carried it outside, screwed it on to a standing plug and turned the tap on full: the results in the way of volume and pressure would have done justice to any city hydrant. I clambered awkwardly on to a hay wagon that was standing nearby and said to the General, "Come on, sir, you first."
He came directly under the earthward-pointed nozzle and the jet of water on head and shoulders from a distance of only a few inches made him stumble and all but fall. But he stuck it gamely for all of the half-minute that I insisted he remain under the hose, and by the time I was finished he was as sodden as if he"d spent the night in the river and shivering so violently that I could hear his teeth chatter above the hiss of the water: but by the time he was finished I knew that any toxin that might have been clinging to face or body would have been completely washed away. The other four all submitted to it in turn and then Hardanger did the same for me. The force of the water was such that it was like being belaboured by a non-stop series of far from lightweight clubs and the water itself was ice-cold: but when I thought of the man who had died and how he had died a few bruises and the risk of pneumonia didn"t even begin to be worth considering. When he had finished with me Hardanger switched off the water and said quietly, "Sorry, Cavell. You had the right of it."
"It was my fault," I said. I didn"t mean my voice to sound dull and lifeless but that was the way it came out, to my ears anyway. "I should have warned him. I should have told him not to touch his mouth or nose with his hand."
"He should have thought of that himself," Hardanger said, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. "He knew the dangers as well as you-they"ve been published in every paper in the land to-day. Let"s go and see if the farmer has a phone. Not that it"ll make much difference now. Gregori knows that the police Jaguar is too hot to hang on to for a second longer than is necessary. He"s won all along the line, d.a.m.n his black soul, and nothing is going to stop him now. Twelve hours he said. Twelve hours and then he would be done."
"Twelve hours from now Gregori will be dead," I said.
"What?" I could sense him staring at me. "What did you say?"
"He"ll be dead," I repeated. "Before dawn."
"It"s all right," Hardanger said. Cavell"s mind had cracked at last, but let"s play it casual, let"s not any of us make a song and dance about it. He took my arm and started out for the lamp-lit rectangles which showed where the house stood. "The sooner this is over the sooner we"ll all get the rest and food and sleep we need."
"I"ll rest and sleep when I"ve killed Gregori," I said. "I"m going to kill him to-night. First I get Mary back. Then I"ll kill him."
"Mary will be all right, Cavell." Mary in that madman"s hands, that was what had sent Cavell"s last few remaining grey cells tottering over the brink, he thought. "He"ll let her go, he"ll have no reason to do anything to her. And you had had to do what you did. You thought that if she stayed there with us in the cider house she would die. Isn"t that it, Cavell?" to do what you did. You thought that if she stayed there with us in the cider house she would die. Isn"t that it, Cavell?"
"I"m sure the superintendent is right, my boy." The General was walking on my other side now, and his voice was quiet because loud voices excite the unhinged. "She won"t be harmed."
I said rudely, to both, "If I"m round the bend, what the h.e.l.l does that make you two?"
Hardanger stopped, tightened his grip on my arm and peered at me. He knew that those whose minds have gone off the rails never talk about it, for the simple reason that they are unshakably convinced that their minds are still on the track. He said carefully, "I don"t think I understand."
"You don"t. But you will." I said to the General: "You must persuade the Cabinet to go on with this evacuation of the Central London area. Continuous radio and TV broadcasts. They"ll have no difficulty in persuading the people to leave, you can believe that. It shouldn"t cause much trouble-that area"s pretty well unlived in by night, anyway." I turned again to Hardanger. "Have two hundred of your best men armed. A gun for me, too-and a knife. I know exactly what Gregori intends to do to-night. I know exactly what he hopes to achieve. I know exactly how he intends to leave the country-and exactly where he will be leaving from."
"How do you know, my boy?" The General"s voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear above the drumming of the rain.
"Because Gregori talked too much. Sooner or later they all talk too much. Gregori was cagier than most, even when he was convinced that we would all be dead in a minute he still said very little. But that little was too much. And I think I"ve really known ever since we found MacDonald"s body."
"You must have heard things that I didn"t hear," Hardanger said sourly.
"You heard it all. You heard him say he was going to London, if he really wanted the bug set loose in London to have Mordon destroyed he"d have stayed in Mordon to see what happened and have had some stooge do the job in London. But he has no interest in seeing Mordon destroyed, he never had. There"s something he has to do in London. Another of his never-ending red herrings-the Communist red herring, of course, was purely fortuitous, he"d no hand in that at all. That"s the first thing. The second-that he was going to achieve some great ambition to-night to-night. The third- that he had twice saved Henriques from the electric chair. That shows what kind of a man he is-and I don"t mean a criminal defence lawyer of the U.S. Bar a.s.sociation-and what kind of ambition he has in mind: I"ll take long odds not only that he"s on the Interpol files but also that he"s an ex big-time American racketeer who has been deported to Italy-and the line of business in which he used to specialise would make very interesting reading, because the criminal leopards, even the biggest cats in the jungle, never change their spots. The fourth thing is that he expects to be clear of this country in twelve hours" time. And the fifth thing is that this is Sat.u.r.day night. Put all those things together add see what you get."
"Suppose you tell us," Hardanger said impatiently.
So I told them.
The rain still fell as vertically, as heavily as ever, just as heavily as when we had left that farmhouse some hours previously, where the torrential rain in conjunction with the quick evacuation of the area had robbed the botulinus toxin of all victims other than the unfortunate policeman who had died so terribly before our eyes. Now, at twenty minutes past three in the morning, the rain was ice-cold, but I didn"t really feel it. All I could feel was my exhaustion, the harsh stabbing pain in my right ribs that came with every breath I took and the continuous rending worry that, in spite of the confidence I"d shown to the General and Hardanger, I might be hopelessly wrong after all and Mary lost to me for ever. And even if I were right, she might still as easily be lost to me. With a conscious and almost desperate effort of will, I turned my mind to other things.
The high-walled courtyard where I"d been standing for the past three hours was dark and deserted, as dark and deserted as the heart of London itself. Evacuation of the centre of the city, the temporarily homeless going to prepared halls, ballrooms and theatres, had begun shortly after six o"clock, just after the last of the offices, businesses and shops had closed: it had been hastened by radio broadcasts at nine o"clock saying that, according to the latest message received, the time for the release of the botulinus toxin had been advanced from four a.m. to half past two: but there had been no hurry, no panic, no despair, in fact there would have been no sense of anything unusual happening had it not been for the unusual number of people carrying suitcases: the phlegmatic Londoners who had seen the City set on fire and suffered a hundred nights of ma.s.s area bombing during the war weren"t to be stampeded into anything for anybody.
Between half past nine and ten o"clock over a thousand troops had combed their methodical way through the heart of the city checking that every last man, woman and child had been moved to safety, that no one had been inadvertently overlooked. At half past eleven a darkened drifting police launch had nosed silently into the north bank of the river and put me ash.o.r.e on the Embankment, just below Hungerford Bridge. At midnight troops and police, all of them armed, had completely sealed off the entire area, including the bridges across the Thames. At one o"clock a power failure on a large scale had blacked out the better part of a square mile of the city-the square mile cordoned off by troops and police.
Twenty past three. Fifty minutes after the timed release of the botulinus toxin. It was time to go. I eased the borrowed Webley in its ill-fitting holster, checked the knife that was strapped, handle downwards, to my left forearm, and moved out into the darkness.
I"d never seen a picture of, far less visited, the new helicopter port on the North Bank, but an Inspector of the Metropolitan Police had briefed me so exhaustively that by the time he had finished I could have found my way up there blind-folded. And that, to all intents and purposes, was exactly what I was. Blind-folded. Blind. In that blacked-out city and oh that weeping overcast night, the darkness was just one degree short of absolute.
I had been told that there were three different ways up to the heliport, perched on the roof of the station, a hundred feet above the streets of London. There were two lifts, but with the power failure those would be out of operation. Between those lifts was a gla.s.sed-in circular staircase without a shred of cover from top to bottom, using which would be as neat a way as any of committing suicide if there was a reception committee waiting and I could not see Gregori as a man who would leave his main line of approach unguarded. And then there was the third way, the fire-escape on the other side of the station. That was the only way in for me.
I walked two hundred yards from the courtyard along a narrow cobbled lane. When the wall gave way to a high wooden fence I reached for the top, pulled myself up, slipped quietly down on the other side and set off along the railway tracks.
The reference book compilers who a.s.sert that Capham Junction has more sets of parallel tracks than any place in Britain wouldn"t go around making silly statements like that if they"d tried this lot on a pitch black October night with the sleety rain falling about their ears. There wasn"t a single piece of ironware in the whole interminable width of those tracks that I didn"t find that night, usually with my ankles and shins. Railway lines, wires, signalling gear, switch gear, hydrants, platforms where there shouldn"t have been platforms -I found them all. To add to my discomfort the burnt cork that had been so heavily rubbed into my face and hands was beginning to run, and burnt cork tastes exactly as you would expect it to taste: and when it gets in your eyes it hurts. The only hazard I didn"t have to contend with was live rails- the power had been switched off.
I found the fence on the other side of the track easily enough, just by walking into it. Once down in the lane on the other side I turned left and made my way towards the fire-escape which came down, I had been told, into a small recessed court. I found the court, crossed the entrance and flattened myself against the far wall. The fire-escape was there all right, just barely discernible twenty feet away against the fractionally lighter darkness of the sky, gaunt and stark and angular and zig-zagging upwards out of sight. The first two or three flights of the fire-escape were invisible, lost against the darkness of high walls beyond.
For three minutes I stood there, showing as many signs of life as a wooden Indian. Then I heard it-even above the drumming of the sleet on my sodden shoulders and the sound of water running in the gutters, I heard it: the slight shuffle of a shoe on the pavement as someone changed his cramped position. The sound didn"t come again, but then I didn"t need to hear it again. Once was enough. Someone was standing directly under the lowermost platform of the fire-escape and if he turned out to be the soul of innocence doing it for his health"s sake it would be surprising, to say the least. It was also going to be unfortunate for him, but he wouldn"t be caring much when he was dead.
Finding this man here didn"t give me any feeling of dismay and frustration because of the possible threat and setback he offered, all it afforded me was the sense of profound satisfaction and relief that could not be described. I had gambled, but I had won. Dr. Gregori was doing exactly what I"d told the General and Hardanger he would be doing.
The knife came free of its sheath and I brushed the blade with the ball of my thumb. It had a point like a lancet and an edge like a scalpel. It was only a very little knife, but three and a half inches of steel can kill you just as dead as the longest stiletto or the heaviest broadsword. If you know where to hit, that is. I had a fair idea where to hit, and how. And at anything up to ten paces I was twice as accurate with a knife as with a gun.
I covered sixteen of the intervening twenty feet in just over ten seconds, making no more sound than the moonlit shadow of a drifting snowflake. And now I could see him, quite clearly. He was directly under the first platform of the fire-escape to get what shelter he could from the rain. His back was to the wall. His head was bowed, as if his chin was resting on his chest, as if he was half-asleep on his feet. He"d only to glance sideways under raised eyelids and he"d have had me.
He wasn"t going to remain so obligingly unseeing for an indefinite period. I twisted the knife until the blade pointed upwards, then found myself hesitating. Even with Mary"s life in the balance I found myself hesitating. Whoever this character was I"d little doubt but that he deserved to die anyway. But to knife an unsuspecting and half-asleep man, however much he deserved it? This wasn"t the war any more. I slid out the Webley, quiet as a mouse tiptoeing past a sleeping cat, caught the barrel and swung for a spot just below the dripping brim of his hat, just behind the left ear, and because I was feeling illogically angry about my uneasiness in knifing him I struck him very hard indeed. The sound was the sound of an axe sinking deep into the bole of a pine. I caught and lowered him gently to the ground. He wouldn"t wake up before dawn. Maybe he"d never waken again. It didn"t seem to matter. I started up the fire-escape.
There was no hurry, no haste, in my going. Haste could be the end of it all. I went up the steps slowly, one at a time, always staring upwards. I was too near the end of the road now to let rashness be the ruin of everything.
After the sixth or seventh flight of steps I slowed down even more, not because my leg and queer shortness of breath were troubling me, which they were, but because I had become suddenly aware of an area of diffused light in the darkness of the wall above me, where a light had no right to be. There shouldn"t have been any light anywhere, for all the lights of Central London were out.
If ghosts were allowed to have black faces-though I suspected mine was getting pretty streaky by this time-then I want up the next flight of steps like a ghost. As I approached the light I could see that it came not from a window but from a grille-work door set in the wall. Cautiously, I raised my head to the level of this door and peered inside.
It was on a level with the ma.s.sive iron girders that spanned and supported the roof of the station. At least a dozen lights were burning inside the station, small, weak, isolated sources of illumination that served only to emphasise the depth of the gloom that lay over most of the huge and cavernous building. Six of the lights were directly above sets of hydraulic buffers at the end of tracks, and I suddenly realised why they were burning there: some lights are essential to the safe operation of a railway station and those must have been battery-powered lamps designed to come on in the event of a power failure. A prosaic enough explanation and, I was sure, the correct one.
I looked for some moments at the geometric tracery of soot-blackened girders that dwindled and vanished into impenetrable darkness at the farthest reaches of the station, then put a slight experimental pressure on the door. It gave under my hand. And the d.a.m.ned thing squeaked, like a gibbet creaking in the night wind. A gibbet with a corpse on it. I put the thought of corpses out of my mind and withdrew my hand from the door. Enough was enough.
But the door was sufficiently open to let me see a couple of vertical iron ladders leading away from the steel platform just inside. One led upwards to a long gangway immediately below the vast skylights, the other down to another gangway about the level of the highest of the lights inside the station: the former would be for the window-cleaners, the latter for the electricians. It was a great help to me to know that. I straightened. At least six nights of stairs to go yet before I started getting really interested.
The arm that locked round my throat and started throttling the life out of me belonged to a gorilla, a gorilla with a shirt and jacket on, but a gorilla for all that. In those first two h.e.l.lish seconds of immobilised shock and pain I thought my neck was going to snap, and before I could even begin to react something hard and metallic smacked down on my right wrist and sent the Webley flying from my grasp. It struck the iron platform and then spun off into s.p.a.ce.
I never heard it land on the roadway beneath. I was too busy fighting for my life. With my left hand-my right hand was momentarily paralysed and quite useless-I reached up, caught his wrist and tried to tear his arm away. I might as well have tried to tear a four-inch bough from an oak tree.
He was phenomenally strong and he was squeezing the life out of me. And not slowly.
Something ground savagely into my back, just above the kidney. The unspoken order was clear as day but for all that I didn"t stop struggling, a few more seconds of that pressure and I knew my neck would go. I smashed my right foot against the grille door and sent us both staggering back against the outside platform rail. I felt his feet leave the platform as the rail struck him about hip-level, and for a moment we both teetered there on the point of imbalance, his arm still locked around my neck, then the pressures on neck and back were simultaneously released as he grabbed desperately for the rail to save himself.
I staggered away from him, whooping painfully for breath, and fell heavily against the next flight of steps leading upwards. I landed on my right side, just where the ribs were gone, and the world darkened and dimmed in a haze of pain and if I"d then let myself go, relaxed even for the briefest moment and yielded to the body"s clamorous demands for rest, I should have pa.s.sed out. But pa.s.sing out was the one luxury I couldn"t afford. Not with this character anyway. I knew who I had now. If he"d wanted merely to knock me out he could have tapped me over the head with his gun: if he"d wanted to kill me he could have shot me in the back or, if he"d no silencer and didn"t want noise, a tap on the head and a heave over the rail to the roadway sixty feet below would have served his purpose equally well. But this lad didn"t want anything so quiet and simple and painless. If I was to die, he wanted me to know I was dying: for me he wanted the tearing agony of death by violence, for himself the delight of savouring my agony. A vicious and evil s.a.d.i.s.t with a dark mind crimsoned by the l.u.s.t for blood. Gregori"s hatchet-man, Henriques. The deaf mute with the crazy eyes.
Half-lying, half-standing against the steps, I twisted to face him as he came at me again. He was crouched low and he had his gun in front of him. But he didn"t want to use that gun. Not if he could help it. From a bullet you died too quickly, unless, of course, you were very careful with the placing of the bullet. Suddenly I knew this was just what he had in mind, the muzzle was ranging down my body as he searched for the spot where a bullet would mean that I would take quite some time dying, unpleasantly. I straightened my arms on the step behind me and if the scything upward sweep of my right foot had caught him where I had intended Henriques wouldn"t have worried me any more. But my vision was fuzzy and co-ordination poor. My foot glanced off his right .thigh, swept on and struck his forearm, jarring the gun from his hand: the gun carried over the edge of the platform and clattered down a couple of steps on the flight below.
He turned like a cat to retrieve it and I was hardly any slower myself. As he leaned over the top step, scrabbled for and found his gun, I jumped and caught him with both feet. He grunted, an ugly hoa.r.s.e sound, then crashed and cartwheeled down the steps to the platform below. But he landed on his feet: and he still had the gun.
I didn"t hesitate. If I"d tried running up the remaining flights to the heliport on top of the station roof, he"d have caught me in seconds or picked me off at his leisure: even had I managed to reach the top, a.s.suming that the days of miracles were not yet over, secrecy and silence would have vanished and Gregori would be waiting for me, I"d be trapped between two fires and everything would be over for Mary. It would have been just as suicidal to go down and meet him or wait for him where I was: I"d only the knife strapped to my left forearm and my numbed right hand was not sufficiently recovered to ease it out from its sheath, far less use it, and even had we both been weaponless, even had I been at my fittest and best, I doubt whether I could have coped with the dark violence of that phenomenally powerful deaf mute. And I was a very long way from my fittest and best. I went through the grille door like a rabbit bolting from its hole with a ferret only half a length behind.
Desperately I glanced round the tiny platform. Up the vertical ladder to the window cleaners" catwalk or down to the electricians"? It took me all of half a second to realise I couldn"t do either. Not with one hand still out of commission and hope to reach either the top or bottom of the ladder before Henriques came through that door and picked me off in his own sweet time.
Six feet away from the platform was one of the giant girders that spanned the entire width of the station roof. I didn"t stop to think of it, subconsciously I must have known that if I had stopped to think, even for a second, I"d have chosen to remain there and have it out with Henriques on that platform, gun or no gun. But I didn"t stop. I ducked under the waist-high chain surrounding the platform and launched myself across that sixty foot drop.
My good foot landed fair and square on the girder, the other came just short and slipped off the thickly treacherous coating of soot deposited there by generations of steam locomotives. As my shin cracked painfully against the edge of the metal I grabbed the beam with my left hand and for two or three dreadful seconds I just teetered there while the great empty station swam dizzily around me. Then I steadied and was safe. For the moment. I rose shakily to my feet.
I didn"t crawl along the girder. I didn"t p.u.s.s.yfoot along with arms outstretched to aid my balance. I just put down my head and ran. The beam was only eight or nine inches wide, it was covered with this dangerous layer of soot and the two rows of smooth rivet-heads running along its entire length would have been my death had I stepped on their slippery convexities. But I ran. It took me seconds only to cover the seventy feet to the great central vertical girder that disappeared into the darkness above. I grabbed it, edged recklessly round, and stared back in the direction from which I"d come.
Henriques was on the platform by the grille door. His gun was extended at the full stretch of his right arm, pointing directly at me, but he was lowering it even as I looked: he"d seen me, all right, but too late to draw a bead before I"d vanished behind the shelter of the vertical girder.
He looked around him, seemed to hesitate. I stood where I was, clinging on to the girder while some of the numbness drained from my right hand, and while Henriques was making up his mind I cursed myself for my folly. All the way up that fire-escape from street level I"d never once thought to look behind. The deaf mute must have been making a round of the posted guards, found the unconscious man at the foot of the fire-escape and drawn the inevitable conclusions.
Henriques had made up his mind. The idea of the leap from the platform across to the girder didn"t appeal to him, and I couldn"t blame him. He swarmed up the iron ladder to the window cleaners" catwalk above, moved over to a position directly above the girder I was standing on, crossed the catwalk rail and lowered himself until his feet were only inches above the girder. He dropped, steadying himself with his hands on the wall, turned carefully and started coming towards me, his hands outstretched like a tight-rope walker"s. I didn"t wait for him. I turned and started walking also.
I didn"t walk far for there wasn"t far to walk. The beam I was on stretched to the other side of the main hall of the station and there it ended, vanishing into the grimy brickwork. There was no convenient platform here. No catwalk above or below. Just the beam vanishing into the wall. And sixty feet below the dull gleam of rails and hydraulic buffers. Just myself and the girder and the blank wall. The end of the road and no way out. I turned and made ready to die.
Henriques had reached the vertical girder in the centre, had safely negotiated his way past it and was advancing on me. Fifty feet away he stopped and even in the gloom I could see the white glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. He had seen how it was with me, that I was trapped and quite at his mercy. It must have been one of the highlights in the life of that crazy man.
He started moving again, slowly closing the distance between us. Twenty feet away he stopped, stooped, lowered his hands to the girder and sat down, locking his legs securely under the beam. He was wearing a very smooth line in Italian sacking and all that soot wouldn"t be doing it any good at all but he didn"t seem to care. He raised his pistol, holding it with both hands, and pointed it at the middle of my body.
There was nothing I could do. With my hands at my back, bracing myself against the wall, I stiffened in futile preparation for the slamming rending impact of the shock. I stared at his hands and imagined I could see the fingers whiten. In spite of myself I winced and closed my eyes. Only for a second or two. When I opened them again he"d lowered the gun until his hand was resting on the beam and was grinning at me.
For sheer calculated sadism and feline cruelty I"d never met its equal. But I should have known it, I should have expected it. The monstrous madman who had forced a cyanide sweet down Clandon"s throat, who had strangled MacDonald alive at the end of a rope, who had pulped in the back of Mrs. Turpin"s head, who had tortured Easton Derry to death-and, for good measure, had stove in my ribs- such a man wasn"t going to pa.s.s up the exquisite pleasure of watching me die by inches, even although for once, the dying was to be by terror of the mind instead of agony of the body. I could visualise those empty eyes now hot and greedy for the suffering of others, I could almost visualise the wolf-like slavering of that twisted grinning mouth. He was the cat, I was the mouse, and he was going to play with me until he had extracted every last ounce of pleasure from his macabre game. And then, regretfully, he would shoot me, although he would still have that one last joy of seeing me fall and being smashed and mangled on the steel and concrete far below.
I had been very afraid. I"m no hero when I see that death is certain, when my murder is certain, nor do I believe anyone else is. I had been close to physical paralysis with that fear, and that numbness had extended to the mind, but now the petrifaction of body and mind vanished in a suddenly overwhelming warm flood of pure anger, anger that my life and the fate of Mary should be at the mercy of the whims of a sub-human creature like this. I remembered my knife.
Slowly I brought together the hands behind my back until they were touching. The fingers of my right hand, painful still but no longer numb, reached up under my left sleeve and closed on the haft of the knife. Henriques lifted his gun again, pointing it at my head this time, his lips lifted back in a snarling smile, but I just kept on working away slowly till the knife was clear of the sheath. It was too soon for the deaf mute to kill me yet: there was still a great deal more of innocent pleasure to be extracted from his harmless game before he grew bored and blew the last whistle on me by leaning on the trigger.
Henriques lowered the gun a second time, shifted slightly to lock his ankles even more securely under the girder and dug into his jacket pocket with his left hand. He brought out a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches. He was smiling like a crazy man, because this was the zenith, the towering pinnacle of refinement of torture, the killer taking his luxuriantly insolent ease while the trembling terror-stricken victim waits, not knowing when the last moment will come, but knowing it must inevitably come: and he"d thought it all up by himself.
He got a cigarette into his mouth, bent over a match to strike it The gun was still in his right hand. The match flared and for half a second of time he was blind.
Steel flickered and gleamed briefly in the weak backwash of light and Henriques coughed. The knife buried itself to the hilt in the base of his throat. He jerked violently, arching over backwards, as if a heavy electric shock had pa.s.sed through the steel girder. The gun flew from his hand and curved earthwards in a long crazy curve. It seemed to take an age to fall and I couldn"t look away from it. I didn"t see it land, but I saw sparks on the line below as steel struck steel.
I looked back at Henriques. He"d straightened and bent slightly forward and was staring at me in perplexity. His right hand reached up and pulled the knife clear and in a moment his shirt front was saturated in the pumping blood. His face twisted in a snarl, a snarl already tinged with approaching dissolution, and he raised his right hand up and back over his shoulder. The blade no longer gleamed in the lamplight. He leaned back to give impetus to his throw, and then tiredness came into the dark and evil face and the knife slipped from his dying hand and clattered to the concrete below. The eyes closed and he slipped to one side, slipped right over until he was beneath the girder and held only by his locked ankles. How long he hung like that I couldn"t later say. It seemed a very long time. And then, at last, in a weird slow-motion sequence, the ankles slowly unlocked and he fell from sight. I didn"t see him fall, I couldn"t see him fall. But when at last I did look I saw him far below, his broken body hanging limply over the gleaming ram of a gigantic hydraulic buffer. For Henriques" sake, wherever he was now, I hoped the shades of his victims weren"t waiting for him. I became vaguely aware that my cheek muscles were aching. I had been smiling down at the dead man. I had never felt less like smiling.
Sick and dizzy and trembling like an old man with the ague, I made my way back across the girder by crawling on my hands and knees. I took me a long time I think, and I"ll never be clear how I managed the six foot jump from girder to platform, even although it was easier this time for the chain was there for my hands to catch. I staggered through the grille door to the fire-escape and half-lowered myself, half-collapsed on to the platform. The night air of London had never smelled so sweet.
How long I lay there I don"t know. I can"t remember whether I was conscious or not most of the time. But it couldn"t have been long for when I looked at my watch it was still only ten minutes to four.
I pushed myself to my feet and made my way wearily down the fire-escape. When I reached street level I didn"t even bother looking for my Webley, it might have taken me long enough to find it, and the chances were that some part of its mechanism had been damaged in its long fall. I would have been very surprised if the guard I"d disposed of hadn"t been carrying a gun. I wasn"t surprised. I didn"t know what make of automatic it was but it had a trigger and safety catch in the usual position and that was all I wanted. I started to climb the fire-escape again.
I made the last two flights to the roof of the station on my hands and knees. Not from the need of stealth or secrecy, I just couldn"t make it any other way. I was as far through as that. I rested for a bit with my back to the wall of the pa.s.senger lounge, then walked slowly across the concrete to the hangar in the far corner.
A faint wash of light shone weakly through the open doors: it would be invisible from below, for the hangar doors opened on to the centre of the heliport. The light came not from the hangar itself but from what was inside it-the big twenty-four-seater Voland Helicopter that the Inter-City Flights were now operating on their new routes.