O'Donnell, Peter - Modesty Blaise Pieces Of Modesty, page 9
That must have raised a lot of questions, but Janet didn’t ask any. As I went to the phone she limped across and put a hand on my arm and said in a quiet voice, ‘She’s good at looking after herself, surely.’
I didn’t need telling that. She’d look after herself all right if she could see them coming, but this was different. I told Janet so while I was looking up Dave Craythorpe’s number. Dave has a Beagle Pup that he keeps at White Waltham, not very far from The Treadmill. He’s done quite a few flying jobs for us. I was praying that he was at home, and available, or if not, that I could borrow his Beagle to fly myself up to Glasgow.
The phone kept ringing. Janet said, ‘Who are you trying to get, Willie? And why?’
I told her. She put her hand on the phone-cradle and cut me off. ‘There’s Daddy’s Beechcraft Baron at Heathrow,’ she said. ‘He came down on Tuesday and he’s still in town. I’ll fly you up to Glasgow myself, Willie.’
Jesus! Good old Daddy Earl. I didn’t ask if he’d let her borrow the plane because I had an idea she wasn’t going to bother about permission. Nobody at Heathrow would stop her, not when she gave them diat look with ten generations of earls behind it. And the Beechcraft could do 225 mph against die Beagle’s 120.
I put my arms round her and kissed her as if I meant it, which I did. She smelt fresh and cool, and she was good to kiss. Then I rang a Glasgow number and this time I got through right away. Wee Jock Miller said, ‘Aye?’ and I told him I wanted a good car waiting at Glasgow Airport from 2 am onwards. He just said ‘Aye, Wullie,’ and we rang off. Jock
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had a Network pension because a bullet wound had cost him the sight of one eye, and he ran a garage hi Glasgow now. He’d never talked much, but if he said, ‘Aye,’ then you could stop worrying.
Janet said, ‘I was inside Castle Glencroft once when I was a wee diing. It’s no more than a big house, Willie, north of Loch Shiel and nothing for miles around.’ I told her I knew there was a phone laid on, so I reckoned the place was still habitable. I was moving about the room opening drawers, repacking the bag, taking a few things out, putting a few in. Janet didn’t blink as she saw me gear. She’d picked up quite a bit about Modesty and me, and I suppose she’d guessed quite a bit more.
‘The family lived there till a few years ago,’ she said. ‘Then they moved out. I don’t know if they sold Glencroft, but likely enough they couldn’t. Maybe whoever’s there now rented it for a while.’
That sounded about right. I zipped up the bag. While Janet was getting the car out I went upstairs and changed into black denims. There were twin sheaths stitched inside the breast of die denim windcheater, and I slipped a knife into each sheath.
I felt cooler now, and I didn’t go mad driving to Heathrow. Fitch was supposed to bring me in by noon. If we didn’t arrive then, Rodelle would start work on the Princess. But now, widi any luck we’d be in Glasgow by two-thirty and I’d reach Glencroft Casde by four-thirty. That meant I’d have a few hours of darkness and all morning to clean things up.
At Heathrow we were lucky getting clearance for a quick take-off. Janet brought the Baron round on course, set the controls on auto-pilot and asked for a cigarette. She couldn’t tell me much about Glencroft Casde, except diat it was ringed by a high wall and built in a sort of E-shape widi the middle stroke missing. One wing had been condemned years ago, and the family had lived in die odier wing.
We didn’t talk very much during the flight. I suppose Janet felt there wasn’t much that could be said, and I was busy with a few mental tricks diat stop you burning up all your juice widi adrenalin fatigue. All I remember is diat after a long time she said a bit uncertainly, as if she wasn’t sure how I’d react,
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‘Willie … you think an awful lot of her, don’t you?’
Well, I don’t often try to explain this, because it can’t be done, but I reckoned Janet was entitled to an answer. It’s a long story, and I could only give her the bones of it, which don’t mean much really. Most of my life I was a mean, stupid, twisted bum, who hated everything and everyone, and who was always in trouble. Then the Princess came along. She was only twenty then, but she’d been running The Network for two years and was already big-time. She picked me out of the gutter, or out of jail to be exact, gave me a job to do, and trusted me. It was like being melted down and remoulded. I came out of it… well, different.
Different? Try imagining something that’s always lived in pitch dark, groping around at the bottom of the sea, and then suddenly it finds it can live in the open, in the air and sun. It was like that. Or like if suddenly you found you could take off and fly like a bird. It was that different.
When I’d finished blundering around with words, trying to explain all this to Janet, she sat thinking for a bit and then said slowly, ‘I have an idea of what you mean, Willie. You’re the only man I know who’s … exhilarated all the time.’ She looked at me. ‘I see what she’s meant to you. Maybe finding you has meant quite a lot to her, too.’ She smiled then, a nice easy smile, and reached out to rest her knuckles against my cheek. ‘All right. She’s your Princess and you’re her faithful courtier. There’s plenty left, and I’ll settle for that.’
We landed at two-thirty. Jock Miller had two cars waiting in the car park. I chose the E-type Jag and put my bag in. When I introduced Lady Janet to him, Wee Jock’s scarred and wicked little face went dull red with pleasure. I wouldn’t say he’s a snob, but he’d certainly swing a claymore for the aristocracy, providing they were Scottish. I told him Rodelle had got the Princess, and his eyes went ugly. He looked up at me from his five foot nothing and said, Til borrow a razor an’ come wi’ ye Wullie.’
I said, ‘You bloody well won’t, Jock. It’s got to be done sneaky, and one’s sneakier than two. So you look after Lady Janet and get ‘er fixed up at an hotel. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’
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I kissed Janet goodbye, and she hung on to me tight for just a second. Then I got in the car and drove off. In the mirror I could see the two of them looking after me until I turned out of sight.
The winter snows had gone and the roads were clear. I made good time up past Loch Lomond, and didn’t lose a lot on the road through the Grampians. Then there was Rannoch Moor and the long curve round to Fort William before I took the minor road running north. Half an hour later I turned down a track leading to Glencroft Castle. It was nearly a mile away, but I drove with no lights. After about half a mile I pulled off the track into a little rocky lay-by, got the bag out, and went ahead on foot.
It wasn’t four yet, and up north here I knew it wouldn’t be dawn till well after eight. I was feeling nice and easy inside now. I’d got there, I’d got time in hand, and I’d got the initiative, which was the most important thing of all. As far as Rodelle knew, I was in a car with Fitch and had probably only just cleared the Midlands at this moment.
Glencroft was a miniature castle, as Janet had said, and there was a crenellated wall right round it, about thirty feet high. As the castle itself only had three floors, the wall was way out of proportion. But God knows why anyone had built the place there anyway. It didn’t defend anything, except whoever was inside it. Still, with the clans always feuding, that had probably been the point.
I took a look all round the wall. There was one big main gate with spikes on top. It was newer than the castle, not more than a century old, of very solid timber, and locked or barred on the inside. The barbed wire reinforcing the spikes was newer still, not even rusty yet. The wall arched over the top of the gate, and the small gap was filled with these spikes and barbed wire. On the eastern side there was a small door set in the wall, again very solid, and barred on the inside.
I decided to go over the top, so I sorted out the stuff in the bag, put a selection of it in a small pack, and strapped this on my back. Then I took a length of knotted nylon rope with a grapnel at the end. The tines of the grapnel were sheathed in rubber, except for the tips. It hardly made any noise when I
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tossed it up and got it hooked over one of the crenels.
It was an easy walk up the wall. I was trying to think what they call the bits that stick up between the crenels. About four feet from the top I remembered they’re called merlons. And at just about the same time I felt the rope give. The mortar holding the big stone that the grapnel was hooked on must have been weak and crumbly, because I could see this stone, about eighteen inches long and a foot thick, leaning over as it tilted out from the top of the wall.
Then we both fell. I’m not laying it on when I say I can take a twenty-five-foot fall on to turf without worrying too much. Falling is something I can do quite well, which isn’t much to boast about. The smart bloke is the one who doesn’t fall.
This fall had problems, though. I didn’t want to land on my back, because I was wearing the pack with a lot of hardware in it. Another thing I didn’t want was to have a hundredweight block of stone land on top of me, so I was fending this off as I went down - or rather trying to push myself aside from underneath it.
That was the last thing I remember for a bit. When I opened my eyes I felt cold as a deep-freeze except for my left shoulder, which was on fire. The block of stone lay a yard away, and it hadn’t hit me. I hadn’t landed on my back, either, because that didn’t hurt. What I’d done was to dislocate my left shoulder. When I sat up and touched it, I could feel the lump where the bone was out of the socket.
Charming.
After a bit I stood up and leaned against the wall with my good shoulder, wondering. In some places my name carries quite a reputation, and I was wondering why. My own opinion of Garvin just then was that with a lot of help he might just about make the grade as a village idiot.
There was nothing I could do about the shoulder, not on my own, so I spent a little while wrapping the pain up in black velvet and shutting it away where it couldn’t reach me. It’s a mental trick, and it’s one of about a million things I owe to the Princess. You don’t learn it in an hour or a day. There’s an old
says he’s a hundred and twenty-seven. I think he’s a liar. He’s
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a hundred and fifty if he’s a day. The Princess sent me to him years back, and I spent two of the weirdest months of my life learning a lot of useful things.
After a while, when the pain was a long way off, I moved along the wall a few yards and tossed the grapnel up again. This time I put my weight on it for about five minutes before I started to climb. It’s not all that funny, climbing with one hand and two feet, but it must be possible because I managed it. Then I dropped the rope inside the wall and climbed down.
Two minutes later I was at a window of the west wing, where a light was showing. The curtains weren’t drawn and I could look straight into the room. A big fire was blazing in the old fireplace, and there were five men. Four sat at a table playing cards, with full ashtrays and half-full glasses. The fifth was Rodelle. He sat in a wheelchair with a rug over his knees, a big brandy-glass in one hand, looking into the fire. I remembered him as a big man with a hard brown face. He was still big, but his face was yellow and the flesh had gone from it now, leaving it shrunken and taut. It was as if some acid had been eating away for years inside his skull. And I suppose it had.
The other four were just the kind I expected, variations of Fitch. That sort cost money, but they’re worth it to a man like Rodelle. I wasn’t surprised that they were up and playing cards at this hour. Rodelle was always a night owl.
Immediately inside the window was a big grille with close-set bars. This wasn’t new, so I guessed it was part of the fittings, and that these grilles were fitted inside all the ground-floor windows to prevent theft when the place was empty. I checked another half-dozen windows, and they were all the same. I thought it likely the upper windows would be free of grilles, but decided to have another look in the lighted room before I started climbing again.
When I got back to it I saw that one of the men had brought some plates and a big dish of thick sandwiches. Rodelle hadn’t moved and wasn’t eating, but the rest were. Then the door opened and a new man came in, herding the Princess ahead of him with a gun.
I felt my stomach jump like a trout. Her hands were behind
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her, and she wore the sweater and cord slacks she often wears for riding when she’s down at Benildon. Her hair was a bit tousled and there was a bruise on her face, but she was all right. She walked in, cool as a model on a catwalk, and even in diose old riding clothes she looked like something out of Vogue. Really, she’s not all that big, about five foot six, but somehow she seemed a head taller than anyone in the room.
I got that funny little ache in the throat for a second, same as I always get when I see her again after a little while. The new man shoved her towards a chair by the table. When she turned round to sit down I saw that her wrists were tied with wire. Barbed wire. I could see dried blood on her hands and on the sleeves of her sweater.
I swallowed a big bubble of hate, and chalked that one up on the slate to be settled later. They put a plate with a doorstep sandwich in front of her, and the new man said something. Rodelle moved for the first time, turning to watch. It was just the sort of thing he’d enjoy, watching her get her face down to gnaw at the sandwich like a dog. But it didn’t bother me, because I knew it wouldn’t bother the Princess. Food’s energy, and that’s a lot more important than pride when you’re on a caper.
She bent and bit at the sandwich. It struck me that this was a good time for me to try the upstairs windows. If I could get inside and then down, I could see where she was taken when she finished eating. Now that I knew she wasn’t under heavy sedation, I wanted to get her free of that barbed wire before starting a rumble.
It didn’t improve my opinion of that genius Garvin to realize that one thing I hadn’t got in the pack was a pair of pliers for wire cutting, so it was going to take a bit more than a trice to get her free.
Five minutes later I’d got the rope and grapnel from the outer wall and was standing under a window about twenty yards from the lighted room. On the second try I managed to get the grapnel hooked on the sill. I tested it well, then started up. Now and again the pain in the shoulder kept breaking through, and the arm itself was useless. But somehow I made
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the climb. Then I saw the bars of a grille inside the window. This didn’t seem to be my night. I sat on the sill and felt cold, and suddenly I was sick. Next second a light went on in the room, and I got off the sill so fast I nearly fell. I hung by one hand, groping for the rope with my feet, and realized that I must have picked the room where the Princess was kept, and that the guard had just brought her back to it.
I eased myself up until I could look over the sill. The new man was just going out, and before he closed die door I saw the makeshift drop-bar fixed on die outside of it. The Princess was sitting on an iron bedstead with no mattress. There was nothing else in the room, except a wooden chair. I’ll never know how I got up on the still again one-handed, but after about a hundred years I found myself sitting there.
The Princess had moved and was half squatting on the floor against the foot of the bed. She eased herself over as if she was doing a sideways roll. I realized she’d managed to wedge the plier-twisted ends of the wire into a crack of the bedstead, and was trying to untwist them. It wasn’t surprising I’d seen blood on her hands if she’d been doing that for long.
I tapped on the window with a finger nail. Her head turned, then she got up and came towards me. Her face was almost against the bars as she stared out, trying to see me. Then she lit up suddenly with a smile. This one was a very special smile she’s got, and you don’t see it often, but I reckon it’s what the Helen of Troy girl must have had when she got a thousand ships launched. It’s a smile where her eyes dance and sparkle and laugh, warm as sunshine.
Then it was gone, widi just the ghost of it left as she lifted an eyebrow at me. I got a glass-cutter out of my windcheater pocket, scribed a quadrant in a lower corner of the glass, and tapped it loose. She bent down to the hole, and I whispered, ‘The grille?’
She whispered back, ‘Hinged one side, padlock die odier. Have you got a probe, Willie love?’
I’d got half a dozen probes. I spread them in my hand and reached dirough the hole and the bars. She turned round so she could get her hands to the probes, and took the one she wanted, then brought the chair, set it to one side of the
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window, climbed on it, and turned her back again to work on the padlock.
After about two minutes she climbed down from the chair and gave me a nod. I reached through the hole in the glass and pushed the grille. It swung inwards. She moved the chair, stood on it again, and managed to unfasten the casement catch. Ten seconds later I was inside.
Now that she could see me in the light she stared again, and this time she wasn’t smiling. I suppose I’d lost a bit of colour and was hunched up on one side, because she whispered, ‘You look like parchment - what have you done to your shoulder, Willie?’ I started to tell her, but didn’t get very far. It must have been the reaction from finding her OK that made me lose my grip on the pain, but suddenly the whole shoulder seemed to turn into raw acid. Everything went grey and whoozy, and I only just got to the bed before I passed out.
It was no more than a minute or two, I think, but when I came round I was lying on the bed on my back, with the pack off. The Princess’s hands were still bound, but they were in front of her now. She’d managed to wriggle her bottom and legs through her arms; try it with barbed wire round your wrist sometime. She was at the door, listening. I could see her slacks were badly torn, and there was blood on her thighs now as well as new blood on her wrists.
She saw I’d come round, and whispered, ‘He’ll be back soon. They never leave me for more than ten minutes.’ She moved quickly to the bed. ‘Got to get that shoulder back in place first, Willie. Take another little nap for a few seconds.’ Her hands went round my throat, not tightly, and I felt a little scratch on my chest from one of the barbs. Then her thumbs began pressing steadily on the two carotid arteries. I didn’t feel myself going, I just went. That’s the way with a sleeper hold. I knew what she was going to do, and I was glad to be out of it for the next half-minute or so.
I didn’t need telling that. She’d look after herself all right if she could see them coming, but this was different. I told Janet so while I was looking up Dave Craythorpe’s number. Dave has a Beagle Pup that he keeps at White Waltham, not very far from The Treadmill. He’s done quite a few flying jobs for us. I was praying that he was at home, and available, or if not, that I could borrow his Beagle to fly myself up to Glasgow.
The phone kept ringing. Janet said, ‘Who are you trying to get, Willie? And why?’
I told her. She put her hand on the phone-cradle and cut me off. ‘There’s Daddy’s Beechcraft Baron at Heathrow,’ she said. ‘He came down on Tuesday and he’s still in town. I’ll fly you up to Glasgow myself, Willie.’
Jesus! Good old Daddy Earl. I didn’t ask if he’d let her borrow the plane because I had an idea she wasn’t going to bother about permission. Nobody at Heathrow would stop her, not when she gave them diat look with ten generations of earls behind it. And the Beechcraft could do 225 mph against die Beagle’s 120.
I put my arms round her and kissed her as if I meant it, which I did. She smelt fresh and cool, and she was good to kiss. Then I rang a Glasgow number and this time I got through right away. Wee Jock Miller said, ‘Aye?’ and I told him I wanted a good car waiting at Glasgow Airport from 2 am onwards. He just said ‘Aye, Wullie,’ and we rang off. Jock
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had a Network pension because a bullet wound had cost him the sight of one eye, and he ran a garage hi Glasgow now. He’d never talked much, but if he said, ‘Aye,’ then you could stop worrying.
Janet said, ‘I was inside Castle Glencroft once when I was a wee diing. It’s no more than a big house, Willie, north of Loch Shiel and nothing for miles around.’ I told her I knew there was a phone laid on, so I reckoned the place was still habitable. I was moving about the room opening drawers, repacking the bag, taking a few things out, putting a few in. Janet didn’t blink as she saw me gear. She’d picked up quite a bit about Modesty and me, and I suppose she’d guessed quite a bit more.
‘The family lived there till a few years ago,’ she said. ‘Then they moved out. I don’t know if they sold Glencroft, but likely enough they couldn’t. Maybe whoever’s there now rented it for a while.’
That sounded about right. I zipped up the bag. While Janet was getting the car out I went upstairs and changed into black denims. There were twin sheaths stitched inside the breast of die denim windcheater, and I slipped a knife into each sheath.
I felt cooler now, and I didn’t go mad driving to Heathrow. Fitch was supposed to bring me in by noon. If we didn’t arrive then, Rodelle would start work on the Princess. But now, widi any luck we’d be in Glasgow by two-thirty and I’d reach Glencroft Casde by four-thirty. That meant I’d have a few hours of darkness and all morning to clean things up.
At Heathrow we were lucky getting clearance for a quick take-off. Janet brought the Baron round on course, set the controls on auto-pilot and asked for a cigarette. She couldn’t tell me much about Glencroft Casde, except diat it was ringed by a high wall and built in a sort of E-shape widi the middle stroke missing. One wing had been condemned years ago, and the family had lived in die odier wing.
We didn’t talk very much during the flight. I suppose Janet felt there wasn’t much that could be said, and I was busy with a few mental tricks diat stop you burning up all your juice widi adrenalin fatigue. All I remember is diat after a long time she said a bit uncertainly, as if she wasn’t sure how I’d react,
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‘Willie … you think an awful lot of her, don’t you?’
Well, I don’t often try to explain this, because it can’t be done, but I reckoned Janet was entitled to an answer. It’s a long story, and I could only give her the bones of it, which don’t mean much really. Most of my life I was a mean, stupid, twisted bum, who hated everything and everyone, and who was always in trouble. Then the Princess came along. She was only twenty then, but she’d been running The Network for two years and was already big-time. She picked me out of the gutter, or out of jail to be exact, gave me a job to do, and trusted me. It was like being melted down and remoulded. I came out of it… well, different.
Different? Try imagining something that’s always lived in pitch dark, groping around at the bottom of the sea, and then suddenly it finds it can live in the open, in the air and sun. It was like that. Or like if suddenly you found you could take off and fly like a bird. It was that different.
When I’d finished blundering around with words, trying to explain all this to Janet, she sat thinking for a bit and then said slowly, ‘I have an idea of what you mean, Willie. You’re the only man I know who’s … exhilarated all the time.’ She looked at me. ‘I see what she’s meant to you. Maybe finding you has meant quite a lot to her, too.’ She smiled then, a nice easy smile, and reached out to rest her knuckles against my cheek. ‘All right. She’s your Princess and you’re her faithful courtier. There’s plenty left, and I’ll settle for that.’
We landed at two-thirty. Jock Miller had two cars waiting in the car park. I chose the E-type Jag and put my bag in. When I introduced Lady Janet to him, Wee Jock’s scarred and wicked little face went dull red with pleasure. I wouldn’t say he’s a snob, but he’d certainly swing a claymore for the aristocracy, providing they were Scottish. I told him Rodelle had got the Princess, and his eyes went ugly. He looked up at me from his five foot nothing and said, Til borrow a razor an’ come wi’ ye Wullie.’
I said, ‘You bloody well won’t, Jock. It’s got to be done sneaky, and one’s sneakier than two. So you look after Lady Janet and get ‘er fixed up at an hotel. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’
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I kissed Janet goodbye, and she hung on to me tight for just a second. Then I got in the car and drove off. In the mirror I could see the two of them looking after me until I turned out of sight.
The winter snows had gone and the roads were clear. I made good time up past Loch Lomond, and didn’t lose a lot on the road through the Grampians. Then there was Rannoch Moor and the long curve round to Fort William before I took the minor road running north. Half an hour later I turned down a track leading to Glencroft Castle. It was nearly a mile away, but I drove with no lights. After about half a mile I pulled off the track into a little rocky lay-by, got the bag out, and went ahead on foot.
It wasn’t four yet, and up north here I knew it wouldn’t be dawn till well after eight. I was feeling nice and easy inside now. I’d got there, I’d got time in hand, and I’d got the initiative, which was the most important thing of all. As far as Rodelle knew, I was in a car with Fitch and had probably only just cleared the Midlands at this moment.
Glencroft was a miniature castle, as Janet had said, and there was a crenellated wall right round it, about thirty feet high. As the castle itself only had three floors, the wall was way out of proportion. But God knows why anyone had built the place there anyway. It didn’t defend anything, except whoever was inside it. Still, with the clans always feuding, that had probably been the point.
I took a look all round the wall. There was one big main gate with spikes on top. It was newer than the castle, not more than a century old, of very solid timber, and locked or barred on the inside. The barbed wire reinforcing the spikes was newer still, not even rusty yet. The wall arched over the top of the gate, and the small gap was filled with these spikes and barbed wire. On the eastern side there was a small door set in the wall, again very solid, and barred on the inside.
I decided to go over the top, so I sorted out the stuff in the bag, put a selection of it in a small pack, and strapped this on my back. Then I took a length of knotted nylon rope with a grapnel at the end. The tines of the grapnel were sheathed in rubber, except for the tips. It hardly made any noise when I
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tossed it up and got it hooked over one of the crenels.
It was an easy walk up the wall. I was trying to think what they call the bits that stick up between the crenels. About four feet from the top I remembered they’re called merlons. And at just about the same time I felt the rope give. The mortar holding the big stone that the grapnel was hooked on must have been weak and crumbly, because I could see this stone, about eighteen inches long and a foot thick, leaning over as it tilted out from the top of the wall.
Then we both fell. I’m not laying it on when I say I can take a twenty-five-foot fall on to turf without worrying too much. Falling is something I can do quite well, which isn’t much to boast about. The smart bloke is the one who doesn’t fall.
This fall had problems, though. I didn’t want to land on my back, because I was wearing the pack with a lot of hardware in it. Another thing I didn’t want was to have a hundredweight block of stone land on top of me, so I was fending this off as I went down - or rather trying to push myself aside from underneath it.
That was the last thing I remember for a bit. When I opened my eyes I felt cold as a deep-freeze except for my left shoulder, which was on fire. The block of stone lay a yard away, and it hadn’t hit me. I hadn’t landed on my back, either, because that didn’t hurt. What I’d done was to dislocate my left shoulder. When I sat up and touched it, I could feel the lump where the bone was out of the socket.
Charming.
After a bit I stood up and leaned against the wall with my good shoulder, wondering. In some places my name carries quite a reputation, and I was wondering why. My own opinion of Garvin just then was that with a lot of help he might just about make the grade as a village idiot.
There was nothing I could do about the shoulder, not on my own, so I spent a little while wrapping the pain up in black velvet and shutting it away where it couldn’t reach me. It’s a mental trick, and it’s one of about a million things I owe to the Princess. You don’t learn it in an hour or a day. There’s an old
says he’s a hundred and twenty-seven. I think he’s a liar. He’s
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a hundred and fifty if he’s a day. The Princess sent me to him years back, and I spent two of the weirdest months of my life learning a lot of useful things.
After a while, when the pain was a long way off, I moved along the wall a few yards and tossed the grapnel up again. This time I put my weight on it for about five minutes before I started to climb. It’s not all that funny, climbing with one hand and two feet, but it must be possible because I managed it. Then I dropped the rope inside the wall and climbed down.
Two minutes later I was at a window of the west wing, where a light was showing. The curtains weren’t drawn and I could look straight into the room. A big fire was blazing in the old fireplace, and there were five men. Four sat at a table playing cards, with full ashtrays and half-full glasses. The fifth was Rodelle. He sat in a wheelchair with a rug over his knees, a big brandy-glass in one hand, looking into the fire. I remembered him as a big man with a hard brown face. He was still big, but his face was yellow and the flesh had gone from it now, leaving it shrunken and taut. It was as if some acid had been eating away for years inside his skull. And I suppose it had.
The other four were just the kind I expected, variations of Fitch. That sort cost money, but they’re worth it to a man like Rodelle. I wasn’t surprised that they were up and playing cards at this hour. Rodelle was always a night owl.
Immediately inside the window was a big grille with close-set bars. This wasn’t new, so I guessed it was part of the fittings, and that these grilles were fitted inside all the ground-floor windows to prevent theft when the place was empty. I checked another half-dozen windows, and they were all the same. I thought it likely the upper windows would be free of grilles, but decided to have another look in the lighted room before I started climbing again.
When I got back to it I saw that one of the men had brought some plates and a big dish of thick sandwiches. Rodelle hadn’t moved and wasn’t eating, but the rest were. Then the door opened and a new man came in, herding the Princess ahead of him with a gun.
I felt my stomach jump like a trout. Her hands were behind
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her, and she wore the sweater and cord slacks she often wears for riding when she’s down at Benildon. Her hair was a bit tousled and there was a bruise on her face, but she was all right. She walked in, cool as a model on a catwalk, and even in diose old riding clothes she looked like something out of Vogue. Really, she’s not all that big, about five foot six, but somehow she seemed a head taller than anyone in the room.
I got that funny little ache in the throat for a second, same as I always get when I see her again after a little while. The new man shoved her towards a chair by the table. When she turned round to sit down I saw that her wrists were tied with wire. Barbed wire. I could see dried blood on her hands and on the sleeves of her sweater.
I swallowed a big bubble of hate, and chalked that one up on the slate to be settled later. They put a plate with a doorstep sandwich in front of her, and the new man said something. Rodelle moved for the first time, turning to watch. It was just the sort of thing he’d enjoy, watching her get her face down to gnaw at the sandwich like a dog. But it didn’t bother me, because I knew it wouldn’t bother the Princess. Food’s energy, and that’s a lot more important than pride when you’re on a caper.
She bent and bit at the sandwich. It struck me that this was a good time for me to try the upstairs windows. If I could get inside and then down, I could see where she was taken when she finished eating. Now that I knew she wasn’t under heavy sedation, I wanted to get her free of that barbed wire before starting a rumble.
It didn’t improve my opinion of that genius Garvin to realize that one thing I hadn’t got in the pack was a pair of pliers for wire cutting, so it was going to take a bit more than a trice to get her free.
Five minutes later I’d got the rope and grapnel from the outer wall and was standing under a window about twenty yards from the lighted room. On the second try I managed to get the grapnel hooked on the sill. I tested it well, then started up. Now and again the pain in the shoulder kept breaking through, and the arm itself was useless. But somehow I made
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the climb. Then I saw the bars of a grille inside the window. This didn’t seem to be my night. I sat on the sill and felt cold, and suddenly I was sick. Next second a light went on in the room, and I got off the sill so fast I nearly fell. I hung by one hand, groping for the rope with my feet, and realized that I must have picked the room where the Princess was kept, and that the guard had just brought her back to it.
I eased myself up until I could look over the sill. The new man was just going out, and before he closed die door I saw the makeshift drop-bar fixed on die outside of it. The Princess was sitting on an iron bedstead with no mattress. There was nothing else in the room, except a wooden chair. I’ll never know how I got up on the still again one-handed, but after about a hundred years I found myself sitting there.
The Princess had moved and was half squatting on the floor against the foot of the bed. She eased herself over as if she was doing a sideways roll. I realized she’d managed to wedge the plier-twisted ends of the wire into a crack of the bedstead, and was trying to untwist them. It wasn’t surprising I’d seen blood on her hands if she’d been doing that for long.
I tapped on the window with a finger nail. Her head turned, then she got up and came towards me. Her face was almost against the bars as she stared out, trying to see me. Then she lit up suddenly with a smile. This one was a very special smile she’s got, and you don’t see it often, but I reckon it’s what the Helen of Troy girl must have had when she got a thousand ships launched. It’s a smile where her eyes dance and sparkle and laugh, warm as sunshine.
Then it was gone, widi just the ghost of it left as she lifted an eyebrow at me. I got a glass-cutter out of my windcheater pocket, scribed a quadrant in a lower corner of the glass, and tapped it loose. She bent down to the hole, and I whispered, ‘The grille?’
She whispered back, ‘Hinged one side, padlock die odier. Have you got a probe, Willie love?’
I’d got half a dozen probes. I spread them in my hand and reached dirough the hole and the bars. She turned round so she could get her hands to the probes, and took the one she wanted, then brought the chair, set it to one side of the
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window, climbed on it, and turned her back again to work on the padlock.
After about two minutes she climbed down from the chair and gave me a nod. I reached through the hole in the glass and pushed the grille. It swung inwards. She moved the chair, stood on it again, and managed to unfasten the casement catch. Ten seconds later I was inside.
Now that she could see me in the light she stared again, and this time she wasn’t smiling. I suppose I’d lost a bit of colour and was hunched up on one side, because she whispered, ‘You look like parchment - what have you done to your shoulder, Willie?’ I started to tell her, but didn’t get very far. It must have been the reaction from finding her OK that made me lose my grip on the pain, but suddenly the whole shoulder seemed to turn into raw acid. Everything went grey and whoozy, and I only just got to the bed before I passed out.
It was no more than a minute or two, I think, but when I came round I was lying on the bed on my back, with the pack off. The Princess’s hands were still bound, but they were in front of her now. She’d managed to wriggle her bottom and legs through her arms; try it with barbed wire round your wrist sometime. She was at the door, listening. I could see her slacks were badly torn, and there was blood on her thighs now as well as new blood on her wrists.
She saw I’d come round, and whispered, ‘He’ll be back soon. They never leave me for more than ten minutes.’ She moved quickly to the bed. ‘Got to get that shoulder back in place first, Willie. Take another little nap for a few seconds.’ Her hands went round my throat, not tightly, and I felt a little scratch on my chest from one of the barbs. Then her thumbs began pressing steadily on the two carotid arteries. I didn’t feel myself going, I just went. That’s the way with a sleeper hold. I knew what she was going to do, and I was glad to be out of it for the next half-minute or so.
