head off. There was no one close enough to hear me if I did. Not the few overnight stable lads fast asleep three hundred yards away. Only the Krayes, who would find it sweet.
Doria licked her lips, as if at a feast.
‘Go on,’ said Kraye. ‘Hurry.’
‘Oh, all right,’ she agreed crossly, and went out through the door into the passage.
Kraye finished pulling me across the room, turned the chair round so that I was facing the wall with my knees nearly touching it and stood back, breathing deeply from the exertion.
On the other side of the wall the boiler gently roared. One could hear it more clearly at such close quarters. I knew I had no crashing explosion, no flying bricks, no killing steam to worry about. But the sands were running out fast, all the same.
Doria came back and said in a puzzled voice, ‘I thought you said there would be water all down the passage.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, there isn’t. Not a drop. I looked into the boiler room and it’s as dry as a bone.’
‘It can’t be. It’s nearly three hours since it started over-flowing. Oxon warned us it must be nearly ready to blow. You must be wrong.’
‘I’m not,’ she insisted. ‘The whole thing looks perfectly normal to me.’
‘It can’t be.’ Kraye’s voice was sharp. He went off in a hurry to see for himself, and came back even faster.
‘You’re right. I’ll go and get Oxon. I don’t know how the confounded thing works.’ He went straight on out of the main door, and I heard his footsteps running. There was no urgency except his own anger. I shivered.
Doria wasn’t certain enough of the boiler’s safety to spend any time near me, which was about the first really good thing which had happened the whole night. Nor did she find the back of my head worth speaking to: she liked to see her worms squirm. Perhaps she had even lost her appetite, now things had gone wrong. She waited uneasily near the door for Kraye to come back, fiddling with the catch.
Oxon came with him, and they were both running. They charged across the weighing room and out into the passage.
I hadn’t much left anyway, I thought. A few tatters of pride, perhaps. Time to nail them to the mast.
The two men walked softly into the room and down to where I sat. Kraye grasped the chair and swung it violently round. The weighing room was quiet, undisturbed. There was only blackness through the window. So that was that.
I looked at Kraye’s face, and wished on the whole that I hadn’t. It was white and rigid with fury. His eyes were two black pits.
Oxon held the mouse in his hand. ‘It must have been Halley,’ he said, as if he’d said it before. ‘There’s no one else.’
Kraye put his right hand down on my left, and systematically began to take his revenge. After three long minutes I passed out.
I clung to the dark, trying to hug it round me like a blanket, and it obstinately got thinner and thinner, lighter and lighter, noisier and noisier, more and more painful, until I could no longer deny that I was back in the world.
My eyes unstuck themselves against my will.
The weighing room was full of people. People in dark uniforms. Policemen. Policemen coming through every door. Bright yellow lights at long last shining outside the window. Policemen carefully cutting the rope away from my leaden limbs.
Kraye and Doria and Oxon looked smaller, surrounded by the dark blue men. Doria in her brave white suit instinctively and unsuccessfully tried to flirt with her captors. Oxon, disconcerted to his roots, faced the facts of life for the first time.
Kraye’s fury wasn’t spent. His eyes stared in hatred across the room.
He shouted, struggling in strong restraining arms, ‘Where did you send him? Where did you send Ellis Bolt?’
‘Ah, Mr Potter,’ I said into a sudden oasis of silence. ‘Mr Wilbur Potter. Find out. But not from me.’
NINETEEN
Of course I ended up where I had begun, flat on my back in a hospital. But not for so long, that time. I had a pleasant sunny room with a distant view of the sea, some exceedingly pretty nurses, and a whole stream of visitors. Chico came first, as soon as they would let him, on the Sunday afternoon.
He grinned down at me.
‘You look bloody awful.’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘Two black eyes, a scabby lip, a purple and yellow complexion and a three day beard. Glamorous.’
‘It sounds it.’
‘Do you want to look?’ he asked, picking up a hand mirror from a chest of drawers.
I took the mirror and looked. He hadn’t exaggerated. I would have faded into the background in a horror movie.
Sighing, I said, ‘X certificate, definitely.’
He laughed, and put the mirror back. His own face still bore the marks of battle. The eyebrow was healing, but the bruise showed dark right down his cheek.
‘This is a better room than you had in London,’ he remarked, strolling over to the window. ‘And it smells O.K. For a hospital, that is.’
‘Pack in the small talk and tell me what happened,’ I said.
‘They told me not to tire you.’
‘Don’t be an ass.’
‘Well, all right. You’re a bloody rollicking nit in many ways, aren’t you?’
‘It depends how you look at it,’ I agreed peaceably.
‘Oh sure, sure.’
‘Chico, give,’ I pleaded. ‘Come on.’
‘Well, there I was harmlessly snoozing away in Radnor’s arm-chair with the telephone on one side and some rather good chicken sandwiches on the other, dreaming about a willing blonde and having a ball, when the front door bell rang.’ He grinned. ‘I got up, stretched and went to answer it. I thought it might be you, come back after all and with nowhere to sleep. I knew it wouldn’t be Radnor, unless he’d forgotten his key. And who else would be knocking on his door at two o’clock in the morning? But there was this fat geezer standing on the doorstep in his city pinstripes, saying you’d sent him. ‘Come in, then,’ I said, yawning my head off. He came in, and I showed him into Radnor’s sort of study place, where I’d been sitting.
‘ “Sid sent you?” I asked him, “What for?”
‘He said he understood your girl-friend lived here. God, mate, don’t ever try snapping your mouth shut at the top of a yawn. I nearly dislocated my jaw. Could he see her, he said. Sorry it was so late, but it was extremely important.
‘ “She isn’t here,” I said. “She’s gone away for a few days. Can I help you?”
‘ “Who are you?” he said, looking me up and down.
‘I said I was her brother. He took a sharpish look at the sandwiches and the book I’d been reading, which had fallen on the floor, and he could see I’d been asleep, so he seemed to think everything was O.K., and he said, “Sid asked me to fetch something she is keeping for him. Do you think you could help me find it?”
‘ “Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
‘He hesitated a bit but he could see that it would look too weird if he refused to tell me, so he said “It’s a packet of negatives. Sid said your sister had several things of his, but the packet I want has a name on it, a make of
