I tried to shrug. I couldn’t even manage that with all the ropes. “If this is what they teach you at private school,” I said, “I’m glad I went public.”
“Take him into the back room,” Gott snapped. “It’s time he met our other guest.”
Himmell picked me up and carried me across the room. I’m not heavy, but he was still stronger than I thought. There was a door at the far end, beyond the piano. He drew back a metal bolt with one hand and opened it.
“When are you going to let me out of here?” a voice demanded. A voice I knew.
Himmell threw me down on the floor. I found myself sitting opposite Lauren Bacardi. She was tied up just like me.
“Company for you,” Gott said.
He closed the door and locked it behind him. A minute later I heard the two Germans leave for Victoria Station. I wondered what they’d find in Locker 180. I wondered if there even
With an effort, I tried to put them out of my mind. I looked around at Lauren. “Hi,” I said.
“I know you,” she said.
“Yeah. Nick Diamond. We met at the Casablanca Club—the night they came for you.”
She nodded. “I remember. Thanks a bunch, Nick. I was enjoying my life until you came along.”
She was still dressed in the glitzy clothes she had worn for her singing act, but the fake jewelry was gone and she had washed off some of the makeup. She looked better without it. She was sitting in the corner with her knees drawn up, a plate and a mug on the floor beside her. There was no furniture in the room, which was about as big as a large walk-in closet. It was lit by a single small window that would have been too high up to reach even if we hadn’t been tied up. I gave a cautious tug at the ropes. In the movies, there would have been a piece of broken glass or something for me to cut them with. But it looked like I was in the wrong movie.
I gave up. “I’m sorry about this,” I said. “But I didn’t lead them to you.”
“No? Then who did?”
It was a good question. How had they found out about her? “You told them about the Maltesers?” I said.
She sniffed. “Why else do you think I’m still alive?”
“Enjoy it while you can,” I said. “They’re going to be back at five and they’re not going to be very happy. I strung them a line out there. When they get back, I reckon they’re going to want to string me up with one.”
“Then we’d better move.”
“Sure. If I can just get across to you, maybe you can get at my ropes with your teeth and—”
I stopped. Lauren Bacardi had wriggled. That was all she had done, but now the ropes were falling away from her like overcooked spaghetti. It was incredible. I tried it myself. But while she got to her feet, unhooking the last loop from her wrist, I stayed exactly where I was.
“That’s a real trick,” I said. “How did you do it?”
“Before I became a singer I worked in cabaret,” she told me. “I was the assistant to an escape artist . . . Harry Blondini. I spent two and a half years being tied up. Harry loved ropes. He used to wear handcuffs in bed and he was the only guy I ever knew who took his showers hanging upside down in a straitjacket. He taught me everything he knew.”
By now she was kneeling beside me, pulling the knots undone. “Why didn’t you escape before?” I asked.
“There was no point. The door’s barred from the outside. There’s nothing I can do about that. And even if I could reach the window, it’s too small for me to get through.”
Too small for her, but when she gave me a leg up about fifteen minutes later, I found I could just squeeze through. Gott and Himmell hadn’t bothered to lock it. Why should they? They’d left me tied up, and anyway, it didn’t lead anywhere. It was five stories up and just too far below the roof for me to be able to scramble up there. I paused for a moment on the window ledge, my legs dangling inside, my head and shoulders in the cold evening air. I could see men working on a construction site in the distance and I shouted, trying to attract their attention. But they were too far away and, anyway, there was too much noise.
I looked down. It made my stomach heave a little. The pavement was a long, long way below. I could see the French windows that led back into the main living room about ten feet away. If I could break in through them, I could open the door and let Lauren out and at least we’d be on the way to safety. But the windows were too far away, and although they had a narrow ledge of their own, there was no way I could reach it. Unless . . .
This was a warehouse and like all the other warehouses it had a hook on a metal arm jutting out of the wall—in this case exactly halfway between the two windows and about a yard above them. In the old days it would have been used to hoist goods up from the street on a rope. The rope was gone, of course. But rope was at least one thing we had in plenty.
I squeezed myself back into the room.
“No way out—eh?” Lauren muttered.
“There might be.” I explained what I had in mind.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t do it.”
“I’ve got to do it,” I said. “Better crazy than dead.”
Ten minutes later I was half in and half out again, but this time with a length of rope around my waist. We’d taken the rope that Himmell had used to tie us up and knotted it into a single length. There was a good twelve feet of it. I held the slack in my hand and now I began to swing it a bit like a lasso. Then I threw it, holding on to the end. The loop flew out toward the hook, missed, and fell. I pulled it in and tried again. I hooked it on the fourth attempt.
So there I am, five stories up, leaning out of a window. There’s a rope leading from me to a hook and then back again, and I tie the end around my waist, too. Remember that isosceles triangle I mentioned? Well, it’s a bit like that. The two windows are the lower corners. The hook is the point at the top. All I have to do is jump and the rope will swing me across like a pendulum from one side to the other. At least that’s the general idea.
I didn’t much like it. In fact I hated it. But I was running out of time and there didn’t seem to be any other way.
I jumped.
For a giddy second I swung in the air, one shoulder scraping across the brickwork. But then my scrabbling hands somehow managed to grab hold of the edge of the French windows. I pulled, dangling in midair, supported only by the rope, my legs kicking at nothing. I pulled with all my strength. And then I was crouching on the ledge, trying hard not to look down, my heart beating in my chest like it would rather be someplace else.
I stayed where I was until I’d gotten my breath back, afraid of falling back into space. The ledge could only have been six inches wide and my whole body was pressed against the windowpanes. Without looking back into the street, I reached down and pulled off my shoe. Slowly I lifted it up. It was cold out there, but the sweat was running down inside my shirt. My eyes were fixed on the grand piano on the other side of the window. Somehow looking at it made me forget where I was and what I was doing. I held the shoe firmly in one hand, then brought it swinging forward. The heel hit the window, smashing it. I dropped the shoe into the room, then, avoiding the jagged edges of broken glass, slipped my hand through, found the lock, turned it. The window opened. With a sigh of relief I eased my way inside, then untied the rope and pulled it in after me.
I hadn’t gotten very far, but at least I was still alive.
Gott and Himmell had left the tea things out. I put my shoe back on and took a swig of milk out of the jug. Then I went over to the door and drew back the bolt.
Lauren raised an eyebrow when she saw me. “So you made it?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. I would have said more, but for some reason my teeth were chattering at about one hundred and fifty miles per hour. It must have been even colder out there than I’d thought.
Lauren tried the door that led to the staircase. It was locked. Then she strolled across to the broken window and looked out.
“That’s great, Nick,” she drawled. “We’re out of the closet but we can’t get out of the room. There’s nobody near enough to hear us shouting for help. You’ve sent our German friends on a wild-goose chase, and when they get back they’re going to string you up and use you for target practice. We don’t have enough rope to climb down with and we don’t have any guns.”
