Roche ceased stamping, but found himself beyond any sort of answer. If it was the other one he'd taken—he didn't know where, or why, or who even—then there was no answer to give—

The torch left him again, answered by his silence.

dummy5

'Jilly?'

'Yes, David.' Jilly was leaning against the wall, by the door.

'Get Mike up the stairs—see what you can see outside, between you— but keep down and be careful. Okay?'

Roche cancelled out the lack of paraffin in the lamp: the big man was thinking for all of them, in an attempt to salvage something out of chaos.

'Okay, Jilly?' repeated Audley, projecting encouragement at the girl.

She stared into the torch beam. 'Lexy, David—'

'I know. But you go with Mike, there's a good girl. Roche and I will see to Lexy.'

Lexy?

Roche cast around in the darkness helplessly. There was the faintest light coming down the stairway from above, where the trap-door must be open. But it was only enough to indicate a pattern of the stairs where the wine rack ran up the wall beside its uppermost treads.

Lexy

'Go on, Jilly.' The voice and the torch both directed her from the door across the shambles, to where Mike Bradford was already raising himself up to meet her, with a mixture of grunts and curses.

Roche started to feel his way off the carpet, vaguely orientating himself into the quarter of the compass Audley dummy5

had left dark.

'Wait!' Audley hissed at him, while still directing the ill-matched couple up the lower half of the staircase, until they could see their way for themselves.

'All right, Roche.' The torch at last into the forbidden quarter, on the edge of a glistening pool of wine.

Lady Alexandra had chosen a simple white dress in which to welcome back Captain Roche from his so- important duties.

But it wasn't all-white anymore.

Nor would Lady Alexandra ever again be the flawless English rose, matching those in her father's garden: an unaimed bullet or a flying splinter of glass had scored her cheek to the bone, masking half her face with blood.

'Oh God—Jesus Christ—what have I done?' whispered Roche, lifting her up into his arms. 'What have I done?'

'You haven't done anything, man!' snapped Audley from above him. 'Or not that wouldn't have been worse if you hadn't done anything—put her down—you're only making her bleed worse!'

The shortened beam had dropped from the face to the spreading patch of blood below her shoulder, which oozed freshly as Roche stared at it.

'Here—press that against it— hard—' Audley dropped a large silk handkerchief directly on to the mess '—I'll be back in a moment—press it down hard, man!'

The torch beam shifted again, more on Roche than the girl, dummy5

so that he looked up involuntarily into the light even as he pressed the handkerchief into a ball over the wound. Audley had wedged the thing into an entpty space in the rack, just at his eye-level.

'Audley? Where the hell have you gone?' The torch blinded him again, but as he opened his mouth to protest he felt the girl squirm under his hand.

' Ouch! Mind what you're doing—you're hurting me!' Her voice was surprisingly strong. 'David! David!'

He couldn't reach the torch to free himself from its beam.

'It's all right, Lexy darling—just lie still.'

'Then stop hurting me! . . . Golly! You do look a mess! What on earth have you been doing to yourself?' Doubt weakened the voice. 'Your face is all bloody—!'

Roche was aware that his face was smarting. 'I scratched myself on a bramble-bush— Lie still.'

'No you didn't!' Doubt shifted to urgent certainty. 'They came in—the men from the woods—I said they would! And they wanted you—they wanted something you'd got, I think. . . and they made us wait. There were two of them, David—where are they?'

He could hear Audley's feet on the staircase. 'It's all right, Lexy. Just lie still, Lexy darling.'

'No—it isn't all right—' Her voice weakened '—there were two of them—and they wanted it, whatever it is . . .'

Roche remembered the brief-case. It was out there dummy5

somewhere, in the shambles alongside the man whose head he had hammered into a pulp.

'She's conscious, is she?' Audley recovered his torch.

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