Maybe if I were buried long enough in the wilds of Wiltshire, I, too, would take to playing hopscotch in the rain. still with my eye on this apparition I eased quickly into the driving seat pulling the door to behind me and it was not until then that I discovered that the purpose of the hopscotch merchant was not to demonstrate the standard of loopiness in rural Wiltshire but to distract my attention from the back of my car where someone had been biding crouched down on the floor.
I heard a slight noise behind me and started to twist but I was far too late, the black-jack must have been chopping down even as I heard the sound. My left foot was still on the wrong side of the steering column and, anyway, he was on my left or blind side. The black-jack made contact just below and behind my left ear with what must have been considerable force or accuracy or both for the agony and the oblivion were separated by only a hairsbreadth in time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It wouldn't be accurate to say that I woke up. The term 'waking up' implies a fairly rapid and one-way transition from a state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness and there was nothing either rapid or one-way about my progress through the twilight zone that separates those. One moment I was greyly aware that I was lying on something hard and wet, the next the awareness was gone. How long a time elapsed between the intervals of greyness I'd no means of knowing and even if I had my mind would have been too fuzzy to appreciate it. Gradually the spells of awareness became longer and longer until, eventually, there was no more darkness but I wasn't all that sure that this was in any way an improvement or a desirable state of affairs for with returning comprehension came an all but paralysing pain that seemed to hold my head, neck and right hand side of my chest in an immense vice, a vice with some burly character inexorably tightening the handle. I felt the way a grain of wheat must feel after it had passed through a combine harvester.
Painfully I opened my good eye and swivelled it around until I located the source of the dim light. A grilled window high up on one wall, just below the roof. I was in a cellar of some kind, of the semi-sunk basement type featured in Chessingham's house.
I'd made no mistake about the hardness of the floor. Or the wetness. Rough unfinished concrete with shallow pools of water on it and whoever had left me there had thoughtfully dumped me right in the centre of the largest puddle.
I was lying stretched out on the floor, partly on my back, partly on my right hand side with my arms behind my back in a ridiculously strained and uncomfortable position. I wondered vaguely why I chose to lie in this awkward position and found out when I tried to change it. Somebody had made a very efficient job of tying my hands behind my back and from the numbness in my forearms it was a fair guess that he'd used considerable weight in the tying of the knots.
I made to gather my legs under me to jerk myself up to a sitting position and discovered that they wouldn't gather. I just couldn't move them. I used their immobility to lever myself upwards to a sitting position, waited until the coruscating lights dancing before my eyes faded and vanished then peered forward and down. My legs were not only tied at the ankles, they were secured to a metal upright of a wine-bin which took up practically the entire length of the wall beneath the window. And not only was I tied, but I was tied with PVC plastic flex. If I'd needed any confirmation that a professional had been at work, I didn't any more. Even a gorilla couldn't snap PVC and nothing less than a pair of hefty pliers could possibly undo the knots: fingers were quite useless for the job.
Slowly, carefully — any rash movement and my head would have fallen off — I looked around the cellar. It was as featureless and just about as empty as any cellar could ever be— the window, the closed door, the wine-bin and me. It could have been worse. No one pouring in water to drown me, no one flooding the confined space with a lethal gas, no snakes, no black widow spiders. Just the cellar and me. But bad enough.
I hitched myself forwards towards the wine-bin and tried to snap the wire securing me to it by jerking my legs back as violently as I could but all I did was to add another pain to the overfull quota I had already. I struggled to free my hands, knowing before I began that I was only wasting my time, and gave up almost as soon as I had started. I wondered how long it would be before I died of starvation or thirst.
Take it easy, I said to myself. Think your way out of this, Cavell. So I thought, as best I could without my head hurting the way it did, but it didn't seem to do much good, all I could think of was how sore and uncomfortable I was.
It was then that I saw the Hanyatti. I blinked, shook my head and cautiously looked again. No doubt about it, the Hanyatti, the top of the butt just visible three or four inches below and to the side of the left-hand lapel of my coat. I stared at it and it still didn't go away. I wondered dimly how the man — men, certainly — who had dragged me there had missed it and it slowly came to me that they hadn't missed it because they hadn't looked for it in the first place. Policemen in Britain don't carry guns. I was — more or less — a policeman. Hence I didn't carry a gun.
I hunched up my left shoulder and reached my head as far down and to the left as possible, at the same time pushing the lapel away with the side of my face. On the third try got my teeth to the butt but they just slipped off the rounded surface when I tried to get a purchase and lift the gun from its holster. Four times I repeated this manoeuvre and after the fourth attempt I gave up. Contorting my neck into that strained and unnatural position would have been uncomfortable enough in any event: added to the effects of the blackjack the only result this contortion was having was to make the cellar swim dizzily around me. At the same time the manoeuvre brought a sharply piercing pain to my right chest and I wondered drearily whether any of my ribs had been broken and were sticking into a lung. The way I felt I was prepared to believe anything.
A brief rest, then I had twisted up until I was in a kneeling position. I bent sharply from the waist, my head coming close to the concrete floor to give gravity an assist in freeing the Hanyatti from the holster. Nothing happened. I tried again, overdid the violence of the forward jerk and fell flat on my face. When my head finally cleared I repeated the process and this time the gun finally slid from the holster and clattered to the floor.
In the poor half-light of the cellar I knelt and peered anxiously at the gun. A character with a sadistic enough turn of mind might have considered it highly amusing to empty the gun and replace it in the holster. But I'd been spared the humorist. The loading indicator registered nine. The magazine was full.
I squirmed round on the floor, picked up the Hanyatti with my bound hands, slipped the safety catch and dragged the gun around to my right side as far as the unnaturally twisted position of my left shoulder would allow. The folds of my jacket kept getting in the way of the automatic but I strained and pushed until I could see about three inches of the barrel protruding beyond my side. I bent my knees and hitched myself forward until my feet were within fifteen inches of the muzzle.
For a brief moment I considered trying to shoot through the PVC that bound my ankles. But only for a brief moment. Buffalo Bill might have done it, but then Buffalo Bill had had binocular vision and I felt pretty certain he'd never performed any of his sharp-shooting feats in dim half-light with numbed hands bound behind his back. The chances were a thousand to one that the net result achieved would be the anticipation of those two London surgeons who wanted to remove my left foot. I decided to concentrate instead on the eighteen inch length of four twisted strands of PVC that attached my legs to the wine-bin.
I sighted as best I could and squeezed the trigger. Three things happened, instantaneously and simultaneously. The recoil from the gun together with the unnatural position in which I was holding it, made me feel as if my right thumb had broken: the reverberation of the sound in that confined space had the same effect on my eardrums: and I felt a wind ruffle my hair as the ricocheting bullet, soundless in flight in that echoing intensity of sound, came within half an inch of ending my problems for good and all. And a fourth thing happened. I missed.
Two seconds later I fired again. No hesitation. If there was a watchdog upstairs taking his ease he'd be charging down the cellar steps in a matter of moments to find out who was breaking up his happy home. Not only that, but I knew if I stopped to consider the chances of the ricochet being that half inch lower this time I never would get around to pulling that trigger.
Again the close thunder of the explosion and this time I was sure my right thumb had gone. But I hardly cared. The wire binding me to the wine-bin was neatly severed in half. Buffalo Bill couldn't have done it any better.
