The door moved; the scraping sound grated. The opening widened — six inches, a foot, almost enough room for him to go through — and he saw her face, demonic, pale, and the razor that gleamed in an arc and missed his face as he recoiled but slashed down his left arm. He fell back into the hall, almost going down the stairs. The door slammed again.
Blood was running down his arm and dripping on the rag rug. The unconnected thought that she had made the rugs herself came into his mind. She had built herself a nest, he thought. He was tearing off the shirt of his silly outfit and wrapping it around his arm, then pulling it tight and holding the end with his left hand so it wouldn’t unwind.
He pushed the door again. It swung open and banged against the dresser that had been pushed against it. Holding his bleeding arm above his head, Denton nudged the door with his hip, alert for the razor, waiting for her to attack again.
The room was empty. Like the hall it was pretty. On the far wall above a double bed was the ‘little Wesselons’.
The dormer window was open.
He pushed the dresser out of the way and looked around the room for her, even bending and lifting the girlish flounce to look under the bed. She was clever enough to hide and let him think she’d gone out of the window, but she wasn’t in the room.
The dormer was high, six feet wide; the window was a tall double casement that swung from the middle post. Both leaves were open. If he went out of the wrong window, she might be able to come back in the other and escape him before he knew where she was.
He closed the door and pushed the dresser against it again to slow her if she came back in. His blood dripped on the floor and he raised the arm over his head again.
He went out of the right-hand window. When he looked down the pitch of the roof to the eave, vertigo staggered him. His old fear of heights. He closed his eyes, shook his head; then, not looking at the ground, he went out, left leg first, pulling the other after, peering around the corner of the dormer for her and pulling his head back in case the razor swung.
She was most of the way up the roof, heading for the peak. She was sitting, boosting herself up on her buttocks, keeping her feet and hands on the slates. She, too, was afraid of the height, he thought. When she saw him, she began to move faster. Above her and at the edge of the roof to her right was a chimney; she seemed to be making for it. Maybe there was a way down there; he didn’t think so, rather that she was going for the chimney because it was solid and seemed to offer support. If she could get down the other side of the roof, however, she could probably drop to the front garden; the house was higher at the back than the front because of the drop to the river.
‘You can’t make it!’ he shouted.
She moved herself up again. He saw the razor flash in her hand.
‘Give it up!’
He started up the roof. He went on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, the light rubber shoes he wore for rowing a help. She screamed, screamed again. He was aware of voices below them and understood how it must look to anybody who could see them — a half-naked man chasing a woman.
‘Come down from there, you monster!’ a woman’s voice shouted, the sound thinned by distance.
Mary Thomason screamed again. She had almost reached the chimney. And then what?
Denton pushed himself harder. He forgot the bad leg. He looked at nothing but the woman in the white dress. Straightening, he went up on the diagonal faster than she was moving, and when she reached the chimney, he was only three yards behind. He put his right foot over the peak of the roof and balanced there, a foot on each side. She looked down towards the ground at the front of the house. Several people were down there, foreshortened, shouting.
‘Leave that poor girl alone! The police are coming!’ One of them blew a police whistle.
She scrambled upright, using the chimney to support her. With her back to it and the razor at her side where they couldn’t see it from below, she faced him. Denton moved closer. He raised his arm over his head because of the bleeding.
‘Give it up. It’s over.’
She was very like the drawing. Not quite pretty, but arresting. The breeze stirred her hair. He said, ‘Give it up. You think you’re a nasty piece of work, but I’m nastier. I’ll kill you if I have to.’
They were fixed on each other as if they were the only people in the world. They were, in that shared concentration, like lovers. The Thames, the day, the glory of the summer, didn’t exist. He looked at her and she looked at him, and for a moment he saw her face soften and he felt for her something that was beyond sympathy, almost an identification, a sharing of self, as if in the instant of violence that was coming they were the same. He held out the bloody left arm with the hand open. ‘Give it to me. It’s over.’
Then her face changed to the demonic one he had glimpsed through the door, and she swung the razor at him. He flung up his arm and caught it on the part that was wrapped in the shirt. It slashed down; he felt its bite again and grabbed her wrist. He raised it high, as if they were doing some country dance, drawing her off the chimney, and she tried to pull away. His other hand was balled into a fist, and he hesitated an instant because she was a woman, because her female face was so near his own. Then the razor’s blade cut into his palm as his slippery hand lost its grip and she turned in the air in front of him, one foot on a slate and one foot in the air, and then she was gone and he heard the thud of her body on the flagstones beside the house.
And then he felt his own vertigo, and he collapsed against the chimney, hugging it as if he had been thrown against it by a wave.
‘Man or woman?’
‘Man.’ Munro grinned. ‘Relieved?’ He set down a mug of tea for Denton.
‘I was about ninety-eight parts in a hundred sure. But I thought-If she was a woman-’
‘Well, he wasn’t. How’s that arm?’
‘Hurts like hell. Nice lot of stitches.’
‘You lost a good lot of blood. Feeling queasy?’
‘I’ve been told to take Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. I think I’ll stay with Mrs Cohan’s soup. The tea’s a godsend for now.’ They were in a borrowed office in Brentford Infirmary. The local constabulary had first arrested Denton and brought him there in handcuffs to be sewn up. It had taken three hours to sort out what had happened, the actual sorting-out being done only when New Scotland Yard had been brought in. More time had passed while somebody figured out that what had happened at Strand-on-the-Green was part of a case Munro was already working on.
Munro put his hands in his trouser pockets and stared out of the window. ‘He’s dead. I’m sorry about that — I’d like to see the bastard in the dock.’ He looked at Denton. ‘I’ve got a dozen witnesses that will swear they saw you push a woman off that roof.’
‘I’m sure. But I didn’t.’
‘I’ve read your statement. Funny, what people see.’
‘How’s Brown?’
‘Head’s too broken for us to take a statement. Concussion. Maybe by tomorrow. You didn’t have to try to kill him, too, you know.’
‘I didn’t want him behind me while I went after the woman.’
‘His nose was mashed flat against his face, he has two broken ribs, and he fractured a finger, apparently trying to protect himself from the poker. Can’t you ever go easy on them?’
‘I told you, I didn’t want him behind me.’
Munro stared out of the window, then shook his head. ‘
‘I lost my grip on her wrist. She was off balance.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had. He was an ugly piece of work. Cutting the head off Himple, killing Heseltine — the painting that came from Heseltine’s flat pretty well cinches that one. You’re always right.’
‘Like hell.’
Munro grinned at him, then became serious again. ‘You think he was insane?’
‘Anybody who commits murder is insane, isn’t he?’
