There was nothing to say.
Yorkshire bit into a pickle. ‘What do we do with him, then?’
‘First we find out why he’s here.’
Tilepit said, ‘He came to get The Pump to stop—’
‘Balls,’ Ellis interrupted. ‘He’s lying.’
‘How can you tell?’ Tilepit protested.
‘I know him.’ He said it with authority, and it was true.
‘What, then?’ Yorkshire asked.
Ellis said to me, ‘You’ll not get me into court, Sid. Not Monday. Not ever. You haven’t been able to break my Shropshire alibi, and my lawyers say that without that the prosecution won’t have a chance. They’ll withdraw the charge. Understand? I know you do understand. You’ll have destroyed your own reputation, not mine. What’s more, my father’s going to kill you.’
Yorkshire and Tilepit showed, respectively, pleasure and shock.
‘Before Monday?’ I asked.
The flippancy fell like lead. Ellis strode around behind me and yanked back the right front of my brown overalls, and the tracksuit beneath. He tore a couple of buttons off my shirt, pulling that back after, then he pressed down strongly with his fingers.
‘Gordon says he broke your collarbone,’ he said.
‘Well, he didn’t.’
Ellis would see the remains of bruising and he could feel the bumps of callus formed by earlier breaks, but it was obvious to him that his father had been wrong.
‘Gordon will kill you,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t you care?’
Another unanswerable question.
It seemed to me as if the cruel hidden side of Ellis suddenly took over, banishing the friend and becoming the threatened star who had everything to lose. He roughly threw my clothes together and continued around behind me until he stood on my left side.
‘You won’t defeat me,’ he said. ‘You’ve cost me half a million. You’ve cost me lawyers. You’ve cost me sleep.’
He might insist that I couldn’t defeat him, but we both knew I would in the end, if I tried, because he was guilty.
‘You’ll pay for it,’ he said.
He put his hands on the hard shell of my left forearm and raised it until my elbow formed a right angle. The tight strap around my upper arms and chest prevented me from doing anything to stop him. Whatever strength that remained in my upper left arm (and it was, in fact, quite a lot) was held in uselessness by that strap.
Ellis peeled back the brown sleeve, and the blue one underneath. He tore open my shirt cuff and pulled that sleeve back also. He looked at the plastic skin underneath.
‘I know something about that arm,’ he said. ‘I got a brochure on purpose. That skin is a sort of glove, and it comes off.’
He felt up my arm until, by the elbow, he came to the top of the glove. He rolled it down as far as the wrist and then, with concentration, pulled it off finger by finger, exposing the mechanics in all their detail.
The close-fitting textured glove gave the hand an appearance of life, with knuckles, veins and shapes like fingernails. The works inside were gears, springs and wiring. The bared forearm was bright pink, hard and shiny.
Ellis smiled.
He put his own strong right hand on my electrical left and pressed and twisted with knowledge and then, when the works clicked free, unscrewed the hand in several turns until it came right off.
Ellis looked into my eyes as at a feast. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘You shit.’
He smiled. He opened his fingers and let the unscrewed hand fall onto the carpet.
Chapter 13
Tilepit looked shocked enough to vomit, but not Yorkshire: in fact, he laughed.
Ellis said to him sharply, ‘This man is not funny. Everything that has gone wrong is because of him, and don’t you forget it. It’s this Sid Halley that’s going to ruin you, and if you think he doesn’t care about what I’ve just done’ — he put his toe against the fallen hand and moved it a few inches — ‘if you think it’s something to laugh at, I’ll tell you that for him it’s almost unbearable… but not unbearable, is it, Sid?’ He turned to ask me, and told Yorkshire at the same time, ‘No one yet has invented anything you’ve found actually unbearable, have they, Sid?’
I didn’t answer.
Yorkshire protested, ‘But he’s only—’
‘Don’t say only,’ Ellis interrupted, his voice hard and loud. ‘Don’t you understand it yet? What do you think he’s doing here? How did he get here? What does he know? He’s not going to tell you. His nickname’s “Tungsten Carbide” — that’s the hardest of all metals and it saws through steel. I know him. I’ve almost loved him. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, and we’ve got to decide what to do with him. How many people know he’s here?’
‘My bodyguards,’ Yorkshire said. ‘They brought him up.’
It was Lord Tilepit who gave him the real bad news. ‘It was a TV crew who told Owen that Sid Halley was in the building.’
‘A TV crew!’
‘They wanted to interview him. Mrs Dove said she would tell them he’d gone.’
‘Mrs Dove!’
If Ellis had met Mrs Dove he would know, as I did, that she wouldn’t lie for Yorkshire. Mrs Dove had seen me, and she would say so.
Ellis asked furiously, ‘Did Mrs Dove see him tied in that chair?’
‘Yes,’ Tilepit said faintly.
‘You stupid…’ Words failed Ellis, but for only a few short seconds. ‘Then,’ he said flatly, ‘you can’t kill him here.’
‘Kill him?’ Tilepit couldn’t believe what he’d heard. His whole large face blushed pink. ‘I’m not… are you talking about murder?’
‘Oh yes, my lord,’ I said dryly, ‘they are. They’re thinking of putting Your Lordship behind bars as an accessory. You’ll love it in the slammer.’
I’d meant only to get Tilepit to see the enormity of what Ellis was proposing, but in doing so I’d made the mistake of unleashing Yorkshire’s rage.
He took two paces and kicked my unscrewed hand with such force that it flew across the room and crashed against the wall. Then he realized the wrench was still in his hand and swung it at my head.
I saw the blow coming but couldn’t get my head back far enough to avoid it altogether. The wrench’s heavy screw connected with my moving cheekbone and tore the skin, but didn’t this time knock me silly.
In Owen Yorkshire, the half-slipping brakes came wholly off. Perhaps the very sight of me, left-handless and bleeding and unable to retaliate, was all it took. He raised his arm and the wrench again, and I saw the spite in his face and the implacably murderous intention and I thought of nothing much at all, which afterwards seemed odd.
It was Ellis who stopped him. Ellis caught the descending arm and yanked Owen Yorkshire around sideways, so that although the heavy weapon swept on downwards, it missed me altogether.
‘You’re brainless,’ Ellis shouted. ‘I said not in here. You’re a raving lunatic. Too many people know he came here. Do you want to splatter his blood and brains all over your new carpet? You might as well go and shout from the rooftops. Get a grip on that frigging temper and find a tissue.’
‘A what?’
‘Something to stop him bleeding. Are you terminally insane? When he doesn’t turn up wherever he’s expected, you’re going to get the police in here looking for him. TV crew! Mrs Dove! The whole frigging county! You get one drop of his blood on anything in here, you’re looking at twenty-five years.’