Yorkshire, bewildered by Ellis’s attack and turning sullen, said there weren’t any tissues. Verney Tilepit tentatively produced a handkerchief; white, clean and embroidered with a coronet. Ellis snatched it from him and slapped it on my cheek, and I wondered if ever, in any circumstances, I could, to save myself, deliberately kill him, and didn’t think so.
Ellis took the handkerchief away briefly, looked at the scarlet staining the white, and put it back, pressing.
Yorkshire strode about, waving the wrench as if jerked by strings. Tilepit looked extremely unhappy. I considered my probable future with gloom and Ellis, taking the handkerchief away again and watching my cheek critically, declared that the worst of the bleeding had stopped.
He gave the handkerchief back to Tilepit, who put it squeamishly in his pocket, and he snatched the wrench away from Yorkshire and told him to cool down and plan.
Planning took them both out of the office, the door closing behind them. Verney Tilepit didn’t in the least appreciate being left alone with me and went to look out of the window, to look anywhere except at me.
‘Untie me,’ I said with force.
No chance. He didn’t even show he’d heard.
I asked, ‘How did you get yourself into this mess?’
No answer.
I tried again. I said, ‘If I walk out of here free, I’ll forget I ever saw you.’
He turned around, but he had his back to the light and I couldn’t see his eyes clearly behind the spectacles.
‘You really are in deep trouble,’ I said.
‘Nothing will happen.’
I wished I believed him. I said, ‘It must have seemed pretty harmless to you, just to use your paper to ridicule someone week after week. What did Yorkshire tell you? To save Ellis at all costs. Well, it is going to cost you.’
‘You don’t understand. Ellis is blameless.’
‘I understand that you’re up to your noble neck in shit.’
‘I can’t do anything.’ He was worried, unhappy and congenitally helpless.
‘Untie me,’ I said again, with urgency.
‘It wouldn’t help. I couldn’t get you out.’
‘Untie me,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’
He dithered. If he had been capable of reasoned decisions he wouldn’t have let himself be used by Yorkshire, but he wasn’t the first or last rich man to stumble blindly into a quagmire. He couldn’t make up his mind to attempt saving himself by letting me free and, inevitably, the opportunity passed.
Ellis and Yorkshire came back, and neither of them would meet my eyes.
Bad sign.
Ellis, looking at his watch, said, ‘We wait.’
‘What for?’ Tilepit asked uncertainly.
Yorkshire answered, to Ellis’s irritation, ‘The TV people are on the point of leaving. Everyone will be gone in fifteen minutes.’
Tilepit looked at me, his anxieties showing plainly. ‘Let Halley go,’ he begged.
Ellis said comfortingly, ‘Sure, in a while.’
Yorkshire smiled. His anger was preferable, on the whole.
Verney Tilepit wanted desperately to be reassured, but even he could see that if freeing me was the intention, why did we have to wait?
Ellis still held the wrench. He wouldn’t get it wrong, I thought. He wouldn’t spill my blood. I would probably not know much about it. I might not consciously learn the reciprocal answer to my self-searching question: Could he personally kill me, to save himself? How deep did friendship go? Did it ever have absolute taboos? Had I already, by accusing him of evil, melted his innermost restraints? He wanted to get even. He would wound me any way he could. But kill… I didn’t know.
He walked around behind me.
Time, in a way, stood still. It was a moment in which to plead, but I couldn’t. The decision, whatever I said, would be his.
He came eventually around to my right-hand side and murmured, ‘Tungsten,’ under his breath.
Water, I thought, I had water in my veins.
He reached down suddenly and clamped his hand around my right wrist, pulling fiercely upward.
I jerked my wrist out of his grasp and without warning he bashed the wrench across my knuckles. In the moment of utter numbness that resulted he slid the open jaws of the wrench onto my wrist and tightened the screw. Tightened it further, until the jaws grasped immovably, until they squeezed the upper and lower sides of my wrist together, compressing blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, bearing down on the bones inside.
The wrench was heavy. He balanced its handle on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and held it steady so that my wrist was up at the same level. He had two strong hands. He persevered with the screw.
I said, ‘Ellis,’ in protest, not from anger or even fear, but in disbelief that he could do what he was doing: in a lament for the old Ellis, in a sort of passionate sorrow.
For the few seconds that he looked into my face, his expression was flooded with awareness… and shame. Then the feelings passed, and he returned in deep concentration to an atrocious pleasure.
It was extraordinary. He seemed to go into a kind of trance, as if the office and Yorkshire and Tilepit didn’t exist, as if there were only one reality, which was the clench of forged steel jaws on a wrist and the extent to which he could intensify it.
I thought: if the wrench had been lopping shears, if its jaws had been knives instead of flat steel, the whole devastating nightmare would have come true. I shut my mind to it: made it cold. Sweated, all the same.
I thought: what I see in his face is the full-blown addiction; not the cruel satisfaction he could get from unscrewing a false hand, but the sinful fulfillment of cutting off a live hoof.
I glanced very briefly at Yorkshire and Tilepit and saw their frozen, bottomless astonishment, and I realized that until that moment of revelation they hadn’t wholly believed in Ellis’s guilt.
My wrist hurt. Somewhere up my arm the ulna grumbled.
I said, ‘Ellis’ sharply, to wake him up.
He got the screw to tighten another notch.
I yelled at him, ‘Ellis,’ and again, ‘Ellis.’
He straightened, looking vaguely down at fifteen inches of heavy stainless steel wrench incongruously sticking out sideways from its task. He tied it to the arm of the chair with another strap from the desk and went over to the window, not speaking, but not rational, either.
I tried to dislodge myself from the wrench but my hand was too numb and the grip too tight. I found it difficult to think. My hand was pale blue and gray. Thought was a crushed wrist and an abysmal shattering fear that if the damage went on too long, it would be permanent. Hands could be lost.
Both hands… Oh, God. Oh, God.
‘Ellis,’ I said yet again, but in a lower voice this time: a plea for him to return to the old self, that was there all the time, somewhere.
I waited. Acute discomfort and the terrible anxiety continued. Ellis’s thoughts seemed far out in space. Tilepit cleared his throat in embarrassment and Yorkshire, as if in unconscious humor, crunched a pickle.
Minutes passed.
I said, ‘Ellis…’
I closed my eyes. Opened them again. More or less prayed.
Time and nightmare fused. One became the other. The future was a void.
Ellis left the window and crossed with bouncing steps to the chair where I sat. He looked into my face and enjoyed what he could undoubtedly see there. Then he unscrewed and untied the wrench with violent jerks and dropped the abominable ratchet from a height onto the desk.