No one said anything. Ellis seemed euphoric, high, full of good spirits, striding around the room as if unable to contain his exhilaration.
I got stabbing pins and needles in my fingers, and thanked the fates for it. My hand felt dreadful but turned slowly yellowish pink.
Thought came back from outer space and lodged again earthily in my brain.
Ellis, coming down very slightly, looked at his watch. He plucked from the desk the cosmetic glove from my false arm, came to my right side, shoved the glove inside my shirt against my chest and, with a theatrical flourish, zipped up the front of my blue tracksuit to keep his gift from falling out.
He looked at his watch again. Then he went across the room, picked up the unscrewed hand, returned to my side and slapped the dead mechanism into my living palm. There was a powerful impression all around that he was busy making sure no trace of Sid Halley remained in the room.
He went around behind me and undid the strap fastening me into the chair. Then he undid the second strap that held my upper arms against my body.
‘Screw the hand back on,’ he instructed.
Perhaps because they had bent from being kicked around, or perhaps because my real hand was eighty per cent useless, the screw threads wouldn’t mesh smoothly, and after three half turns they stuck. The hand looked re-attached, but wouldn’t work.
‘Stand up,’ Ellis said.
I stood, swaying, my ankles still tied together.
‘You’re letting him go,’ Tilepit exclaimed, with grateful relief.
‘Of course,’ Ellis said.
Yorkshire was smiling.
‘Put your hands behind your back,’ Ellis told me.
I did so, and he strapped my wrists tight together.
Last, he undid my ankles.
‘This way.’ He pulled me by the arm over to the door and through into the passage. I walked like an automaton.
Looking back, I saw Yorkshire put his hand on the telephone. Beyond him, Tilepit was happy with foolish faith.
Ellis pressed the call button for the elevator, and the door opened immediately.
‘Get in,’ he said.
I looked briefly at his now unsmiling face. Expressionless. That made two of us, I thought, two of us thinking the same thing and not saying it.
I stepped into the elevator and he leaned in quickly and pressed the button for the ground floor, then jumped back. The door closed between us. The elevator began its short journey down.
To tie together the wrists of a man who could unscrew one of them was an exercise in futility. All the same, the crossed threads and my fumbling fingers gave me trouble and some severe moments of panic before the hand slipped free. The elevator had already reached its destination by the time I’d shed the tying strap, leaving no chance to emerge from the opening door with everything anywhere near normal.
I put the mechanical hand deep into my right-hand tracksuit trousers pocket. Surreal, I grimly thought. The long sleeve of brown overall covered the void where it belonged.
Ellis had given me a chance. Not much of one, probably, but at least I did have the answer to my question, which was no, he wouldn’t personally kill me. Yorkshire definitely would.
The two blue-clad bodyguards were missing from the lobby.
The telephone on the desk was ringing, but the bodyguards were outside, busily positioning a Topline Foods van. One guard was descending from the driver’s seat. The other was opening the rear doors.
A van, I understood, for abduction. For a journey to an unmarked grave. A bog job, the Irish called it. How much, I wondered, were they being paid?
Ellis’s timing had given me thirty seconds. He’d sent me down too soon. In the lobby I had no future. Out in the open air… some.
Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shot out through the doors as fast as I could, and sprinted — and I ran not to the right, towards my own car, but veered left around the van towards the open gates.
There was a shout from one of the blue figures, a yell from the second, and I thought for a moment that I could avoid them, but to my dismay the gatekeeper himself came to unwelcome life, emerging from his kiosk and barring my exit. Big man in another blue uniform, overconfident.
I ran straight at him. He stood solidly, legs apart, his weight evenly balanced. He wasn’t prepared for or expecting my left foot to knock aside the inside of his knee or for my back to bend and curl like a cannonball into his stomach: he fell over backwards and I was on my way before he struggled to his knees. The other two, though, had gained ground.
The sort of judo Chico had taught me was in part the stylized advances and throws of a regulated sport and in part an individual style for a one-handed victim. For a start, I never wore, in my private sessions with him, the loose white judogi uniform. I never fought in bare feet but always in ordinary shoes or sneakers. The judo I’d learned was how to save my life, not how to earn a black belt.
Ordinary judo needed two hands. Myoelectric hands had a slow response time, a measurable pause between instruction and action. Chico and I had scrapped all grappling techniques for that hand and substituted clubbing; and I used all his lessons at Frodsham as if they were as familiar as walking.
We hadn’t exactly envisaged no useful hands at all, but it was amazing what one could do if one wanted to live. It was the same as it had been in races: win now, pay later.
My opponents were straight muscle men with none of the subtlety of the Japanese understanding of lift and leverage and speed. Chico could throw me every time, but Yorkshire’s watchdogs couldn’t.
The names of the movements clicked like a litany in my brain — shintai, randori, tai-sabaki. Fighting literally to live, I stretched every technique I knew and adapted others, using falling feints that involved my twice lying on the ground and sticking a foot into a belly to fly its owner over my head. It ended with one blue uniform lying dazed on his back, one complaining I’d broken his nose, and one haring off to the office building with the bad news.
I stumbled out onto the road, feeling that if I went back for my car the two men I’d left on the ground would think of getting up again and closing the gates.
In one direction lay houses, so I staggered that way. Better cover. I needed cover before anyone chased me in the Topline Foods van.
The houses, when I reached them, were too regular, the gardens too tidy and small. I chose one house with no life showing, walked unsteadily up the garden path, kept on going, found myself in the back garden with another row of houses over the back fence.
The fence was too high to jump or vault, but there was an empty crate lying there, a gift from the gods.
No one came out of any of the houses to ask me what I thought I was doing. I emerged into the next street and began to think about where I was going and what I looked like.
Brown overalls. Yorkshire would be looking for brown overalls.
I took them off and dumped them in one of the houses’ brown-looking beech hedges.
Taking off the overalls revealed the nonexistence of a left hand.
Damn it, I thought astringently. Things are never easy, so cope.
I put the pink exposed end of arm, with its bare electrical contacts, into my left-hand jacket pocket, and walked, not ran, up the street. I wanted to run, but hadn’t the strength. Weak… Stamina a memory, a laugh.
There was a boy in the distance roller-blading, coming towards me and wearing not the ubiquitous baseball cap but a striped woolen hat. That would do, I thought. I fumbled some money out of the zip pocket in my belt and stood in his way.
He tried to avoid me, swerved, overbalanced and called me filthy names until his gaze fell on the money in my hand.
‘Sell me your hat,’ I suggested.
‘Yer wha?’