“Too late,” she said, turning him round.
“We’ve got company.”
Hal, horribly unprepared, showed his teeth in a wolfish grin.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he drawled. With a proprietary arm he eased Roz behind him and prepared to defend what was his.
There were four of them, large anonymous men in ski-masks.
They said nothing, just weighed in indiscriminately with baseball bats, using Hal as a human target. It happened so fast that Roz was a spectator to their grisly sport almost before she realised it. She, it seemed, was too insignificant to concern them.
Her first angry impulse was to catch out at a flailing arm but the battering she had had at the hands of Rupert two weeks before persuaded her to use her brain instead. With trembling fingers she opened her handbag and removed the three-inch hat ping she had taken to carrying with her, thrusting it upwards into the buttock of the man nearest her.
It drove in up to its ornate jade head and a soft groan issued from his mouth as he stood, completely paralysed with shock, the baseball bat slipping to the floor from his slackening fingers. No one noticed, except her.
With an exclamation of triumph she dived on it and brought it up in a swinging arc to smash against the man’s balls. He sat on the floor and started to scream.
“I’ve got one. Hal,” she panted.
“I’ve got a bat.”
“Then use it, for Christ’s sake,” he bellowed, going down under a rain of blows.
“Oh God!” Legs, she thought. She knelt on one knee, swiped at the nearest pair of trousers and crowed with hiumph when she made contact.
She took another swipe only to have her head jerked up as a hand seized her by the hair and started to pull it out by the roots. Shock and pain flooded her eyes with stinging tears.
Hal, on his hands and knees on the floor, his head protected by his shoulders, was only vaguely aware that the rapidity of the blows beating against his back had lessened. His brain was concentrated on the high-pitched screaming which he thought was coming from Roz. His anger was colossal, triggering such a surge of adrenalin that he exploded to his feet in an all consuming fury and threw himself at the first man he saw, bearing him back against the gleaming ovens where a saucepan of fish stock bubbled gently. Oblivious to the blow which crashed with the force of a bus between his shoulder blades he bent his victim in an arc over the rings, grabbed the saucepan and upended the boiling liquid over the masked head.
He swung round to face the fourth man and fended off another blow with his forearm before smashing the cast-iron base of the saucepan into the side of an unprotected jaw. The eyes behind the mask registered the briefest glimmer of surprise before rolling helplessly into their sockets. The man was unconscious before he hit the floor.
Exhausted, Hal looked about for Roz. It was a moment or two before he found her, so disorientated was he by the noise of screaming which seemed to be filling the kitchen from every side. He shook his head to clear the fog and looked towards the door. He saw her almost immediately, her neck trapped in the hooked arm of the only man left with any fight in him. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled alarmingly to one side.
“If you make a move,” the man told Hal between jerky breaths, “I’ll break her neck.”
A hatred, so primeval that he couldn’t control it, erupted like hot lava in Hal’s brain. His actions were instinctive. He lowered his head and charged.
FIFTEEN
Roz swam up to a strange twilight world between oblivion and consciousness. She knew she was there in the oom but she felt apart from it as if she were watching what was going on from behind thickened glass. Sound was muted. She had a vague memory of fingers clamping round her throat. And afterwards? She wasn’t sure. It had, she thought, been very peaceful.
Hal’s face loomed over her.
“Are you all right?” he asked from a great distance.
“Fine,” she murmured happily.
He smacked her on the cheek with the flat of his hand.
“That’s my girl,” he told her, his voice muffled by cotton wool.
“Come on, now. Snap out of it. I need some help.”
She glared at him.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” she said with dignity.
He hauled her to her feet.
“Now,” he said firmly, ‘or we’ll be back where we started.” He thrust a baseball bat into her hand.
“I am going to tie them up but you’ve got to protect my back while I’m doing it. I don’t want one of these bastards surprising me.” He looked into her dazed eyes.
“Come on, Roz,” he said savagely, shaking her.
“Pull yourself together and show a bit of character.”
She took a deep breath.
“Has anyone ever told you what a complete and utter turd you are? I nearly died.”
“You fainted,” he said unemotionally, but his eyes were twinkling.
“Hit anything that moves,” he instructed her, except the one with his head under the tap. He’s in enough agony already.”
Reality came rushing in on wings of sound. Moans and groans and running water. There was a man with his head under the tap. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and swung the baseball bat in terrified reaction, ramming home the hat ping that its unfortunate recipient was gingerly plucking from his bottom. His screams of reawakened agony were pitiful.
? “Oh God!” she cried.
“I’ve done something awful.” Tears sprang into her eyes.
Hal finished trussing her putative killer, who had been knocked cold by his frenzied charge, and moved on to the other unconscious figure, winding twine expertly about the wrists and ankles.
“What’s he yelling for anyway?” he demanded, tethering his victim to the table for good measure.
“He’s got a pin in his bottom,” said Roz, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.
Hal approached the man warily.
“What sort of pin?”
“My mother’s hat ping She gagged.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
He saw the green ornamental head protruding from the man’s Levis and felt a tiny twinge of sympathy. It didn’t last. He left it there while he bound the man’s wrists and ankles and tethered him, like his friend, to the table. It was almost as an afterthought that he gripped the jade and yanked the hat ping grinning, from the quivering buttock.
“You arse hole he murmured cheerfully, tucking the pin into the front of his jumper.
“I feel ill,” said Roz.
“Sit down, then.” He took a chair and pressed her into it before moving to the back door and flinging it open.
“Out,” he ordered the man at the sink.
“Get yourself to hospital as fast as you can. If your friends have an ounce of decency they’ll keep your name to themselves. If they haven’t’ he shrugged - ‘you’ve got about half an hour to get yourself admitted before the police come looking for you.”
The man needed no persuading. He launched himself into the fresh air of the alleyway and took to his heels.
With a groan of exhaustion, Hal shut the door and slithered to the floor.
“I need a rest. Do me a favour, sweetheart, and take off their masks.
Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Roz’s head was aching intolerably where the roots of her hair had been loosened. She looked at him with burning eyes in a pasty white face.
“For your information, Hawksley,” she said icily, “I’m just about out on my feet. It may have escaped your notice, but if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have got anything.”
He gave a mighty yawn and winced as pain seared around his chest and back. Fractured ribs, he thought tiredly.
“I’ll tell you this for free, Roz. As far as I’m concerned you are the most wonderful woman God ever made and I’ll marry you if you’ll have me.” He smiled sweetly.
“But at the moment I’m bushed.