The brilliant researchers came up with several solutions that required Tarzan-like swinging over an abyss, but with civil regard for each other’s brains, they voted unanimously for the exit I actually took.
The glowingly pretty female doctor whose idea I followed gave me life-threatening directions. “Go up the stairs. Beside the top of the staircase, on the sixth floor, there’s a bolted door. Unbolt it. Open it. You’ll find yourself on the roof. Slide down the tiles until you meet a parapet. Crawl along behind the parapet there, so that the man in the mews doesn’t see you. Crawl to the right. Keep your head down. There are seven houses joined together. Go along behind their parapets until you come to the fire escape at the end. Go down it. There’s a bolt mechanism that lets the last part of the iron ladder slide down to the pavement. When you’re down, shove the last part of the ladder up again until it clicks. My car is parked in the mews. I’ll drive out in half an hour. You should be on the ground there by then, out of sight of Doctor Force. I’ll pick you up and go to meet your driver. When I pick you up, lie on the floor, so that my car looks empty except for me.”
Everyone nodded.
I shook hands with George Lawson-Young. He gave me multiple contact numbers and mentioned with a grin that I already had the phone number of the lab. He would expect me to find the stolen tape. Deduction and intuition would do it.
I said, “What a hope!”
“Our only hope,” he added soberly.
The author of my escape and a couple of her colleagues came up to the top floor with me in high good spirits and unbolted the door to the roof.
Cheerfully, but in whispers because of the man in the mews far below, the researchers helped me slide down the gently sloping roof tiles to reach the parapet along the edge. Seeing me safely on my knees there, they happily waved good-bye and bolted the top-floor door behind me.
It was true I could have crawled along on my hands and knees, but I would have been visible to Norman Osprey waiting below. She, my savior, being tiny, hadn’t realized that I was almost double her body size. To be invisible I would have to go on my stomach, as the height of the parapet was barely the length of a forearm.
I sweated and trembled along on my stomach within the parapet’s scanty cover and had to freeze my nerves and imagination to zero in order to cross crumbling bits of old mortar. It was a long way down to the ground.
Dusk gathered in unwary corners and made matters worse.
The seven houses seemed like fifty.
When at last I reached the fire escape, I’d begun to think that falling over the parapet would be less terrifying than inching along so precariously behind it.
At least, I thought grimly, if Adam Force had ever been up on the laboratory house’s roof, he wouldn’t expect me to have gone up there myself.
My dear pretty savior, on picking up my shaky self, remarked critically that I’d taken my time on the journey. My dry mouth found it impossible to reply. She apologized that the recent rain had drenched the roof and wet my clothes. Think nothing of it, I croaked. She switched on the headlights and the heater. I gradually stopped shivering — both from cold and from fear.
We found Jim at the rendezvous in his usual state of agitation. My savior, handing me over, reported that the fun escape had been a great success. She wouldn’t accept anything for petrol. She did accept an absolutely heartfelt hug of gratitude, and a long, long kiss.
9
I made a detour to talk to Bon-Bon on my way home and found her tears fewer and her memory recovering. When I asked her questions, she sweetly answered. When I suggested a course of action, she willingly agreed.
By the time Jim decanted me yawning to my hill house we were both very tired and he still had a few miles to go. Far and away the most orthodox of my three self-appointed minders, he also lived nearest. His wife, he said, had told him to apply to drive me regularly until I got my license back. I was considering the cost, and he was considering a ban on radio and music. We had agreed to let each other know.
On that Wednesday, Catherine’s transport stood on its frame outside the kitchen door. Inside the kitchen, when Jim had driven away, the warm welcoming smell of cooking seemed as natural as in the past with other women it had been contrived.
“Sorry about this.” She pointed with her elbow at half-scrambled eggs. “I didn’t know when you were coming back, and I was hungry.”
I wondered how much care had gone into saying “back” instead of “home.”
She gave me a careful look, her eyebrows rising.
“I got a bit wet,” I said.
“Tell me later.” She cooked more eggs while I changed, and we ate in companionable peace.
I made coffee for us both and drank mine looking at her neat face, her blond curving hair and her close-textured skin; and I wondered without confidence what I looked like to her.
I said, “I saw Doctor Force again today...” Catherine smiled. “And was he still charming and good-looking and filling everyone with belief in humanity?”
I said, “Well, not exactly. He quite likely meant to bump me off, if he got a chance.” I yawned, and bit by bit, without exaggeration, told her about my day.
She listened with concentration and horror.
I collected her coffee cup and put it in the sink. We were still in the kitchen, which thanks to my mother had a pair of large comfortable chairs near an efficient heater.
We sat together, squashed into one of the chairs, as much for support for the spirits as for physical pleasure.
I told her about the professor and his X-factor method of research. “So now,” I finished, “I go over everything that anyone has said and done, add in X and see what I get.”
“It sounds difficult.”
“Different, anyway.”
“And when you find him? Blackmask Number Four?”
“He gives me nightmares,” I said.
I smoothed her hair. She felt right in my arms, curling there comfortably.
If I added Blackmask Four into the picture when he’d first blown into my awareness of his existence I had to remember every separate blow of that encounter on the Broadway sidewalk and, I realized with distaste, I had to go back and listen again in my mind to every word of Rose’s.
She’d shouted, “Break his wrists...”
Catherine stirred in my arms and cuddled closer, and I discarded Rose in favor of bed.
Catherine woke early and went off before dawn to her morning shift, and I walked down in the dark to Logan Glass thinking of the past two days in Lynton and Bristol and wondering, like Professor Lawson-Young, if Doctor Force still possessed and could produce for sale the irreplaceable data he’d stolen.
Strictly speaking, none of it was truly the business of a provincial glassblower, but my fast-mending skin reminded me still that not everyone agreed.
Also, strictly speaking, none of it was truly the business of a dead steeplechase jockey, but his wife and children had been assaulted by gas and comprehensively robbed of their video machines.
The dedicated professor depended, he’d hopefully said, on my deductive abilities, but to my mind he was staking his shirt on a nonrunner, as Martin would have put it.
I had come to see the hunt for the videotape as sorties up a series of roads leading nowhere: as a starburst of cul-de-sacs. The professor believed that one of the roads would eventually lead to his treasure, and I thought of Lloyd Baxter and Ed Payne and Victor and Rose and Norman Osprey and Bon-Bon and Adam Force, all as blind-alley roads. I thought of all they’d said and done, and the professor was right, if I could discard the lies, I’d be left with the truth.