Someone called the ‘eye-man’ was on the run, apparently. The ‘eye-man’? Bale grinned. Well, it made sense, in an off-beam sort of a way. At least it confirmed that the police didn’t yet know his name. Which also meant that Madame, his mother’s, house might still be a safe place to retreat to. The only problem would lie in getting there.
Sabir walked back towards the door behind which Bale was hiding. For a split second Bale was tempted to smash the door into his face. Even with one arm, he was more than a match for a man like Sabir.
But the loss of blood from his neck had weakened him. And the other gypsy was still out there – the one who had sprinted into the house just a few seconds after Bale had set the girl on the dangle. That had taken balls. If the plain-clothes policeman hadn’t neck-shot him, Bale would have picked off the gypsy a good twenty metres before he reached his target. The man must have a guardian fucking angel.
Bale waited for Sabir’s footfalls to diminish down the corridor – yes, there was the expected hesitation near the policeman’s body. Then the manoeuvring around the furniture. Sabir would want to avoid stepping in the man’s blood – he was a gringo, after all. Far too squeamish.
Hardly breathing, Bale eased himself out into the corridor.
In the salon there was a red glow as the fire in the grate gradually took hold. Now Sabir was lighting more candles. Good. No one would be able to make Bale out beyond the immediate axis of the light.
Keeping his back tight against the wall, Bale sidestepped towards the rear stairs. He reached down. Good. They were stone, not wood. No creaking.
A drop of blood plopped on to the step beside him. He felt around and scrubbed it off with his sleeve. He’d best make it fast. Before he left a blood trail any idiot could follow – let alone a policeman.
At the top of the stairs Bale decided that it was safe enough to risk his pocket torch. Shading the beam with his fingers, he played the torch down the disused corridor and then up along the ceiling. He was looking for an attic or a loft space.
Nothing. He moved into the first bedroom. Junk everywhere. When had this house last been lived in? Anybody’s guess.
He tried the ceiling again. Nothing.
Two bedrooms further down the corridor he found it. A loft hatch, consisting of a hole with a board laid across it. But no ladder.
Bale shone the torch around the room. There was a chair. A chest. A table. A bed with a distressed, motheaten coverlet. That would do.
Bale set the chair underneath the loft space. He knotted the coverlet around the spine of the chair and then tied the other end of the coverlet through his belt.
He tested the chair for weight. It held.
Bale eased himself up on to the chair and reached up with his one good arm for the loft cover. The sweat began popping out on his forehead. For a second he felt faint and as though about to fall, but he refused to countenance such a possibility. He let his arm drop and took a few deep breaths, until his condition returned to normal.
Bale realised that he would have to conduct the thing in one explosive movement, or else his strength would leave him and he would be unable to achieve his end.
He closed his eyes and began, quite consciously, to regulate his breathing once more. He started by telling his body that it was okay. That any trauma that had occurred to it was trivial. Not worth compensating for in terms of weakness.
When he felt his heart rate return to near normal, he reached up, slid the loft cover to the left and hooked his good arm up over the lip. Using the chair as a fulcrum, he swung himself up and out, taking the full weight of his body on to his good arm. He would have one only chance at this. He had better make it good.
Upending himself, he swung first one leg, then the other, over the lip of the loft space. For a moment he hung there, his bad arm fl ailing down, his legs and half his upper body eaten by the space. Kicking forwards, he managed to get the back of his right upper thigh across the hatch.
Now he was hanging with the coverlet trailing from his belt and still attached to the chair. He scissored his way further into the loft space, transferring the entire weight of his body on to his thighs.
With one final twist he launched himself over the edge of the loft hatch and lay there, cursing silently through clenched teeth.
When he had sufficient control of himself again, he untied the coverlet from around his waist and pulled the chair up behind him.
For one dreadful moment he thought that he had misjudged the size of the hatch cover and that the chair was not going to pass through. But then he had it. Out of sight, out of mind.
He shone his torch down on to the floor to check for blood loss. No. All the blood had landed on the chair. By morning, any other spots would have dried anyway and be virtually indistinguishable from the filth already covering the oak boards.
Bale hefted the plank back across the loft hatch, untied the coverlet from the chair and collapsed.
66
He awoke to a fearful, nagging pain in his left shoulder. Daylight had found its way through a thousand inadvertent chinks in the roof and one chink had been shining fully on to his face.
He could hear voices outside the house – shouts, orders, the hefting of large objects and the firing-up of engines.
Bale crawled out of the light, dragging the coverlet behind him. He would have to do something about his shoulder. The pain of his shattered collarbone was close to unbearable and he didn’t wish to pass out, with the risk that he might call out in his delirium and alert the police below.
He found himself an isolated corner, well out of the way of any boxes and bric-a-brac that might be susceptible to a kick or to toppling over. Any noise at all – any unexpected crashes – and the enemy would find him.
He constructed a pad for himself with the coverlet, forcing it under his armpit and then tying it back around his shoulder blades. Then he lay fl at on the planking, with his legs stretched out and his arms down by his sides.
Slowly, incrementally, he began inhaling in a series of deep breaths and as he took each breath he allowed the words ‘sleep, deep sleep’ to echo through the inside of his head. Once he’d got a satisfactory rhythm going, Bale opened his eyes as wide as he could manage and rotated them backwards, until he was staring at a point on the ceiling way beyond his forehead. With his eyes fixed in that position, he deepened his breathing, all the while maintaining the rhythms of his internal chant.
When he could feel himself drifting into a pre-hypnotic state, he began to suggest certain things to himself. Things like ‘in thirty breaths you will fall asleep’, followed by ‘in thirty breaths you will do exactly as I tell you’ – and then, later, ‘in thirty breaths you will no longer feel any pain’ – culminating with ‘in thirty breaths your collarbone will begin to heal itself and your strength will return to you’.
Bale understood only too well the potential shortcomings of self-hypnosis. But he also knew that it was the only possible way that he could dominate his body and return it to a state bordering on the functional.
If he was to last out in this loft space – with no food and with no medical attention – for the day or two that it would take the police to complete their enquiries, he knew that he must focus all his resources on the conservation and cultivation of his essential energies.
All he had was what he came in with. And those assets would diminish with each passing hour, until either an infection, an unforced error, or an unintended noise could bring him low.
67
Gavril’s body lay exactly where Alexi had said it would be. Sabir glanced idly towards the woodland – yes, there was the solitary cypress tree, just as Alexi had described it. But it might as well have been on Mars for all the good it would do him at this moment.