"I'm not sure," the General said hesitantly. "I rather think you're right. We've no time—"
He broke off in horror as one of the unclothed constables, the one whose shoe had been splashed by the cider, screamed aloud in agony, the scream deepening to a tearing rasping coughing moan: clutching hands clawed in a maniac frenzy at a suddenly stiffened straightened neck where the tendons stood out whitely like quivering wires: then he toppled and fell heavily to the muddy ground, silent now, the nails of his fingers tried to tear his throat open. His crew-mate, the other uniformless constable, made some sort of unintelligible sound, moved forward and down to help his friend, then grunted in pain as my arm hooked around his neck.
"Don't touch him!" I shouted hoarsely. "Touch him and you'll die too. He must have picked up the toxin when he brushed his shoe with his hand then touched his mouth. Nothing on earth can save him now. Stand back. Keep well clear of him."
He took twenty seconds to die, the kind of twenty seconds that will stay with a man in his nightmares till he draws his last breath on earth. I had seen many men die, but even those who had died in bullet and shrapnel-torn agony had done so peacefully and quietly compared to this man whose body, in the incredibly convulsive violence of its death throes, twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. Twice in the last shocking seconds before death he threw his racked and tortured body clear off the ground and so high in the air that I could have passed a table beneath him. And then, as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun, it was all over and he was no more than a strangely small and shapeless bundle of clothes lying face downwards in the muddy earth. My mouth was kiln-dry and full of the taste of salt, the ugly taste of fear.
I can't say how long we stood there in the heavy cold rain, staring at the dead man. A long time, I think. And then we looked at each other, and each one of us knew what the others were capable of thinking only one thing. Who was next? In the pale wash of light from the lamp I still held in one hand, we all stared at each other, one half of our senses and minds outgoing and screwed up to the highest pitch of intensity and perception to detect the first signs of death in another, the other half turned inwards to detect the first signs in themselves. Then, all at once, I cursed savagely, perhaps at myself, or my cowardice, or at Gregori or at the botulinus virus, I don't know, turned abruptly and headed for the byre, taking the lamp with me, leaving the others standing there round the dead man in the rain-filled pitchy darkness like darkly-petrified mourners at some age-old heathen midnight rites.
I was looking for a hose and I found one almost immediately. I carried it outside, screwed it on to a standing plug and turned the tap on fulclass="underline" the results in the way of volume and pressure would have done justice to any city hydrant. I clambered awkwardly on to a hay wagon that was standing nearby and said to the General, "Come on, sir, you first."
He came directly under the earthward-pointed nozzle and the jet of water on head and shoulders from a distance of only a few inches made him stumble and all but fall. But he stuck it gamely for all of the half-minute that I insisted he remain under the hose, and by the time I was finished he was as sodden as if he'd spent the night in the river and shivering so violently that I could hear his teeth chatter above the hiss of the water: but by the time he was finished I knew that any toxin that might have been clinging to face or body would have been completely washed away. The other four all submitted to it in turn and then Hardanger did the same for me. The force of the water was such that it was like being belaboured by a non-stop series of far from lightweight clubs and the water itself was ice-cold: but when I thought of the man who had died and how he had died a few bruises and the risk of pneumonia didn't even begin to be worth considering. When he had finished with me Hardanger switched off the water and said quietly, "Sorry, Cavell. You had the right of it."
"It was my fault," I said. I didn't mean my voice to sound dull and lifeless but that was the way it came out, to my ears anyway. "I should have warned him. I should have told him not to touch his mouth or nose with his hand."
"He should have thought of that himself," Hardanger said, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. "He knew the dangers as well as you — they've been published in every paper in the land to-day. Let's go and see if the farmer has a phone. Not that it'll make much difference now. Gregori knows that the police Jaguar is too hot to hang on to for a second longer than is necessary. He's won all along the line, damn his black soul, and nothing is going to stop him now. Twelve hours he said. Twelve hours and then he would be done."
"Twelve hours from now Gregori will be dead," I said.
"What?" I could sense him staring at me. "What did you say?"
"He'll be dead," I repeated. "Before dawn."
"It's all right," Hardanger said. Cavell's mind had cracked at last, but let's play it casual, let's not any of us make a song and dance about it. He took my arm and started out for the lamp-lit rectangles which showed where the house stood. "The sooner this is over the sooner we'll all get the rest and food and sleep we need."
"I'll rest and sleep when I've killed Gregori," I said. "I'm going to kill him to-night. First I get Mary back. Then I'll kill him."
"Mary will be all right, Cavell." Mary in that madman's hands, that was what had sent Cavell's last few remaining grey cells tottering over the brink, he thought. "He'll let her go, he'll have no reason to do anything to her. And you had to do what you did. You thought that if she stayed there with us in the cider house she would die. Isn't that it, Cavell?"
"I'm sure the superintendent is right, my boy." The General was walking on my other side now, and his voice was quiet because loud voices excite the unhinged. "She won't be harmed."
I said rudely, to both, "If I'm round the bend, what the hell does that make you two?"
Hardanger stopped, tightened his grip on my arm and peered at me. He knew that those whose minds have gone off the rails never talk about it, for the simple reason that they are unshakably convinced that their minds are still on the track. He said carefully, "I don't think I understand."
"You don't. But you will." I said to the Generaclass="underline" "You must persuade the Cabinet to go on with this evacuation of the Central London area. Continuous radio and TV broadcasts. They'll have no difficulty in persuading the people to leave, you can believe that. It shouldn't cause much trouble — that area's pretty well unlived in by night, anyway." I turned again to Hardanger. "Have two hundred of your best men armed. A gun for me, too — and a knife. I know exactly what Gregori intends to do to-night. I know exactly what he hopes to achieve. I know exactly how he intends to leave the country — and exactly where he will be leaving from."
"How do you know, my boy?" The General's voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear above the drumming of the rain.
"Because Gregori talked too much. Sooner or later they all talk too much. Gregori was cagier than most, even when he was convinced that we would all be dead in a minute he still said very little. But that little was too much. And I think I've really known ever since we found MacDonald's body."
"You must have heard things that I didn't hear," Hardanger said sourly.
"You heard it all. You heard him say he was going to London, if he really wanted the bug set loose in London to have Mordon destroyed he'd have stayed in Mordon to see what happened and have had some stooge do the job in London. But he has no interest in seeing Mordon destroyed, he never had. There's something he has to do in London. Another of his never-ending red herrings — the Communist red herring, of course, was purely fortuitous, he'd no hand in that at all. That's the first thing. The second — that he was going to achieve some great ambition to-night. The third— that he had twice saved Henriques from the electric chair. That shows what kind of a man he is — and I don't mean a criminal defence lawyer of the U.S. Bar Association — and what kind of ambition he has in mind: I'll take long odds not only that he's on the Interpol files but also that he's an ex big-time American racketeer who has been deported to Italy — and the line of business in which he used to specialise would make very interesting reading, because the criminal leopards, even the biggest cats in the jungle, never change their spots. The fourth thing is that he expects to be clear of this country in twelve hours' time. And the fifth thing is that this is Saturday night. Put all those things together add see what you get."