He wasn't going to remain so obligingly unseeing for an indefinite period. I twisted the knife until the blade pointed upwards, then found myself hesitating. Even with Mary's life in the balance I found myself hesitating. Whoever this character was I'd little doubt but that he deserved to die anyway. But to knife an unsuspecting and half-asleep man, however much he deserved it? This wasn't the war any more. I slid out the Webley, quiet as a mouse tiptoeing past a sleeping cat, caught the barrel and swung for a spot just below the dripping brim of his hat, just behind the left ear, and because I was feeling illogically angry about my uneasiness in knifing him I struck him very hard indeed. The sound was the sound of an axe sinking deep into the bole of a pine. I caught and lowered him gently to the ground. He wouldn't wake up before dawn. Maybe he'd never waken again. It didn't seem to matter. I started up the fire-escape.
There was no hurry, no haste, in my going. Haste could be the end of it all. I went up the steps slowly, one at a time, always staring upwards. I was too near the end of the road now to let rashness be the ruin of everything.
After the sixth or seventh flight of steps I slowed down even more, not because my leg and queer shortness of breath were troubling me, which they were, but because I had become suddenly aware of an area of diffused light in the darkness of the wall above me, where a light had no right to be. There shouldn't have been any light anywhere, for all the lights of Central London were out.
If ghosts were allowed to have black faces — though I suspected mine was getting pretty streaky by this time — then I want up the next flight of steps like a ghost. As I approached the light I could see that it came not from a window but from a grille-work door set in the wall. Cautiously, I raised my head to the level of this door and peered inside.
It was on a level with the massive iron girders that spanned and supported the roof of the station. At least a dozen lights were burning inside the station, small, weak, isolated sources of illumination that served only to emphasise the depth of the gloom that lay over most of the huge and cavernous building. Six of the lights were directly above sets of hydraulic buffers at the end of tracks, and I suddenly realised why they were burning there: some lights are essential to the safe operation of a railway station and those must have been battery-powered lamps designed to come on in the event of a power failure. A prosaic enough explanation and, I was sure, the correct one.
I looked for some moments at the geometric tracery of soot-blackened girders that dwindled and vanished into impenetrable darkness at the farthest reaches of the station, then put a slight experimental pressure on the door. It gave under my hand. And the damned thing squeaked, like a gibbet creaking in the night wind. A gibbet with a corpse on it. I put the thought of corpses out of my mind and withdrew my hand from the door. Enough was enough.
But the door was sufficiently open to let me see a couple of vertical iron ladders leading away from the steel platform just inside. One led upwards to a long gangway immediately below the vast skylights, the other down to another gangway about the level of the highest of the lights inside the station: the former would be for the window-cleaners, the latter for the electricians. It was a great help to me to know that. I straightened. At least six nights of stairs to go yet before I started getting really interested.
The arm that locked round my throat and started throttling the life out of me belonged to a gorilla, a gorilla with a shirt and jacket on, but a gorilla for all that. In those first two hellish seconds of immobilised shock and pain I thought my neck was going to snap, and before I could even begin to react something hard and metallic smacked down on my right wrist and sent the Webley flying from my grasp. It struck the iron platform and then spun off into space.
I never heard it land on the roadway beneath. I was too busy fighting for my life. With my left hand — my right hand was momentarily paralysed and quite useless — I reached up, caught his wrist and tried to tear his arm away. I might as well have tried to tear a four-inch bough from an oak tree.
He was phenomenally strong and he was squeezing the life out of me. And not slowly.
Something ground savagely into my back, just above the kidney. The unspoken order was clear as day but for all that I didn't stop struggling, a few more seconds of that pressure and I knew my neck would go. I smashed my right foot against the grille door and sent us both staggering back against the outside platform rail. I felt his feet leave the platform as the rail struck him about hip-level, and for a moment we both teetered there on the point of imbalance, his arm still locked around my neck, then the pressures on neck and back were simultaneously released as he grabbed desperately for the rail to save himself.
I staggered away from him, whooping painfully for breath, and fell heavily against the next flight of steps leading upwards. I landed on my right side, just where the ribs were gone, and the world darkened and dimmed in a haze of pain and if I'd then let myself go, relaxed even for the briefest moment and yielded to the body's clamorous demands for rest, I should have passed out. But passing out was the one luxury I couldn't afford. Not with this character anyway. I knew who I had now. If he'd wanted merely to knock me out he could have tapped me over the head with his gun: if he'd wanted to kill me he could have shot me in the back or, if he'd no silencer and didn't want noise, a tap on the head and a heave over the rail to the roadway sixty feet below would have served his purpose equally well. But this lad didn't want anything so quiet and simple and painless. If I was to die, he wanted me to know I was dying: for me he wanted the tearing agony of death by violence, for himself the delight of savouring my agony. A vicious and evil sadist with a dark mind crimsoned by the lust for blood. Gregori's hatchet-man, Henriques. The deaf mute with the crazy eyes.
Half-lying, half-standing against the steps, I twisted to face him as he came at me again. He was crouched low and he had his gun in front of him. But he didn't want to use that gun. Not if he could help it. From a bullet you died too quickly, unless, of course, you were very careful with the placing of the bullet. Suddenly I knew this was just what he had in mind, the muzzle was ranging down my body as he searched for the spot where a bullet would mean that I would take quite some time dying, unpleasantly. I straightened my arms on the step behind me and if the scything upward sweep of my right foot had caught him where I had intended Henriques wouldn't have worried me any more. But my vision was fuzzy and co-ordination poor. My foot glanced off his right.thigh, swept on and struck his forearm, jarring the gun from his hand: the gun carried over the edge of the platform and clattered down a couple of steps on the flight below.
He turned like a cat to retrieve it and I was hardly any slower myself. As he leaned over the top step, scrabbled for and found his gun, I jumped and caught him with both feet. He grunted, an ugly hoarse sound, then crashed and cartwheeled down the steps to the platform below. But he landed on his feet: and he still had the gun.
I didn't hesitate. If I'd tried running up the remaining flights to the heliport on top of the station roof, he'd have caught me in seconds or picked me off at his leisure: even had I managed to reach the top, assuming that the days of miracles were not yet over, secrecy and silence would have vanished and Gregori would be waiting for me, I'd be trapped between two fires and everything would be over for Mary. It would have been just as suicidal to go down and meet him or wait for him where I was: I'd only the knife strapped to my left forearm and my numbed right hand was not sufficiently recovered to ease it out from its sheath, far less use it, and even had we both been weaponless, even had I been at my fittest and best, I doubt whether I could have coped with the dark violence of that phenomenally powerful deaf mute. And I was a very long way from my fittest and best. I went through the grille door like a rabbit bolting from its hole with a ferret only half a length behind.