Anyway she had got the message that help was on the way. She'd stopped bouncing on the bed and Peregrine was about to explain that he'd have her out of there in a jiffy when she moaned again and spoke.
'More, more. Why've you stopped? I was just coming.' It was on the tip of Peregrine's tongue to say that she didn't have to because he was there and would untie her when a man's voice answered.
'How many hands have you got?' he asked.
'Hands? Hands? How many hands? Is that what you said?'
'That's exactly it.'
'That's what I thought,' muttered the woman, 'at a time like this you've got to ask fool questions? How the hell many hands do you think I've got, three?'
'Yes,' said the man, 'And one of them is cold and horny.'
'Jeepers, horny! Only thing round here that's horny has got to be you. I should know. So come on, honey, lay off the gags and give it to me.'
'All right,' said the man doubtfully, 'All the same I could have sworn...'
'Don't be crazy, lover. Get with it.'
The bouncing began again though this time it was accompanied by rather less enthusiastic grunts from the man and by frantic requests for more from the woman. Crouching in the darkness by the bed Peregrine dimly understood that for the first time in his lift he was in the presence of a sexual act. He wondered what to do. The only thing he was sure of was that this couldn't be the Countess. Countesses didn't writhe and moan on beds with hairy men bouncing on top of them. All the same, he was interested to see what they were doing but he couldn't stay there when the Countess's life was at stake. He was just getting up when the mat on the floor slid away from him. To stop himself from falling Peregrine reached out and this time grasped the woman's raised knee. A strangled yell came from the bed and the bouncing stopped. Peregrine let go hurriedly and tiptoed to the door.
'What's the matter?' asked the man.
'Hands,' gasped the woman. 'You did say hands?'
'I said one hand.'
'I believe you. It just grabbed my knee.'
'Well, it wasn't mine.'
'I know that. Where's the lightswitch? Get the lightswitch.'
As her voice rose hysterically, Peregrine groped for the door-handle and knocked over a vase. The sound of breaking china added to the din.
'Let me go,' shrieked the woman, 'I've got to get out of here There's something awful in the room. Oh, my God. Someone do something!'
Peregrine did. He wasn't waiting around while she screamed blue murder. He found the door and shot into the corridor. Behind him the woman's screams had been joined by those of her lover.
'How the hell can I do anything if you won't let me go?' he bawled.
'Help,' yelled the woman.
As doors along the passage opened and lights came on, Peregrine disappeared round the corner and was hurtling down a large marble staircase towards the faint light illuminating the open doorway when he collided with the British delegate, Sir Arnold Brymay, who had been trying to think of some rational argument to the assertions of all the other delegates that Britain's colonial role in Ulster was as detrimental to world peace as the Middle East question, U.S. involvement in South America and Russia's in Afghanistan and Poland, about which topics there was no such agreement. Since his expertise was in tropical medicine, he hadn't come up with an answer.
'What on earth...' he began as Peregrine ran into him but this time Peregrine was determined to get a straight answer.
'See this?' he said jamming the revolver under Sir Arnold's nose with a ferocity that left no doubt what it was. 'Well, one sound out of you and I'm going to pull the trigger. Now, where's the Countess?'
'You tell me not to utter a sound and then you ask me a question? How do you expect me to answer?' asked Sir Arnold, who hadn't been debating the Irish question for nothing.
'Shut up,' said Peregrine and forced him through the nearest doorway and shut the door. 'Any funny tricks and your brains will be all over the ceiling.'
'Now look here, if you'd kindly remove that firearm from my left nostril we might be able to get down to the agenda,' said Sir Arnold, jumping to the natural conclusion that he was either dealing with one of the other delegates who'd gone clean off his head or, more probably, with the I.R.A.
'I said where's the Countess,' growled Peregrine.
'What Countess?'
'You know. If you don't answer it's curtains.'
'It rather sounds like it,' said Sir Arnold, buying time.
Upstairs a fresh problem had obviously arisen. 'Let me out,' bawled the erstwhile lover.
'I can't,' screamed the woman, 'I'm all tensed up.'
'As if I didn't know. And stop pulling my legs, you bastards. You want me to be disembowelled or something? Can't you see I'm dog-knotted?'
'Dear God,' said Sir Arnold, 'This is terrible.'
'Answer the question.'
'It rather depends on which countess you mean.'
'The Countess of Montcon.'
'Really? An unusually revealing name, and one that by the sound of things upstairs that young man would have found infinitely more inviting, don't you think?'
'Right,' said Peregrine. 'You've asked for it and you're going to get it.' And shoving Sir Arnold against the wall he aimed the revolver at him with both hands.
'All right, all right. As a matter of fact she's not here,' said the expert on bilharzia, deciding that, while he hadn't asked for anything, the time had come to invent something in preference to being shot. 'She's at Antibes.'
'And where's she live, this aunt?' asked Peregrine.
'Live?' said Sir Arnold, his sangfroid crumbling under this line of questioning and the discussion going on above. Some voluble woman who claimed to know all about dog-knotting from personal experience with her bull terriers had just tried throwing a bucket of cold water over the loving couple with predictably aggravating results.
'Shit,' yelled the young man. 'Get it into your stupid head I'm not a fucking bull terrier. Do that again I'll be clamped in a corpse.'
Sir Arnold dragged his attention away from this academic question and faced up to his imminent death. Peregrine had begun the countdown.
'Antibes is a place, for God's sake,' he said, beginning to gibber.
'I know that, but where?' demanded Peregrine.
'Near St Tropez.'
'And what's the address?'
'What address?'
'Aunt Heeb's.'
But the strain of being held at gunpoint by a maniac who thought that Antibes was a person while a couple who claimed they weren't bull terriers were being drowned upstairs was proving too much for Sir Arnold.
'I can't stand it. I can't stand it,' he gibbered, and proved his point by slumping down the wall. For a moment Peregrine hesitated. He was tempted to kick some life into the swine but the sound of footsteps and someone talking excitedly in the hall deterred him. Besides he fairly sure now that the Countess wasn't in the Château, and mere was no point in risking capture. Opening a window, he checked that the courtyard was clear and then jumped lightly across the flowerbed. Five minutes later he had reached the roof and was scrambling down the lightning conductor with a lack of vertigo that would have appalled Glodstone.
Not that Glodstone needed appalling. Ever since he had scrambled onto the ledge at the bottom of the cliff he had come to feel differently about adventures. They were not the splendid affairs he had read about. Quite the contrary, they were bloody nightmares in which one stumbled across miles of foul countryside carrying an overweight rucksack, spent sleepless nights shivering with cold in the rain, ate burnt corned beef out of tins, learned what it felt like to be drowned and ended up soaked to the skin on rock ledges from which the only escape had to be by drowning. Having experienced the Boose's horrid habit of sucking things down like some torrential lavatory pan, he knew he'd never be able to swim across.