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 bream, 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. Oregon’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 Oregon 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.
Desperately I glanced round the tiny platform. Up the vertical ladder to the window cleaners’ catwalk or down to the electricians’? It took me all of half a second to realise I couldn’t do either. Not with one hand still out of commission and hope to reach either the top or bottom of the ladder before Henriques came through that door and picked me off in his own sweet time.
Six feet away from the platform was one of the giant girders that spanned the entire width of the station roof. I didn’t stop to think of it, subconsciously I must have known that if I had stopped to think, even for a second, I’d have chosen to remain there and have it out with Henriques on that platform, gun or no gun. But I didn’t stop. I ducked under the waist-high chain surrounding the platform and launched myself across that sixty foot drop.
My good foot landed fair and square on the girder, the other came just short and slipped off the thickly treacherous coating of soot deposited there by generations of steam locomotives. As my shin cracked painfully against the edge of the metal I grabbed the beam with my left hand and for two or three dreadful seconds I just teetered there while the great empty station swam dizzily around me. Then I steadied and was safe. For the moment. I rose shakily to my feet.
I didn’t crawl along the girder. I didn’t pussyfoot along with arms outstretched to aid my balance. I just put down my head and ran. The beam was only eight or nine inches wide, it was covered with this dangerous layer of soot and the two rows of smooth rivet-heads running along its entire length would have been my death had I stepped on their slippery convexities. But I ran. It took me seconds only to cover the seventy feet to the great central vertical girder that disappeared into the darkness above. I grabbed it, edged recklessly round, and stared back in the direction from which I’d come.
Henriques was on the platform by the grille door. His gun was extended at the full stretch of his right arm, pointing directly at me, but he was lowering it even as I looked: he’d seen me, all right, but too late to draw a bead before I’d vanished behind the shelter of the vertical girder.