He looked around him, seemed to hesitate. I stood where I was, clinging on to the girder while some of the numbness drained from my right hand, and while Henriques was making up his mind I cursed myself for my folly. All the way up that fire-escape from street level I’d never once thought to look behind. The deaf mute must have been making a round of the posted guards, found the unconscious man at the foot of the fire-escape and drawn the inevitable conclusions.
Henriques had made up his mind. The idea of the leap from the platform across to the girder didn’t appeal to him, and I couldn’t blame him. He swarmed up the iron ladder to the window cleaners’ catwalk above, moved over to a position directly above the girder I was standing on, crossed the catwalk rail and lowered himself until his feet were only inches above the girder. He dropped, steadying himself with his hands on the wall, turned carefully and started coming towards me, his hands outstretched like a tight-rope walker’s. I didn’t wait for him. I turned and started walking also.
I didn’t walk far for there wasn’t far to walk. The beam I was on stretched to the other side of the main hall of the station and there it ended, vanishing into the grimy brickwork. There was no convenient platform here. No catwalk above or below. Just the beam vanishing into the wall. And sixty feet below the dull gleam of rails and hydraulic buffers. Just myself and the girder and the blank wall. The end of the road and no way out. I turned and made ready to die.
Henriques had reached the vertical girder in the centre, had safely negotiated his way past it and was advancing on me. Fifty feet away he stopped and even in the gloom I could see the white glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. He had seen how it was with me, that I was trapped and quite at his mercy. It must have been one of the highlights in the life of that crazy man.
He started moving again, slowly closing the distance between us. Twenty feet away he stopped, stooped, lowered his hands to the girder and sat down, locking his legs securely under the beam. He was wearing a very smooth line in Italian sacking and all that soot wouldn’t be doing it any good at all but he didn’t seem to care. He raised his pistol, holding it with both hands, and pointed it at the middle of my body.
There was nothing I could do. With my hands at my back, bracing myself against the wall, I stiffened in futile preparation for the slamming rending impact of the shock. I stared at his hands and imagined I could see the fingers whiten. In spite of myself I winced and closed my eyes. Only for a second or two. When I opened them again he’d lowered the gun until his hand was resting on the beam and was grinning at me.
For sheer calculated sadism and feline cruelty I’d never met its equal. But I should have known it, I should have expected it. The monstrous madman who had forced a cyanide sweet down Clandon’s throat, who had strangled MacDonald alive at the end of a rope, who had pulped in the back of Mrs. Turpin’s head, who had tortured Eastern Derry to death — and, for good measure, had stove in my ribs — such a man wasn’t going to pass up the exquisite pleasure of watching me die by inches, even although for once, the dying was to be by terror of the mind instead of agony of the body. I could visualise those empty eyes now hot and greedy for the suffering of others, I could almost visualise the wolf-like slavering of that twisted grinning mouth. He was the cat, I was the mouse, and he was going to play with me until he had extracted every last ounce of pleasure from his macabre game. And then, regretfully, he would shoot me, although he would still have that one last joy of seeing me fall and being smashed and mangled on the steel and concrete far below.
I had been very afraid. I’m no hero when I see that death is certain, when my murder is certain, nor do I believe anyone else is. I had been close to physical paralysis with that fear, and that numbness had extended to the mind, but now the petrifaction of body and mind vanished in a suddenly overwhelming warm flood of pure anger, anger that my life and the fate of Mary should be at the mercy of the whims of a sub-human creature like this. I remembered my knife.
Slowly I brought together the hands behind my back until they were touching^ The fingers of my right hand, painful still but no longer numb, reached up under my left sleeve and closed on the haft of the knife. Henriques lifted his gun again, pointing it at my head this time, his lips lifted back in a snarling smile, but I just kept on working away slowly till the knife was clear of the sheath. It was too soon for the deaf mute to kill me yet: there was still a great deal more of innocent pleasure to be extracted from his harmless game before he grew bored and blew the last whistle on me by leaning on the trigger.
Henriques lowered the gun a second time, shifted slightly to lock his ankles even more securely under the girder and dug into his jacket pocket with his left hand. He brought out a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches. He was smiling like a crazy man, because this was the zenith, the towering pinnacle of refinement of torture, the killer taking his luxuriantly insolent ease while the trembling terror-stricken victim waits, not knowing when the last moment will come, but knowing it must inevitably come: and he’d thought it all up by himself.
He got a cigarette into his mouth, bent over a match to strike it The gun was still in his right hand. The match flared and for half a second of time he was blind.
Steel flickered and gleamed briefly in the weak backwash of light and Henriques coughed. The knife buried itself to the hilt in the base of his throat. He jerked violently, arching over backwards, as if a heavy electric shock had passed through the steel girder. The gun flew from his hand and curved earthwards in a long crazy curve. It seemed to take an age to fall and I couldn’t look away from it. I didn’t see it land, but I saw sparks on the line below as steel struck steel.
I looked back at Henriques. He’d straightened and bent slightly forward and was staring at me in perplexity. His right hand reached up and pulled the knife clear and in a moment his shirt front was saturated in the pumping blood. His face twisted in a snarl, a snarl already tinged with approaching dissolution, and he raised his right hand up and back over his shoulder. The blade no longer gleamed in the lamplight. He leaned back to give impetus to his throw, and then tiredness came into the dark and evil face and the knife slipped from his dying hand and clattered to the concrete below. The eyes closed and he slipped to one side, slipped right over until “he was beneath the girder and held only by his locked ankles. How long he hung like that I couldn’t later say. It seemed a very long time. And then, at last, in a weird slow-motion sequence, the ankles slowly unlocked and he fell from sight. I didn’t see him fall, I couldn’t see him fall. But when at last I did look I saw him far below, his broken body hanging limply over the gleaming ram of a gigantic hydraulic buffer. For Henriques’ sake, wherever he was now, I hoped the shades of his victims weren’t waiting for him. I became vaguely aware that my cheek muscles were aching. I had been smiling down at the dead man. I had never felt less like smiling.
Sick and dizzy and trembling like an old man with the ague, I made my way back across the girder by crawling on my hands and knees. I took me a long time I think, and 111 never be clear how I managed the six foot jump from girder to platform, even although it was easier this time for the chain was there for my hands to catch. I staggered through the grille door to the fire-escape and half-lowered myself, half-collapsed on to the platform. The night air of London had never smelled so sweet.
How long I lay there I don’t know. I can’t remember whether I was conscious or not most of the time. But it couldn’t have been long for when I looked at my watch it was still only ten minutes to four.