“Are you-are you badly hurt?” The professor was aghast with anxiety.
“Hurt? No, I’m not hurt. I just felt tired and lay down for a rest.” I glared up at him savagely, both hands cradling my right foot. “How far do you think you could walk with a broken ankle?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday 10 P.M.-Thursday 5 A.M.
Abject apologies, restoring the patient with what few drops of brandy still remained, splinting and taping my ankle in a surgical dressing took about ten minutes. After that they half-helped, half-carried me back to the guest hut. The side-screens were down but I could see the chinks of light through them. The professor rapped on the door and waited. The door opened.
“Who-who is there?” Marie had thrown some kind of wrap over her shoulders and the light of the kerosene lamp behind her made a shining halo round the soft fair hair.
“Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Bentall,” Witherspoon said soothingly. “Your husband’s just had a slight accident. Hurt his foot rather, I’m afraid.”
“Slight accident!” I yelped. “Hurt his foot. I’ve broken my bloody ankle.” I pushed off the restraining hands, tried to lurch through the door, stumbled, cried out and measured my length on the floor of the guest house. I was getting good at measuring my length on floors, it was far quicker than using a tape. Marie, her voice high-pitched in anxiety, said something I couldn’t catch above my own moans and dropped to her knees beside me, but the professor lifted her gently to her feet while Hewell picked me up and placed me on my bed. I weigh close on two hundred, but he lifted and set me down with as little effort as a girl her doll, except perhaps not quite so gently. But those string beds were stronger than they looked and I didn’t go through to the floor. I moaned some more and then propped myself up on one elbow, letting them see how a stiff-lipped Englishman suffers in silent agony, wincing and screwing my eyes shut from time to time just in case they didn’t get it.
Professor Witherspoon explained, rather haltingly, what had happened-at least, his version of what had happened, a convincing amalgam of jammed combinations, top-heavy safes and sagging floors which made safes unstable-and Marie listened to him in stormy silence. If she was acting, she’d missed out on her profession: the quick breathing, the compressed lips, the slightly flared nostrils, the tightly clenched fists, those I could understand: but to get your face as pale as she did hers you really have to put your heart into it. When he’d finished I really thought she was going to start in on him, she didn’t seem the slightest scared or awed by Hewell’s towering bulk, but she seemed to control herself and said in an icy voice: “Thank you both very much for bringing my husband home. It was most kind of you. I’m sure it was all an accident. Good-night.”
That hardly left the door open for any further conversational gambits and they took themselves off hoping aloud that I would be better the next day. What they were really hoping they kept to themselves and they forgot to say how they expected a broken bone to set overnight. For about ten seconds more Marie stood staring through the door by which they’d left, then whispered: “He’s-he’s terrifying, isn’t he? He’s like something left over from the dark ages.”
“He’s no beauty. Scared?”
“Of course I am.” She stood still for some seconds longer, sighed, turned round and came and sat on the edge of my bed. For a long moment she looked down at me, like a person hesitating or making up her mind, then she touched me lightly on the forehead with both cool hands, smoothed her fingertips past my hair and looked down at me, propped up by a hand on either side of my head. She was smiling but there was no amusement in the smile and her hazel eyes were dark with worry.
“I’m sorry for all this,” she murmured. “It-it’s pretty bad, isn’t it, Johnny?” She’d never called me that before.
“Terribly.” I reached my hands up, put them round her neck and pulled her down till her face was buried in the pillow. She didn’t resist any, recovering from the shock of a first-time close-up of Hewell would always take time or maybe she was just humouring a sick man. She had a cheek like a flower petal and she smelled of the sun and the sea. I put my lips close to her ear and whispered: “Go and check if they’ve really gone.”
She stiffened as if she’d touched a live wire, then pushed herself upright and rose. She went to the door, peered through some interstices in the side screens, then said in a quiet voice: “They’re both back in the professor’s living room. I can see them lifting the safe into position.”
“Put the lights out.”
She crossed to the table, turned down the wick, cupped her hands above the top of the glass funnel and blew. The room was plunged into darkness. I swung off the bed, unwound the couple of yards of medical plaster they’d wrapped round splints and ankle, cursing softly as it stuck to the flesh, put the splints to one side, stood up and gave two or three experimental hops on my right foot. I was hopping almost as good as ever, the only pain was on the outside of my big toe which had taken the brunt of the weight of the safe when the sole had bent. I tried it again and it was still O.K. I sat down and began to pull on sock and shoe.
“What on earth are you doing?” Marie asked. The soft concern, I noticed with regret, had gone from her voice.
“Just testing,” I said softly. “I think the old foot will carry me around a bit yet.”
“But the bone-I thought the bone was broken.”
“Just a natural fast healer.” I tried the foot inside the shoe and hardly felt a thing. Then I told her what had happened. At the end she said: “I suppose you thought it was clever to fool me?”
I’d become used to a lot of feminine injustice in my life so I let it pass. She was too smart not to see how unfair she was, not, at least, when she’d cooled down. Why she had to cool down I didn’t know, but when her temperature dropped she would realise the immense advantage I’d gained by having created the impression that I was completely incapacitated. I heard her moving across the room back to the bed and as she passed me she said quietly: “You told me to count the Chinese going in and out of the long hut.”
“Well?”
“There were eighteen.”
“Eighteen!” All I’d counted in the mine was eight.
“Eighteen.”
“Notice what any of them was carrying when he came out?”
“I didn’t see any come out. Not before it was dark.”
“Uh-huh. Where’s the torch?”
“Under my pillow. Here.”
She turned in and shortly I could hear her slow even breathing, but I knew she wasn’t asleep. I tore up strips of the plaster and stretched them across the face of the torch until there was only a quarter inch diameter hole left in the middle. Then I took up position by a crack in the side-screens where I could watch the professor’s house. Hewell left shortly after eleven o’clock, went to his own house. I saw a light come on, then go out after about ten minutes.
I crossed to the cupboard where the Chinese boy had put our clothes, hunted around with the tiny spotlight of light until I’d found a pair of dark grey flannels and a blue shirt and quickly changed in the darkness. Taking a midnight walk in white shirt and white ducks was something that Colonel Raine wouldn’t have approved of at all. Then I went back to Marie’s bed and said softly: “You’re not sleeping, are you?”
“What do you want?” No warmth in the voice, just none at all.
“Look, Marie, don’t be silly. To fool them I had to fool you too when they were there. Don’t you see the advantage of being mobile when they think I’m completely immobilised. What did you expect me to do? Stand there at the door supported by Hewell and the prof and sing out cheerily: ‘Don’t worry about this, dear. I’m only kidding’?”
“I suppose not,” she said after a minute. “What did you want? Just to tell me that?”
“As a matter of fact it wasn’t that, it was your eyebrows.”
“My what?”
“Eyebrows. Your hair is so blonde, the eyebrows so black. Are they real? The colour, I mean?”
“Are you all right?”
“I want to blacken my face. Mascara. I thought you might have-”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place instead of trying to be clever?” Whatever her intelligence said about ‘forgive’ some other part of her mind was against it. “No mascara. All I have is black shoe polish. Top drawer, right side.”