I Had a Date with Lady Janet

We were pretty busy in The Treadmill that evening. At least it seemed that way to me, though Doris said it was about average, and she knows best. I'm an absentee landlord half the time.
Charlie had a night off, so I was helping Doris behind the bar. About ten o'clock I saw Lady Janet come in. She was wearing a lime-green trouser-suit, and it looked very nice against her short chestnut hair. She always wears slacks of some kind, because of her leg. She took her usual stool at the end of the bar, and I put out two glasses and opened a bottle of claret.
I had a date with Lady Janet that night. She's Lady Janet Gillam. You don't just call her Lady Gillam, because being the daughter of an earl she holds the title in her own right, not by marriage. So it's Lady Janet Gillam, with the first name thrown in.
She's Scottish, and she's my steady when I'm home at The Treadmill, which is a bit surprising seeing that I'm a roughneck Cockney. Still, we get on fine. She's thirty, and somewhere between good-looking and beautiful, with a nice figure and no spare fat. She works too hard for that.
By all accounts, especially her own, she was a swinging hell-raiser as a debutante. Drove fast cars, flew Daddy's private plane, threw crazy parties, all that sort of thing. Then she married a Walter Mitty type called Gillam, who decided to be a rich farmer. He started off rich, and in two years he was a poor farmer. Then he went on the bottle, and crashed the car not far from The Treadmill one night. That was some years before I took it over. Janet was in the car with him. Gillam
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ended up dead, and she lost half a leg, which is why she always wears slacks.
But this is the thing. When she came out of hospital with a tin leg from the knee down, she didn't go home to Daddy Earl or ask him for help or money. The ex-swinging kid set her teeth into running that farm, and she turned it into a little goldmine. I like them with guts.
I don't think she even thought about men until two or three years ago, when I turned up on the scene, and even then we just said a polite 'Good evening' to each other for about a year before anything developed. She told me later she'd written herself off for men. She reckoned that with half a leg gone she wasn't the sort a man would want to take to bed unless he was a kink or after her money. She knows now I'm a million miles from both, but it took a little while before she could really believe that I liked the ninety per cent of her that was left much better than a hundred per cent of most girls.
Come right down to it, I admire her in a big way, so what difference does the leg make? You'd be pretty stupid if you only admired people who hadn't got hurt in a lousy accident.
What started us getting together was when I found out some small-time protection mob had moved out into the country a bit and started picking on easy-looking marks. Lady Janet was one of them, and when she stuck her heels in they began the kind of trouble that could have ruined the farm.
So I stuck my nose in. Went to see her and told her I'd sort it out. It seemed the neighbourly thing to do. She was pretty snooty at first, but I could see that underneath she was close to breaking. When she realized I meant it, she cried for about five seconds before she could get hold of herself. Then she was worried that I'd get hurt, and I had to explain that I wasn't really a beginner at sorting out trouble.
It wasn't much of a caper, really. I went and saw the top man, who wouldn't have rated seventh in most of the mobs I'd known. I didn't lower the boom on him right away. After the years I spent working for the Princess, I reckon to be better on technique than that. I just told him to lay off, or else.
So of course he sent his strong-arm boys in, to do me. There were three of them, and I put them in hospital, and then I
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went back to the boss-man and brought him to the farm, out cold in the boot of a car. He was fat and flabby, and I made him work like a slave, shovelling muck from dawn to dusk for a month, sleeping on straw in a locked out-house.
It nearly killed him, and it certainly changed him. A week after I let him go there was a lot of rain, and Janet got a letter from him saying please excuse the liberty, but her ladyship ought to keep an eye on the culvert at the south end of the valley bottom, because it got blocked easily and might cause flooding.
Anyway, during that month I had to stay on the farm to keep tabs on him. I started off in one of the cottages, but at the end of the week I moved into the farmhouse with Lady Janet, and we found we suited each other fine. There aren't any strings either way, and we both know there never will be. Now she's got over feeling bad about the leg, I hope one day she'll meet some nice bloke and marry again. I'll miss her a lot, so maybe I hope it won't happen too soon.
This night I'm talking about, I'd only been back from the States for three days and it was the first time I'd seen her since getting back. We'd fixed a date by phone, and when the pub closed we were going to drive up to town, see a late movie, then go on to a club. Nightclubs leave me cold, but they make quite a change for Janet these days, and now that trouser-suits are OK anywhere she can enjoy that sort of evening out.
We chatted a bit about the farm and what I'd been doing in the States, and then about ten minutes before closing-time Doris came up and said a gentleman at the other end of the bar was asking for me. I excused myself to Janet, and moved down the bar.
He was about thirty-eight, in a nice suit, no overcoat, with grey eyes and sandy hair going a bit thin. He had a long upper lip and a funny down-turned smile. I felt a sort of bristling at the back of my neck, because this one was dangerous. I gave him the nice cheery grin I save up for that kind, and said, 'What can I do for you?'
Td like a private word with you, Mr Garvin. My name's Fitch.' It was a very soft voice, a touch of Irish in it overlaid by something American. The American bit was intonation
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more than accent, the kind of thing you can pick up if you live over there a while. I registered the accent as one I might use sometime. I can do most voices, from BBC to Nashville, Tennessee, and I've often used them on capers, but for everyday I stick to Cockney because that's the natural me.
I said to Fitch, 'If it's private, we'd better 'ave a chat in the sitting-room.'
I told Doris to take care of closing-time, then let Fitch through the bar flap and led the way along the passage at the back. When I took over The Treadmill I had the living quarters fixed up very nicely. There's a kitchen, office and big sitting-room on the ground floor, and two bedroom suites with bathrooms and dressing-rooms upstairs. I needed the second suite for when the Princess stays with me sometimes.
I hadn't bothered to ask Fitch what it was all about, because I was damn sure he wasn't selling insurance or a new kind of bottle-opener. And I was right. When I closed the sitting-room door and turned round he had a gun in his hand, a .44 Magnum.
I stood where I was and said, 'You can get 'urt carrying one of those things.'
He said easily, 'Let's sit down. The gun's just in case you blow your top before I've finished spelling things out for you, Garvin.'
I chose an upright chair, because you can get moving from it quicker than from an armchair. Fitch did the same thing. He was confident, but not over-confident. And he wasn't feeling big just because he'd got a gun in his hand. Fitch was a pro, and the gun was his tool. I'd already tagged him as dangerous, and now I shoved the grading up a notch or two.
There are dangerous soft men and dangerous hard men. Fitch was hard. Take his gun away, and he wouldn't just fold. Break his arms and he'd keep coming at you with his teeth. I knew the type. They're rare, but Fitch was one of them.
He said in that soft voice with a bit of a lilt, 'I'm working for Rodelle. He sent me to pick you up.'
That was a laugh, so I laughed, and said, 'Rodelle sent you? Then you must be the first bloke to find a way back from hell.'
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'Rodelle's not dead,' Fitch said. 'Only half dead, from the waist down. It was a long fall, I'm told.'
That made me think. There didn't seem any percentage for Fitch in lying about this, so suppose he was telling the truth? If Rodelle was alive, I wasn't pleased to hear it. I've known some nasty pieces of work, but they don't come any nastier than Rodelle. He was a Levantine, and he'd been in the flesh game, selling girls in South America, Saudi Arabia, and anywhere that he could get a good price.
Don't ever think that sort of thing went out with silent movies. It still goes on, and it's easier than you'd think. The experts who specialize in breaking in the girls before they're placed in red-lamp houses would have made Caligula throw up.
About three years before the Princess closed down The Network we tangled with Rodelle. He had a biggish mob, and they snatched a girl we used for smuggling diamonds. That's all the Princess needed. She'd hated Rodelle's guts for a long time. We got the girl back, and the Princess decided it was time for Rodelle to be put down. Call it murder if you like. I'd put it under Good Works.
I've heard Modesty called a ruthless killer. That's a load of old cobblers. She didn't just run the smartest organization since crime began, she ran the cleanest. Sometimes it seemed we spent more time breaking up dirty mobs than bringing in loot. And I remember we passed up a fifty-grand job once, because we couldn't figure a way to do it without a couple of fuzz getting hurt. Certainly she's signed a few people off, but it's always been the kind of bastard whose going leaves the world smelling a lot sweeter. Like Rodelle.
We went over to Istanbul to take care of him, just the Princess and me. She never sent any of the boys on that sort of thing. This caper turned out tough, and ended up as a minor pitched battle in a warehouse, against Rodelle and half a dozen others. I killed Rodelle myself. At least, I put a knife between his ribs from thirty paces, when he was firing down from a catwalk, and he fell fifty feet on to concrete, which seemed good enough.
Then we beat it back to Tangier. Rodelle's organization
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folded, and that was that. But now here was this Fitch, just the sort Rodelle would have working for him, telling me Rodelle was alive. And Fitch knew about the fall, too. He was just looking at me, waiting. His eyes were light grey and shallow, with no depth to them. I said, 'Yes, it was a long fall. If he's only 'alf dead, he was lucky.'
'He's been paralysed from the waist down ever since,' Fitch said. 'That's why he wants to see you, Garvin.' He smiled that down-turned smile. 'I don't think he's had much else on his mind in all that time.'
'He could've spent some of it thinking about a few thousand parcels of flesh he's sold,' I said. 'Where is he?'
Fitch shook his head. 'Later, Garvin. If I told you that now, it might make my job very difficult.'
I looked at the gun. 'You reckon I'm going to go along quietly just because you're 'olding that?'
'No.' He smiled a bit more. 'Because Rodelle has Modesty Blaise.'
That got me like a boot in the stomach. I gave him a grin. 'As easy as that?'
'It's always easy when they're not expecting it. We could have taken you the same way. But Rodelle wants you on the hoof, walking in with your eyes open.'
That figured. From what I knew of Rodelle, he'd never stick a knife in without twisting it. Fitch reached for the phone and pulled it towards him. He dialled a number, and right then I hated the Trunk Dialling System. He dialled more than seven digits, which meant it was a call outside London, but he didn't have to ask for any exchange, so I learned nothing.
He looked at his watch and said, 'They're expecting this call.' After a few seconds he said into the phone, 'I'm with him now. Put her on.' He laid the phone down on the table and pushed it across to me. I picked it up. She said, 'Willie?' It was her all right, nobody could fool me with an imitation of her voice.
I said, 'Where?' That's what I had to know. She came back quick. 'Don't know. But don't go along with it, Willie--' Then her voice was smothered. After a second or two a man's voice came on the phone, a voice with an accent. I didn't know it
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well enough to recognize, but I didn't have any doubts that it was Rodelle. I've never heard a voice so crawling with hate. He just said slowly, 'That was bad advice. Fitch will tell you what happens if you don't come, Garvin.' Then he cut the connexion.
As I put the phone down Fitch said, 'Rodelle has her. He's expecting us at a certain hour. If we don't arrive by then, he puts his experts to work on her.' He let it sink in, then stood up and slipped the gun into a shoulder holster. 'I guess that holds you better than a gun.'
They had it all weighed up just right. Anybody who knew the Princess and me could lay a million to one that I'd go along, even without an escort.
I stood up and said, Til get me jacket.' I felt sick, and I reckon I looked it now. I was letting it show, to make Fitch feel easy. My jacket was on the back of another chair. I picked it up, tossed it in Fitch's face, and followed up. I gave him stiff fingers in the solar plexus and a chop under the ear as the jacket fell away from his head, then caught him as he went down. I chucked him over my shoulder and went out of the back door.
It was dark and quiet. There's a fair bit of ground between the pub and the river, with a brick path leading to what I call the gym, though it's more than that. It's a long brick building with no windows, or rather fake windows, and a special double door. There's a pistol range, a short archery range, a combat dojo, gym equipment, and showers. The whole building is soundproof. At the far end, separate, there's my workshop where I do a lot of fiddling around with electronics and micro-engineering.
I carried Fitch in and locked the outer door, then tied his hands behind him and took the gun away. I'd got to find out where the Princess was, and I knew the only way to do it was to break this bastard fast. Given time, I might have eased it out of him with scopolamine, but I didn't have any around and I didn't have time either.
Making someone talk has never been my line. And Fitch was tough, not just on the surface but deep down. If I thought about what Rodelle's experts would do to the Princess I sup-
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pose I could have got busy on Fitch without too much sweat, but even that was no good. I've been worked on myself, once with a hot iron, and you can ride the pain till it knocks you out. Fitch was the kind who'd do that. Or more likely still, he'd talk but lie - and there wasn't time to chase after false leads. I had to break him from the inside, so when he talked he gave the right answers.
I fetched a coil of rope, climbed one of the gym ropes and ran the end of the coil through a big pulley in a beam that ran across the gym. I dropped down, made a small bowline noose in the other end, and forced it over Fitch's head. Then I brought a chair from the workshop and stood it under the pulley.
Fitch was beginning to come round. While he was still half senseless I pulled on the rope and dragged him to his feet. After about ten seconds, when he could stand without his knees buckling, I heaved on the free end of the rope again. The chair was right beside him, and the only thing he could do was climb up on to it. He stood there swaying, head twisted, eyes sucking out, sweating cobs in case he overbalanced. I made the end of the rope fast round a wall-bar, keeping it taut, then went and stood in front of him, looking as vicious as I knew how.
'You stupid bloody fool,' I said, not loud, but cold and mean. 'You reckon I'm sucker enough to think it'd help Modesty Blaise if I let you take me in on a lead? I'm going to find Rodelle. In twenty minutes I'll 'ave contacts in London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Cardiff on the job. He's off 'is own turf, and they'll find 'im. It'll be too late to 'elp, but not too late to kill the bastard. And you, Fitch ... you just stay 'ere and swing.'
I tipped the chair so he slipped off, then set it down and went for the door at a run. There's a four-foot space between the two doors, so I could look through the crack of the inner door and see Fitch. There was no drop to break his neck, and the noose wasn't a slip-knot, so he wouldn't strangle right away. I could see him with his head strained sideways, neck muscles standing out, body swinging a bit, trying to get a foot on the chair I'd left close alongside. I reckoned he'd make it,
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so I went quietly out of the second door and ran up the path to the car park.
Doris had closed the pub and there was only one car left, a Jaguar XJ6. It was locked, but that only stopped me for about ten seconds. In the back I found a pair of handcuffs bolted to the bodywork on a short bit of chain. They were for keeping me quiet when we got near journey's end.
I walked back to the gym, opened the outer door and went through the inner door at a run, heading for the workshop at the far end. It was only when I was past Fitch that I braked hard and turned to look at him, showing a bit of surprise. He was standing on the chair, up on his toes, leaning at an angle, his breath rasping like a saw going through plywood. His face was reddish blue, the flesh swollen. And his eyes weren't shallow now, there was plenty of depth in them, and it was all fear.
I said, 'You must've stretched an inch or two, Fitch.' Then I walked over and tilted him off the chair again. He managed to croak, 'Listen--!' But then the rope cut him off. He hung there, swinging, his mouth working as if he was trying to talk. I started to move away with the chair, then stopped as if I'd had second thoughts. I said, as if I was screwed up tight with hate, 'All right... you can 'ave it the slow way if that's what you fancy.' Then I put the chair down close to his feet again.
I went through the door Into the workshop and began putting a few things in a grip. I packed two or three knives, a Colt .32, which is one of the two guns the Princess likes best, some medical stuff, and an assortment of gadgets that I thought might come in useful. When I came out, Fitch was on the chair again, but he was shaking and wobbling, righting for balance. It wouldn't last long. I walked past him and said, ' 'Ave a good time.'
His voice sounded like a chronic bronchitis case whispering, but he managed to get it out. 'Garvin! Wait! They've got her in Glencroft Castle...' His mouth kept moving but he'd run out of air. I walked back to him, slow, grabbed the back of the chair again and said, 'You lying sod.'
He heaved in a great whooping breath, his face all mottled. If you can scream in a whisper, that's how it came out when he
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said, 'God's truth! Glencroft Castle ... Inverness!'
I knew it was true. He hadn't even tried to bargain, because he didn't think I'd give him time. He'd just told me, and now he was looking at me with mad eyes, hoping for the best, begging for it. I said as if I couldn't believe it, 'You were supposed to take me to Inverness?' He tried to nod, nearly lost his balance, and croaked, 'All-night drive. Due tomorrow ... noon.'
So that was the deadline. It figured OK in terms of time and distance. And Fitch was in no shape to work out any nicely turned lies. I went to the wall-bar and untied the rope. He fell off the chair and lay heaving and gasping. I opened the bag and took out a hypodermic. He didn't even try to move when I pushed his sleeve back and gave him a shot. Three grains of phenobarbitone. He'd be out for hours.
It hadn't been pretty, but he'd come out of it with a whole skin, and I reckoned he ought to be thankful for that.
I went to the phone in the workshop and rang Weng, Modesty's houseboy. He told me she was down at her cottage in Wiltshire. I told him different. It shook him a bit. I gave him a quick rundown on what was happening and told him to come down fast and take charge of Fitch.
Weng wouldn't make any mistakes. He had Modesty's keys to the gym. He'd truss Fitch up till only his nose was showing, then sit with a gun stuck under that for a week if need be.
When I rang off I picked up the bag, went out, and walked back to the pub. Lady Janet was in the sitting-room, looking through a magazine. As I came in she said in that soft burring voice, 'And what happened to your friend, then?' She looked up, saw my face, and stood up so quick you'd never have known she had a gammy leg. 'What happened to you, for God's sake?'
I was getting out Ordnance Survey maps and a guide-book. I said, 'Sorry Jan. The date's off. I got big trouble.'
Castle Glencroft was in the guide-book. It was described as a fortified house and only rated three lines, so I knew it wasn't very big, probably one of those old mansions with a castellated roof.
Lady Janet said, 'Is it Her Highness?'
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That's how she always spoke of Modesty. Before they knew each other there used to be a bit of acid in it, but they've met quite a few times when the Princess has been staying with me, and I think they got on pretty well. Janet still spoke of 'Her Highness', but it was just a sort of joke now, with no needle in it.
I said, 'She's been grabbed, Jan. An old grudge and a bad one. They're the kind of men you've never even met in nightmares, and they've got her at a place called Glencroft Castle. At noon tomorrow they'll start taking her apart.'
That must have raised a lot of questions, but Janet didn't ask any. As I went to the phone she limped across and put a hand on my arm and said in a quiet voice, 'She's good at looking after herself, surely.'
I didn't need telling that. She'd look after herself all right if she could see them coming, but this was different. I told Janet so while I was looking up Dave Craythorpe's number. Dave has a Beagle Pup that he keeps at White Waltham, not very far from The Treadmill. He's done quite a few flying jobs for us. I was praying that he was at home, and available, or if not, that I could borrow his Beagle to fly myself up to Glasgow.
The phone kept ringing. Janet said, 'Who are you trying to get, Willie? And why?'
I told her. She put her hand on the phone-cradle and cut me off. 'There's Daddy's Beechcraft Baron at Heathrow,' she said. 'He came down on Tuesday and he's still in town. I'll fly you up to Glasgow myself, Willie.'
Jesus! Good old Daddy Earl. I didn't ask if he'd let her borrow the plane because I had an idea she wasn't going to bother about permission. Nobody at Heathrow would stop her, * not when she gave them diat look with ten generations of earls behind it. And the Beechcraft could do 225 mph against die Beagle's 120.
I put my arms round her and kissed her as if I meant it, which I did. She smelt fresh and cool, and she was good to kiss. Then I rang a Glasgow number and this time I got through right away. Wee Jock Miller said, 'Aye?' and I told him I wanted a good car waiting at Glasgow Airport from 2 am onwards. He just said 'Aye, Wullie,' and we rang off. Jock
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had a Network pension because a bullet wound had cost him the sight of one eye, and he ran a garage hi Glasgow now. He'd never talked much, but if he said, 'Aye,' then you could stop worrying.
Janet said, 'I was inside Castle Glencroft once when I was a wee diing. It's no more than a big house, Willie, north of Loch Shiel and nothing for miles around.' I told her I knew there was a phone laid on, so I reckoned the place was still habitable. I was moving about the room opening drawers, repacking the bag, taking a few things out, putting a few in. Janet didn't blink as she saw me gear. She'd picked up quite a bit about Modesty and me, and I suppose she'd guessed quite a bit more.
'The family lived there till a few years ago,' she said. 'Then they moved out. I don't know if they sold Glencroft, but likely enough they couldn't. Maybe whoever's there now rented it for a while.'
That sounded about right. I zipped up the bag. While Janet was getting the car out I went upstairs and changed into black denims. There were twin sheaths stitched inside the breast of die denim windcheater, and I slipped a knife into each sheath.
I felt cooler now, and I didn't go mad driving to Heathrow. Fitch was supposed to bring me in by noon. If we didn't arrive then, Rodelle would start work on the Princess. But now, widi any luck we'd be in Glasgow by two-thirty and I'd reach Glencroft Casde by four-thirty. That meant I'd have a few hours of darkness and all morning to clean things up.
At Heathrow we were lucky getting clearance for a quick take-off. Janet brought the Baron round on course, set the controls on auto-pilot and asked for a cigarette. She couldn't tell me much about Glencroft Casde, except diat it was ringed by a high wall and built in a sort of E-shape widi the middle stroke missing. One wing had been condemned years ago, and the family had lived in die odier wing.
We didn't talk very much during the flight. I suppose Janet felt there wasn't much that could be said, and I was busy with a few mental tricks diat stop you burning up all your juice widi adrenalin fatigue. All I remember is diat after a long time she said a bit uncertainly, as if she wasn't sure how I'd react,
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'Willie ... you think an awful lot of her, don't you?'
Well, I don't often try to explain this, because it can't be done, but I reckoned Janet was entitled to an answer. It's a long story, and I could only give her the bones of it, which don't mean much really. Most of my life I was a mean, stupid, twisted bum, who hated everything and everyone, and who was always in trouble. Then the Princess came along. She was only twenty then, but she'd been running The Network for two years and was already big-time. She picked me out of the gutter, or out of jail to be exact, gave me a job to do, and trusted me. It was like being melted down and remoulded. I came out of it... well, different.
Different? Try imagining something that's always lived in pitch dark, groping around at the bottom of the sea, and then suddenly it finds it can live in the open, in the air and sun. It was like that. Or like if suddenly you found you could take off and fly like a bird. It was that different.
When I'd finished blundering around with words, trying to explain all this to Janet, she sat thinking for a bit and then said slowly, 'I have an idea of what you mean, Willie. You're the only man I know who's ... exhilarated all the time.' She looked at me. 'I see what she's meant to you. Maybe finding you has meant quite a lot to her, too.' She smiled then, a nice easy smile, and reached out to rest her knuckles against my cheek. 'All right. She's your Princess and you're her faithful courtier. There's plenty left, and I'll settle for that.'
We landed at two-thirty. Jock Miller had two cars waiting in the car park. I chose the E-type Jag and put my bag in. When I introduced Lady Janet to him, Wee Jock's scarred and wicked little face went dull red with pleasure. I wouldn't say he's a snob, but he'd certainly swing a claymore for the aristocracy, providing they were Scottish. I told him Rodelle had got the Princess, and his eyes went ugly. He looked up at me from his five foot nothing and said, Til borrow a razor an' come wi' ye Wullie.'
I said, 'You bloody well won't, Jock. It's got to be done sneaky, and one's sneakier than two. So you look after Lady Janet and get 'er fixed up at an hotel. I'll call you as soon as I can.'
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I kissed Janet goodbye, and she hung on to me tight for just a second. Then I got in the car and drove off. In the mirror I could see the two of them looking after me until I turned out of sight.
The winter snows had gone and the roads were clear. I made good time up past Loch Lomond, and didn't lose a lot on the road through the Grampians. Then there was Rannoch Moor and the long curve round to Fort William before I took the minor road running north. Half an hour later I turned down a track leading to Glencroft Castle. It was nearly a mile away, but I drove with no lights. After about half a mile I pulled off the track into a little rocky lay-by, got the bag out, and went ahead on foot.
It wasn't four yet, and up north here I knew it wouldn't be dawn till well after eight. I was feeling nice and easy inside now. I'd got there, I'd got time in hand, and I'd got the initiative, which was the most important thing of all. As far as Rodelle knew, I was in a car with Fitch and had probably only just cleared the Midlands at this moment.
Glencroft was a miniature castle, as Janet had said, and there was a crenellated wall right round it, about thirty feet high. As the castle itself only had three floors, the wall was way out of proportion. But God knows why anyone had built the place there anyway. It didn't defend anything, except whoever was inside it. Still, with the clans always feuding, that had probably been the point.
I took a look all round the wall. There was one big main gate with spikes on top. It was newer than the castle, not more than a century old, of very solid timber, and locked or barred on the inside. The barbed wire reinforcing the spikes was newer still, not even rusty yet. The wall arched over the top of the gate, and the small gap was filled with these spikes and barbed wire. On the eastern side there was a small door set in the wall, again very solid, and barred on the inside.
I decided to go over the top, so I sorted out the stuff in the bag, put a selection of it in a small pack, and strapped this on my back. Then I took a length of knotted nylon rope with a grapnel at the end. The tines of the grapnel were sheathed in rubber, except for the tips. It hardly made any noise when I
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tossed it up and got it hooked over one of the crenels.
It was an easy walk up the wall. I was trying to think what they call the bits that stick up between the crenels. About four feet from the top I remembered they're called merlons. And at just about the same time I felt the rope give. The mortar holding the big stone that the grapnel was hooked on must have been weak and crumbly, because I could see this stone, about eighteen inches long and a foot thick, leaning over as it tilted out from the top of the wall.
Then we both fell. I'm not laying it on when I say I can take a twenty-five-foot fall on to turf without worrying too much. Falling is something I can do quite well, which isn't much to boast about. The smart bloke is the one who doesn't fall.
This fall had problems, though. I didn't want to land on my back, because I was wearing the pack with a lot of hardware in it. Another thing I didn't want was to have a hundredweight block of stone land on top of me, so I was fending this off as I went down - or rather trying to push myself aside from underneath it.
That was the last thing I remember for a bit. When I opened my eyes I felt cold as a deep-freeze except for my left shoulder, which was on fire. The block of stone lay a yard away, and it hadn't hit me. I hadn't landed on my back, either, because that didn't hurt. What I'd done was to dislocate my left shoulder. When I sat up and touched it, I could feel the lump where the bone was out of the socket.
Charming.
After a bit I stood up and leaned against the wall with my good shoulder, wondering. In some places my name carries quite a reputation, and I was wondering why. My own opinion of Garvin just then was that with a lot of help he might just about make the grade as a village idiot.
There was nothing I could do about the shoulder, not on my own, so I spent a little while wrapping the pain up in black velvet and shutting it away where it couldn't reach me. It's a mental trick, and it's one of about a million things I owe to the Princess. You don't learn it in an hour or a day. There's an old
says he's a hundred and twenty-seven. I think he's a liar. He's
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a hundred and fifty if he's a day. The Princess sent me to him years back, and I spent two of the weirdest months of my life learning a lot of useful things.
After a while, when the pain was a long way off, I moved along the wall a few yards and tossed the grapnel up again. This time I put my weight on it for about five minutes before I started to climb. It's not all that funny, climbing with one hand and two feet, but it must be possible because I managed it. Then I dropped the rope inside the wall and climbed down.
Two minutes later I was at a window of the west wing, where a light was showing. The curtains weren't drawn and I could look straight into the room. A big fire was blazing in the old fireplace, and there were five men. Four sat at a table playing cards, with full ashtrays and half-full glasses. The fifth was Rodelle. He sat in a wheelchair with a rug over his knees, a big brandy-glass in one hand, looking into the fire. I remembered him as a big man with a hard brown face. He was still big, but his face was yellow and the flesh had gone from it now, leaving it shrunken and taut. It was as if some acid had been eating away for years inside his skull. And I suppose it had.
The other four were just the kind I expected, variations of Fitch. That sort cost money, but they're worth it to a man like Rodelle. I wasn't surprised that they were up and playing cards at this hour. Rodelle was always a night owl.
Immediately inside the window was a big grille with close-set bars. This wasn't new, so I guessed it was part of the fittings, and that these grilles were fitted inside all the ground-floor windows to prevent theft when the place was empty. I checked another half-dozen windows, and they were all the same. I thought it likely the upper windows would be free of grilles, but decided to have another look in the lighted room before I started climbing again.
When I got back to it I saw that one of the men had brought some plates and a big dish of thick sandwiches. Rodelle hadn't moved and wasn't eating, but the rest were. Then the door opened and a new man came in, herding the Princess ahead of him with a gun.
I felt my stomach jump like a trout. Her hands were behind
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her, and she wore the sweater and cord slacks she often wears for riding when she's down at Benildon. Her hair was a bit tousled and there was a bruise on her face, but she was all right. She walked in, cool as a model on a catwalk, and even in diose old riding clothes she looked like something out of Vogue. Really, she's not all that big, about five foot six, but somehow she seemed a head taller than anyone in the room.
I got that funny little ache in the throat for a second, same as I always get when I see her again after a little while. The new man shoved her towards a chair by the table. When she turned round to sit down I saw that her wrists were tied with wire. Barbed wire. I could see dried blood on her hands and on the sleeves of her sweater.
I swallowed a big bubble of hate, and chalked that one up on the slate to be settled later. They put a plate with a doorstep sandwich in front of her, and the new man said something. Rodelle moved for the first time, turning to watch. It was just the sort of thing he'd enjoy, watching her get her face down to gnaw at the sandwich like a dog. But it didn't bother me, because I knew it wouldn't bother the Princess. Food's energy, and that's a lot more important than pride when you're on a caper.
She bent and bit at the sandwich. It struck me that this was a good time for me to try the upstairs windows. If I could get inside and then down, I could see where she was taken when she finished eating. Now that I knew she wasn't under heavy sedation, I wanted to get her free of that barbed wire before starting a rumble.
It didn't improve my opinion of that genius Garvin to realize that one thing I hadn't got in the pack was a pair of pliers for wire cutting, so it was going to take a bit more than a trice to get her free.
Five minutes later I'd got the rope and grapnel from the outer wall and was standing under a window about twenty yards from the lighted room. On the second try I managed to get the grapnel hooked on the sill. I tested it well, then started up. Now and again the pain in the shoulder kept breaking through, and the arm itself was useless. But somehow I made
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the climb. Then I saw the bars of a grille inside the window. This didn't seem to be my night. I sat on the sill and felt cold, and suddenly I was sick. Next second a light went on in the room, and I got off the sill so fast I nearly fell. I hung by one hand, groping for the rope with my feet, and realized that I must have picked the room where the Princess was kept, and that the guard had just brought her back to it.
I eased myself up until I could look over the sill. The new man was just going out, and before he closed die door I saw the makeshift drop-bar fixed on die outside of it. The Princess was sitting on an iron bedstead with no mattress. There was nothing else in the room, except a wooden chair. I'll never know how I got up on the still again one-handed, but after about a hundred years I found myself sitting there.
The Princess had moved and was half squatting on the floor against the foot of the bed. She eased herself over as if she was doing a sideways roll. I realized she'd managed to wedge the plier-twisted ends of the wire into a crack of the bedstead, and was trying to untwist them. It wasn't surprising I'd seen blood on her hands if she'd been doing that for long.
I tapped on the window with a finger nail. Her head turned, then she got up and came towards me. Her face was almost against the bars as she stared out, trying to see me. Then she lit up suddenly with a smile. This one was a very special smile she's got, and you don't see it often, but I reckon it's what the Helen of Troy girl must have had when she got a thousand ships launched. It's a smile where her eyes dance and sparkle and laugh, warm as sunshine.
Then it was gone, widi just the ghost of it left as she lifted an eyebrow at me. I got a glass-cutter out of my windcheater pocket, scribed a quadrant in a lower corner of the glass, and tapped it loose. She bent down to the hole, and I whispered, 'The grille?'
She whispered back, 'Hinged one side, padlock die odier. Have you got a probe, Willie love?'
I'd got half a dozen probes. I spread them in my hand and reached dirough the hole and the bars. She turned round so she could get her hands to the probes, and took the one she wanted, then brought the chair, set it to one side of the
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window, climbed on it, and turned her back again to work on the padlock.
After about two minutes she climbed down from the chair and gave me a nod. I reached through the hole in the glass and pushed the grille. It swung inwards. She moved the chair, stood on it again, and managed to unfasten the casement catch. Ten seconds later I was inside.
Now that she could see me in the light she stared again, and this time she wasn't smiling. I suppose I'd lost a bit of colour and was hunched up on one side, because she whispered, 'You look like parchment - what have you done to your shoulder, Willie?' I started to tell her, but didn't get very far. It must have been the reaction from finding her OK that made me lose my grip on the pain, but suddenly the whole shoulder seemed to turn into raw acid. Everything went grey and whoozy, and I only just got to the bed before I passed out.
It was no more than a minute or two, I think, but when I came round I was lying on the bed on my back, with the pack off. The Princess's hands were still bound, but they were in front of her now. She'd managed to wriggle her bottom and legs through her arms; try it with barbed wire round your wrist sometime. She was at the door, listening. I could see her slacks were badly torn, and there was blood on her thighs now as well as new blood on her wrists.
She saw I'd come round, and whispered, 'He'll be back soon. They never leave me for more than ten minutes.' She moved quickly to the bed. 'Got to get that shoulder back in place first, Willie. Take another little nap for a few seconds.' Her hands went round my throat, not tightly, and I felt a little scratch on my chest from one of the barbs. Then her thumbs began pressing steadily on the two carotid arteries. I didn't feel myself going, I just went. That's the way with a sleeper hold. I knew what she was going to do, and I was glad to be out of it for the next half-minute or so.
She was going to lie head to toe with me on the bed, put a foot in my left armpit, grip my wrist, and give a mighty heave to click the bone snugly back into the socket. And that's what she did. When I came round again, even after just that little time, it was like waking up in a new world. If you've ever had
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a joint put back in place, you'll know what I mean. The shoulder ached and was sore, but all the fire and pain from the stretched tendons had gone, and I could move it without too much trouble.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at me, sort of half smiling but concerned at the same time. I'm eight years older than she is, but sometimes she makes me feel like a kid with a grazed knee who comes running to have it kissed better. I gave her a big grin, and it was a real one. Next second she was on her feet and moving towards the door fast. I must have been a bit dopey still, because I hadn't heard anything.
The door opened and the man came in, the man who'd brought her up here maybe ten minutes ago. He wore no jacket and there was a gun in his shoulder holster. I reached for a knife under the open windcheater. Besides falling well, that's another thing I can usually manage - drawing a knife and throwing it without a lot of time-wasting. Say about three-tenths of a second.
This time you wouldn't have needed a stop-watch, you could have timed me with a calendar. That left it to the Princess, her hands still bound with that bloody wire.
What happened next shows just how fast she thinks. She took off and went sailing at him feet first, but not in a drop-kick because of the noise when he fell in the passage.
He was still moving forward, only just registering the situation, when her feet went one on either side of his neck and her whole body twisted so that she was face down in mid-air, his neck locked between her crossed shins, her feet turned in and hooked behind his neck. She held it as she hit the floor with her palms, getting some horrible punctures from the barbs, and in the same instant she ducked her head and went into a high-powered forward roll. The man at the end of her legs was whipped over the top of her as she rolled. He went flying headfirst through the air, parallel to the bed, like a fishing-line flies after the rod when you make a cast.
He travelled about four feet while she held the grip, and another five feet after that. His head went straight into the solid wall just beside me with a quiet, nasty noise. My only contribution was that as I knew what was coming, I managed
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to swing both legs round, spread wide under his body, to break the fall after he hit the wall. At least it helped to make sure there was hardly any noise.
I heaved him off my legs and sat on the edge of the bed looking down at his head. It was unnaturally flat on top, like an egg hit with a spoon, and a trickle of blood was running through his hair. As the Princess came to her feet I said, 'If there's a vacancy for a ghost in the castle, this bloke's just qualified.'
'It was meant,' she said, then sat down beside me and held out her hands. When I looked at them I didn't blame her for meaning it. I got busy on the ends of the wire. They were twisted solidly together and I used the notch of the glass-cutter to work on them, slowly getting them untwisted.
It took a few minutes, and we talked in whispers. They'd picked her up in the stables at Benildon. She'd walked in and found three guns looking at her. They'd brought her up north in a car, drugged. She'd been here thirty-six hours now.
The wire came off at last. I got the little medical kit from the pack, put Usol on her wrists and bandaged them up. She stripped off her torn slacks and lay face down on the bed while I doctored the punctures and gashes in her thighs. I told her my side of things, and how I'd got up here so fast. We weren't wasting time. There was some work to be done soon, I needed to be in fair shape for it, and this little break while I patched her up was working wonders. With the shoulder in place and her free, I felt better every minute.
When I'd finished the first-aid bit she pulled on the slacks and said, 'Think of something pretty special I can do for your Lady Janet sometime, Willie.'
I told her I'd try, then said, 'What was Rodelle going to do?'
'It was you he wanted to get at,' she said in a kind of tired voice. 'The knife just missed killing him that night in Istanbul, but the fall crippled him. I think he's been eaten up by hate ever since. He's been planning this and relishing it.' We were sorting out the things in the pack, and she was buckling on the belt with the Colt .32, slipping the kongo into her pocket. I checked the knives in their sheaths under my windcheater. It was automatic. All I was thinking of was Rodelle,
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and wondering exactly what 'it' was that he'd been relishing.
'He wanted you to walk in here under your own steam,' she said. 'There are big cellars under the castle. He was going to put you in shackles, then have his experts get busy on me in front of you. He wasn't going to kill you. Being dead doesn't hurt much. He was going to hurt you for life, the best way he knew.'
I felt cold again. It wasn't the same sick cold, it was a deadly sort of cold.
She said, 'You were going to watch while his men did this and that to me. And at the end of it all they were going to use a whip till I was dead.'
I wiped the sweat from my face and stood up. I don't much fancy killing a man in a wheelchair, but I was going to kill Rodelle without any second thoughts at all. 'Let's get it over with, Princess,' I said.
Just for a minute I thought of Janet, and how she'd come back fighting after that lousy accident. Rodelle hadn't come back fighting, just hating. It had made him even less human than he'd been before, and I'd never have believed that was possible.
We went out of the room and along a broad passage to the head of the stairs. There wasn't any planning to do. We were just going to go into the room and get busy. Five men, including Rodelle. With that Colt the Princess could take three of them in about a second. I couldn't use my left arm comfortably yet, but even with one arm I could take the other two men with knives in about the same time.
The hall and stairway were poorly lit and I could see the crack of brighter light under the door where Rodelle and the others were. We'd got about halfway down the stairs when something went wrong, though we'll never know exactly how it happened. Maybe they heard a noise, maybe somebody had taken a walk outside and found the rope hanging from the window. Whatever it was, they knew the game had changed.
Suddenly the light in the hall went out. So did the light showing under the door. I think they shorted the circuit and blew the fuse. Next second the door was open and somebody was firing a sub-machine-gun at us.
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Not exactly at us, he was firing blind, but near enough. We went back up those stairs like a couple of hares in overdrive. Down below I could hear Rodelle's voice shouting. It was shrill, more like screaming than shouting. Then torches came on, shining up the long curve of the stairs, but we were at the top by then.
House fighting in the dark is a dodgy business. It gives the edge to the side with the most firepower, and Rodelle's lot had that all right. The Princess hung over the balustrade at the top, trying to sight a torch to fire at, but we could only see the beams of light, not the torches. There came another burst of firing and we hopped back a bit smartly. The beams of light moved, and shone up from the foot of the stairs.
It was a nice piece of work. The torch-men were keeping out of the line of fire until we'd been driven back, or knocked off, by a spray from the smg. As soon as we moved back, the torch-men advanced while the gunner moved forward in the dark. So we had no target.
I started wishing I'd primed the two grenades I carried in the pack, but until now there hadn't been much likelihood that we'd need them, and this wasn't the moment to start fumbling around. The gunner was moving up the stairs throwing a quick burst at intervals.
The Princess touched me on the arm, and we ran. She said, 'Down and up behind them, if we can find the way.' It made sense. A slow retreat from a slow advance wasn't going to help us. Our best move was to go like the clappers while they edged forward, so we could get down by another staircase and then along the ground floor and up behind them. I still say it was the right move, even though it worked out so badly I might have thought of it myself.
There had to be another staircase, of course, and there was. But if I could find out the name of the mad Scot who built the small staircase at the end of the west wing so that it by-passed the ground floor and went straight down to the cellars, I'd go and jump on his grave.
We went down. And down. I'd got my own torch out now, because there were no lights anywhere. From the sound of firing, the advance wasn't as slow as we might have hoped.
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Then we went through a doorway, with broken hinges and no door, into a long damp cellar with arches of mildewed stone, inches of sodden dust, and all kinds of debris, the sort of stuff you can't imagine was ever bought, or used, but which seems to be specially manufactured to fill cellars.
We slowed down a little and weaved between the stone piers, looking for one of the other doors that must lead up to the ground floor.
No door. We'd already turned the corner into the stretch of cellar that lay under the connecting hall, and soon we reached the next and last corner, where the other end of the hall joined the east wing. Still no door. We moved on, under the east wing. I stopped and shone the torch round slowly. Damp-stained walls. Crumbling stone piers swelling to vaulted sections of ceiling. Dust. Cobwebs. Junk. No door. No trapdoor.
The Princess said through her teeth, 'Who built this bloody place?' It's not often she swears, but she was hopping mad now. I always want to laugh when she's like that. She doesn't lose her temper over someone like Rodelle setting his experts to work on her. It's always little things, female sort of peeves, that make her blow her top, like why the clown who built Glencroft Castle hadn't put a door there for us to get out of three hundred years later. Mind you, he wasn't my favourite builder either.
Quite suddenly there came a burst of firing that sounded much nearer, and I realized that Rodelle's men had reached the cellar door we'd come in by. The only door. They were still round two corners from us, but they wouldn't be long arriving now. I put the torch on the ground and began to prime the two grenades. I was by a stone pier, and the Princess was on one knee beside me. She'd gone dead calm again now. She pushed back a bit of hair that had fallen over one eye and just knelt there, the Colt in her hand, watching the right-angle turn of the wall where Rodelle's men would have to show up eventually.
In a funny sort of way I felt quite happy, like I always do when we're in a spot together. I've tried to figure why, but I can't. I certainly don't have any death-wish, just the opposite.
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Maybe it's because deep down I reckon that if the Princess is there we'll come out of it. That makes more sense than you'd think, because Modesty's the great survivor, right from ever since she can remember. She's got a will to survive that's as hard as the Koh-i-noor diamond, and just as big.
Even now I was backing her to outshoot Rodelle's gunmen, if it came to that. But it didn't come to that. I had plenty of time to prime the grenades, because nothing at all happened for a while. It was only later that we found out why, and then it was hard to believe.
All we knew at the time was that they left us alone long enough for me to prime the two grenades. A lot longer, really, because it's not a big job. As soon as it was done the Princess gave me a nod. I wormed my way up to the angle of the wall while she covered me, then I edged half an eye round the corner.
All I could see was blackness, so I signalled and she came up beside me, bringing the torch but switched off now. For five minutes we just waited. Then we saw some light at the far end, by the other corner. Rodelle's men were moving forward slowly, dodging from pier to pier.
I felt Modesty snake away, and knew what she was going to do. It was about a minute later that her torch beam flashed out, lighting up the centre stretch of the cellar. There came a racket of firing, but I knew she was well away from the torch by then and taking cover behind the angle of die wall.
Not one bullet hit the torch, where she'd propped it on some crate or sixteenth-century headsman's block sh&'d found. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because in the first two seconds I'd seen all I wanted to - three men half hidden behind piers about twenty paces away, and a fourth darting between piers, a little nearer.
I pulled the pin from the grenade, counted three, tossed it so it fell a bit beyond where they were hidden, then ducked back. It made a nice impressive bang, and the shrapnel seemed to keep flying around for about ten seconds, ringing against the walls and the piers and screaming off in ricochets. What happened next was more impressive still.
The castle fell down. I must be one of the few men who ever
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knocked down a castle with a Mills bomb. Not exactly the whole castle, or the outer walls, but at least half the interior ground floor and quite a bit above that. It began slowly, with a weird sort of creaking as the echoes of the grenade faded.
That was when I remembered that we were under the wing that wasn't in use, the wing Janet had told me was condemned as unsafe. After the creaking there came a long rending crash as some big beam broke and fell, probably making about a million woodworms homeless. From then on it was like a house of cards collapsing as one bit of the cellar ceiling after another came down.
The dust was like a sand storm, and if the damp hadn't kept it down to some extent we'd probably have choked to death. I wasn't feeling happy any more, I was scared rigid. As soon as the first crash came I jumped up and went running from the corner, yelling, 'Princess!' Don't ask me how I saw her, maybe it was because she'd run and grabbed the torch, which was another bit of fast thinking, but when I saw her she was lying huddled at the base of a wall pier, her arms wrapped round her head. I took one great dive and landed on top of her.
Afterwards I discovered that she wasn't hurt, at least not until I made that pancake landing which knocked all the breath out of her. I could hear her panting in my ear and I could feel her heart beating, which was a relief. I spread myself out over her as much as I could, and listened to the splintering of beams and the crunch of great stones as the castle came tumbling down. It went on slowly, in a kind of continuous process, for about two minutes. Then at last everything became quiet, and we were still alive.
From underneath me the Princess said, a bit muffled and gasping, 'I ... don't want to disturb you, Willie love ... but the torch is digging into my ribs.'
I rolled off her, and about five pounds of dust fell off my back. 'You're getting soft,' I said. 'It's like that story about the princess and the pea. She could feel it through twenty mattresses.'
I heard her grunt and give a little laugh as she sat up. She groped around, found me, put her hand on my face for a
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moment, and said, 'Thanks anyway, Willie.' A moment later the torch clicked on.
We looked around. Whoever had condemned this east wing had only been half right. He should have double-condemned the whole hall between the two wings. Not a great deal had fallen close to us, but where the centre section joined the wing there was nothing but a great pile of stones and nibble with broken beams and joists sticking out of it.
The roof had certainly fallen in on Rodelle's men, which was a good thing. Not such a good thing was the fact that we were entombed. The Princess switched off the torch and we waited for our eyes to get used to the dark. After about five minutes she touched me and said, 'There, Willie.' I felt along her arm to find where she was pointing. Then I looked and saw it, a tiny crack of light, moonlight or starlight, coming in through a pile of debris that sloped up against the angle of the wall.
It took me an hour to make anything of that gap, and we spent most of it working on chunks of stone that Cheops could have used for building his pyramid. We had to handle them gently, edging them an inch at a time and then waiting to see what happened to the rest of the great heap before making another move.
Having a half-useless shoulder didn't help, but luckily I'm quite strong, and weight for weight I reckon the Princess is even stronger. I don't know where she packs it, because she certainly doesn't bulge with muscle.
At last we dragged clear a joist that was holding a pile of small rubble, and when the dust settled we could see our way out, a narrowing hole that wove up through the wreckage to the ground floor level. The light we could see seemed to be coming in through an uncurtained window there. The Princess looked at this horrible shaky tunnel for a while in the light of the torch, then she said, 'It's never going to get any better, so let's go.' We didn't argue about who was going to risk it first. At five stone lighter it made more sense for her to give it a try. She was just starting to crawl up the first bit of the slope when a voice from somewhere said, 'Please ...'
It wasn't loud, but it was quite clear, and the echo in that
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cellar made the word hover in the air so creepily that my hair bristled. We froze. Then the Princess backed down and pointed. I swung the torch and we moved forward to where a great mass of wreckage had spilled forward at the point where the centre section joined the wing.
That's when we found that Rodelle was with us, and it explained the delay earlier. They'd spent time carrying him down those stairs at the far end in his wheel-chair, and when they advanced he must have trundled himself along the far wall of the centre section, the south wall. The only reason I can work out is that he wanted to see the end of it all. He'd missed out on his main idea, and he knew he'd never round us up alive, so he didn't want to miss seeing us killed. I suppose when the grenade went off he must have been forward of it, and covered by a pier.
At first when we saw him I thought he'd fallen through from the floor above, but he was pinned under a beam and he must have been below when the cellar roof fell in. The wheel-chair had saved him. It was on its side, with him still in it, half buried under small rubble and with this beam lying across it. The chair was partly crushed, but it held the beam just enough to stop it squashing him. He looked a mess, but so did we all.
There it was, then. An hour before, we'd been out to kill him. Now we were looking at that beam and figuring how to get him free. Don't ask me why it works that way, it just does. He looked into the light with flat dead eyes from a face black with dust and said, 'Please,' again.
The Princess said, 'If you can crawl under that beam and ease it up a fraction, Willie...' So I did. It really creased me. I felt I was lifting the whole castle. She managed to get him by the shoulders and drag him out, his useless legs trailing. I lowered the beam the couple of inches I'd lifted it, then crawled out backwards. A second later there was a great crunch as tons of stuff settled down on the place where I'd just been.
I said, 'Christ!' and that was all the breath I could spare for a while. The Princess knelt holding the torch on Rodelle, and holding the Colt on him too. Nobody said anything. When I
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could move, I checked him. His shoulder holster was empty and there was no gun in his pockets.
The Princess put her Colt away and we looked at this crazy little tunnel again. I still had a coil of rope in the pack, but we couldn't just climb out and then drag him up. I didn't mind him taking the last and nastiest chance, but this tunnel through the wreckage wasn't a smooth slope up, it ran through a pile of tangled joists and blocks of stone, all very dodgily balanced.
Try to drag a crippled man up through that, and he'd get snagged every few feet. Increase the pull, and the whole lot would come down on him. I waited for the Princess to say what I knew she was going to say, and I felt my stomach shrinking to the size of a golf ball.
She said in a fed-up voice, sort of irritably, 'Oh, let's get on with it. You first, Willie. I'll go up with him and ease him over the snags.'
I'd have liked to argue, but it was no good. I'm that much stronger, and it had to be me hauling on the rope. I heaved Rodelle to the foot of the slope on his back, tied a bowline noose round under his armpits, then took the other end of the rope and went up that long, shaky hole. It was a petrifying trip. I could feel everything shuddering, including me. But nothing gave way, and I came out at last through a gap where floorboards were missing, on to a bit of solid flooring in the room above. Then I took up the slack of the rope very gently.
From below, the Princess called, 'Right, Willie.' I heaved very slowly, about an inch a second. After about half a minute she called, 'Stop.' Then I heard a scrambling and the rattle of little stones falling from way down the hole. It seemed to go on for hours, and I was scared spitless. I had to remember to breathe. She called, 'Right,' and I started die slow-motion heaving again. That's the way it sent on, start-stop-wait, as she eased him up that death-trap with creakings and groanings and little whispering falls of rubble that took years off my life.
At last I saw her head. She was on her back, with most of Rodelle's trunk on her legs. She had to be that way, to get him over die snags. Even then she didn't hurry, which made sense, but I had to dredge up all the control I could find to stop myself heaving like mad.
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From start to finish it took ten minutes. Then she scrambled clear and I gave a last heave that dragged Rodelle out and on to the solid floor -1 mean solid compared to the rest.
She said, 'I didn't like that much,' and wiped her filthy face with the sleeve of her filthy sweater. I was so relieved, and so sort of proud of her, I wanted to hug her till my muscles cracked. I got out a probe and unfastened the padlock on the grille over the window, then went and picked up Rodelle. Two minutes later we were outside, and we didn't stop moving until we'd crossed the space between the castle and the outer wall, I suppose you'd call it the bailey in a real castle.
I put Rodelle down, propped against the wall near the big gate, and started to draw the bars. The Princess said, 'Give me a few minutes, Willie,' and sat down cross-legged, hands resting on her knees, upright but relaxed. She started to breadie very slowly, eyes open but not seeing anything. I knew she was starting one of Sivaji's processes to ease the knots out of her nerves, and after all she'd been through I didn't wonder. If we'd been alone, without Rodelle, she'd have turned to me and had a little weep for a minute or so, and that would have unwound her completely. But she'll never do that unless we're alone.
I drew the bars, lit a cigarette and walked a few paces back towards the castle. From the outside it didn't look too bad, because the outer walls had held. There was a full bright moon, low down, and everything showed up clearly. It was six-thirty, still a long way short of sunrise.
Suddenly my ears prickled, and that's a sure sign of trouble. I swung round, and saw it like a tableau. Rodelle had a little gun in his hand, an automatic. He was sitting propped against the wall and he had the fist holding the gun resting on his left forearm at eye-level, taking very careful aim at the Princess, only six paces away, her back half turned to him.
Somehow I'd missed the gun when I'd checked him, and now he was going to kill her. Not me. Her. Because that was the diing that would crucify me.
I'm fast with a knife, but I've never drawn and thrown one as fast as I did then. It was only twenty paces, and I can split
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a matchbox sideways at that range, but I couldn't risk anything fancy.
I couldn't see his chest, because of the forearm covering it, but I could just see his throat over the top of the forearm. The first knife grazed his gun-hand and went straight into his neck. His hands jerked up with a shock, and a single shot whistled high towards the castle. I heard it break a window just as the second knife thumped into his heart below the breastbone.
He fell over sideways with hardly any sound. I saw the Princess turn her head slowly to look, and I went across to Rodelle. The right leg of his trousers was rucked up almost to the knee, and there were two broad strips of plaster still half clinging to the side of his leg at about mid calf.
The Princess was standing beside me now, her eyes a bit funny from her having been jerked back to normal just as she was starting to slow everything down. I pointed and said, 'The gun was stuck to 'is leg. Sorry, Princess.'
She said, 'You think I wouldn't have missed it?'
I didn't argue. I picked up Rodelle and we walked back to the Castle and climbed in through the same window. At the top of that hole the Princess had dragged him up, I pulled the knives out of his chest and throat. Being very dead, he hardly bled at all. I shoved him head first down the hole. He slid about six feet down, then jammed.
The wreckage creaked and groaned as I jumped about. But now we wanted it to collapse, it wouldn't. I got out the other grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it down so that it bounced on Rodelle and then went rolling on below.
We didn't wait. We went out of that window like greyhounds out of a trap, and kept running. Five seconds later we heard the bang, then a lot of crashing and grinding. When it stopped, we walked back and looked through the window. The whole floor had fallen in. Rodelle was entombed widi the rest of his friends, and I thought it likely they'd stay there a very long while, if not for ever. Nobody in their senses would want to start rebuilding Glencroft Castle.
We walked away, and out of the gate. A big old mounting block stood just to one side of it. The Princess said, 'Willie...' and turned to me. I put my arms round her, sat down on the
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mounting block with her on my lap, and held her close. She didn't make any noise when she cried. I could just feel her shaking a bit, and the tears making my neck wet. It's not often she does it after a caper, but this one had been a real nerve-twister, especially her part of it.
Now I felt the opposite of what I'd felt when she fixed my shoulder. It makes me feel about ten feet tall when she turns to me like that. I talked nonsense and made a bit of a joke now and again until she felt all quiet and relaxed in my arms. Then she sat up, borrowed my handkerchief, blew her nose, and grinned at me through the streaky mask of dirt on her face.
I said, 'Weng's sitting in the gym at The Treadmill with a cannon stuck in Fitch's ear.'
We got up and walked half a mile up the track to where I'd left the car. There were two cars now. Lady Janet Gillam was there, carrying a sporting rifle, and so was Wee Jock Miller.
Jock said, 'She was going to come an' ask for ye at sunrise. I could'nae stop her. If she wasn't out in ten minutes, I was to go an' bring the fuzz.' Well, in Bonnie Scotland the police would have come looking for Lady Janet Gillam fast enough, but I wouldn't like to bet they'd have found her alive.
The Princess said, 'Hallo, Janet. Thanks for all the help.' There was a lot more in her voice than just the words.
Janet gave her a smile, a nice one, then looked at us both and said, 'Jock has showers at the garage. We'd best be moving.'
The Princess said, Til go with Jock,' and got in the E-type with him, leaving the Rover for Janet and me.
Janet said, 'Are you hurt under all that muck, Willie?' But her voice started shaking and she only just got it out. Then I saw some tears on her face. I was going to cuddle her up and tell her everything was all right, but I was coated in filth, so I stopped.
Janet said, her voice all up and down, 'Never mind the dirt, what the hell do you think she went on ahead for? We're not all made of teak and she could see I was going to cry, so hold me a wee while, Willie.'
So I did, which was the second time in about ten minutes. But I didn't tell Lady Janet that.
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