by Janice Law
“There’s a risk in hanging about,” I said, slowing only a little. I skirted the big open rectangle where the major and Jenkins had found their pottery and headed onto a band of turf no wider than a sidewalk with exploratory trenches on either side. The grass was wet and the turned-up earth slick. What was in my mind? Nothing but delay and improvisation. “Corner here,” I said and stepped onto another stretch of turf, yes, a little narrower yet. Wasn’t this the one that Jenkins had warned me not to use, not even for a shortcut?
A cry behind me and I jerked away as Grove tried to seize my arm. Off balance and heavier than me, he broke loose a patch of turf and tumbled into the trench, discharging the pistol. I fell but managed to evade the drop, and I got back on my feet, slipping along the slick edges until I reached a wider path. Behind me, Grove shouted something and the pistol discharged twice more. I was certain he was right on my tail, and when I saw the stakes and ropes of the perimeter, I hurdled the last trench to land flat on the wet grass, slithered through some nettles, and dived for the nearest shadows, the shrubbery at the base of the tower.
Wet stone, weeds, brambles, a small tree that I grasped and swung around into the greater darkness of the tower. I should have explored it with Poppy; I should have a map in my mind. Instead, I was caught in the impenetrable darkness I had hoped for with Grove. A bang and ouch as I caught my shins and again as I fell forward onto my hands. A step. Steps. Of course, access to the levels of the tower. I didn’t stop to consider whether I might be as easily trapped in a Norman ruin as in the major’s antique water closet. Grove was down; I was going up.
The interior stair had pie-shaped treads, uneven and badly worn with loose rock here and there. But it was dark. Let Grove try his aim in here! Old dust was the downside, and the effort of climbing strained my lungs. I pressed on, sometimes bent over, feeling my way step by step up the corkscrew stairs until a gust of rain hit me in the face. I had reached the top. A platform? There must be some sort of floor. And hopefully a parapet? I’m not terribly fond of heights, especially heights with no clear barrier between solid stone and thin air.
Better find one, Francis! I froze for a moment and listened, expecting to hear Grove’s heavy tread, his impressive vocabulary, the crack and ricochet of an experimental shot. Or worse. Grove denied that he’d killed Freddie, but had he been up in the tower with him? Would he know the stairs, the extent of safe footing? In some ways, silence was worse than the certainty of his approach. I reached forward as far as I could and felt my way along the stones. One foot, two feet. I took the last step and lamented the abandonment of the snooker cue. With it, I could have tapped my way to safety.
I edged a foot instead. I wanted to get away from the steps and around the wall of the stairwell to what must be the level area visible from the lawn. Once out from the shadows of the wall, I should be able to distinguish the outlines of the building and get a view of what was happening below. Desirable developments! Yes, indeed, and yet I stopped with one hand on the broken interior wall, listening to the wind and rain and waiting for some sound from Grove, or better, a shout from Uncle Lastings or the inspector or even the major, whose absence was now suspect.
Nothing, nothing at all, but I had a sense of something amiss, some warning. From the lower depths of my subconscious, as Maurice would say? Or just the unpleasant memory of Freddie’s body sprawled near the base of the tower? The latter was much the more likely, and I stepped around the interior wall onto the remains of an upper floor, heavy Norman construction with missing stones possible. Go canny, Nan said in my ear.
I could just make out the jagged outline of the exterior against the murk, and I was stepping toward it, checking the stone floor for gaps and holes, when I was struck a heavy blow from behind, knocking me against the not nearly high enough wall.
“Give them to me!” a voice cried. Not Grove. I was sure it was not Grove. Then who? The thought of some unquiet spirit flickered through my mind but disappeared at the shout—“Those negatives!”—as someone definitely of the here and now grabbed my arms and tried to wrestle me to the ground.
I began yelling. “I don’t have them! Not with me! Let me go!” But nothing did the trick. My assailant stopped trying to knock me down and began punching me. I took advantage of this to swing around and attempt a few blows of my own, quite ineffective given the blinding wind-driven rain, the dark, the slick stones underfoot, and the height of my attacker. “Who are you?” I shouted. “What do you want?”
“The negatives. The document negatives!”
Before I could answer, I felt the terrible sensation of going from solid to not solid at all, to a stomach-dropping, total-body-seizing plunge. I felt the rough edge of the broken wall scrape my side and heard screams. Then nothing. A blank.
Moments erased from time before I was aware of water on my face, a pain in one thigh, something mysteriously wrong with my left shoulder, and a lot of twigs and sticks. Also a light.
Grove had been wanting a light. Could that be him? What the hell, I called out anyway, and the light swung around, revealing my situation. No wonder I felt strange! I was lying on a big shrub, make that halfway into a big shrub, several feet above the ground, which was why, come to think of it, I was shouting and feeling strange and in a fair bit of pain instead of lying unconscious with bad things about my spine like the late Freddie Bosworth.
I tried to extract myself and heard the major’s voice: “Don’t move just yet.”
He had a light and something else that glimmered. Without thinking—because I was clearly not in the self-preservation mode—I said, “Please, don’t kill me.”
With a click, the blade of the flick knife disappeared. Just the same—and without any real evidence—I guessed how Freddie had died. Knowledge I’d better keep to myself because this was dangerous territory, up in the crumbling tower territory. Had the major attacked me there? Unlikely, when he was standing quite intact and mobile, instead of impaled on shrubbery or lying motionless like the figure I could just see on the ground. “How is he?” I asked.
The major went over and had a look. Or maybe a second look. “Out cold, but he’ll live, I think.”
“He wanted the negatives.”
“Yes. It’s George Armitage, I believe.”
“He wasn’t—” I said before I lost the train of thought in a hubbub of shouts and lights. Several men with flashlights and an improvised stretcher had arrived. They were moving about in a purposeful way, and I recognized Jenkins’s voice. “Shift him carefully,” he was saying. “In case it’s his spine.”
My spine was fine. All extremities moving. My problem was a burning sensation in my thigh that was becoming sharper by the second. The pain brought my mind back into focus, and when Uncle Lastings peered into my face, I said, “Armitage wasn’t a traitor. Not entirely. He was trying to get the negatives back. About Chain Home. He wanted—”
“Enough of that,” warned my uncle. He was joined by Inspector Davis, and more important, since he seemed to be the medical expert, Jenkins. The Agreeable One took in my situation and said, “Bloody hell! We need a hedge lopper.”
That sounded so bad I did the sensible thing and passed out. When I came to, I was in the backseat of the inspector’s car with my naked left leg propped on rolled-up towels and what appeared to be a sprig of shrubbery protruding from my thigh. “I feel sick,” I said.
“Oilcloth everywhere, lad,” said my uncle. “You’re on your way to hospital.”
“And Armitage?”
“Ambulance for him. He has a brain worth millions, they say.”
The sedan went over a bad bit in the road, and I passed out again. My last thought was that safe in his ambulance, George Armitage could take care of himself.
Chapter 15
I don’t recommend the piercing of any body part whatsoever. You can put that in capital letters, even though the attending physician nattered on ab
out my good luck that shrubbery had broken my fall. Otherwise, propelled beneath the weight of what he called “the other participant,” I might well have been killed. I can tell you that before they gave me a shot of morphine, I was uncertain about the merits of survival.
However, a jab in the buttock, and I floated gently above the surgical table and the cares of this world. At some time in the night, the nursing sister topped up the shot, and I woke for good the next morning with my leg propped up, a drain in my thigh, and a six-inch length of twig left as a souvenir on the table beside my bed, right next to the metal pan for when I was feeling queasy. Nothing good there!
The first positive development was Nan’s arrival. She came escorted by the surgeon who regaled us by describing how he’d extracted “half a foot worth of American elderberry” from my leg and a variety of “toothpick-size” fragments from my back. I was still too doped up to be appreciative, but Nan thanked him and shook his hand and set about examining my injuries for herself.
“Cuts and bruises mostly,” said the surgeon. “His back should heal up nicely once he can get out of bed. The leg we’ll have to watch, given that the branch was certainly not sterile.” He pointed out the drain that he’d inserted, now carrying away a quantity of dubious red and yellow fluids. He added that even if I threw a fever, there was little cause for alarm, thanks to a recently introduced drug that was “very effective against infection.”
Nan sniffed at this, being a great believer in iodine, the stronger and more liberally applied, the better. However, I saw her face change when she examined the twig and saw the massive bandage around my thigh.
“You watch him,” the doctor said, “and alert the sister at any time if he seems feverish.”
Feverish I wanted to avoid, preferring to remain what my old Latin teacher called compos mentis and chat with Nan. Uncle Lastings had fetched her, which was interesting in itself, and she had closed the studio and caught the first train south. “We must get you back to London,” she said.
You can bet I agreed with that idea, and Nan said that I must have an ambulance to travel home and considered how best to convince the medical people. Then she read me a little P. G. Wodehouse that made me laugh until my leg hurt. I only agreed to rest when I began feeling distinctly woozy. I’ve discovered that morphine, which has delightful effects on the brain, comes with a wretched aftermath for the stomach.
“I’ll get a coffee and come back,” Nan promised as I closed my eyes.
The light was low when I woke up. I’d been in the tower, feeling my way across the ditches of the dig, and the major was on a sofa reading a novel. I knew it was the major although it didn’t look like him at all, and the sofa, on reflection, looked a great deal more like a heap of Norman pottery or maybe an elephant. “Where am I?”
“Dear boy! It’s all right.” That was Nan. In the real world, not the dream one.
“Where am I, Nan?”
She said I was in the hospital in Hastings and pushed the call button. A sister arrived, starchy and official, to take my temperature.
Whatever it was, she declared that my leg needed examination, and she began the excitement of unraveling the bandage. Where it stuck to the wound, she snipped the fabric away with scissors and lifted the sticking bits with a pair of tweezers. I believe I was shouting at that point, and the sister called for reinforcements, including the surgeon who could identify shrubs from branches and who was up on all the latest drugs.
A consultation followed. I believe I was babbling, thanks to another shot of morphine. Floating above the bed on a cloud of opiates, I saw the doctor leave and return with what looked like a saltshaker. He proceeded to season my wound. His mouth was moving, talking to Nan. A sensible choice since I was far beyond conversation. The drain was checked and fresh bandages applied. My newly acquired plumbing reminded me of the major’s antique WC, currently hiding phony documents. I started to explain about this to Nan, then nothing.
Night. I woke up, more or less in my right mind, to a familiar clicking sound, the night sound of my childhood: Nan knitting through the long summer twilights or by the light of the oil lamp that warded off nursery terrors on dark winter nights. Knitting socks and sweaters for me and for my brothers and sisters, and, during the late war, socks, caps, and balaclavas for the troops. Who are you knitting for? I used to ask, and she would say, For a soldier far away. That night in the hospital, it took me some time to work out that I was not still dreaming, that Nan was actually in the room, her long needles moving at top speed.
“Knitting for a soldier far away?” I asked.
“One near to hand,” she said, coming over to the bed. “Feeling any better, dear boy?”
“I think so, but I’d like some water.”
Shortly, the sister arrived to take my temperature and bring a bedpan. The results passed muster: My fever was dropping and my kidneys were working.
“We’ll let him sleep through the night,” she told Nan and added that she should get some rest as well.
I felt wide awake and reasonably compos, but almost as soon as Nan resumed her knitting, I dropped off to the rhythmic clatter of the needles. I don’t know how long I was asleep, but it was still deep in the night when I was jerked awake by angry shouts and a struggle around my bed. To explain those, I must rely on Nan’s account, and on the less coherent reports from the nursing sisters and the doctor, and fill in the gaps with imagination.
So, envision the room: Dark it would have been, the shade of the tall window drawn down against all but a sliver of the moonlight, and the low corridor lighting reduced to a glimmer as the door was mostly closed. Nan in the chair near the window, dozing, I expect. Her knitting with the needles in the work resting on her lap, the ball of wool dropped to one side. The bed curtain on the window side was still drawn partway, and I was lying in the darkness, the sides of my bed up in case my fever spiked again and I attempted, as Nan said I’d done earlier, to leave bed, room, and hospital on some fool’s errand.
Then the near soundless opening of the door. Have I ever mentioned that my nan has both the eyes and ears of a cat? Oh, yes. No unauthorized exits from her nursery under any condition whatsoever! No unauthorized entrances, either. She opened her eyes on a shadow. One of the nursing sisters? No, someone wearing trousers and a surgical mask but with a white coat—dear boy, it practically glowed—instead of surgical scrubs.
When she saw that he had something pointed—a needle? a knife? a syringe?—in his hand, Nan shouted, “Stop!”
That’s when I woke up, mouth dry, thigh throbbing, stomach twitching. A rattle as the bed rail on my left side was lowered. One hand pulled roughly at the bandages on my thigh; the other held something shiny, something pointed, then Nan’s familiar voice was raised in anger. I saw the long gleam of a knitting needle and heard a shout before the figure staggered and fell against the bed, his arm grazing mine, the impact of his weight on the mattress sending a jolt of pain through my thigh like a knife. I saw blackness and flashes, but he was the one who screamed, a dreadful sound, beyond pain into something else more terrible, before he reared up and whirled away, knocking Nan to the floor.
Running feet, shouts in the corridor, the door flung open. As the room lights came on, I grabbed the bars on the right side of the bed and hauled myself up. Nan was lying on the floor with a sister beside her. Another sister appeared at my bed. “Are you all right? Were you hurt?”
“What about Nan? Is Nan all right?”
“Yes, dear boy, no more than a few bruises.” She sat up and got her feet under her. “That was no doctor.”
“Certainly not!” The head of the ward was indignant. “No further medication had been authorized for this patient, not by anyone on the staff.”
“He had something in his hand,” Nan said. “An ice pick or maybe a syringe. Too large for a needle. He was trying to open Francis’s bandages and get at the wound.”
/> “He gave the most terrible scream,” I said. “Perhaps when you hit him, he stuck himself.”
“Whatever he had, he was up to no good. Dangerous no good,” the sister said, and we all agreed, which was fortunate because one of Nan’s long needles lay bloodstained on the tile floor. She hadn’t hesitated, and I had a moment to imagine all that could have gone wrong before I reached out and pressed her hand.
“We’ll get you back to London,” she said. Music to my ears!
She took that up with Inspector Carstairs, the local man, when he showed up bright and early the next morning, having dispatched his sergeant in the wee hours to sit in the hallway and keep watch on my room. He said that his hands were tied. “The matter is now up to Special Branch and the Yard.”
She next tried Inspector Davis, who arrived shortly afterward. As I was no favorite with the London inspector, I figured he would be eager to have me gone, but I was wrong. I was apparently vital to the inquiry on a number of levels, and he wanted my account of the events at Larkin Manor. I did my best, although, without morphine, I had not only a throbbing leg, but a myriad of stinging and aching cuts and bruises. He already knew about my meeting with Basil Grove, who he said was lying a few rooms down in traction for a badly broken leg.
“Unfortunate,” he added in a peevish tone. “Without that accident, we might have discovered his contacts.”
“He had a pistol and threatened to shoot me. I wasn’t so worried about his contacts as my survival.”
The inspector made mollifying noises and asked me to continue. When I finished describing the events in the tower and my, admittedly vague, remembrances of the aftermath, I asked about George Armitage.