Be Shot For Six Pence (22 page)

“But—”

“Is it Lady’s intention to provoke a General Strike?”

There was a clock on the wall with a big second hand. I watched it up to four. Then, for an agonising moment, I thought I had miscounted and I found myself shouting.

“Yes.”

“There was no hurry,” said Dru. “You had all of ten seconds. Now we will start again. When is the strike to be?”

“I don’t know,” I said at once. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

Then we sat in silence as the second hand moved through its allotted span, and I felt the sweat start out all over my body, like water from a wrung cloth.

“Five,” said Dru, after what seemed an age. And then, “Ten.”

“So, he did not tell you. A pity.”

One of the telephones on the desk rang discreetly. It must have been a special telephone, because Dru went straight to it, picked it up, and said, “Colonel Dru speaking.” Then he said, “I see. If you would kindly wait a moment.”

He placed his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Major Becker, “Take him away. You know where to put him. I will speak to him again in the morning.”

The crowd was melting quietly out of the room. Becker took me, professionally holding my arm just above the elbow, and two of the men fell in behind me.

As we went I heard the Colonel say into the telephone. “I was having the room cleared. Now please, if you will go on.”

The room had not been particularly hot but as we came out into the passage I felt as if I was coming out of a Turkish bath.

We climbed, in all, six flights of stairs. After the third we had to stop for Becker to get his breath back. He was in no sort of condition.

The final flight was narrow, steep and uncarpeted. It ended at the junction of an L-shaped corridor out of each arm of which opened two doors.

We must have been on the top storey of one of the corner turrets (the north-eastern one, I calculated). In the original scheme of things the rooms would have served as box-rooms, perhaps, or servants’ bedrooms. Now it seemed to be a special sort of prison block.

The original doors had been taken out and much stronger ones put in their place. Doors of planks, pierced by one small square spyhole, and fastened on the outside by two long bolts. We went into the end room.

“I regret,” said Becker, with ponderous sarcasm, “it is not luxurious.”

I took no notice of the fat Major. After Dru he was just a long drink of water.

The room was bare. Bare wooden floor, bare walls, a single window, a high ceiling, from which swung a single light. In the middle of the floor stood the only piece of furniture, a big, old fashioned bedstead, a bed of the unyielding sort, with plenty of scrollwork and four brass knobs, one at each corner. On it lay a thin and lumpy mattress and one single small, extremely tattered blanket.

“It is an apartment we keep for special guests,” said the Major. “Those we are anxious to keep with us. It has every modern convenience—” he indicated the bed—”and plenty of fresh air.” He walked over to the window and opened it and stared out pointedly. He seemed to be waiting for me, so I walked across and looked out too.

Eighty feet below us, lighted by arc lamps, was the courtyard. There was something else too. For a moment I could not make it out. Then I saw. Set into the concrete surface of the yard were a number of steel spikes. They were, I think, pieces of angle-iron, which had been cut to an acute point at the top; and they were arranged in a cheval-de-frise immediately under my window.

“We have sometimes found our guests curiously anxious to leave us,” said the Major with a smirk. “We might, of course, have fastened up the window, but that would have been contrary, would it not, to all the rules of hygiene? We therefore thought it best to discourage any unorthodox exit. One must admit, of course, that if you were
really
determined, the presence of our little pincushion would not prevent you from throwing yourself out. However, of the fifty or more guests we have entertained, no one has yet made the attempt.”

I walked over to the bed, sat down on it, and yawned as rudely as I could.

“Quite right,” said the Major, with a sneer. “Quite right. We must not keep you from your bed. The best of dreams. If you are cold, you can always run round the room. Should you need anything, just ring the bell. No one will come.”

“Stop behaving like a clown,” I said.

He stood for a moment, looking down at me. I thought he was going to hit me, and did not greatly care. Then he said: “Curious that you should be so truculent now. You did not seem to be truculent a short time ago, ha ha! Or was I mistaken?”

I said nothing, and he went out. I heard the bolts shot home and I heard the Major posting one of his men at the far end of the corridor, and giving him some instructions. He was too far off for me to hear what was said to him, but his job was pretty simple. All he had to do was to put himself where he could watch all four doors, and see that none of the prisoners tried to lean out and fiddle with the bolts (which were out of reach, anyway, and fastened home with a patent lock that needed a special key to open it).

I turned out the light, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

It was there that fear got hold of me. It came with the sudden silence. It filtered in with the half-light, from the open window. It laid its fingers upon me and loosed my reins and sinews. At that moment if I had been forced to stand I think my knees would have betrayed me.

Will-power is a tricky thing. It has unimaginable reserves and unexpected limitations. A climber has more occasion to think about it than most people for any difficult climb is a three cornered fight between will, body and the rock face. By hard experience I had found out a certain amount about my own equipment. And one thing I was certain about was that I could not afford to compromise.

Dru had broken me once; and that meant that in future battles, the odds were heavily in his favour.

There were other considerations, but they were of lesser importance. It was becoming clear to me, for instance, that I had been made a fool of. Twice bitten by Lady, I had a third time proffered my hand. He had, of course, concurred in my kidnapping. He may even have known of the exact method and route that were to be used. I do not mean that he had arranged it; that would have been an unnecessary refinement. All he had to ensure was that the guards were posted in the wrong places.

He had allowed me, then, to be kidnapped. So that I might be tortured into revealing the half-truths that he had pumped into me. It added insult to injury that he had carefully put me on my guard by explaining to me, in advance, the rules by which he worked.

My mind refused to contemplate just what was going to happen to me when I had been sounded by Dru and his assistants and found to be empty; or what I was likely to suffer in the process.

A cold and comfortless self-contempt had got hold of me. This was the moment of truth, which comes to a climber when he finally realises that he can do no more. He can go neither forward nor back, neither up nor down. Whether he holds on or drops off is between him and his Maker. It concerns no one else in the wide world.

It was my anger with Lady that saved the day. Anger can be as warming as alcohol. And much more permanent in its effects. I sat up, quite suddenly, on that ludicrous iron bedstead, and swore that I would twist Lady’s neck for what he had done to me.

I had not until that moment considered my position objectively at all. But now I did two things which in retrospect seem to me significant. I kicked off my shoes and padded across to the door. The guard was sitting on a chair at the end of the passage. He looked about as mobile as the Tower of London. Then I glanced at my watch. It was almost exactly eleven o’clock.

As an abstract problem, what I had to do did not merit any great expenditure of thought. The room I was in was built to hold. It was beyond imagination that I could make any impression on the woodwork of the walls or floor or ceiling. Certainly I could do nothing effective without attracting the instant attention of my guard. He might be resting on the base of his spine, but he wasn’t as fast asleep as all that. And anyway, I had no semblance of a tool to cut or hack my way out with. Not a blade, not a pin, not a nail.

Which left the window.

This was not guarded with shutters or bars. My captors had insolently relied on an older and stronger barrier.

(I suppose that a desperate man might have wrought himself up to the pitch where he would have cast himself on the bare stones of the courtyard. But I do not believe that of any man born of woman would deliberately have impaled himself alive on those steel spikes which winked up so hopefully at him from the abyss.)

However, since it was the only way, it was the way I must take. I must plan it with forethought; arrange such aids as I might; and trust to my ability for the rest.

The first problem was direction. To go sideways promised little. If I managed to circle the turret I should merely find myself with my problem repeated on the sheer face of the building. To go down would need eighty foot of reliable rope and the single blanket was so old as to be virtually useless. The cover of the mattress was more hopeful. If I could succeed in tearing it quietly and plaiting it, into strips, it might give me fifteen feet. Which might be enough to reach the window underneath me.

It was the beginning of an idea, and better than nothing. I went across to the window, put my legs through, let them slip down, and then, holding the sill with my right hand, I pushed myself out, until my head and body were clear. A quick look down was enough. The window underneath me, and the one under that, were both shuttered, flush to the sills.

I pulled myself back into the room.

(I was glad to notice, incidentally, that this preliminary exercise had not worried me. Not to be afraid of ‘exposure’ is one of the first things a climber learns; and in the end a so-called ‘head for heights’ becomes as much a part of his equipment as his crampons or rope. But like other faculties, it is one that fatigue or hunger, or even the stress of emotion, can easily impair.)

If it was a straight choice between down and up, there was a lot to be said for going up. It was clear that the top of the turret must be above the guttering level of the roof. If, therefore, I proceeded on an upwards diagonal course, I must, quite quickly, strike the spot where the turret joined the roof. This would avoid the difficult ‘overhang’ caused by the guttering of the turret itself.

Whether or not I could venture on such a course depended almost entirely on the state of preservation of the brickwork. If it had been a new house, or even an old house, with the brickwork recently repointed, it would have been hopeless from the start. I leaned out of the window again and felt with my finger nail.

It was better than I had dared to hope. The mortar between the bricks was comparatively soft and flakey. Moreover the bricks had originally been laid with a wider band of mortar between them than you would find in English building.

I sat down again on the bed. What I proposed was feasible. It was still hideously dangerous.

My plan was to make an ascent, by the use of pitons, or metal pegs, of the diagonal stretch of fifteen foot or so of brick wall which separated my window from the point where the swell of the turret touched the eaves of the main building.

I should need a minimum of seven pegs, each at least ten inches long, strong enough to bear my weight. The ideal would be a standard alpine ice-piton, with a serrated point and a flattened end; an ideal for which I might whistle. In addition I wanted a mallet, heavy enough to drive the pegs, but soft enough not to awaken the guard who was now snoring uneasily on his hard perch.

I turned my attention to the bed. The foot was formed of a single cross bar of cast iron, too thick to break, and too long to be of any use. The head was more promising, and I examined it closely.

It was made in three parts. A centre part of four uprights – fifteen inches long, I judged; flanked on either side by a shorter section of four uprights each rather less than a foot long. Hand me a metal saw, remove the guard, and a quarter of an hour’s work would have given me twelve useful pegs.

The centre part seemed to me the most hopeful. It had a double rail at the top. Now if I could lay my hands on a straight, heavy, lever, I could insert it between the two bars, and using the lower one as a fulcrum, could certainly shift the top one. Once the heads were free I could bend those four iron bars out of their sockets at the bottom. The bending, if judiciously performed, would leave each bar with the sort of chisel edge I needed.

If I had a lever.

Any piece of metal, a foot or more long, an inch or two inches thick, and stout enough not to break or bend under pressure.

I kicked my heels at this obstacle for nearly half an hour before I realised that the answer was staring me in the face.

I got up and walked across to the window. It was a perfectly ordinary English type sash window, made in two halves either of which ran up and down on cords in its own wooden slot. And at the end of each cord must hang, I knew, although I could not see it, exactly the lever I needed; the counter weight of the window.

I fingered the woodwork. It was oldish, and needed paint but it was still quite sound. A chisel, a screwdriver, even a pocket knife, would have been enough to have opened it.

If I had a pocket knife.

At this point the guard showed signs of life, and I sank back as quietly as I could on my bed. When he had had a peep at me, and lumbered back to his seat, and resettled himself, I looked again at my watch.

Half-past twelve.

Surely I could find the tiny piece of metal necessary to unlock this ultimate door. The whole bed was made of metal. The base of it was jointed diamonds of thick metal wire. A single one of those would do the trick.

I turned back to the mattress. If I could bend back the tip of one of them, I could soon work it loose. It was too strong for my bare fingers. I needed another piece of metal to start it with. Anything would do. A large coin. A half-crown, even a penny.