[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter (электронная книга .txt) 📗

"May I ask what you propose to do as far as I am concerned, then?"

"I shall probably simply eliminate you. I may decide to extract some information from you first, but there are other, more important things to be done before we bother with you. That is why we have not considered it worth while to try for a third time to kill Mr. Slate. There will be plenty of time for that this evening... If there were more time, however, I should find it... agreeable, shall we say?...to spend a little time persuading you to talk."

"I thought your wife lived here with you?"

"She is a tolerant woman — and with her, as with me, the success of the operation, loyalty to THRUSH, comes before any thing else."

"Suppose I decide I don't wish to stay and be murdered?"

"It is not a decision which rests with you, I am afraid. This pleasant rambling house, these leisured pieces of antique furniture, those lawns you see through the French windows — they are all rather deceptive. I have only two men under me here, but they are tough and well trained. With them and my wife, plus our electric fences and various other — ah — ingenious devices, we aim to succeed in keeping out those whom we do not wish to enter. And of course retain those whom we do not wish to leave."

"Well, that's the most ridicul — the most ridic —" April had begun.. . and then suddenly she wasn't speaking clearly any more; suddenly she wasn't speaking at all. Suddenly she was on the floor.

The sherry, of course, she had thought blearily. How silly of me! And after that there had been a blank. The next thing she had known was a sudden awareness of cold, a sensation of hardness beneath her back (she must have been dumped on the floor in a passageway), and a strange voice asking: "What about her handbag, then?"

Wright's voice, as smooth as ever, had replied: "Handbag? Let me see...keys, money, licence, lipstick, lighter, comb, packet of sweets...that looks innocuous enough. Chuck it in there with her for the moment. We'll dispose of it later. Colonel Forsett and his wife are due at any moment and I don't want to run the risk of them seeing it..."

She had heard a door open and felt the sensation of being lifted, and then once again there was a total blank.

Now here she was, painfully reassembling these fragments of memory to work out how and why she came to be sitting hunched up on the floor of a damp, cold cellar.

Shaking her head to clear it from the lingering effects of the knock-out drops she had unwittingly taken, she looked around her. The cellar was about twelve feet square, with walls of granite slabs and a flagged floor. Apart from a tea chest full of old boxes and papers which stood near the iron-bound door, it was completely empty. Judging from the quality of the light filtering through a high window opposite the door, it was almost dusk. Through the window she could see an outhouse wall topped by thatched eaves, and a triangle of sky. The cellar must be in the basement of the big house, she assumed.

She listened. There was the kind of heavy silence that characterises Sunday afternoons in early spring. Not far away, a tap dripped monotonously into a bucket of water and, a long way above, something — a shutter perhaps? — continuously banged in the wind.

Moving a little to see whether she could discern anything more through the window, she was startled to feel coldness, weight, restriction, and to hear the unmistakable rattle of iron on stone.

She realized she was chained up like a dog!

There was a heavy iron anklet clamped around the soft leather of her left boot, from each side of which a loop of metal projected. To one of these, a similar bracelet encircling her right wrist was padlocked; and from the other, a short length of chain led to a ring concreted into the cellar wall.

Experimentally, she tried to pull her foot out of the boot but found that the anklet was too tight.

Next, with her free hand she turned the two iron circles around to see how they were locked on to her limbs. Like the padlock joining them, they were old, slightly rusty, but strong and they were closed by double catches of the type used on old-fashioned suitcases, which homed into a slit and then were locked in place. The chain — it was about three feet long — was of heavy one-inch links. It seemed to April to make a great deal of noise each time she moved.

Struggling to her feet, she found that the iron ring was set into the wall at such a height that she had the minimum of lateral movement: she could hobble one pace to either side or one pace out towards the centre of the cellar, and that was that...

From the doubled-up position imposed on her by the diagonal wrist-to-ankle attachment, she squinted again through the window. She could see a little more wall, a little more sky, but that was all. In the wedge of darkening blue, the shape of a seagull hung motionless with outspread wings. Distantly, she heard the bird uttering its mewing cry, and then it floated out of sight beyond the thatch.

Sighing, April lowered herself to the floor again. She was still wearing her sheepskin coat, but there was nothing in the pockets that might help her to break free... and then, suddenly, she recalled that fragmentary scrap of dialogue about the handbag. Had she dreamed it, or was the handbag really in here with her...?

Desperately, she looked once more around the cell. And there it was: It was lying on its side, the handles away from her, which was why she had not noticed it before.

The only thing was — the handbag was on the far side of the cellar, over near the tea chest, and she couldn't reach it.

She fell forward on to her knees and stretched out with her free hand. It was a good eighteen inches away from the bag.

Next she advanced as far as the chain would allow, then lifted her left leg until the links were parallel to the floor, and hopped forward the additional step that this permitted. But with her right wrist attached to the raised leg, the resulting contorted posture left her worse off than before. Finally she cast herself down on her side, flattened her shoulder-blades on the flagstones, and groped blindly up behind her head in the manner of a swimmer's backstroke. She couldn't see where her hand was going, but it seemed a little nearer.

A moment later, her outstretched fingertips touched the hard, cold surface of the crocodile bag.

She turned her hand this way and that but could find nothing to grasp hold of. Frenziedly, she shifted her position, brushing the backs of her knuckles along the smooth skin. The bag moved slightly away from her.

April bit back a groan of disappointment. Then, struck by an idea, she sat up and stared at the bag, pursed her lips, and lay down once more on the floor. If she was able to move one end of the bag away from her... and if the floor was not too rough... and if she could hit the crocodile blindly, in the right place.. . then the other end might swivel round towards her and give her fingers something they could grab hold of. It was worth a try.

Again the stretched fingers brushed the hard base of the bag, seeking the end. Ah — this was it! Holding her breath, she drew two fingers slightly towards her and then jerked them outwards, against the bag.

There was a slight scraping noise and her fingers touched air… Now — had she merely pushed the whole thing away, or had it swivelled?

Carefully, she eased her hand back the other way. The side of the little finger touched a cold surface. Hardly daring to breathe, she turned her wrist over. The tip of her middle finger, exploring, found the sewn edge of the bag, beyond which the calf sidepiece concertinaed inwards.

With infinite care, she closed middle finger and forefinger over the edge, and with the bag thus scissored between them precariously, began to draw it towards her. The hard skin grated, scraping against the coarse flag, and once some obstruction halted it and she lost it. But eventually, inch by slow inch, she drew it within reach until at last she could turn over and seize it properly with her whole hand.