by Zoe Sharp
My heart-rate kicked up into overdrive. I hadn't seen a weapon, but one of them had to be carrying. Or possibly both of them. I had no way of telling. But if I went for one bloke and the other pulled a knife on me, I was going to be in more than deep trouble.
I was going to be dead.
I took a full breath. I told myself that I'd taught plenty of class scenarios covering attacks by two players. I wasn't kidding myself that it was easy, but I knew I could do it.
Don't think. Just act.
In the event, it was the smoker who acted first. He strolled over to me as though he was out for his Sunday constitutional and punched me hard in the sternum, putting his bodyweight behind the blow.
I rolled away, gulping for breath, ending up at the furthest edge of the sofa. He advanced, smirking, with his hands clenched by his sides, and making no attempt to keep his guard up.
Still making a play of looking terrified, I managed to slide onto my knees. We'd moved ten feet or so away from the Scouser, and there was an overturned chair between us. The odds were lousy, but they were probably as good as they were going to get. When the smoker was towering over me again, I went for it.
His kneecaps were about on eye-level. Blocking out the pain in my ribs, I drew back and hit the one nearest to me. The heel of my open hand landed just under the patella itself, slanting upwards. I closed my mind to the wet crunch his knee made, like a big dog chewing through chicken bones.
He staggered back, bellowing. I reinforced the damage by smashing the point of my elbow into his thigh, dead-legging him. He went down like a knackered lift.
Unfortunately, the Scouser's reactions were faster than I'd hoped. He leapt over the fallen chair like an Olympic hopeful. By the time he landed, a wicked-looking hunting knife with a six-inch blade had magicked into his hand. Sheer rage boiled out of the holes in his ski mask, fuelled by the smoker's screamed instructions that he should kill the bitch.
The Scouser did his best to comply, cornering me by the balcony. We were in full view of the opening, silhouetted against the lights.
A brief thought flashed into my head that if a bored passenger on a bus happened to glance across the river, they could suddenly find themselves in the middle of a Hitchcockian nightmare.
I had no time to expand on that theme, mentally or otherwise. The Scouser launched a blistering attack of swipes and slashes, but he'd let his anger contaminate his judgement. He was getting wild, leaving himself more and more open. I paused momentarily. Timing was everything.
Then he thrust the knife at me once more. I dodged and it slid past my side with inches to spare. I locked my fingers round the wrist of his knife hand. Control the weapon, and you're halfway to winning the fight.
Using my own forward momentum to tip him off balance, I swept his legs out from under him and dropped him heavily onto the floor. I went forwards onto one knee with him as he went down, keeping hold of the knife hand. I now had his elbow straightened out nicely over my bent leg and I levered it hard, clawing my fingers into his wrist. Drop the knife, damn it!
He was a big tough bloke, but it's difficult to keep your mind on stabbing somebody when your elbow feels ready to explode. For a bit of extra persuasion I jabbed a knuckle into the hollow just below his ear. The combination was enough. His fingers went suddenly nerveless and the knife clattered onto the floor.
“Good boy!” I said tightly, and hit him with my clenched fist on the side of his neck. I don't know why I chose that target. It was exposed, and I took the opportunity. Striking the muscles there makes the throat contract and can leave you fighting for breath. If nothing else it's painful and worrying, but I knew at best I'd gained only a few seconds of escape time.
By this time the smoker had crawled to his feet and was hobbling forwards, looking malevolent. He was between me and the front door. I just had time to scoop up the fallen knife and fling it out over the balcony, praying there were no passing pedestrians below at the time.
Despite clutching at his throat and squawking, the Scouser didn't stay on the floor for long. He was soon back in the play. He started for me as well, and there was death in his eyes.
The balcony suddenly seemed my best option. I turned and ran the last few strides towards the opening, aware all the time that the Scouser was only a heartbeat behind me.
It seemed ironic that only that morning I'd been wary of even leaning on the rusted balcony rail for fear that it would give way. Now I swung myself over it, double handed, with a certain amount of gusto bordering on abandon. I winced as I heard the dusty graunching noise of the rail's anchor points taking the strain.
For a moment I dangled there, suspended over a drop to the pavement below that looked horrendous from this angle. Oh great idea, Fox! What the hell are you going to do now?
The Scouser made it to the balcony and he decided my next move. Now he'd had his toy taken away from him he resorted to simply punching me in the ribs, through the railing. The air gushed out of my lungs and my hands simultaneously lost their strength.
I let go, half-falling, half-slithering down the crumbling sandstone front wall of the building, my fingers scrabbling at the masonry. I managed to find a tiny crevice on top of a window lintel, and gripped on to it by the weakening strength of three fingers.
I know it's possible to support your body weight by such slender means. I've seen them do it on the telly. Unfortunately, I'm not a whipcord-thin elastic free-form climbing expert. Maybe I just needed one of those little sacks of chalk on my belt. Or is that Sumo wrestlers? Whatever, inexorably, my fingers started slipping.
The Scouser decided to put his two penny-worth in by depth-charging me with what was left of an occasional table. I ducked instinctively, my grip slackening in panic, and I plunged the final ten feet towards the pavement.
In theory, a human body falls at thirty-two feet per second, per second. This probably explains why one moment I was suspended in mid-air, and the next I was thumping down onto the flagstones, with no discernable gap in between.
I landed on my feet, but my legs were forced up and I crashed straight onto one side. Never have I been so grateful for wearing leathers. The kevlar reinforcement in key areas saved my hip and elbow from real damage, but I still hit the ground with enough violence to bash the air out of my battered lungs again.
I forced myself to my feet out of sheer bloody-mindedness. OK, so the smoker might be out of the play as far as a running chase was concerned, but the Scouser was only injured enough to make him mad. If I wanted to be able to stay moving, I had to start moving. Now.
Head thumping, I dragged myself upright, snivelling with the effort, and limped off along the frosted quay.
As a getaway it was pitifully slow. I was so numb that I didn't even register until I'd been going maybe fifty yards that I was heading the wrong way. Not towards the middle of town and the brightly lit, crowded bus station, but towards the industrial estates. Hardly likely to be Piccadilly Circus at this time on a Sunday evening.
I hesitated, nearly turned back, but then I heard the thunder of heavy feet rushing down the wooden staircase. The Scouser was coming after me. I put my head down and stumbled on.
Even in my leathers, the cold was biting. My breath was visible in clouds around me. It didn't help that the whole of the front of my shirt was soaked through. I was wheezing like a chronic consumptive on their last legs.
I ducked through the next alleyway which brought me out onto the waste ground behind the building. They'd pulled down most of the Victorian factory next door, but never really got round to finishing the job, never mind redeveloping the plot.
One piece of the building was still standing, a gable end wall, two storeys high, with part of the roof beams sticking out from it like a skeleton. The rafters hung down at a drunken angle, and there were huge cracks in the brickwork itself. I always expected to wake up one morning to find the whole thing had collapsed and saved the demolition team a job.
The ground was littered with broken bricks and debris.
It made my progress far too slow. I turned and headed for the road again, only to spot the silhouette of the Scouser moving along the pavement, obviously searching.
I held my breath, but he was in the glare of the streetlights, and I was still in the shadows. As long as I stayed here I was hidden, but it was a temporary respite.
The Scouser turned inwards, away from the river, and started coming towards me. I edged back the way I'd come, aware all the time that I was fading.
The cold was scorching my lungs and leaching the feeling out of my fingers. I'd started to shake with delayed reaction. My head was banging so hard it was making me feel sick.
All the while, I cursed myself for not hitting the Scouser harder. I could have continued the lock I had on him to its logical conclusion, and cracked his elbow joint using my knee as a fulcrum. I could have hit him in the groin while he was down on the floor. I could have fractured his clavicle, one of the easiest bones to break, or thumped him in the throat to slow down his breathing. I could even have jabbed at his eyes, which would have required little strength and given me a much better chance of evading him now.
I knew, though, that part of me had revolted against what I'd done to stop the fight at the New Adelphi Club. I just hadn't been able to bring myself to do it again. I'm sure my reasoning must have been clear and sound at the time, but now it seemed a foolish, if not deadly mistake.
I tried to creep quietly over the rough ground, while the Scouser closed on my position in a less surreptitious manner. I could see the alleyway in front of me. Only a few yards more.
At that moment, I saw the headlights of a car approaching along the quay. The extra illumination bled into the alleyway. I heard a roar of triumph from behind me, and realised that it had given away my location to the Scouser.
I abandoned all attempts at secrecy and made a run for it. I burst onto the pavement just as the car was drawing level. With my attacker only a few feet behind me, I had no choice but to keep going.
I threw myself into a forward roll, hit the front wing in a dive and clattered over the bonnet. I even had time to realise that the vehicle was a big BMW as I spilled across the bodywork.
The Scouser didn't have quite the same incentive to practice his aerobatics. He skidded to a stop on the pavement, and judged in a second that the odds had tipped against him. He turned and pelted off along the quay on foot.
The BM driver's reactions were remarkably fast. He had already slammed on the brakes by the time I made contact with his paintwork. As I bounced off the other side and tumbled into the far gutter, he had already opened the driver's door and was halfway out.
“Charlie!” he yelled. “Christ, are you all right?”
It was Marc Quinn.
Twelve
I tried to climb to my feet, but my legs wouldn't obey the usual commands. I made two attempts, like a punch-drunk boxer with the count on him. I ended up on my knees both times. The referee would have had no choice but to stop the fight.
Marc saw the state I was in at first glance and his face closed in with fury. He looked longingly after the rapidly disappearing Scouser for a moment, then moved quickly to pick me out of the gutter.
His instinct was to grab me round my ribs to lift me. The pain it caused made me cry out, pushing back away from him and ending up back where I started.
He started to swear then, amazingly inventive oaths about what he was going to do to the people who'd worked me over, as and when he ever caught up with them. It was educational to listen to even if, afterwards, I couldn't remember a single piece of invective.
Eventually, using him as a crutch, I managed to haul myself upright more or less under my own steam.
“Can you make it to the car?” he asked, his voice terse. It was only ten feet or so away, but it seemed like half a mile to go round the bonnet to the passenger side.
I took a deep breath, regretting it as my ribs protested, and nodded.
“OK, come on, take your time.” He put a gentle arm round my shoulders, keeping it light. “I'll be right here.”
I stopped suddenly and peered up at his face. “Marc, what are you doing here?” I asked. My voice seemed awfully reedy and thin. I was still shivering from the cold, which was making my ribs hurt all the more.
He gazed down at me, reaching to move my hair away from my eyes. Most of it on the right-hand side was now glued to my scalp. I daren't even begin to imagine what I looked like.
“I came to see you,” he said, smiling that slow long-burning smile of his.
My heart flip-flopped over in my chest. I couldn't help it.
Maybe it was a ploy to take my mind off things, because the next thing I knew he was pulling open the passenger door of the BM. I stopped short when I saw it had a cream leather interior.
“I can't, Marc, I'll ruin it,” I protested. Not only was half my hair plastered with blood, but I'd picked up a good layer of masonry dust sliding down the front of the building, and a liberal coating of road dirt from the gutter.
“I'll have it valeted,” he dismissed impatiently. “Now for Christ's sake lady, get in!”
I subsided into the soft upholstery without further demur. He slammed the door and moved round the bonnet to the driver's side, looking suddenly hard and dangerous. An unexpected fear needled me. Was I doing the right thing allowing myself to be put into his car so easily?
I quashed it as he climbed into the driving seat and glanced at me, the concern clear in those pale eyes.
“I think perhaps I should take you straight to Casualty,” he said.
“No!” It was a reflex. I hated the damned places. Besides, I had a good enough knowledge of my own body to recognise when an injury was serious. Those I'd sustained this evening were painful, but they were in no way life-threatening.
“Well, I need to do something with you,” he said, touching a hand to my cheek. His fingers felt so hot they almost burnt me. “You're freezing and you're in shock.”
He took my hands between his and tried to rub some warmth into them, but I yelped again. Turning them over, I realised I'd torn and scraped my palms and fingers, but I couldn't for the life of me remember doing it.
He gave me a dark look, but said nothing. Instead, he settled for just turning the car's air con control round to maximum heat and putting the fan on full blast.
We set off sedately along the quay, turning left away from the river to weave through the back streets up towards the railway station, and the castle.
By holding my hands directly over an air vent in the dash for a few minutes, I managed to persuade some sensation to return. Unfortunately, with it came a pulsating pain in my fingers. I clamped them together in my lap and tried not to think about it too much.
As the heat permeated the interior of the car, I was aware of a grinding weariness soaking down over me. “Aren't you going to ask me what that was all about?” I said tiredly.
Marc glanced sideways at me, his face lit by the eerie orange glow from the car's instruments. “I assumed you'd tell me when you were ready,” he said, concentrating on the road ahead.
“Someone at your club doesn't want me there, Marc,” I said, feeling abruptly groggy, “and I don't know why that is.”
I felt the BM react as his hands twitched on the wheel. He favoured me with a brief look. “Do you have any idea who?” he asked sharply.
“Not a clue,” I said hazily. I let my head flop back against the padded rest.
“So why do you think someone doesn't want you there?” he demanded. “Come on, Charlie, talk to me!”
I opened my leaden eyelids with an effort. “Hmm? Oh, I don't know,” I mumbled. “And I don't know what I do know, either, which Jacob thinks is half the problem.”
“Charlie,” he said dryly, “you're rambling.”
“Mm, sorry,” I muttered indistinctly. For some reason a picture of the man outside the French windows at the Lodge slid into my woolly mind. He'd worn a mask, too. “Somebody's been watching me, and I've got a bad
feeling about it,” I informed Marc with a sigh. “A very bad feeling.”
The line between consciousness and oblivion was blurring. I felt it closing in on me.
I slept.
***
It only seemed a few seconds before I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking gently.
“Charlie, come on, wake up.”
I came fully awake with a jerk, automatically tensing to strike before I recognised Marc. He backed off quickly. “It's OK, don't panic.” His voice was calm, soothing.
I realised he'd stopped the BM, and slithered further upright in my seat. I recognised the front entrance to one of the most up-market hotels in the area. His hotel.
“Why are we here?” I felt dazed, disconnected. My mind seemed to be working at half speed.
