Shattered

8

He spoke as if to himself. “He’s six feet tall, maybe an inch or two more. Brown hair. Dark eyes. Twenty-eight to thirty-four years, I’d say. Personable except for recent injury to right side of jaw which has been medically attended to and is healing.”

He was talking into a small microphone held in the palm of his hand. I let him see that I understood that he was describing me in case I attacked him in any fashion. The notion that I might do that would have made me laugh on any other day.

“He arrived in a gray Rover.” He repeated Jim’s registration number and then described my clothes.

When he stopped I said, “He’s a glassblower named Gerard Logan and can be found at Logan Glass, Broadway, Worcestershire. And who are you?”

He was the voice on the telephone. He laughed at my dry tone and stuffed the microphone away in a pocket. He gave himself a name, George Lawson-Young, and a title, Professor of Respiratory Medicine.

“And 2355697?” I asked. “Does it have an address?”

Even with modern technology he didn’t know how I’d found him.

“Old-fashioned perseverance and guesswork,” I said. “I’ll tell you later in return for the gen on Adam Force.”

I liked the professor immediately, feeling none of the reservations that had troubled me with Force. Professor Lawson-Young had no ill will that I could see, but on the contrary let his initial wariness slip away. My first impression of good-humored and solid sense progressively strengthened, so that when he asked what my interest in Adam Force was I told him straightforwardly about Martin’s promise to keep safe Doctor Force’s tape.

“Martin wanted me to keep it for him instead,” I said, “and when he died the tape came into my hands. Force followed me to Broadway and took his tape back again, and I don’t know where it is.”

Out on the road Jim in the gray Rover drove slowly by, his pale face through the window on watch on my behalf.

“I came with a bodyguard,” I said, waving reassurance to the road.

Professor Lawson-Young, amused, confessed he had only to yell down his microphone for assistance to arrive at once. He seemed as glad as I was that he would not have to use it. His tight muscles loosened. My own Worthington-Pigeon-driven alertness went to sleep.

The professor said, “How did you cut your face so deeply?”

I hesitated. What I’d done in the backyard of 19 Lorna Terrace sounded too foolish altogether. Because I didn’t reply Lawson-Young asked again with sharper interest, pressing for the facts like any dedicated newsman. I said undramatically that I’d been in a fight and come off worst.

He asked next what I’d been fighting about, and with whom, his voice full of the authority that he no doubt needed in his work.

Evading the whole truth, I gave him at least a part of it. “I wanted to find Doctor Force, and in the course of doing that I collided with a water tap. Clumsy, I’m afraid.”

He looked at me intently with his head on one side. “You’re lying to me, I’m sorry to say.”

“Why do you think so?”

“It’s unusual to fight a water tap.”

I gave him a half-strength grin. “OK then, I got hit with one that was still on a hose. It’s unimportant. I learned how to find Adam Force, and I talked to him yesterday in Lynton.”

“Where in Lynton? In that new nursing home?”

“Phoenix House.” I nodded. “Doctor Force’s clinic looks designed for children.”

“Not for children. For mentally handicapped patients. He does good work there with the elderly, I’m told.”

“They seemed pretty happy, it’s true.”

“So what’s your take-away opinion?”

I gave it without much hesitation. “Force is utterly charming when he wants to be, and he’s also a bit of a crook.”

“Only a bit?” The professor sighed. “Adam Force was in charge here of a project aimed at abolishing snoring by using fine optical fibers and microlasers...” He briefly stopped. “I don’t want to bore you...”

My own interest, however, had awoken sharply as in the past I’d designed and made glass equipment for that sort of inquiry. When I explained my involvement, the professor was in his turn astonished. He enlarged into detail the work that Force had been busy with and had stolen.

“We’d been experimenting with shining a microlaser down a fine optical fiber placed in the soft tissues of the throat. The microlaser gently warms the tissues, which stiffens them, and that stops a person from snoring. What Adam Force stole was our results of the trials to find the optimum laser light wavelength needed to penetrate the tissues and heat them to the precise temperature necessary... do you follow?”

“More or less.”

He nodded. “A reliable way of abolishing snoring would be invaluable for severe sufferers. Adam Force stole such data and sold it to a firm of marketers whose business it is to advertise and inform prospective buyers of goods available. Force sold our latest but incomplete data to people we had dealt with occasionally before and who had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. Adam produced the right paperwork. It was weeks before the theft was discovered and really no one could believe it when we went to the marketers and they told us they had already bought the material and paid Adam Force for what we were now trying to sell them.”

“So you sacked him,” I commented.

“Well, we should have. He must have thought we might, but he was crucial to our research program.” The professor, however, looked regretful, not enraged.

I said, “Let me guess, you basically let him off. You didn’t prosecute him because you all liked him so much.”

Lawson-Young ruefully nodded. “Adam apologized more or less on his knees and agreed to pay the money back in installments, if we didn’t take him to court.”

“And did he?”

In depression the professor said, “He paid on the dot for two months, and then we found he was trying to sell some even more secret information... and I mean priceless information in world terms...” He stopped abruptly, apparently silenced by the enormity of Adam Force’s disloyalty.

Eventually he went on. “He repaid us for our generosity by stealing the most recent, the most dynamite-laden data in our whole laboratory, and we are certain that he is offering this work to the highest bid he can raise around the world. This is the information recorded on the tape Force took back from you, and it is this tape we have been praying you would find.”

I said with incredulity, “But you didn’t know that I existed.”

“We did know you existed. Our investigators have been very diligent. But we weren’t sure you hadn’t been indoctrinated by Adam, like your friend Stukely.”

“Martin?”

“Oh yes. Force can be utterly charming and persuasive, as you know. We think it likely he also swindled Stukely of a fairly large sum of money, saying it was to be applied to our research.”

“But,” I protested, “Martin wasn’t a fool.”

“It is quite likely that Stukely had no idea that the contents of the tape had been stolen. Believe me, you don’t need to be a fool to be taken in by a con man. I wouldn’t consider myself a fool, but he took me in. I treated him as a friend.”

I said, “Wherever did Martin meet Doctor Force? I don’t suppose you know.”

“I actually do. They met at a fund-raising dinner for cancer research. Adam Force was there raising money on behalf of the charity, and Stukely was there as a guest of a man for whom he raced, who was also a patron of the charity. I too as it happens am a patron, and I also saw Martin Stukely briefly on that evening.”

I vaguely remembered Martin mentioning the dinner but hadn’t paid much attention. It was typical of Martin, though, to make friends in unexpected places. I had myself, after all, met him in a jury room.

After a while Lawson-Young said, “We searched absolutely everywhere for proof that Adam had in his possession material that belonged to the laboratory. We know... we’re ninety percent certain... that he recorded every relevant detail onto the videotape that he entrusted to the care of Martin Stukely.”

There was nothing, I heard with relief, about trying to make me reveal its whereabouts through the use of black mask methods or threats of unmerciful dentistry. I was aware, though, that the former tension in the professor’s muscles had returned, and I wondered if he thought I was fooling him, as Adam Force had done.

I said simply, “Force has the tape. Ask him. But yesterday he told me he’d recorded a sports program on top of your formulae and conclusions, and all that remained on the tape now was horse racing.”

“Oh God.”

I said, “I don’t know that I believe him.”

After a few moments the professor said, “How often can you tell if someone’s lying?”

“It depends who they are and what they’re lying about.”

“Mm,” he said.

I glanced back in my mind to a long line of half-truths, my own included.

“Discard the lies,” George Lawson-Young said, smiling, “and what you’re left with is probably the truth.”

After a while he repeated, “We’ve searched absolutely everywhere for proof that Adam had in his possession material that belongs to the laboratory. We believe that he recorded every relevant detail onto the videotape because one of our researchers thought he saw him doing it, but as he works in an altogether different field he believed Adam when he said he was making routine notes. Adam himself entrusted a tape into the care of Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races. When Stukely died we learned from asking around that his changing room valet had passed the tape on to Stukely’s friend, as previously planned.” He paused. “So as you are the friend, will you tell us where best to look for the missing tape? Better still, bring it to us yourself... as we believe you can.”

I said baldly, “I can’t. I think Force has it.”

Lawson-Young shivered suddenly in the cold damp wind, and my own thoughts had begun to congeal. I proposed that we find somewhere warmer if we had more to say and the professor, after cogitation and consultation with his microphone, offered me a visit to his laboratory, if I should care to go.

Not only would I like to go, I felt honored to be asked, a reaction clearly visible on my face from the professor’s own return expression. His trust however didn’t reach as far as stepping into my car, so he went in one that arrived smoothly from nowhere, and I followed with Jim.

The professor’s research laboratory occupied the ground floor of a fairly grand nineteenth-century town house with a pillared entrance porch. Antiquity stopped right there on the doorstep: everything behind the front door belonged to the future.

George Lawson-Young, very much the professor on his own turf, introduced me to his team of young research doctors whose chief if not only interest in my existence lay in my having long ago invented a way of making perfect glass joins between tiny tubes of differing diameters so that liquid or gasses would move at a desired speed from one tube to the next.

They hadn’t much else of my work there, but the words Logan Glass etched on mini pipettes and a few specialized test tubes got me accepted as a sort of practitioner rather than simply a sightseer. Anyway, my ability to identify things like vacutaires, cell separators, tissue culture chambers and distillation flasks meant that when I asked what exactly had been stolen the second time by Adam Force, I got told.

“Actually, we now think it was the third thing,” a young woman in a white coat murmured sorrowfully. “It seems likely that he also took out of here the formula of our new asthma drug aimed at preventing permanent scar tissue occurring on the airways of chronic asthmatics. Only recently did we realize what had happened, as at the time, of course, we believed his assurances that he was borrowing some finished work from last year.”

The nods all around were indulgent. In spite of all, there were friendly faces for Adam Force. It was the professor himself, whose eyes had opened, who told me finally what I’d been in need of knowing all along.

“The videotape made and stolen by Adam Force showed the formation of a particular tissue culture and its ingredients. The tissue culture was of cancer cells of the commoner sorts of cancer like that of the lung and the breast. They were concerned with the development of genetic mutations that render the cancer cell lines more sensitive to common drugs. All common cancers may be curable once the mutated gene is implanted into people who already have the cancer. The tape probably also shows photographs of the chromatography of the different components of the cancer cell genetic constituents. It is very complicated. At first sight it looks like rubbish, except to the educated eye. It is, unfortunately, quite likely anyone might override the ‘Don’t record on top of this’ tab.”

He lost me halfway through the technical details, but I at least understood that the tape that could save the world contained the cure for a host of cancers.

I asked the professor, “Is this for real?”

“It’s a significant step forward,” he said.

I pondered, “But if Force is going around asking millions for it, is it worth millions?”

Somberly, Lawson-Young said, “We don’t know.”

Adam Force had said the same thing, “I don’t know.” Not a lie, it seemed, but a statement that the process hadn’t yet been extensively tested. The tape was a record of a possibility, or ot an almost certainty whose worth was still a gamble.

I said, “But you do have backup copies of everything that’s on that tape, don’t you? Even if the tape itself should now show horse racing?”

Almost as if he were surrendering to an inevitable execution, the professor calmly stated the guillotine news. “Before he left with the videotape, Adam destroyed all our at-present irreplaceable records. We need that tape, and I hope to God you’re right that he’s lying. It’s two years’ work. Others are working along these lines, and we would be beaten to the breakthrough. We’d more likely lose the millions we might have earned.”

Into a short silence the telephone buzzed. George Lawson-Young picked up the receiver, listened and mutely handed it to me. The caller was Jim in a high state of fuss.

He said with lively alarm, “That medic you saw yesterday, the one with the white beard?”

“Yes?”

“He’s here in the street.”

“Bugger him... What’s he doing?”

“Waiting. He’s in a car parked fifty yards up the road, facing towards you, and there’s a big bruiser sitting next to him. He’s got another car waiting and facing towards you, but coming the other way. It’s a classic squeeze setup, with you in the middle. So... what do you want me to do?”

“Where exactly are you?” I asked. “To reach you, do I turn left or right?”

“Left. I’m four cars in front of White-Beard, pointing towards the door you went in at. I’m parked there, but there’s a parking warden creeping about. I’m in a no-parking zone here, which White-Beard isn’t, and I can’t afford another ticket, it’s not good for my business.”

“Stay where you are,” I said. “Move only if you have to, because of the parking warden. Doctor Force saw you and your car yesterday. It can’t be helped.”

Jim’s voice rose. “White-Beard’s got out of his car. What shall I do? He’s coming this way...”

“Jim,” I said flatly, “don’t panic. Also don’t look at Doctor Force if he comes near you and don’t open the window. Keep on talking to me, and if you have anything near you that you can read, read it aloud to me now.”

“Jeez.”

Lawson-Young’s eyebrows were up by his hairline.

I said to him, “Adam Force is in the road outside here, alarming my driver.” And I didn’t say that on our last encounter the doctor had seen me off with a poisonous-looking syringe.

Jim’s voice wobbled in my ear with the opening paragraphs of the Rover’s instruction manual and then rose again an octave as he said, “He’s outside my window, he’s rapping on it... Mr. Logan, what shall I do?”

“Keep on reading.”

I gave the receiver to the professor and asked him to continue listening, and without wasting time I hurried from the part of the laboratory where we’d been standing, along the hallway and out into the street. Along to my left Adam Force stood in the roadway tapping hard on the window of the gray Rover on the driver’s side and clearly getting agitated at the lack of response from Jim.

I walked fast along the sidewalk, and then, strolling the last part, crossed the road and came up quietly behind Doctor White-Beard and, as I’d done to Victor at Taunton station, said, “Hello,” at his shoulder.

Worthington and Tom Pigeon wouldn’t have approved. Adam Force spun around in astonishment.

“Are you looking for me?” I asked.

Inside the car Jim in great agitation was stabbing with his finger towards the lab’s front door and the road beyond. Traffic in this secondary road was light, but one of the approaching cars, Jim was indicating to me, was ultra-bad news.

“Adam Force,” I said loudly, “is too well known in this street,” and with a total lack of complicated advance planning, and with unadulterated instinct, I grabbed the charming doctor by the wrist, spun him around and ended with him standing facing the oncoming car with his arm twisted up behind him, held in the strongest grip resulting from years of maneuvering heavy molten glass.

Adam Force yelled, at first with pain and then, also, with bargaining surrender. “You’re hurting me. Don’t do it. I’ll tell you everything. Don’t do it... God... Let me go, please.”

In between the two phases, from defiance to entreaty, a small object fell from the hand I’d gripped. It lay in the gutter quite close to a storm-drain grating, and I’d have paid it no attention were it not for Force trying hard to kick it down through the grating into the sewer, to be forever lost.

I didn’t know what he meant when he said “everything,” but I didn’t in the least mind learning. He screeched again under my jerking pressure and I wondered whatever Professor Lawson-Young was making of it, if he were still listening. The advancing car stopped at the sight of Adam Force’s predicament and the four cars behind it exercised their horns, the drivers impatient, not knowing what was going on.

“Everything,” I prompted Force from behind his ear.

“Rose,” he began, and then thought better of it. Rose would frighten anyone.

I jerked his arm fiercely to encourage him and, with some dismay, I saw the big bruiser, now lumbering out of his car to come to his aid, to be Norman Osprey, with his gorilla-type shoulder development. Over my shoulder I could see the second car of the classic squeeze moving towards me. In consequence of these unwelcome surprises I jerked my captive’s arm yet again, then feared to break or dislocate his shoulder. There were tears of real pain in the doctor’s eyes.

Imploring for release, he half said, half sobbed, desperately, “I got the cyclopropane gas for Rose... I took it from the clinic’s pharmacy... I can’t see red from green, but I’m sure of orange... now let me go.”

It was hard to hear him distinctly because of the street noises and the blaring horns, and his “everything” only confirmed what had already seemed likely, but I kept the pressure on just long enough for him to shriek out the answer I badly wanted to the question, “How come you know Rose?”

To him it seemed unimportant. He answered impatiently, “Her sister Gina came with her mother-in-law to my clinic; I met Rose at Gina’s house.”

Satisfied, I was faced with a fast, unharmed disengagement. The cars had advanced until they were radiator to radiator and going nowhere. The driver of the second was hurriedly disembarking, and to my horror, I saw that it was Rose. Uninvolved cars made a constant cacophony. The busy parking warden, notebook to the ready, spotted the fracas from a distance and veered back towards Jim and his zone infringement.

Norman Osprey, a mountain on the move, charged towards Force and myself to release the doctor and maybe continue with the entertainment Tom Pigeon and his dogs had interrupted at Broadway.

Not seeing anything except straight ahead, the warden and Norman the bookmaker bumped into each other violently, which slowed their pace and purpose while they cursed their mutual carelessness.

Jim unhelpfully kept his eyes fixed faithfully down on his instruction manual, as I’d told him, and went on steadfastly reading.

I tried screaming at him to gain his attention, but uselessly, and in the end I let out the loudest possible London-rain taxi whistle, which pierced even Jim’s concentration.

“Window,” I shouted.

He at last understood, but it took him eons to switch on the ignition and press the window-lowering button. Rose started running. The warden unwound herself from Norman Osprey. Car horns deafened because of the blockage of the highway.

I shouted at my driver, “Jim, get the car out of here. I’ll phone you.”

Jim suddenly proved his stunt-driving skills weren’t a rumor. With not much more than two hand spans’ clearance he locked the wheels of his Rover and circled like a circus horse bumping over the sidewalk, brushing me and my captive strongly out of the way with the rear wing and leaving us standing where the car had been, with the white-bearded doctor no longer in agony but still not going anywhere while I held him gripped. Jim’s taillight flashed briefly at the first corner as he slid around it and left the scene.

Everyone else seemed to be running and shouting to no real purpose. I let go of Force’s wrist while at the same time shoving him heavily into the joint arms of the warden and Osprey, with a bounce-off weight that unbalanced them all.

In that disorganized few seconds I bent down, scooped up the small object Force had dropped and ran, ran as if sprinting off the starting blocks on an athletic track. It was only the unexpectedness of my speed, I thought, that made the difference. I ran, dodging cars and irate drivers, swerving around Rose’s grasp like a player evading a tackle in a football game, and believing — making myself believe — that I was fit enough to outrun them all, as long as no busybody stranger tripped me up.

I didn’t have to test fate too much. The front door of the laboratory house swung open ahead of me, with George Lawson-Young, still with the telephone clutched in his hand, coming out under the pillared porch, looking my way and beckoning me to safety. I fairly bolted through his heavy shining black-painted door, and ended breathless and laughing in his hall.

He closed the door. “I can’t see what there is to laugh about,” he said.

“Life’s a toss-up.”

“And today it came up heads?”

I liked the professor. I grinned and held out to him the small object I’d salvaged from the gutter, asking him with moderate urgency, “Can you find out what this contains?”

He looked with shock at what I’d brought him, and I nodded as if in confirmation that I’d got it right. He asked a shade austerely if I knew what he was with great care holding.

“Yes. It’s a sort of syringe. You can put the needle into any liquid drug and suck it into the bubble,” I said. “Then you push the needle into the patient and squeeze the bubble to deliver the drug. Veterinarians sometimes use them on horses that are upset by the sight of an ordinary hypodermic syringe.”

He said, “You’re right. You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I was with Martin once...” I broke off. So much of my life seemed to have touched Martin’s.

Lawson-Young made no comment about Martin but said, “These little syringes can be used too on manic patients, to make them manageable and calm them down.”

Phoenix House treated patients with mental illnesses. Adam Force had access to a well-stocked pharmacy.

George Lawson-Young turned away from me and, holding the tiny balloon with great care, led the way back to that part of the laboratory that held the gas chromatograph.

The thumbnail-sized balloon was full still of liquid, and was also wet outside from lying in the gutter. George Lawson-Young laid it carefully in a dish and asked one of his young doctors to identify the baby balloon’s contents as soon as possible.

“Should it be one of several forms of poison,” he warned me, “it might be impossible to find out what it is.”

“It surely had to be something already in the Phoenix House pharmacy,” I said. “It was only yesterday afternoon that I met Force. He hadn’t much time to mobilize anything too fancy.”

The balloon’s contents raised little but smiles.

It took the young research doctor barely ten minutes to come back with an identification. “It’s insulin,” he said confidently. “Plain ordinary insulin, as used by diabetics.”

“Insulin!” I exclaimed, disappointed. “Is that all?”

Both the young research doctor and the professor smiled indulgently. The professor said, “If you have diabetes, the amount of insulin in that syringe might send you into a permanent coma. If you don’t have diabetes, there’s enough to kill you.”

“To kill?”

“Yes, certainly.” Lawson-Young nodded. “That amount was a lethal dose. It’s reasonable to suppose it was intended for you, not your chauffeur, but I can hardly believe it of Adam.” He sounded shattered. “We knew he’d steal, but to kill...” He shook his head. “Are you sure that syringe came from him? You didn’t just find it lying in the road?”

“I’m positive he was holding it in his hand, and I dislodged it.”

The professor and I by that time were sitting on swiveling chairs in the professor’s personal office-like room section of the laboratory.

“Actually,” I murmured, “the big question is why?”

George Lawson-Young couldn’t say.

“Do me a favor,” he finally begged. “Start from the beginning.”

“I will phone my driver first.”

I used my mobile. When Jim answered his car phone he sounded first relieved that I was free and talking to him, and second, anxious that he was going to be late home for his wife’s risotto, and third, worried about where he was going to find me safe and on my own. I was glad enough that he proposed to wait for me. The professor, taking the phone, gave Jim pinpointing instructions for one hour’s time, and suggested to me that I waste none of it.

“It’s a tale of two tapes,” I tentatively began.

“Two?” said the professor.

“Yes, two,” I replied, but then hesitated.

“Do go on, then.” The professor was in a natural hurry.

“One was filmed here and stolen by Adam Force,” I said. “He persuaded Martin Stukely to keep it safe for him, so that it couldn’t be found.”

“We had obtained a Search and Seizure Order from the court and had already started searching everywhere for it,” said Lawson-Young, “including in Adam’s own home, but we didn’t ever think of it being in the care of a jockey.”

“That must be why he did it,” I said. “But as I understand it, Martin thought Force’s tape would be safer still with me, a friend who hasn’t four inquisitive children.” And no talkative or quarrelsome wife, I could have added. But, I thought, would Martin have really given me the tape if he knew the contents were stolen?

The professor smiled.

I continued, “Martin Stukely received the stolen tape from Force at Cheltenham races and gave it into the temporary care of his valet while he went out to ride a horse called Tallahassee, in the race from which he didn’t return.”

He nodded. “When Martin Stukely died his valet, Eddie, gave the tape to you, as he knew that’s what Martin intended.

“Eddie the valet,” the professor went on, “was eventually one of the people that our investigators talked to and he said he didn’t know anything about any stolen laboratory tape. He said he thought he was handling a tape that you yourself had made, which explained how to copy an ancient and priceless necklace.”

“That’s the second tape,” I said. “It’s also missing.”

“Eddie had seen your duplicate of the necklace in the jockeys’ changing rooms. And incidentally” — George Lawson-Young’s smile illuminated his little office — “he said your copy of the necklace was stunning. Perhaps you will show it to me one day, when all this is over.”

I asked him what he would consider “over,” and his smile disappeared. “For me it will be over when we find the tape of our work.”

He was aware, I supposed, that it was comparatively easy to make duplicates of videotapes. And that the knowledge recorded on them was like the contents of Pandora’s box; once out, it couldn’t be put back. The stolen tape itself might now show racing. The records of the cancer research might already be free in the world, and would never again be under the professor’s control. For him, perhaps, it was already over.

For me, I thought, it would be over when Rose and Adam Force left me alone... but abruptly, out of nowhere, the specter of the fourth black mask floated into my consciousness. It wouldn’t be over for me until his mask came off.

As casually as I could I mentioned Number Four to the professor, fearing he would discount my belief, but instead he took it seriously.

“Add your Number Four into all equations,” he instructed, “and what do you get in the way of answers? Do you get a reason for Force to want you dead? Do you get a reason for anyone to attack you? Think about it.”

I thought that that method must be what he used in nearly all research: if I added in an X factor, an “unknown,” into all I’d seen and heard and hadn’t wholly understood, what would I get?

Before I could really learn the technique, one of the young doctors came to tell me and the professor that Adam Force was standing on the sidewalk opposite with a thin woman with brown hair — my friend Rose. Doctor Force was staring at the entrance of his former workplace as if deciding how best to storm the Bastille. The young doctor, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy devising an escape from the fortress.

The professor said thoughtfully, “Adam knows his way round this house and its environs at least as well as any of us. He’ll have stationed the other man, the one we can’t see now, at the rear door into the mews. So how do we get Mr. Logan out of here without Adam Force being aware of it?”

The brilliant researchers came up with several solutions that required Tarzan-like swinging over an abyss, but with civil regard for each other’s brains, they voted unanimously for the exit I actually took.

The glowingly pretty female doctor whose idea I followed gave me life-threatening directions. “Go up the stairs. Beside the top of the staircase, on the sixth floor, there’s a bolted door. Unbolt it. Open it. You’ll find yourself on the roof. Slide down the tiles until you meet a parapet. Crawl along behind the parapet there, so that the man in the mews doesn’t see you. Crawl to the right. Keep your head down. There are seven houses joined together. Go along behind their parapets until you come to the fire escape at the end. Go down it. There’s a bolt mechanism that lets the last part of the iron ladder slide down to the pavement. When you’re down, shove the last part of the ladder up again until it clicks. My car is parked in the mews. I’ll drive out in half an hour. You should be on the ground there by then, out of sight of Doctor Force. I’ll pick you up and go to meet your driver. When I pick you up, lie on the floor, so that my car looks empty except for me.”

Everyone nodded.

I shook hands with George Lawson-Young. He gave me multiple contact numbers and mentioned with a grin that I already had the phone number of the lab. He would expect me to find the stolen tape. Deduction and intuition would do it.

I said, “What a hope!”

“Our only hope,” he added soberly.

The author of my escape and a couple of her colleagues came up to the top floor with me in high good spirits and unbolted the door to the roof.

Cheerfully, but in whispers because of the man in the mews far below, the researchers helped me slide down the gently sloping roof tiles to reach the parapet along the edge. Seeing me safely on my knees there, they happily waved good-bye and bolted the top-floor door behind me.

It was true I could have crawled along on my hands and knees, but I would have been visible to Norman Osprey waiting below. She, my savior, being tiny, hadn’t realized that I was almost double her body size. To be invisible I would have to go on my stomach, as the height of the parapet was barely the length of a forearm.

I sweated and trembled along on my stomach within the parapet’s scanty cover and had to freeze my nerves and imagination to zero in order to cross crumbling bits of old mortar. It was a long way down to the ground.

Dusk gathered in unwary corners and made matters worse.

The seven houses seemed like fifty.

When at last I reached the fire escape, I’d begun to think that falling over the parapet would be less terrifying than inching along so precariously behind it.

At least, I thought grimly, if Adam Force had ever been up on the laboratory house’s roof, he wouldn’t expect me to have gone up there myself.

My dear pretty savior, on picking up my shaky self, remarked critically that I’d taken my time on the journey. My dry mouth found it impossible to reply. She apologized that the recent rain had drenched the roof and wet my clothes. Think nothing of it, I croaked. She switched on the headlights and the heater. I gradually stopped shivering — both from cold and from fear.

We found Jim at the rendezvous in his usual state of agitation. My savior, handing me over, reported that the fun escape had been a great success. She wouldn’t accept anything for petrol. She did accept an absolutely heartfelt hug of gratitude, and a long, long kiss.