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.
If I had a penny.
Quite suddenly I started to laugh. Kneeling beside the bed, I was overcome with the sheer, ludicrous perversity of my position. How did the rhyme go? Water, water quench fire, fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat dog, dog won’t bite pig, pig won’t get over the stile, and I shan’t get home tonight.
When I had finished laughing I examined the bed once more. It occurred to me that something might be done with the brass knobs. I think what put it into my head was that at school we had slept in beds of much this mark, and it had been one of our ploys to unscrew the knobs, and leave notes for each other inside the shank of the post. It occurred to me that if the knob was indeed hollow, it might supply just the edge I wanted.
The first one I tried was stiff, but I could tell that it was made to move, I exerted pressure, and started it. Quietly, quietly. I dared not hurry for fear of making a noise. At last the knob was clear. I shook it, and a folded spill of paper fell on to the floor.
With fingers that hardly seemed to belong to me I unfolded the paper. Then I carried it across to the window and spread it clumsily out on the sill.
It started without preamble:
“I wonder if you will catch up? You are such a devilish determined person that I believe you will. A slow starter, Philip, but I’ve never known anything in this world to stop you when once you get going. As you will gather, I’m writing this as my last will and testament. This is the end of the road. I’m afraid I know something that Dru will stop at nothing to extract, and I have not got enough confidence in my powers of detachment to face him again. Luckily I am equipped to deal with this situation.”
(They must have found the cyanide capsule after Colin had used it. That, of course, was why they had examined my teeth so carefully).
“It’s quite possible that this will all be old news to you. It may already have reached you by another route. More by luck than judgement I managed to tip the wink to one of Schneidermeister’s boys. He was on hand when they unloaded me from the boat. He couldn’t help me, but the word should get back, through their frontier networks. I doubt it can be in time to do me any good, but I hope it may stop someone else dropping down the same hole.
The main thing, as you have probably guessed, is to deal with Trüe. You realise that she was selling us all up the river? I confess it came as a complete shock to me. But I am not sure that I feel able to judge her. Her father and mother (did she tell you they were dead?) are very much alive, and stand surety to her masters for her good behaviour.”
(Yes, I think I had guessed. She had sold her body to me so coldly that it could not have been for other than adequate consideration.)
“Nothing more to say, Philip, and this pen is running out.”
Then a scrawl which might have been “Goodbye” or “Goodnight.”
I refolded the paper, very carefully, and put it into my pocket. Then I picked up the brass knob, inserted its hollow edge behind the wire of the bed spring, and twisted until the wire came loose; bent open the wire and drew it out. Then I went across to the window, fiddled the end of the wire behind the wooden slat, and worked the slat out far enough to get a finger under it. It was only a question of time and patience before I had loosened the wood enough to lift it out. (It was simply held by two short nails, and was, I fancy, left like that for convenience when a sash cord needed mending.)
On reflection, I decided, at the cost of a little extra time and labour, to take out both sides and remove the bottom window bodily. As long as I was fiddling with one side only I was in deadly danger of making some noise that would bring my guard out of his uneasy dreams of beer and sauerkraut.
When I had got both the side-slats out, I raised the bottom window as high as it would go, thus lowering the counterweights until they rested on the sill. Then I untied the cords and, holding them in one hand, lowered the window again until the cords ran out of the pulleys at the top. Then I lifted the whole window clear and stood it against the wall behind the door. Even if my guard happened to look at the window, I did not think it would have been easy for him to see that one half was gone entirely.
Then I lifted out the left-hand sash weight. It was a trifle shorter than I had hoped, a fat, cylindrical pig of lead with a loop at the top for the cord.
Before using it I swathed it carefully with a long strip off my blanket and then inserted the tip between the two top rails of the centre piece of the bed back and pressed gently downwards.
Both bars bent, but neither gave way entirely.
I moved my lever up to one end, and tried again. Flushed with success, I forgot all caution. There was an appallingly loud crack.
I held my breath.
It had sounded like a gun going off. If that didn’t wake the guard, he was a good sleeper. I think it did something to his subconscious, for I heard the rattle of a chair down the corridor. Then blessed silence. I gave him a full five minutes to settle back into dreamland before I moved again. Then I found that the results exceeded my expectations. The bottom of the two cross bars had broken clean away. The top one was so far bent up that I could draw out all four of the uprights. The middle ones came easily. The two end ones needed more work, but they came finally. I simply took their tops and bent them, one by one, out of their sockets.
I suppose that I assumed that having got so far the other bars would somehow come too. I was wrong. The side portions were independent of the centre and, since they had only one cross bar I was unable to get any purchase for my home-made lever. I tried to bend the bars separately, but they were beyond my strength.
When the sweat ran cold down my face and I found my fingers trembling with the effort I had wasted, I pulled myself up.
It was maddening to be so near and yet so far. Four pegs for fifteen feet. An acrobatic monkey might have made it. Not me. I should need at least seven – preferably nine.
And then I remembered old Rannecker’s account of how he had got himself singlehanded out of a crevasse on the Costa Brava. Captive pitons! Could I do it? Dare I do it? Using proper equipment, with rings at the piton ends and nylon rope it was perilous enough. Rannecker did it to save his life, and it was the last time he ever climbed alone. But he had covered sixty feet, shifting his pitons twelve times. I had to go fifteen feet and should have to make, perhaps, only three independent moves.
The sweat stood out on me again as I thought of it. A climb with pitons is a thing outside the experience of the ordinary mountaineer in this country. The placing of an isolated peg might be tolerated in an emergency. That is all. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to make a straight climb up a sheer face using pegs all the way. You make it in exactly the same way as a climb with an ice axe. First, you cut grips for right hand and right foot; then, using the grips you have cut, fashion further grips, higher up, for left hand and left foot; and so on, whilst strength and nerve last. When working with pitons the same process is employed, a peg being driven instead of a slot being cut. The effort is the same. The difficulty is simply that you must carry with you sufficient pegs for the whole journey.
And that was where Rannecker’s ingenuity came in. He had only four pegs and he had sixty foot to cover. Therefore he attached a length of cord to each peg and dragged the pegs he stood on with him as he went; using the same pegs over and over again.
But he was using mountaineering gear. Not soft iron rods broken from a bedstead and lengths of rotten sash cord.
I took another look at my watch, and thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks. It was already nearly a quarter to four.
If I was going to make the effort I had about an hour in hand. Between half-past four and five would be the ideal time. There would be just enough light to see what I was doing. And perhaps even a kindly early morning mist to seal the eyes of any watchers on the ground.
First I must bend the ends of two of my bars far enough round to take a cord without slipping.
This was difficult, but not impossible. I pushed each bar in turn back into the slot and bent it as far as I dared. Then I tore the sash cords out of their grooves in the side of the window, jerking the nails out, carefully, one by one. I had thought, to start with, that I should need to cut them, but it now occurred to me that I only needed to rope the bottom two pitons.
The next question was whether I climbed with shoes or without. There were dangers both ways. The danger of slipping if I kept them on. The dangers of bruising and of cramp if I dispensed with them.
In the end I decided on a compromise. I took out the thick cork undersole from each shoe and put it inside my woollen sock. This gave me a grip and afforded a degree of protection. Incidentally, it also solved the question of the mallet. A heavy shoe, the heel muffled in several thicknesses of blanket, was as good a hammer as I could have devised.
I was well aware that if once I stopped to think I should never go. So I gave myself no chances.
I put the spare shoe into my trouser pocket, tied the ends of the two cords to my wrists, took my home-made pitons in one hand and my shoe in the other, and stepped out on to the window sill.