The Splintered Sunglasses Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 11
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He had just left the coffee-and-cigar-smelling closeness of the drawing room when he froze back into the shadows beneath the stairs. Through the French windows leading to the terrace, he saw the shadow of a man fall across the flagstones as one of the guards crossed the corner of the moonlit lawn. In a way it was nice to have his suspicions confirmed—but it gave him quite a shock and made him realize afresh the difficulty of his task.
Upstairs again he picked up his shoes from the landing and slung them around his neck by the laces. Outside Carlsen's door he could hear a steady and even snoring. The girl's was ajar, and it was more than ten minutes before he was satisfied that the faint sounds of breathing were deep and regular enough to mean that she slept. But at last he was ready. It was time to act. Climbing on to the newel post at the head of the stairs, he supported himself against the wall with one hand and pushed at the trapdoor with the brass head of the cue-rest.
He had seen that the door was of the counterbalanced kind that would stay open as soon as it had been pushed past the vertical instead of falling over with a slam on to the floor of the loft. But it remained to be seen in practice whether the mechanism was working properly! He pushed a little harder. With the tiniest of creaks, the trapdoor freed itself from its frame and swung upwards into darkness.
Straining, Solo fed up the long wooden handle of the cue-rest. The opening yawned wider and wider still; the door rose higher and higher. When it was almost vertical, presenting the minimum face to his thrust, the metal "x" of the rest slipped on the painted wood with a slight scraping sound. Solo froze; Carlsen gave an extra loud snore and turned over in his sleep; and a moment later the door fell away from the cue-rest and homed in the open position against the pressure of its spring-loading.
The agent realized that he had been holding his breath, and released a lungful of air in a long sigh. He lowered the cue-rest carefully to the floor and leaned it against the wall. And then he prepared to jump....
Balanced awkwardly on the newel post with one stockinged foot on either side of the wooden ball decorating it, he was in a poor position for a spring. But it had to be done. The trapdoor was about two feet above the tips of his fingers as he stood there with outstretched arms. Tensing the muscles of his toes, he flexed his knees, drew a deep breath... and leaped upwards!
The sole of one foot slipped slightly on the polished wood as he took off, so that it was the fingers of his left hand only which hit the frame of the trapdoor, clenched, and frenziedly hung on.
For a timeless moment, he swung over the stairwell, his whole weight on the fingers of his left hand. If the shrieking muscles and sinews and bones of his five fingers couldn't hold him, he would drop to the hall below, and such a fall—even if it didn't break his back—would bring the household around him before he could drag enough breath into his lungs to cry out!
With the sweat pouring down his temples into his eyes, he scrabbled for a hold with his right hand, found it, and then began the nerve-wracking task of hauling his body up on to a level with his hands.
By the time he had managed to drag himself up out of the moonlit dusk of the landing and flop down in the musty darkness of the loft, the muscles of his forearms and biceps were trembling uncontrollably. For two minutes he lay there panting. Then he rose cautiously to his knees and lowered the trapdoor into place again.
Twenty minutes later, after what had seemed an eternity of groping and fumbling in the dark, always fearing that he would step on a joist that creaked or put a foot through the plaster of a ceiling, he was letting himself out on to a slope of tiled roof through a tiny attic dormer.
The moon, riding high in a gap between banks of cloud, was two or three days past the full, its milky light streaming down to throw stables and wall and garage and trees into sharp relief, like the cardboard cutouts of a toy farm. Between them, the ground was dense with shadow.
And somewhere in that shadow, probably, at least one of the torpedoes patrolled with his machine pistol....
Up on his roof, Napoleon Solo shrugged. Guards or no guards, he had to move fast. If they had been going to drug him, whatever it was might have been in the dinner he had eaten some hours ago. What was more likely—if in fact his guess that tonight was the night was correct—was that they would surprise him while he was asleep... at the traditional hour when resistance was at its lowest ebb. Which could mean any-time after the next half hour. Carlsen could have an alarm set to waken him at four. He could be awake already. And in either case Solo had to get clear before he was found missing—just in case!
Edging his way to the shadowed side of the roof, he found a stackpipe, tested it, and lowered himself silently over the guttering.
The descent was surprisingly easy. The pipe was of some rough composition, quite thick, and firmly anchored to the wall. Taking advantage of the excellent grip it offered. Solo swarmed down and rounded the corner of the terrace on stockinged feet. Beyond a shallow flight of steps bordered by classical urns, a stretch of moonlit lawn separated him from the shadowed side of the garage.
He had no time to reconnoiter. The shadow he had seen from the hallway had been moving in the same direction as himself. He must just hope that the man's tour of duty was hourly or half-hourly, in which case he would still have a couple of minutes before the guard was due again. He would have to risk it.
Taking a deep breath, he sprang down the steps and padded across the lawn. The brightness of the moonlight was like a blow in the face. He felt as spotlit and as vulnerable as a high-wire walker until he had gained the comparative safety of the trough of shadow which lay along the side of the old brick building. But none of the blank windows of the house was raised in protest; no call to halt split the silence; no flame from a revolver seared the dark. Releasing his breath in a long sigh, Solo slid around the corner and tried the garage doors.
As he had hoped, they were not locked. Let into the big outer doors was a small inner one that swung noiselessly open as he turned the handle. He slipped through and pulled it close after him.
He could make out the dim shapes of four cars in the reflected light filtering through the windows—a station wagon, a Cadillac, and two small foreign vehicles, one a sedan and the other a convertible. Although the Caddy's vast trunk yawned obediently open as soon as he touched the button, he drew blank when he rummaged around in its interior. It was completely empty. With the station wagon, however, he had more luck. Lifting the wide back door, he found in the space behind the third row of seats exactly what he was looking for; a coil of towing rope, about twelve feet long, with a small iron grappling hook spliced into one end.
With an exclamation of satisfaction, Solo eased the rope out from underneath a heavy tower jack and a roll of tools, and coiled it around his own waist beneath his jacket. Then, having untied the shoes from their position round his neck and slipped them on, he was ready to go.
For a moment he toyed with the idea of trying to find out what State he was in from the license plates of the cars. But it wasn't light enough to read them and he was by no means sure he could decipher them adequately by touch. Besides which, it was late... the stable clock had chimed four times several minutes ago.
Tiptoeing back to the garage door, he pried it open. And froze.
A man was standing four yards away, his back to the garage, staring up at the roof of the house. Holding his breath, Solo followed his gaze. All along the mellow facade, dark windows shinily reflected the light of the moon. All except one.
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