The Deep Dark Sleep

The speed of thought seems to me the most unquantifiable thing: faster than the speed of sound, even the speed of light, even if Albert says it ain’t so. But what happened to me as I stepped through the door of my Glasgow office took me instantly back to a place where you killed without thought or lost your own life.

He had been behind the door and when I came in he hooked his arm around me from behind and dug his fingers into my eye and cheek, pulling me sideways and down. If I had not been taught the same dance steps, that would have been the end of me, but without having to think it through, I knew a knife was heading for the side of my neck. I caught his forearm with a knife-hand blow. It had enough strength to block the blade, but not much else. I stepped sideways towards the knife, counter to instinct, trapping his arm between my shoulder and the wall. His hand still dug into my face and his thumb was trying to seek out my eye socket. I brought my other hand, which still held the keys, down and back and into his groin.

He gasped and the grip on my face loosened. I grabbed his knife hand and slammed it against the wall. My brain registered the shape of the knife: the long, slender, deadly but rather beautiful profile of a Fairbairn-Sykes. I was in trouble. Big trouble. Only one of us was coming out of this alive. He clung on to the knife, so I kept his knife hand pinioned to the wall with my left hand while slamming my right elbow into his face, five or six times within a couple of seconds. I had enough of a look at his face to see an old, ugly scar on his forehead and recognize him as the guy who had jumped me in the alley. Except this time there was no chat.

His nose burst and there was blood all over his face, but he didn’t pay any attention to it. It was something that I always found hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced this kind of combat: it takes a lot to hurt you. Shock and a gallon of adrenalin blocks sensation until it’s all over. Then it hurts.

I knew I had to deal with the knife. I aimed a blow at his wrist with my Yale key, the only weapon I had, but my attacker brought his knee up into the small of my back and pushed me forward. He was a strong bastard all right and I lost my grip on his wrist and spun around to face him. He held the knife flat, face-up, textbook style. He slashed at me. Again, he wasn’t trying to stab me, like some street thug would do. He was looking for the quick kill: a slash across my thigh, neck or forearm to sever the femoral, brachial or carotid artery. Then you just step back out of harm’s way and watch your opponent bleed out in seconds. Textbook stuff.

I rolled over the top of my desk. Every time he came at me, I moved around the desk, keeping it between me and him, like we were playing a childhood game of tag. I felt something wet on my hand and looked down to see blood blooming on my shirt cuff and the back of my hand running red. He’d got me, but on the wrong side of my arm. I needed a weapon. By this time I had done a full circuit of the desk and he was now behind it, where I usually sat. The only thing I could grab was the hat stand behind me. I held it in front of me, stabbing at him like a retiarius gladiator with a trident. He made a move to get around the desk so I jabbed the base of the hat stand at his face and it jarred as it hit bone. One of his eyes had all but closed, swollen from one of the blows with my elbow and I could tell his vision was compromised. I jabbed again, this time slamming into his chest as hard as I could. My captain’s chair caught the back of one of his legs and he fell backwards into the window, smashing the glass. I pushed again, forcing him through the window. He grabbed the window frame on either side with both hands to stop himself falling through, dropping the F-S knife as he did so.

He gave me the look. The look that says ‘I give up’.

Still, I kept the pressure on his chest with the hat stand.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Who do you work for?’

‘Forget it, Lennox. Just call the police and let’s get this over with.’

Like me, he was trying to catch his breath and this time there was no attempt at a half-assed Glasgow accent. He spoke with an English accent, beautifully modulated, received pronunciation. I wondered for a moment if the BBC Home Service had an elite commando announcer unit.

‘What’s this? Name, rank and serial number stuff?’ I jabbed him again and the bloodied fingers of one hand slipped from the window frame. He scrabbled to regain his grip.

‘Okay, Commando Joe, I’m only going to ask this one more time: who sent you? Joe Strachan? Where is he?’

He laughed as heartily as he could manage, blowing a bloody bubble from one nostril of his shattered nose.

‘Or what? You going to kill me in cold blood.’

‘Something like that. So tell me … where’s Joe Strachan?’

‘You honestly think you’re going to get anything out of me? I’m telling you nothing, Lennox, and no one else is going to make me talk.’