Night was falling and Macandrew was almost out of his mind with worry. Simone had not returned and he was being forced to consider the worst. Apart from that, the whole routine of the place seemed to have changed. Neither the fat man nor Parvelli had come to check up on him. He had listened frequently at the door for any clue as to what was going on but the place seemed as silent as the grave.
Once more he stopped pacing up and down to bang on the door and shout for attention, but to no avail. He tried pulling at the window bars yet again. If only he had a lever, he thought and not for the first time. Although the acid had eaten a fair way into the metal, direct pulling clearly wasn’t going to work just yet. He looked around yet again for something to press into use but there was nothing obvious then his gaze settled on a chest of drawers below the bench.
The drawers were each about four feet wide and six inches deep. If he could remove a drawer front... He pulled the top drawer out and dropped it on the floor to smash away its flimsy bottom and sides until all he was left with was the solid drawer front. He was left holding a perfectly serviceable four-foot lever.
He slipped it between the first and second bars on the window and applied pressure. He was almost at the limit of his strength when the window bar snapped at its acid-weakened base and he felt a surge of euphoria. He grabbed at the free end of the bar and worked it loose from its top mounting. The first bar was out. He dropped it on the floor and started with renewed vigour on the second.
The second bar yielded just as quickly but the third refused to budge for the best part of fifteen minutes. Macandrew was close to exhaustion by the time it finally yielded and joined the other two on the floor. He cursed the humidity that was making him sweat so freely and had to rest for a few minutes just to recover his breath but he could see that the window space was now big enough for him to squeeze out through.
He steeled himself for what was to come. It was not going to be easy but there was no other option if he was to be of any help at all to Simone — assuming that he wasn’t too late already. This was something he pushed to the back of his mind as he climbed out on to the broad window ledge and looked down at the lane some thirty-five feet below, a move that caused his stomach to turn somersaults. He steadied himself and raised his eyes to concentrate on the building across the lane. The jump seemed a lot more improbable than it had when he’d first considered it. It was still possible... but only just and that was because the window ledge opposite was slightly lower than the one he was jumping from.
He focused on it before closing his eyes for a moment and going through the leap in his mind. One powerful spring and his hands would grasp the arched stone relief above the window opposite while his feet landed safely on the ledge. He would then open the window and climb inside to raise the alarm. The police would be there within minutes...
He inched forward on the window ledge until his toes — and most importantly the wound site — were clear of the edge and the balls of his feet were in the best position to provide thrust. He took a deep breath and prepared to jump. He had bent his knees and was on the very point of take-off when a wave of doubt seized him and he seemed to sense instinctively that something was wrong. He aborted the jump at the very last moment, almost overbalancing in the process but managing to rescue the situation while teetering on the very edge of disaster. There was something about the glass in the window opposite... He felt himself go weak as he saw what the problem was. The window across the way was barred only the bars were on the inside and not immediately obvious behind the dirty glass. He could just about make them out when the light hit the window at a certain angle — the angle he achieved when he bent his knees. If he had made the jump, he would have been stranded on a ledge, high above the ground, with no way into the building and no way back.
Macandrew crawled slowly inside and felt the bitter taste of failure sap his remaining energy. ‘Jesus Christ...’ he murmured. ‘What an idiot.’
When he’d stopped reliving the near disaster, he came to realise one important thing. He had made an awful lot of noise in the last hour or so but still no one had come to see what all the fuss was about. Could he be alone in this wing of the building? He looked first at the door and then at the iron window bars lying on the floor. He now had the tools he needed to break out... and he could make as much noise as he pleased.
The door was solid so there was no chance of smashing straight through it. Instead, he attacked the lock. It took some time to gouge out the area surrounding it but once he got the bar behind the mechanism, it broke away without much resistance. He could hardly believe it when he found himself standing outside in an empty corridor.
Still with an iron bar in his hand, he made his way along the passage, looking into each and every room as he went. The clinic, for whatever reason, seemed deserted. Al the rooms were empty. The main connecting door to the convent proper was still locked but the door to the back stairs was open. He made his way down to the basement and started looking in the cells along the bottom corridor. There was still no sign of life. He got the impression that Ignatius and the others had had to leave suddenly... but what had they done with Simone?
At last he found evidence of recent occupation in one of the rooms. An architectural plan, a ruler and two pens lay on a table but no people. He stood there, feeling almost ill with apprehension, when he noticed a trap door cover in the floor of this room. It had caught his attention because it was slightly raised as if it had been opened and not replaced properly.
He pulled at the iron ring and looked down into darkness. He couldn’t find a light switch but could see that there was a rough wooden ladder leading down into the blackness. There were candles back in the cells. He fetched one, lit it and sat down on the floor to swing his legs round into the opening. He descended awkwardly, feeling relieved when his feet finally made contact with the solid stone floor.
He held up the candle to illuminate what appeared to be a long, Roman-style bathhouse. Rows of sunken, square stone chambers stretched out as far as he could see along one side of the cellar, each about ten feet square and five feet deep. Each had a stone chute leading up to and disappearing into the outside wall.
His blood ran cold as he looked down into the first one and saw Simone lying there. Beside her was a young nun. Both lay perfectly still. He hurriedly propped up the candle by the side of the bath and lowered himself into it, cursing the fact that there were no steps and briefly wondering why not. He squatted down beside Simone and felt for a pulse, thanking God out loud when he found one. She was unconscious but she was alive. The nun was breathing too.
He made to lift Simone up into his arms only to discover that she and the nun were chained to a ring in the wall and a padlock was fitted to the end. There would be no way of freeing them without a key. He started back up the ladder to begin a frantic search of the room above. The lack of furnishings made searching easy but he didn’t find any key. He had to conclude that Ignatius or Stroud must have taken it with them. But where had they gone?
The only clue he had was the architectural plan on the table. It was a photocopy of a much older document. After a few moments anxious examination, he recognised it as the floor plan of a large church. Mdina Cathedral perhaps? Could that be where they’d gone? It didn’t seem to make sense but he had nothing else to go on. He saw that one area of the plan had been circled — The Chapel of the Cross. He made a mental note of this and its location before climbing back down the ladder to try and make Simone and the nun as comfortable as possible. He left them, lying side by side on the floor of the stone bath, both still deeply unconscious.