Denton cursed the leg and the bullet wounds. He moved as fast as he could, a man walking like a pair of compasses, huge strides, stiff. He could hear her screaming the name Ralph. She went through a doorway. The top half was mullioned glass; he could see her after she closed it, a terrified face, hands working frantically.
He didn’t try to be polite. His momentum carried him to within a few feet of the door, his weight coming on his right leg, which was clumsy but would carry it, and, as an extension of his long stride, he raised his good leg and kicked the door open and almost fell through it as his right leg lost its balance.
‘Ralph! Kill him — kill him-’
Through the door, he saw her within two yards of him and reached out. He was late in seeing motion to his right and behind him; too late, he turned, his right arm up, and caught an iron poker just above the elbow as it slammed down where his head was meant to be. The arm went dead, pain shooting to the shoulder. He saw the poker raised again. The face of Brown the valet was dark red, the eyes wide open with hatred. Denton forced himself in tight against the man and felt the poker swing behind him; he smashed his forehead into Brown’s face. Blood spurted. Denton had his left hand twisted into the man’s shirt then, pulling him close and using his head again to batter him, then kneeing him in the groin and hearing him howl. Denton swung him to his right and flung him into a wall. The valet collapsed down it to a sitting position. He put his hands in front of him.
Denton picked the poker up in his left hand. Brown’s eyes pleaded: No more. Denton hit him backhanded with the iron poker. The sound was like a hammer hitting a post.
The woman screamed. She turned and ran for a flight of stairs and up them. Denton followed as fast he could, reaching the bottom of the stairs only as a door slammed on the floor above. He started up, found it hard going without his stick, and he threw the poker aside and used a banister to pull himself up with his right hand. It was like rowing one-handed, the muscles bunching in his back, the blow on the upper arm aching.
At the top, a corridor ran the length of the small house, a door on each side. He saw but didn’t register the prettiness of it — rag rugs on the floor, watercolours on the walls, fresh flowers. His attention was on the closed door on his left. He tried the handle; it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. He pushed, felt a slight movement and heard the sound of scraping. She had pushed something against it from the other side.
He couldn’t kick this one open, and he couldn’t easily push it with his shoulder. Instead, he put his back against the door and turned the knob with his left hand. It was like pushing the sliding seat in the boat.
The door moved; the scraping sound grated. The opening widened — six inches, a foot, almost enough room for him to go through — and he saw her face, demonic, pale, and the razor that gleamed in an arc and missed his face as he recoiled but slashed down his left arm. He fell back into the hall, almost going down the stairs. The door slammed again.
Blood was running down his arm and dripping on the rag rug. The unconnected thought that she had made the rugs herself came into his mind. She had built herself a nest, he thought. He was tearing off the shirt of his silly outfit and wrapping it around his arm, then pulling it tight and holding the end with his left hand so it wouldn’t unwind.
He pushed the door again. It swung open and banged against the dresser that had been pushed against it. Holding his bleeding arm above his head, Denton nudged the door with his hip, alert for the razor, waiting for her to attack again.
The room was empty. Like the hall it was pretty. On the far wall above a double bed was the ‘little Wesselons’.
The dormer window was open.
He pushed the dresser out of the way and looked around the room for her, even bending and lifting the girlish flounce to look under the bed. She was clever enough to hide and let him think she’d gone out of the window, but she wasn’t in the room.
The dormer was high, six feet wide; the window was a tall double casement that swung from the middle post. Both leaves were open. If he went out of the wrong window, she might be able to come back in the other and escape him before he knew where she was.
He closed the door and pushed the dresser against it again to slow her if she came back in. His blood dripped on the floor and he raised the arm over his head again.
He went out of the right-hand window. When he looked down the pitch of the roof to the eave, vertigo staggered him. His old fear of heights. He closed his eyes, shook his head; then, not looking at the ground, he went out, left leg first, pulling the other after, peering around the corner of the dormer for her and pulling his head back in case the razor swung.
She was most of the way up the roof, heading for the peak. She was sitting, boosting herself up on her buttocks, keeping her feet and hands on the slates. She, too, was afraid of the height, he thought. When she saw him, she began to move faster. Above her and at the edge of the roof to her right was a chimney; she seemed to be making for it. Maybe there was a way down there; he didn’t think so, rather that she was going for the chimney because it was solid and seemed to offer support. If she could get down the other side of the roof, however, she could probably drop to the front garden; the house was higher at the back than the front because of the drop to the river.
‘You can’t make it!’ he shouted.
She moved herself up again. He saw the razor flash in her hand.
‘Give it up!’
He started up the roof. He went on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, the light rubber shoes he wore for rowing a help. She screamed, screamed again. He was aware of voices below them and understood how it must look to anybody who could see them — a half-naked man chasing a woman.
‘Come down from there, you monster!’ a woman’s voice shouted, the sound thinned by distance.
Mary Thomason screamed again. She had almost reached the chimney. And then what?
Denton pushed himself harder. He forgot the bad leg. He looked at nothing but the woman in the white dress. Straightening, he went up on the diagonal faster than she was moving, and when she reached the chimney, he was only three yards behind. He put his right foot over the peak of the roof and balanced there, a foot on each side. She looked down towards the ground at the front of the house. Several people were down there, foreshortened, shouting.
‘Leave that poor girl alone! The police are coming!’ One of them blew a police whistle.
She scrambled upright, using the chimney to support her. With her back to it and the razor at her side where they couldn’t see it from below, she faced him. Denton moved closer. He raised his arm over his head because of the bleeding.
‘Give it up. It’s over.’
She was very like the drawing. Not quite pretty, but arresting. The breeze stirred her hair. He said, ‘Give it up. You think you’re a nasty piece of work, but I’m nastier. I’ll kill you if I have to.’
They were fixed on each other as if they were the only people in the world. They were, in that shared concentration, like lovers. The Thames, the day, the glory of the summer, didn’t exist. He looked at her and she looked at him, and for a moment he saw her face soften and he felt for her something that was beyond sympathy, almost an identification, a sharing of self, as if in the instant of violence that was coming they were the same. He held out the bloody left arm with the hand open. ‘Give it to me. It’s over.’
Then her face changed to the demonic one he had glimpsed through the door, and she swung the razor at him. He flung up his arm and caught it on the part that was wrapped in the shirt. It slashed down; he felt its bite again and grabbed her wrist. He raised it high, as if they were doing some country dance, drawing her off the chimney, and she tried to pull away. His other hand was balled into a fist, and he hesitated an instant because she was a woman, because her female face was so near his own. Then the razor’s blade cut into his palm as his slippery hand lost its grip and she turned in the air in front of him, one foot on a slate and one foot in the air, and then she was gone and he heard the thud of her body on the flagstones beside the house.