Read Online From London Far by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

them, however was that they spanned a chasm the recesses of which dusk was now rendering unplumbable. ‘You suggest’, said Meredith, ‘that we had better get across one of these?’
    The girl looked at a wrist-watch – a motion which Meredith had observed her make several times in the preceding couple of minutes. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ The girl was sincerely apologetic. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir. But I think we better had.’
    ‘I beg you not to.’ Meredith frowned at having said a futile thing. ‘If we had a rope perhaps I could help–’
    ‘But we haven’t. And I’ll go first.’ She advanced to the parapet and there for a fraction of a second hesitated.
    Meredith laid a hand on her arm. ‘Wait.’ He swung his legs over. Three feet was a long way down. The girder, in fact, could not be reached while he was in any state of balance unless he turned on his stomach and lowered himself gently while feeling about with his feet. And the disadvantage of this was that he would then be facing the wrong way round – for to walk across the girder backwards would tax an acrobat. There was no help for it. Over on his stomach he must go and the adventure must begin with an awkward about-turn.
    Having seen the necessity of these manoeuvres, Meredith proceeded to carry them out. He must not look down. As soon as he had managed the turn, he must look carefully but with no strained fixity at a point on the opposite parapet immediately above the girder and move steadily towards it… And now he was over and his feet had found their hold. He straightened up, paused, turned. The opposite parapet was before him, perhaps ten feet away. Suddenly it came to him from some intuitive depth that looking straight ahead was not his particular line. For other people – yes. But he would do better after taking a good peer down… The muscles first of his neck and then of his eyes rebelled; he mastered them and peered; he saw the walls of the two buildings running down until they almost converged in the gloom. And as Meredith thoughtfully scanned this a hovering vertigo lifted and he walked briskly across the girder with a steady tread. Nor did the opposite parapet offer any difficulty. He had surmounted it before beginning to think how to do so.
    ‘It’s not bad,’ he called back seriously – and wondered whether he should stand watching the girl or move out of sight. She was on the girder. An appalling conviction of powerlessness seized him. He dropped on his knees and vomited – as quietly as he could. By the time he had recovered from this irresistible natural call the girl was beside him.
    ‘I don’t think I could have done it if you hadn’t shown me it could be done.’ She laughed a little shakily. ‘I suppose you are a member of the Alpine Club?’
    ‘The Alpine Club?’ Meredith shook his head seriously. ‘The Athenaeum is the only club I belong to nowadays. Some of my colleagues have a fondness for mountaineering. But I have always known I had no head for it. Dear me! What of the dogs? They baulked at the spiral staircase. I fear that the girder–’
    But the dogs – weirdly enough – had taken the girder. Somehow they had got down to it and were crossing sedately now. The girl watched them, fascinated. ‘Ineffective brutes,’ she said indulgently. ‘More like goats than bloodhounds.’ She glanced once more at her watch. ‘These roofs carry on right to the end of the street. And we’ve got to make the other end at the double.’
    They made it – the bloodhounds lolloping grotesquely beside them across the grimy London leads. Only when they were as far from Mr Bubear’s repository as they could get did the girl stop and begin looking for some trapdoor or staircase that would lead them downwards. Nothing of the sort immediately appeared. She halted. ‘I think’, she said seriously, ‘that we’d better take cover. You never know how these things will go.’
    Meredith paused to see the girl drop securely