A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [93]
“I told you: a soporific, standard medical issue, suspended in brandy. It’s a decent brandy, too, if that matters to you. You will smell as if you were drunk, but you will sleep three or four hours, perhaps a little longer, depending on your sensitivity to the drug. You have one minute to decide,” he said, and stood calmly just inside the door of the compartment.
“Why?” I asked desperately.
“We need you out of the way for a bit. We had thought merely to kidnap you, drop a bag over your head or put chloroform to your face, perhaps a needle in a crowd. However, your little demonstration yesterday night made us a bit wary of your skills at defending yourself. It was decided that the only options were those that kept us at a distance from you, while we were in public places where a prolonged struggle might draw attention.”
Lies and truth mixed together. I thought he was telling me the truth about what the mixture contained; I thought he was telling the truth when he spoke of keeping me prisoner; I thought he was lying when he said he would turn me free. I also felt I knew who he was—not that I had set eyes on him before, but Ronnie had described just such a man. Although he did not strike me as “gorgeous” under the circumstances, I had no doubt that this was Margery Childe’s dark, Mediterranean gangster. I had never felt so alone.
“Thirty seconds,” he said, without looking at a watch.
Perhaps, if I might get him to come closer… I nodded coldly and held out my hand.
His left hand went into an inner pocket and brought out a small decorated silver flask. He did not, however, bring it to me as I’d hoped, but tossed it onto the seat beside me. I put down my book and took up the flask, which was slightly warm from his body heat. I removed the stopper, sniffed it deeply: brandy, and something else. No bitter almonds, at any rate, or any of the other poisons that had an odour. I raised it to my mouth and wetted my tongue—again, no immediate taste of poison, but there was a familiar bitter undertaste, reminiscent of hospitals. I knew the taste; everything in me, body and mind, screamed against swallowing it. The thought of becoming unconscious in the hands of a man like this was intolerable, impossible. But would he use the gun, or was it a bluff? I looked into his eyes, and I knew with a certainty that it was no bluff. To fight in this small compartment would be suicide. Which, then, was it to be: a bullet or the chance of poison? I knew enough about poisons to be certain that the flask did not contain arsenic or strychnine, but that left a hundred others, from aconitine, which would kill with an imperceptible amount, to—
“Ten seconds.”
It would have to be a poison that acted very quickly, because this train ended its run in Oxford, and if I were found alive, I might be saved; at the least, I would be capable of setting the police on his trail. The decision made itself, prompted, I think, less by logic than by the irrational conviction that he was telling me a degree of the truth, and that being a prisoner was preferable to death. I raised the flask at the same instant his arm was beginning to straighten out, then drank deeply.
“Drink it all,” he said, and I did, coughing and eyes watering, then held it out upside down to demonstrate that it was empty. One drop fell to the floor, but his eyes remained on me.
“Put it on the seat and relax. It takes a few minutes.”
He continued to stand with his back to the door. I continued to sit and stare at him, feeling after some miles as if this were one of the more avant-garde of the French plays that had recently become popular among the arty set. Perhaps this is the moment for me to make a forceful remark about my left toenail or the age of the sun, I thought flippantly, and then I felt the first quivers of impending unconsciousness as the drug began to descend on my