Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [91]
It took him no more than half a minute, but it seemed like an eternity. When he finally reached the overhanging lip of the flat roof, his arms and legs were trembling and his body was drenched in sweat. This time he did have to rest in order to summon up the energy to haul himself over the ledge.
Finally, first with one hand and then the other, he reached up, grasped the edge of the roof and pulled himself up.
There was an awful moment when he didn’t think he was going to have the strength to do it, when his feet pedalled at empty air and his arms began to tremble with the effort.
Somehow, though, simply through fear of what would happen if his strength did give way, he managed to scramble up and over.
For long seconds he lay there like a beached fish, gasping for air, relief washing through him. Sooner than he would have liked he scrambled to his feet and staggered across to the ledge that ran along the top of the side wall of the hotel.
The building next door was a Chinese restaurant called King Prawn. The narrow alleyway ran between the two buildings, whose roofs were separated by a gap of no more than five feet. Ordinarily, this would have been a simple leap, but at this height, and given Turlough’s current state, the task seemed altogether more daunting. All kinds of possible scenarios ran through his mind as he backed up in preparation for his runup. He imagined himself slipping as he was about to leap and plunging head-first to the ground below; imagined himself falling short on the far side, scrabbling desperately for a handhold and clutching only empty air. Vertigo swept over him in a dizzying wave, and he had to squat down for a moment, squeeze his eyes shut and make himself take slow, deep breaths to calm his pounding heart. At length he opened his eyes again and slowly stood up. The day seemed piercingly bright and almost preternaturally quiet, with not even a gull’s cry to puncture it. By contrast, the gap between the buildings looked as black as the deepest abyss.
Turlough knew that the longer he thought about it the less likely he was to make the jump, so he did the only thing possible: he began to run. The air slid past him, warm and somehow slick; he moved so swiftly that his feet seemed to skim across the roofs surface like a stone over water. He gritted his teeth as he neared the edge, his stomach coiling in on itself. Every instinct screamed at him to slow down, to stop, but he simply made himself run faster, knowing that if he gave in to his fear he was lost.
As he launched himself through the air, the gap between the buildings yawned like a vast black mouth. For an instant he felt like a piece of plankton caught in the downdraft of a fish’s maw - then he was sprawling on the roof of the restaurant, having cleared the gap by a good three feet. His palms slid across the roof’s gritty surface, but Turlough’s relief far outweighed the sting of his skinned hands. He scrambled to his feet and ran towards what he had spotted from the roof of the Lombard - a raised skylight, the glass cloudy with grime.
The skylight had been locked with bolts from the inside, but the wooden frame was rotten with age. It took Turlough no more than fifteen seconds and three good kicks to break in. Lifting the skylight he saw a short drop on to a small, landing and a set of stairs leading down. A minute later he was at street level and hesitating about which way to go.
Straight ahead would take him through the main part of the restaurant and out the front door on to the main street.
The opposite way would take him through what he assumed must be the kitchen, where he would hope to find a back door into somewhere narrower and quieter.
It was no contest. He