The Thousand Faces of Night - Jack Higgins [59]
Marlowe pushed a large branch to one side and started to speak. 'I'm not very interested in how you feel, Butcher.' He let the branch sweep backwards into Butcher's face.
He turned quickly, and as Butcher staggered back with a curse he flung himself forward and hit him across his throat with the edge of the hand. Butcher fell to the ground, choking and moaning faintly. Marlowe drew back his foot and kicked him savagely in the side of the head, and then, without stopping, he started back towards the mill, bearing slightly to the left.
He came out on to the bank of the stream about thirty or forty yards above the mill. The flood waters rushed past him, brown and foam-flecked, bearing all before them. For a brief moment he considered the position, and then he lifted his trouser-leg and pulled the knife from its hiding-place. He held it securely in his right hand and grasping the branches of a small bush that drooped into the stream, slid down the bank and lowered himself into the water.
For a moment he hung there, and then, as the current tugged at his body, he released his grip on the bush and was immediately carried away. At that point the stream was only three or four feet deep and as he was carried towards the mill, his feet scrabbled on the bottom as he tried to keep his balance.
And then the water deepened and he was swimming, kicking strongly with every ounce of strength that he possessed. Quite suddenly he was carried over a concrete apron and fell four or five feet into a deep pool. As he struggled to the surface the great, lumbering mill wheel thundered above his head, churning the water into white foam.
The current carried him relentlessly towards it and a terrible panic moved inside him. He thrashed his legs desperately and then a peculiar twist of the current came to his aid and swept him in behind the wheel against the moss-covered stone foundations of the mill.
For several moments he stayed there, hanging on to a ledge of stone with his left hand and coughing up the brown river water. He found, to his surprise, that he still held the knife in his right hand and he renewed his grip on it with white, numbed fingers. The water was icy and now that he was not moving he was conscious of the coldness of it seeping into him, chilling him to the bone.
He placed the knife carefully between his teeth, took a deep breath and sank down under the surface of the stream, his hands scrabbling at the rough stones of the foundations, pulling himself downwards. The great wheel revolved through the water alarmingly near to his body and panic moved again in him as an unexpected current pulled at his legs and one foot touched the wheel as it went round.
He surfaced once for air and then dived again. There had to be an outlet to that pool inside the mill and he dragged himself along the stones, his eyes straining through the brown, cloudy water. And then he found what he was looking for. It was the entrance to a low, arched tunnel some three feet high and half-way down the wall.
He decided to take a chance and pulled himself into it without surfacing for air. To his surprise he discovered that no more than the thickness of the mill wall separated the pool from the stream itself. He kicked forward and carefully surfaced through the green scum.
He kept well in to the side and raised only his eyes and nose above the surface of the water. Harris and Faulkner were standing over by the half-open door, peering outside.
'I don't like it,' Harris was saying. 'I never did trust Marlowe. He was always a tricky bastard.'
'For God's sake shut up,' Faulkner said impatiently. 'They've only been gone a short time.'
Very carefully Marlowe pulled himself over the edge of the pool and crawled towards the corner where Maria and the Jamaican were lying. As he approached, Mac