There was a slight sound behind us, and we both turned. A tall, powerfully-built man with dark curly hair, dressed in a scarlet sleeveless sweatshirt and dark blue slacks stood just behind us. He held a .38 automatic in his hand and it pointed directly at me. There was a cheerful, patronizing smile on his tanned face as if he was enjoying a private joke that was a little too deep for the average intelligence.
“She tells a pretty tale, doesn’t she?” he said in one of those ultra-masculine voices. “So she wants to run away and hide? Well, so she shall. She’ll be hidden all right, where no one will ever find her, and that goes for you, too, my inquisitive friend.”
I was calculating the distance between us, wondering if I could get up and reach him before he fired, when I heard the all too familiar swish of a descending cosh and the inside of my head seemed to explode.
The last sound I heard was Maureen’s wild, terrified scream.
Chapter IV
I
The room was big and airy, and the walls and ceiling were a dead Chinese white. Cold, white plastic curtains were drawn across the windows, and a shaded lamp made a pool of light over the opposite bed.
There was a man sitting up in the bed. He was reading. His small-boned face with its high, wide forehead gave the impression of a young student reading for an examination.
I watched him through half-closed eyes for some minutes, wondering in a vague, detached sort of way who he was and what he was doing in this room with me. There was something odd about the book he was reading. It was a big volume, and the print was close set and small. It was only when he turned a page and I saw a chapter heading that I realized he was holding the book upside down.
I wasn’t surprised to find myself in this room. I had a vague idea I had been in it for some time: perhaps days, perhaps weeks. The feel of the narrow high bed I was lying in was familiar: almost as familiar as the feel of my own bed in my beach cabin which now seemed as remote as last year’s snow.