Operation Nassau by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

stepping round the turnstile in his turn lifted a storm lantern off a hook at the side of the lift, and, switching it on, flashed it up the first turn of the stairs. He said, hardly raising his voice at all, ‘I think you’d better come down. We’re armed, and you are not. And there’s really no other way out, is there?’
    The answer was a shot which drilled straight through a carousel of transparencies by my right ear. Johnson’s gun in my hand, I jumped to one side and fired straight at the flash. There was a scream, and then utter silence.
    ‘Christ! Beltanno,’ said Johnson.
    ‘We have the best grouse moors in Scotland,’ I said. I felt cheerful. ‘But a flesh wound merely, I am afraid. Your gun.’
    Johnson took it. Trotter closed his mouth and then opened it to say. ‘He’s running upstairs. What’s at the top of this thing?’
    I said, ‘The stairs spiral round the elevator shaft and come out in the same chamber. It’s over 120 feet high. From there you climb a few steps to a circular walk round the tower, with a wall just chin- high around it. Above that is the revolving core of the tower with the searchlight fixed to it, inside a kind of coronet of fairy lights. They don’t work.’
    ‘I’ll take the lift,’ Trotter said.
    I said, ‘He’ll get there before you.’
    ‘Not if I’m on his heels,’ Johnson said. The running footsteps had stopped. He raised his voice. ‘Dr MacRannoch, go for the police. Quickly!’
    ‘Right,’ I said. I ran for the door, banged it, and silently returned.
     
    Sergeant Trotter, in the distant light of Johnson’s storm lantern, found the switch for the elevator and, stepping inside, closed the doors. Johnson, the light at arm’s length, began climbing the stairs. There was a rattle, and the silence was split by the whine of the lift. There was no sound from above.
    I tried to remember the inside of the tower. Mostly visitors go up in the lift with Dahlia, who switches off her normal loud slur as soon as she gets them inside and begins to emit information in short high bursts like a soprano computer: The water is 18 feet deep . . . rises 216 feet above sea level . . view of 18 miles all around, ending as the lift stops with Mind the step in the same breath. Sergeant Trotter was doing that bit, without the benefit of Dahlia.
    Johnson was climbing the stairs which curled left round the torn wire mesh of the lift shaft. The steps came in groups of five, joined by a short two-pace landing. At every landing the white outer wall of the staircase stopped, and there was a gap, filled by shoulder-high railings. Beyond those railings was the outer shell of the tower, lit by arrow-slit windows, and between that outer shell and the gap at each landing was nothing but space: a sheer drop from top to bottom of the tower.
    The waiter knew that Trotter had gone to the top of the tower. He thought that I had left to summon the police. All he had to do, therefore, was to waylay Johnson as he crept up those stairs, torch and pistol in hand, and shoot his way downstairs to freedom.
    He could ambush Johnson from the torn wire of the lift shaft, once the lift had risen up to the top. Or he could move to the outside of the stairs, swing himself over the railings and crouch there. . . on what? I seemed to remember there would be no trouble there. Painters’ planks had been lying for weeks between the outer windows and the staircase railings at various levels. I wished I had pointed this out to Johnson Johnson.
    Then I saw how Johnson was climbing the stairs: silently, flattened against the outer wall of the staircase. And as he came to each gap he stopped, and listened, and slid across it with the nasty ease of an embolism. The whine of the lift stopped and distantly, we could hear the doors rattle open above: Trotter was rightly taking his time to emerge. Then Johnson put out the light.
    Silence. I corrected a full facial palsy and gripped a spanner I had found by the lift. It was