The Finger in the Sky Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги без TXT) 📗

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Not—not when he came in. Profoundly shocked, of course. And very badly shaken. But apart from bruises and—and—and superficial burns...he did not appear too much damaged. He was to have an X-ray examination to see if there were any internal injuries...I was preparing him...That's why I thought it so odd that they should send an ambulance from...from..."

"From where?" Solo prompted gently.

"They said they were from the Anglo-American hospital at Villefranche, Monsieur. As the man was an American, and he kept on talking, talking all the time in American—well, at first I thought maybe they had decided to transfer him to a hospital where they would understand what he said."

"And later?"

"They appeared at the door with a stretcher, and they told me they had orders to transfer him. They had all the necessary pieces of paper, so I...well, I began to help them move him onto the stretcher. Then the patient himself seemed to question what they were doing..."

"He began to protest?"

"I could not understand what he said—I do not speak English—but I think so. They tried to pacify him...and so did I, as far as I was able. Then he attempted to get off the stretcher and they...they...Oh, it was horrible!...They hit him..."

"I understand. Do not distress yourself, Mademoiselle. They beat him unconscious, is that it?"

The woman nodded, tears coursing down her cheeks. "I had begun to wonder, just before. For I know most of the orderlies at Villefranche, and I realized that I had never seen any of these men before. And although they spoke French well enough, there was, well, something about them..."

Solo nodded. "And then you questioned their authority yourself?"

"As soon as the first blow fell, of course. It was so rapid.. so vicious—the poor man was unconscious almost before he had time to cry out. There were four of them, you see..."

"What did you do?"

"Naturally I tried to stop them, Monsieur. But two of them held me—one with his hand over my mouth—while the others...finished their vile work with the patient. And then...and then—while they still held me—one of the others...a little dark fellow, he was...came over and hit me with a —"

The nurse stopped talking suddenly and pressed her clenched hands against her mouth.

"And you have no idea at all, what the patient was talking about before they came in? You didn't catch anything he said—even a single word—before he was beaten insensible?"

The woman shook her head dumbly.

"He wasn't entirely unconscious, Napoleon," Illya said. "Look."

He had picked up from the floor the wooden board to which the patient's temperature chart was clipped. Wordlessly, he held it out for Solo to see.

Below the thick black line which had begun to move out from the left hand margin, a wider, more vivid line in red wavered across the squared paper. And above it, two hastily daubed symbols stood out against the white in the same sticky medium.

"He must have used his finger to write us a message," Illya said soberly. "using his own blood as ink..."

Chapter 10 — An eye in the wall

"The guy must have been lying apparently unconscious on the floor," Solo said. "And while THRUSH's thugs were beating up the nurse, he opened his eyes and saw the chart where it had been knocked to the ground in the struggle."

"Yes," Illya said. "And he'd only have a moment before they picked him up to put him on the stretcher, so he'd have to work very fast. The thing is—how would his mind have worked and what was he trying to tell us with these daubs?"

They were back in the T.C.A. building at the airport. Matheson, the Technical Director, had lent them his office while he supervised the crash inquiry team working in the wreckage out on the floodlit runway, and they had decided to have a council of war before deciding on their next move.

Solo picked up the temperature chart with its gruesome symbols. "This guy's a steward," he said, "so whatever information he has will at least be given with a semi-technical mind...Let's analyze this thing properly."

The survivor's temperature had been logged five times—once when he was first put in the ambulance, again just before they reached the hospital, and three times, at quarter-hour intervals, in Room 17. The graph joining the five blobs was almost flat: a heavy black line sloping faintly downwards towards the right-hand side of thte sheet with a uniform inclination. Standing on the line at its left-hand end was a long thin rectangle drawn in blood, with a smaller, tall rectangle on top of it. Higher up, on the far side of the paper, a crudely executed dart shape with a crossed tail dipped its nose towards the rectangles. There was a facsimile of the black line laboriously traced in red about an inch lower down the sheet. And apart from a few smudges below the dart shape, that was all.

"Well, one thing seems clear," Solo said at last. "Whatever the message is, it's not in any way an attempt at actual writing: there's nothing here remotely like lettering. So what we have to solve is a picture puzzle."

"I agree. And I should think it fairly certain that this sort of thin arrow with a stroke across its tail is meant to represent the aircraft, wouldn't you?" Illya asked. "It's not at all unlike a Trident."

"Yeah. Landing, I guess, since the nose points down....So okay: he's painting us a picture of the plane coming in to land. So what's the significance of the two box-like shapes on top of one another? How do you figure them?"

"I think...Wait a minute, Napoleon! Suppose he was using the existing line—the black line of the graph—to represent the ground..."

"Yeah?"

"...then surely the two rectangles might be a simple way of indicating the airport buildings with the control tower above them?"

"They might at that," Solo admitted. "But then so what? We have a picture of a plane landing. It doesn't tell us anything about the landing—or about the wreck."

"Oh, but it could, Napoleon. Don't forget these smudges. I don't think they are random. They are very faint, but they are in a definite line...coming downwards from the plan—Look!—and reaching the red line below the black one. There are none above the plane and none below the red line."

"Kind of a dotted line, it seems."

"Exactly. And what's implied by a dotted line—in comic strips, for example?"

Solo considered. "As far as I'm concerned," he said slowly, "a dotted line between two objects implies some kind of relationship between them—nothing more, in the absence of other data."

"But that's just it! A relationship between the plane—the red plane—and the red line..."

"I still don't quite see —"

"Look at the red line," Illya said excitedly. "Everything else has been scrawled roughly, daubed in great haste. But the red line has been done very carefully, laboriously, even. In the desperate hurry he was in to get the message across before he was discovered, he took time to get this bit exactly right."

"How do you mean—exactly right?"

"It repeats the black line very precisely; same slope, same slight differences where the blobs occur, same length—see, it ends on the very same line of the graph paper."

"But if the black line represents the ground, as we think..."

"Then the red one also represents the ground."