With their feet braced against the lip of the central air shaft, she and James began to pull. The rope was thick and strong, and there were no obstacles in their path. Keenan was nearly half inside to begin with, and Harkness a consistent, if dead, weight at the other end. Yet almost as they began to make progress, a furious tussle began on the precipice.
"Oi!" cried Keenan, "he's a-going, he's a-going."
"Hold him!" barked James. "As you value your life, hold on to him."
"He's let go of me!"
"Then hold tighter!"
They retracted the rope in hard-fought increments, one inch, even half an inch at a time. Sometimes they made no progress for the stretch of a minute, so great was the effort of raising those two large, struggling men. It was James, Mary thought, a rivulet of sweat running down her forehead. Despite his heroic efforts, he was beginning to flag. The hectic glitter in his eyes was gone, his colour ashen beneath the rosy flush of exertion, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
He caught her assessing glance. "Pull harder!"
She nodded, although she was already pulling with all her might.
Somehow, somehow, Keenan's torso inched towards them, dragged painfully over the open ledge. He was very still and completely silent, waiting, holding, concentrating. At long last, his armpits hooked the edge of the half-wall.
"Steady there!" gasped James, relief plain in his exhausted face. "We're coming to help pull up Harkness."
It took them only seconds to reach the ledge. In that interval, with a single, defiant movement, Keenan threw his hands up. "There! Ain't that what you wanted?"
The scream that sliced the air was dreadful, shrill enough even to stir a ghostly echo from the bells. It seemed to pierce Mary's skull. Futile though it was to do so, she stumbled towards the ledge. Scanned the rows of neat shingles, the elaborate Gothic traceries, then craned below to the shadowy cobblestoned yard. At that moment, the sun dropped fully below the horizon and a new, almost tangible darkness fell over the city, cloaking from view the body she knew must be splayed below, broken and bloody.
An instant later, she cried out in surprise as a rough hand seized the back of her collar and she was whisked into the air to dangle, like Harkness, over the beautiful slanted roof of St Stephen's Tower. The seam of her collar bit into her throat, constricting her airway; the tips of her toes grazed the stone of the belfry wall. It was Keenan, of course. What a fool she'd been to come anywhere near him, now that he was safe.
James rushed towards her, only to be stopped by a commanding gesture from Keenan. James stood perfectly still, his expression sick with horror. His lips worked, forming the first syllable of her name.
Alarmed though she was, Mary still had her wits. She shook her head in a very slight movement. He mustn't reveal her gender now; doing so would only give Keenan more power, more delight in hurting her. She focused on James's face, tried to project her message using only her eyes.
"Ta for the lift," grinned Keenan. "Sorry about Harkness."
"Bring the boy back inside," said James, his voice vibrating with tension and exhaustion. "Keenan, you don't know the trouble you're making for yourself."
"Don't I, though? Seems to me you're awful fond of this useless little whoreson. Seems as you'd do anything for him."
"He's a good lad." James's pulse hammered in his throat.
"Your special little lad, hey?" Keenan looked contemptuous. "You don't look the back-door sort, but I suppose I don't know about all that Greek stuff."
She was so close. Every couple of seconds, the toe of one of her boots bumped against the half-wall. She focused on that, at this moment her one scrap of hope. Better to think about that than of the choking sensation in her throat, the blood roaring in her ears, the sheer terror turning her limbs to water. If she could just gain half a second's purchase, a tiny bit of momentum… if only there were a handhold, a pillar, anything she could use to pull herself forward.
"What d'you want?"
Keenan grinned. "Now you're talking. What I want, Mr Fancy Safety Engineer, is for you to forget this last couple hours ever happened. You ain't come here. You ain't seen Harky. And you most surely ain't seen me."
"Agreed," said James promptly. "Now bring him in."
"No," croaked Mary. James was entirely a man of his word. Without his testimony, they'd never convict Keenan, and they all knew it.
"Ain't nobody taught you not to contradict?" Keenan raised her yet higher and grinned as her breathing became laboured. "Less you fight, longer you'll live."
"I've already agreed to your terms," said James. "Bring him in."
"Oh, that ain't all," said Keenan easily. "You're going to fix your report so whosoever asks, me and Wick got nothing to do with anything. We's just two harmless brickies minding our own business, and Wick's death's a proper tragedy."
"What else?"
As James and Keenan bargained, Mary's sensitive ears caught a new sound outside the tower. Above the remote babble of urban life, a new sound intruded: a long, shrill whistle, and then the heavy thud of boots on cobblestones. At least two pairs. Running.
James and Keenan seemed oblivious of this new development, near as it sounded. And, dangling in mid-air like a worm on a fishing hook, Mary couldn't turn to see anything. But she closed her eyes and listened, and the noises began to sort themselves out in her mind, so clearly could she visualize them. A police whistle. A pair of bobbies giving chase. Even, perhaps, the clang of the site gate. The boots kept galloping, and now they changed in sound. They were no longer running flat out, but were instead taking smaller, faster paces. What could cause that? She reckoned she knew. And the thought of it made her open her eyes and smile broadly.
"What you grinning at?" snarled Keenan, jerking her close for better inspection.
It was all the chance she needed. "This," she said, and kicked him in the groin.
A roar of pain. A blow to the chin that damn near knocked her unconscious.
Blindly, Mary hung on, and after a few seconds realized she was clinging to the lip of the belfry. The hard pressure against her chin was the stone ledge. A steady trickle of blood seemed to confirm this, although she felt no pain.
"My God, Mary! Hold on!" James was there, his face white and frantic, wrapping his long hands about her forearms.
"Keenan! Where's Keenan!"
James didn't even glance back. "Sod Keenan; he's run off. Can you hold my wrists?"
She could. A minute later – surely less, although it felt like more – she tumbled over the ledge into his arms. He fell back onto the floor, squeezing her tightly, pressing her against his chest so hard it hurt. His heart was thumping at a furious pace, his chin digging into the top of her head.
"My God, Mary. Oh my God. I thought – oh, Mary." He covered her hair and face with fierce kisses, and when she hugged him back, he groaned and laughed at the same time. "You careless, daring, vicious, damned little fool. You nearly died, purely for the satisfaction of kicking him in the-"
"I didn't," she protested, laughing now, too. "I miscalculated. I thought I was further inside than I was."
"Oh, well, that's all right, then." He rolled her onto her back. "Idiot."
"Who's an idiot? You were about to agree to all of his outrageous conditions, just to-"
"To save your life," he agreed, kissing her again, so hard she could scarcely breathe. "Damned foolish of me."
"He'd never have kept his word. You'd have sworn all that, and he'd still have knocked me off the ledge, just for the fun of it."
"I suppose you're going to scold me now for letting him escape."
She examined his face carefully. His eyes were bloodshot, his pulse going far too quickly and his skin hot and dry. Clearly, that dubious "stimulant" he had taken earlier was wearing off and in a moment he would be desperately ill – and grumpy to boot. But despite all this, she could think of no one else she wanted as much as this; no other place she'd rather be. "No," she said thoughtfully. "I'm not."
He feigned shock.
"I think he's been caught. Listen." They paused then, and through the wide air shaft they heard the echoes of heavy-booted steps, grunts of exertion, a roar of defiance. "The police are on their way up."