Curtis shook his head. “These chaps put themselves at risk for their country. Cowards don’t do that.”
Daniel was silent for a few moments, but Curtis was sure his body had lost some of its tension. He watched the back of his dark head, the nape of his neck. He wanted, so much, to lean forward, to touch that skin with his lips, the lightest brush.
He asked, “What happened, anyway? How did they catch you?”
“Oh, rotten luck. I let myself into the service corridor while everyone was downstairs—I thought it was most likely to be unoccupied then. Unfortunately, that brute March came along with a couple of his pals, and he summoned Holt. I had no chance of talking my way out of it to that pair, and from inside the corridor, it’s impossible not to see what they’re up to, with the cameras and mirrors.” Daniel shifted his weight closer against Curtis. “And of course Holt doesn’t like me, what with my irritating habit of Judaism, and that stupid showy performance at billiards, from which I really could have refrained.” He sighed. “I have not covered myself in glory on this mission.”
Curtis tightened his arm. “So what happened then?”
“Well, Holt wanted to know how I got in there. Whether you knew what I was doing. I went all whiny East End in an effort to persuade him I was just an opportunistic thief, but he chose not to believe me. Which was when he came up with the bright idea of the cave.” Curtis felt his convulsive swallow. “The idea being, you see, that after a day underground I should be ready to tell them whatever they wanted, which was of course quite correct, except that it didn’t take anything like a day, not with that bloody water dripping down like stones falling and the c-cold—” He stopped short, then took a deep breath, exhaled hard, and went on with just the barest tremor in his voice. “Holt was too clever for his own good. I don’t honestly think he believed I was more than a thief. I think he wanted to find a reason to torture me. Or even, to torture somebody, and I happened to be in a vulnerable position.”
“I’m damned sorry I gave him the idea with that blasted story.”
“I’m not. For one thing, I shouldn’t have preferred it if he’d used knives or needles. For another, it’s thanks to his desire to see me go mad underground that you were able to reach me, for which—”
“Sssh.” Curtis pulled him closer and felt Daniel twist to slip his arms round his chest.
They held each other in silence, in the chilly dark, with the faint light of the moon through the mullioned window casting everything grey. Curtis found, to his own slight surprise, that he was stroking Daniel’s hair. Daniel wasn’t objecting.
“Holt,” Daniel said at last. “You killed him.”
Curtis’s hand stopped briefly. “Yes.”
“I was in something of a state at the time, what with the cold, and spending a day in an utter funk, and I’ll admit I wasn’t entirely in my right mind. Nevertheless, it did seem to me that neither were you.”
“No.” Curtis had no idea what else to say about that.
“Was that what they call a berserk state?”
“You’ve read that damned book about my uncle, haven’t you?”
“Well, I have, but I have also read a number of Icelandic sagas,” said Daniel astonishingly. “I did my master’s thesis on Old Norse.”
“You’ve an MA?” said Curtis, with the instinctive alarm of one who had got a place at Oxford on the strength of his boxing.
“The German equivalent, as it happens, from Heidelberg. Hence I have read a fair few descriptions of berserk warriors, and I must say, Curtis… You looked about twice your already substantial size, you kept laughing, which was unnerving, and of course you broke his neck with your bare hands. It was a sight to behold. I don’t speak in a spirit of criticism, I was just rather startled,” he added. “Much as if one had come across a Roman legionary, alive and well in the twentieth century.”
Curtis shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know what to tell you. Quatermain, the writer fellow, used to say my uncle and I are throwbacks to our Norse forefathers. Race memory or some such tripe. Nonsense, if you ask me. I lose control of myself in a scrap sometimes, that’s all. I don’t much like it.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do. Did Holt get you with that knife?”
Curtis appreciated the absence of sympathy or apology in the deft shift of subject. It was one of the things that made Daniel so easy to talk to, at least when he wasn’t in one of his prickly moods. “Slashed my forearm. It’s not deep. My coat took the brunt.” He had bundled the ripped coat up with his blood-soaked shirt and hidden them in the wardrobe, then closed the wound with strips of sticking plaster. It wasn’t comfortable, but it would heal.