Young Petrella by Michael Gilbert Page A

mistake by waiting at all. Equally, he could spoil everything by starting too early. He decided to compromise. He would give them until eleven o’clock.
    It was ten minutes to eleven when they came again – the same three men. This time they searched him. They found the pliers, but made no comment on them. Petrella got the idea that they were emptying his pockets less to deprive him of chances to escape than as a first step in stripping all marks of identity from him. His tailors’ tabs would go next. Then, perhaps, his fingers and his face. One man had brought a can of coffee.
    “You had better drink it,” said Clairambaud.
    “Later,” said Petrella.
    “As you wish.”
    When they had gone, he sniffed at the contents of the can and decided that there was more in it than coffee. He emptied it out into the corner.
    At eleven fifteen he opened the grating, and stepped out into the cellar. The door at the head of the steps offered him nothing. It was massive and was bolted on the outside.
    There was an inner door, at the top of a ramp, in the left-hand wall, and this was unlocked. It led into the chambre-des-cuviers, where the fermenting vats stood, stretching from floor to ceiling. They were empty now, scrubbed and ready for the coming vintage, but the room stank of bygone grape harvests. Unfortunately, its outer door was bolted, too.
    He made another circuit of the two cellars and confirmed that there were only two ways out. Then he sat down again to think.
    He might hide in the cellar. But for how long? Or he might conceal himself behind the door and try to slip out, or fight his way out, when the men came for him. It seemed a slender chance. And, at the back of his mind, maddening him . . . he knew that there was a way out.
    It was a chance thought about scrubbing the vats that brought it back to him.
    In olden days they had, literally, to be scrubbed: by men with brushes, who were lowered from the opening at the top. In modern vats there was often a device in the back at ground level enabling a man to get through. He would drag a pressure hose with him, and so the work would be done in a tenth of the time.
    Petrella prayed that the march of science had reached the Château Maurice-Epinard. It had, and a minute later he was inside the vat itself. He had armed himself with a pole from the cellar, and with it he pushed at the big trapdoor in the ceiling of the vat. It swung up under his pressure. So far, so good. The chance existed, but at the moment it was three clear feet out of reach of his fingertips. He needed something to stand on.
    The empty barrels in the main cellar would be tall enough to set on end, but they were too wide to get into the vat. He stumbled around in the dark for ten minutes and discovered two brooms and a rake, but nothing more.
    Twelve o’clock.
    Sweating now, he went back into his prison and took all the bottles from one of the racks. Then he set to work at loosening a section. It was a very bad time indeed before it came away from the wall. But it was thin enough to be squeezed through the opening in the vat, and just strong enough to take his weight.
    The last piece was a nightmare. He dared place very little weight on the rack, and he had to stand on it and lift a heavy trapdoor, using a thin wooden pole. That done, he had to pull himself up through the opening. His arms were trembling with fatigue, and twice he thought he would drop. It was only the realisation that if he failed he would never be able to try again that got him through on to the floor of the loft.
    And that was almost the end of his difficulties. The loft door was bolted, but on the inside. Five minutes later, he was in the open, creeping between the vines, heading for the main road.
     
    It was seven o’clock in the morning, in London. Superintendent Costorphine had been dragged from his bed at six, but he seemed neither surprised nor excited. He listened silently to the outline of Detective Petrella’s