The Castle of the Demon

by Reginald Hill

  She glanced across at Sterne as though for confirmation, but he didn’t move or speak. A thin thread of smoke drifted up from the cigarette he had lit now they had finished eating. He was meticulous in his concern for the comfort of others—in little things. She wondered how he felt standing in the background listening to an interrogation which so closely concerned himself. She suspected he felt nothing, his reaction was purely cerebral. And it was beginning to dawn on her that she was here in this room at the instigation of the others, not of Sterne.

  Conn nodded once more.

  ‘It’s a lonely place,’ he said.

  ‘Look,’ said Emily. ‘What’s all this about? I am, I take it, in the college?’

  They nodded sombrely. The Colonel looked at Major Glover who began speaking.

  ‘We’ll stick to you for the moment, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Follett. You can see our problem. Either you’re in Skinburness purely by accident or you are here by design.’

  ‘Applause, applause,’ said Emily.

  Glover went on unperturbed.

  ‘This could either be your own design, because you know of Mr. Follett’s connection with the place and wish to make capital out of your knowledge. Alternatively, it could, of course, be by Mr. Follett’s own design.’

  There it was now. Spelt out clearly. Sterne was on the hook, not wriggling and struggling, but hanging there passively till the moment came to break completely loose. Why and how didn’t matter. What did she owe him? That was the question. And just how important was her silence? She had to know a lot more before she could decide. Time was the thing.

  ‘I don’t know if it will help or hinder my husband,’ she said steadily, ‘but it was my own free decision to come here. If we had arranged it together why would it have been necessary to arrange for me to be spied on?’

  ‘Spied on?’ said Conn, surprised.

  ‘You mean the man Burgess,’ said the Colonel, almost apologetically. He looked at Sterne, who raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the Colonel. ‘The switchboard sergeant was naturally curious about the calls. He did a bit of checking back. I disciplined him, of course, but intelligence, however obtained, is intelligence.’

  Sterne nodded understandingly, a quiet smile on his lips.

  ‘Purely a marital matter, you understand, Petard. Things have not been well. I’m sorry, my dear.’

  This did not match up to the Follett image at all, thought Emily. An explanation, followed by an apology! The implied lie was to be expected, however.

  She glanced at the others to see if they had noticed.

  ‘This man Burgess,’ said Conn. ‘What is he? Some kind of private eye?’

  A pained look crossed Sterne’s face.

  ‘Arthur Burgess is an old and trusted employee of mine, an executive of some considerable status.’

  ‘Nothing to do with the set-up here, eh?’ barked Petard.

  ‘As you so obviously know, Colonel. Nothing to do with the college side of my business.’

  ‘You sure make your executives earn their dough,’ said Conn, an edge of scorn in his voice.

  ‘Mr. Conn, please,’ said the Colonel. ‘You are a guest.’

  ‘Oh God! The English!’ said Conn, throwing his arms out in mock despair.

  ‘Perhaps I might remind you,’ said Glover urbanely. ‘If there had been a little more English common sense, and a little less super-duper-American-swingalong security among your people, we wouldn’t be here now.’

  ‘Stop squabbling, please,’ said Sterne sharply. He moved forward from the fireplace and held everyone in his gaze.

  He’s going to take over again, thought Emily. He’s picked his moment. I don’t understand what the hell’s going on, but Sterne’s gathering up the strings again.

  ‘I think,’ said her husband, ‘that I have stood aside from my responsibilities for long enough, Colonel. It is always unfortunate in our business when the domestic overlaps with the professional. I realise it is necessary you satisfy yourself this is accidental. On the other hand, much remains to be done.’

  ‘Of course, sir. You appreciate it was necessary. I did not wish to work behind your back.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Colonel Petard.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Conn. ‘O.K., so we’re happy that Mrs. Follett is here by a dirty great coincidence. So perhaps we can stop scratching each other’s backs and get down to business.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Conn. Would you mind opening the door and asking Captain Carruthers to step inside?’

  That’s you reduced to serf status, Mr. Conn! thought Emily sympathetically.

  Conn caught her eye, grinned, and went to the door. The young man who had brought Emily downstairs came in at his call.

  ‘Captain,’ said Sterne, ‘please take Mrs. Follett back to her room. See she is comfortable and has everything she wants.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Emily. ‘I’m comfortable right here. And what I want is simple. I want to know what the hell’s going on. I’m entitled to know. I’ve got bruises to prove it. You can make it short or you can make it long. But here I stay till I’m in the picture as you might put it, Colonel.’

  There was a heavy silence.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Conn suddenly. ‘Hell, it’s not my business, but you’ve got to tell her something.’

  He glared around defiantly, but there was no resistance.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sterne. ‘But we need not detain you here, my dear. Who better than Captain Carruthers to tell the story? Captain, you heard? Take my wife upstairs and put her in the picture, that was I think the phrase? Try not to contravene too much of the Official Secrets Act, there’s a good fellow. In fact, perhaps you should get her to sign first.’

  Carruthers came smartly to attention and opened the door with a polite bow to Emily. Reluctantly she rose.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But if I am not satisfied I’ll be back. Good morning, gentlemen.’

  Back in her room she was amused but not surprised when Carruthers brought her a paper to sign. Sterne did not make jokes. It was a digest of the Official Secrets Act. She glanced quickly over it, then signed a printed statement saying that she had read and understood. Something of her earlier frivolity remained and she had to restrain herself from adding a line of kisses under her name.

  Kisses somehow made her think again of Michael Scott and as before the thought sobered her. For some reason comparisons of Scott and Sterne started rising in her mind. Sterne’s courtesy, Scott’s rudeness; Sterne’s elegance, Scott’s casualness; Sterne pecking at her cheek, Scott’s face white with pain above the rearing horse. Sterne alive, outliving everything, everyone, a natural survivor; and Scott washed bloatedly ashore by Blitterlees or Wolsty Bank.

  Carruthers was looking at her patiently, ready to start when she was. She forced herself back to the present.

  ‘Right, Captain,’ she said. ‘Simple things first. Just what is this place?’

  ‘The college?’ he said with a smile. ‘Why, it’s what the name implies. A college. A place where people are trained.’

  ‘Trained for what?’

  ‘Really, I suppose, it’s a kind of military training. Men come here who have been selected as suitable for a rather specialised kind of job.’

  He sat down opposite, balanced precariously on a rickety-looking chair, and seemed ready to warm to his task.

  ‘What do you know about your husband, Mrs. Follett? About his job, I mean?’

  ‘His job?’ Emily was surprised. ‘Well, I know that he’s an enormously wealthy man, that he has a controlling financial interest in several companies. He has a suite of offices in Davies Street off Oxford Street, where he spends much of his time in London. But he seems to spend more travelling around Europe on some kind of business trips—making top-level contacts is the nearest I’ve heard him get to describing his work. All I knew was that it usually involved dining with a lot of very important, very boring people.’

 
; Her mind went back to those trips. France, Italy, Austria, behind the Curtain. She was being unfair, stressing the boring people. Not all had been boring. And she had seen the world in a style and at a level she had never dreamed possible even in her most extravagant adolescent fantasies. Too much style, perhaps. Too high a level.

  ‘Sterne seemed to collect influence like other people collect match-boxes or stamps.’

  She realised she had spoken aloud. Some vestigial sense of loyalty made her sorry, sorry at least that she had spoken thus in front of a subordinate about his boss.

  ‘Sterne is your boss, isn’t he?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘Why yes. He is. He is the one behind it all. He is the one responsible,’ said Carruthers. ‘Listen. Mr. Follett’s trips abroad were all they seemed to be. But a little more also. You see, your husband is more than just a collector of influence, he’s a man of action too. He is also employed by one of our security services.’

  He paused, as though waiting for a dramatic reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘You mean, Sterne’s a spy!’ said Emily incredulously.

  ‘No, no,’ laughed Carruthers. ‘Not in any sense you mean. No guns, micro-film, beautiful blondes in the boudoir, present company excepted, of course, nothing like that. He is a man of quite exceptional organising talents, as I’m sure you know. That’s what made him what he is. His job in security was as a kind of peripatetic organiser. All the strings are gathered in at Whitehall, of course. And on the spot we have our local centres—third secretaries, trade missions, that kind of thing. But from time to time it’s invaluable to have a top man on the spot also. Someone who can check up on the local organisation while seeing the overall big picture at the same time.’

  ‘And this has been Sterne’s job?’

  ‘Yes. For many years now. And a tremendous success he has made of it. But a few years ago, two or three, it began to be felt that the time had come for a change. One thing’s certain in this game. If you go on long enough you’ll be found out. Oh, I know you only hear about the ones that get caught, never the ones that are successful. But it’s a good basic tenet of belief! Anyway, it wasn’t worth the risk exposing your husband to the dangers of trips behind the Curtain any more, not with his vast knowledge of the whole European set-up. So a fade-out job began. Gradually, of course. It’s still going on. It’s like stalking—one unexpected or violent movement and everything goes running. But you might have noticed you weren’t travelling so far so often in recent years?’

  Emily nodded slowly. Their journeys to Eastern Europe had become much fewer and more infrequent. Not that she had minded. Despite all her tenaciously retained left-wing views, she was always glad to see those particular frontiers fall behind her.

  ‘Of course, Western Europe still remained. Everybody listens to everybody else. But other work was found for Mr. Follett also. He is too valuable a man to be kept even in partial indolence. One of his new babies was this place.’

  He waved his hand vaguely around.

  ‘“By indirections find directions out,”’ quoted Emily. ‘You mean you’re finally going to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘Certainly. But the preamble was essential as your surprise demonstrated. Well now. The college was until about three years ago a teachers’ training college, before that it had been a private residence I believe. It was too small to be viable as a teachers’ college, the Department of Education decided, and they were in the act of closing it down when it came to our notice. I said before that the exotic spy image didn’t fit your husband. It doesn’t really fit anyone. It’s all foreign businessmen as collectors and disaffected natives as retailers. But another kind of operation is often needed. A quick in-and-out. Scrumping, we call it. Over the wall, fill your pockets with apples, then run like hell.’

  ‘Like Commando raids in the war?’ asked Emily.

  ‘Yes. Very like. But even more flexible, more expert. More anonymous too. Strictly non-military. That would be an act of war.’

  ‘I don’t quite see what purpose…’

  ‘Look,’ interrupted Carruthers. ‘Something odd starts being constructed just over the border from West Germany. You want to know what it is quick. No time to get to a man on the actual job, even if that were possible. So you send a little boarding party to have a look, preferably without being noticed. That needs experts. Real experts. They’ve got to be good enough to run up the beach at Havana, walk twice around the town and leave before dawn without Fidel’s sleep being disturbed.’

  ‘And are they?’

  ‘Just about,’ he said, his forehead crinkling into a slight frown. ‘That’s part of the trouble. Anyway, as you’ve probably grasped by now, we took over this place as a training centre. It was perfect. Remote without being inaccessible and with enough people around to make constant vigilance an absolute essential. Anyone can wander around in the Scottish Highlands, for instance, thinking they’re softer-footed than the last of the Mohicans. Here you’re really put to the test. And over on the other side we have a sister establishment.’

  He went to the window and pulled open the curtains. Emily blinked into the daylight for a moment. The room was at the front of the college and she was looking out over the Solway to the Scottish shore. The sky was a beautiful shade of eggshell blue. The only sign of the previous night’s storm were sparkling droplets of rain which gleamed everywhere in the grass and the bushes below.

  ‘It’s a useful arrangement,’ said Carruthers. ‘It gives both of us a target on training raids. And as we all know the methods we use, both places devise defence systems to combat these. Which means in turn we devise new methods of circumventing the defences. It’s like the public-school house system. A bit of hearty competition sharpens up everyone. There the resemblance ends, I’m glad to say.’

  ‘And Sterne’s in charge? But what on earth does he know … ?’ Her voice tailed away, incredulous at the thought of Sterne running around in the dark with his face blackened and a gun in his hand.

  ‘About this kind of exercise?’ Carruthers completed her question. ‘In practice, nothing of course. In theory, from what I have heard him say, he has obviously read and taken in everything that’s ever been written on the subject. He has a tremendous mind. But his real job has been an organisational one. Getting the idea off the ground, finance, establishment, selection of personnel, siting. It’s been a tremendous job, especially when it’s been done more or less part time. And he has made a real go of it. There are two others as well. One in the Lake District, one in Northern Ireland. We cover a wide variety of terrains.’

  ‘What’s gone wrong, then?’ Emily asked, anxious to get to the meat of the matter.

  And what’s happened to Michael? And what’s being done about Inwit and Plowman? And has anyone gone to dig up poor Fenimore Castell?

  But she didn’t voice these questions, just let them worry their way round and round her mind as she listened to Carruthers.

  ‘Six days ago,’ he said, ‘a raiding party set out from the college. As always, the man in charge of the party had received sealed orders which he did not open until he reached a pre-ordained spot. In this case it was two miles off shore in one of our rubber dinghies. It seemed certain the objective would be the familiar one of our sister college. Instead when the leader opened his instructions they told him to effect entry to the U.S. naval research base at Caerlaverock. You’ve probably noticed the lights at night. Look, you can see it now.’

  He pointed out across the water. Emily nodded without really looking.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Well, orders are orders. The man in charge was puzzled but…’

  ‘Stop being coy,’ said Emily in exasperation. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Why, yes. It was,’ said Carruthers with a slow smile. ‘How very perceptive.’

  ‘This is why Sterne said you were the obvious man to tell the story.’

  ‘Good thinking! All right. I was puzzled, but it seemed no
t unreasonable. I assumed the go-ahead had been given by the Americans. And indeed we had in the past studied both in the field and on paper the outer defence system of the base. So as an exercise in extemporisation, which we frequently had, it was not all that exceptional.’

  ‘But enough to puzzle you.’

  ‘Yes. Still, on we pressed. There were six of us. About a mile off shore we anchored the dinghy. That is, someone went down to the bottom with a line and hitched it to a rock. Then we all went over the side and headed for the shore.’

  A look of revelation swept up into Emily’s face.

  ‘You mean, like frogmen? You’d be wearing some kind of …? Well, what colour… ?’

  Carruthers looked puzzled for a second, then laughed.

  ‘Green! Of course! You and your green men. I thought you’d realised! It’s an excellent camouflage colour round here. We have skin-tight suits, a sort of blacky green, and dark green nylon hoods which take away the shape of the face as well as mask the colour.’

  ‘It was you last night who picked me up!’

  ‘Of course. Didn’t you know? I’ve been waiting for maidenly gratitude to rear its head ever since.’

  ‘Later please, Captain.’ She smiled at him, liking this young man very much.

  ‘Let’s have the end of the story first.’

  ‘Well, to cut it short, we got in with remarkable ease, which was not surprising as we discovered later, got clean through to their central admin block as instructed in our orders, then made our way out again. They would never have known we’d been there, but someone touched off an alarm as we made our way back over the perimeter wire. It’s an old lesson, one you can’t learn often enough. You’ve got to be even more careful getting out than in. But it was lucky in a way that night. We went off like the clappers, of course. Their men seemed to spring out of the ground all around us. This didn’t worry me till someone put a shot over our heads. Then I worried! But we made it back to the dinghy O.K., got back across to our side in good spirits—you know how you feel invigorated after danger—beached and stowed the dinghy, came back here and were arrested at the front door!’