Durrell had been wrong about the amount of breathable air available inside that safe. He’d overestimated. He was semi-collapsed with his knees resting on Marcel’s back, which made it fortunate for Marcel that he was still unconscious. At least, I thought he was unconscious. I didn’t bother to check. I caught Durrell by the shoulder and pulled. It was like pulling a bull moose out of a swamp, but he came eventually and rolled out on to the floor. He lay there for a bit, then pushed himself groggily to his knees. I waited patiently until the laboured stertorous whooping sound dropped to a mere gasping wheeze and his complexion ran through the spectrum from a bluish-violet colour to what would have been a becomingly healthy pink had I not known that his normal complexion more resembled the colour of old newspaper. I prodded him and indicated that he should get to his feet and he managed this after a few tries.
‘Astrid Lemay?’ I said.
‘She was here this morning.’ His voice came as a hoarse whisper but audible enough all the same. ‘She said that very urgent family matters had come up. She had to leave the country.’
‘Alone?’
‘No, with her brother.’
‘He was here?’
‘No.’
‘Where did she say she was going?’
‘Athens. She belonged there.’
‘She came here just to tell you this?’
‘She had two months’ back pay due. She needed it for the fare.’
I told him to get back inside the safe. I had a little trouble with him, but he finally decided that it offered a better chance than a bullet, so he went. I didn’t want to terrify him any more. I just didn’t want him to hear what I was about to say.
I got through to Schiphol on a direct line, and was finally connected with the person I wanted.
‘Inspector van Gelder, Police HQ here,’ I said. ‘An Athens flight this morning. Probably KLM. I want to check if two people, names Astrid Lemay and George Lemay, were on board. Their descriptions are as follows – what was that?’
The voice at the other end told me that they had been aboard. There had been some difficulty, apparently, about George being allowed on the flight as his condition was such that both medical and police authorities at the airport had questioned the wisdom of it, but the girl’s pleading had prevailed. I thanked my informant and hung up.
I opened the door of the safe. It hadn’t been shut more than a couple of minutes this time and I didn’t expect to find them in such bad shape and they weren’t. Durrell’s complexion was no more than puce, and Marcel had not only recovered consciousness but recovered it to the extent of trying to lug out his underarm gun, which I had carelessly forgotten to remove. As I took the gun from him before he could damage himself with it, I reflected that Marcel must have the most remarkable powers of recuperation. I was to remember this with bitter chagrin on an occasion that was to be a day or so later and very much more inauspicious for me.
I left them both sitting on the floor, and as there didn’t seem to be anything worthwhile to say none of the three of us said it. I unlocked the door, opened it, closed and locked it behind me, smiled pleasantly at the faded blonde and dropped the key through a street grille outside the Balinova. Even if there wasn’t a spare key available, there were telephones and alarm bells still operating from inside that room and it shouldn’t take an oxyacetylene torch more than two or three hours to open it. There should be enough air inside the room to last that time. But it didn’t seem very important one way or another.
I drove back to Astrid’s flat and did what I should have done in the first place – asked some of her immediate neighbours if they had seen her that morning. Two had, and their stories checked. Astrid and George with two or three cases had left two hours previously in a taxi.
Astrid had skipped and I felt a bit sad and empty about it, not because she had said she would help me and hadn’t but because she had closed the last escape door open to her.
Her masters hadn’t killed her for two reasons. They knew I could have tied them up with her death and that would be coming too close to home. And they didn’t have to because she was gone and no longer a danger to them: fear, if it is sufficiently great, can seal lips as effectively as death.
I’d liked her and would have liked to see her happy again. I couldn’t blame her. For her, all the doors had been closed.
NINE
The view from the top of the towering Havengebouw, the skyscraper in the harbour, is unquestionably the best in Amsterdam. But I wasn’t interested in the view that morning, only in the facilities this vantage point had to offer. The sun was shining, but it was breezy and cool at that altitude and even at sea-level the wind was strong enough to ruffle the blue-grey waters into irregular wavy patterns of white horses.
The observation platform was crowded with tourists, for the most part with wind-blown hair, binoculars and cameras, and although I didn’t carry any camera I didn’t think I looked different from any other tourist. Only my purpose in being up there was.
I leaned on my elbows and gazed out to sea. De Graaf had certainly done me proud with those binoculars, they were as good as any I had ever come across and with the near-perfect visibility that day the degree of definition was all that I could ever have wished for.
The glasses were steadied on a coastal steamer of about a thousand tons that was curving into harbour. Even when I first picked her up I could detect the large rust-streaked patches on the hull and see that she was flying the Belgian flag. And the time, shortly before noon, was right. I followed her progress and it seemed to me that she was taking a wider sweep than one or two vessels that had preceded her and was going very close indeed to the buoys that marked the channel: but maybe that was where the deepest water lay.
I followed her progress till she closed on the harbour and then I could distinguish the rather scarred name on the rusty bows. Marianne the name read. The captain was certainly a stickler for punctuality, but whether he was such a stickler for abiding by the law was another question.
I went down to the Havenrestaurant and had lunch. I wasn’t hungry but meal-times in Amsterdam, as my experience had been since coming there, tended to be irregular and infrequent. The food in the Havenrestaurant is well spoken of and I’ve no doubt it merits its reputation: but I don’t remember what I had for lunch that day.
I arrived at the Hotel Touring at one-thirty. I didn’t really expect to find that Maggie and Belinda had returned yet and they hadn’t. I told the man behind the desk that I’d wait in the lounge, but I don’t much fancy lounges, especially when I had to study papers like the papers I had to study from the folder we’d taken from Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s, so I waited till the desk was momentarily unmanned, took the lift to the fourth floor and let myself into the girls’ room. It was a fractionally better room than the previous one they’d had, and the couch, which I immediately tested, was fractionally softer, but there wasn’t enough in it to make Maggie and Belinda turn cartwheels for joy, apart from the fact that the first cartwheel in any direction would have brought them up against a solid wall.
I lay on that couch for over an hour, going through all the warehouse’s invoices and a very unexciting and innocuous list of invoices they turned out to be. But there was one name among all the others that turned up with surprising frequency and as its products matched with the line of my developing suspicions, I made a note of its name and map location.
A key turned in the lock and Maggie and Belinda entered. Their first reaction on seeing me seemed to be one of relief, which was quickly followed by an unmistakable air of annoyance. I said mildly: ‘Is there something up, then?’
‘You had us worried,’ Maggie said coldly. ‘The man at the desk said you were waiting for us in the lounge and you weren’t there.’
‘We waited half an hour.’ Belinda was almost bitter about it. ‘We thought you had gone.’
‘I was tired. I had to lie down. Now that I’ve apologized, how did your morning go?’
‘W
ell—’ Maggie didn’t seem very mollified ‘we had no luck with Astrid—’
‘I know. The man at the desk gave me your message. We can quit worrying about Astrid. She’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ they said.
‘Skipped the country.’
‘Skipped the country?’
‘Athens.’
‘Athens?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the vaudeville act for later. ‘She and George left Schiphol this morning.’
‘Why?’ Belinda asked.
‘Scared. The bad men were leaning on her from one side and the good guy – me – on the other. So she lit out.’
‘How do you know she’s gone?’ Maggie enquired.
‘A man at the Balinova told me.’ I didn’t elaborate, if they’d any illusions left about the nice boss they had I wanted them to keep them. ‘And I checked with the airport.’
‘Mm.’ Maggie was unimpressed by my morning’s work, she seemed to have the feeling that it was all my fault that Astrid had gone and as usual she was right. ‘Well, Belinda or me first?’
‘This first.’ I handed her the paper with the figures 910020 written on it. ‘What does it mean?’
Maggie looked at it, turned it upside down and looked at the back. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Let me see it,’ Belinda said brightly. ‘I’m good at anagrams and cross-words.’ She was, too. Almost at once she said: ‘Reverse it. 020019. Two a.m. on the 19th, which is tomorrow morning.’
‘Not bad at all,’ I said indulgently. It had taken me half an hour to work it out.
‘What happens then?’ Maggie asked suspiciously.
‘Whoever wrote those figures forgot to explain that,’ I said evasively, for I was getting tired of telling outright lies. ‘Well, Maggie, you.’
‘Well.’ She sat down and smoothed out a lime-green cotton dress which looked as if it had shrunk an awful lot with repeated washing. ‘I put on this new dress to the park because Trudi hadn’t seen it before and the wind was blowing so I had a scarf over my head and–’
‘And you were wearing dark glasses.’
‘Right.’ Maggie wasn’t an easy girl to throw off stride. ‘I wandered around for half an hour, dodging pensioners and prams most of the time. Then I saw her – or rather I saw this enormous fat old – old–’
‘Beldam?’
‘Beldam. Dressed like you said she would be. Then I saw Trudi. Long-sleeved white cotton dress, couldn’t keep still, skipped about like a lamb.’ Maggie paused and said reflectively: ‘She really is a rather beautiful girl.’
‘You have a generous soul, Maggie.’
Maggie took the hint. ‘By and by they sat down on a bench. I sat on another about thirty yards away, just looking over the top of a magazine. A Dutch magazine.’
‘A nice touch,’ I approved.
‘Then Trudi started plaiting the hair of this puppet–’
‘What puppet?’
‘The puppet she was carrying,’ Maggie said patiently. ‘If you keep on interrupting I find it difficult to remember all the details. While she was doing this a man came up and sat beside them. A big man in a dark suit with a priest’s collar, white moustache, marvellous white hair. He seemed a very nice man.’
‘I’m sure he was,’ I said mechanically. I could well imagine the Rev. Thaddeus Goodbody as a man of instant charm except, perhaps, at half-past three in the morning.
‘Trudi seemed very fond of him. After a minute or two, she reached an arm round his neck and whispered something in his ear. He made a great play of being shocked but you could see he wasn’t really, for he reached a hand into his pocket and pressed something into her hand. Money, I suppose.’ I was on the point of asking if she was sure it wasn’t a hypodermic syringe, but Maggie was far too nice for that. ‘Then she rose, still clutching this puppet, and skipped across to an ice-cream van. She bought an ice-cream cornet – and then she started walking straight towards me.’
‘You left?’
‘I held the magazine higher,’ Maggie said with dignity. ‘I needn’t have bothered. She headed past me towards another open van about twenty feet away.’
‘To admire the puppets?’
‘How did you know?’ Maggie sounded disappointed.
‘Every second van in Amsterdam seems to sell puppets.’
‘That’s what she did. Fingered them, stroked them. The old man in charge tried to look angry but who could be angry with a girl like that? She went right round the van, then went back to the bench. She kept on offering the cornet to the puppet.’
‘And didn’t seem upset when the puppet didn’t want any. What were the old girl and the pastor doing the while?’
‘Talking. They seemed to have a lot to talk about. Then Trudi got back and they all talked some more, then the pastor patted Trudi on the back, they all rose, he took his hat off to the old girl, as you call her, and they all went away.’
‘An idyllic scene. They went away together?’
‘No. The pastor went by himself.’
‘Try to follow any of them?’
‘No.’
‘Good girl. Were you followed?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘There was a whole crowd of people leaving at the same time as I did. Fifty, sixty, I don’t know. It would be silly for me to say that I was sure nobody had an eye on me. But nobody followed me back here.’
‘Belinda?’
‘There’s a coffee-shop almost opposite the Hostel Paris. Lots of girls came and went from the hostel but I was on my fourth cup before I recognized one who’d been in the church last night. A tall girl with auburn hair, striking, I suppose you would call her—’
‘How do you know what I’d call her? She was dressed like a nun last night.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you couldn’t have seen that she had auburn hair.’
‘She had a mole high up on her left cheekbone.’
‘And black eyebrows?’ Maggie put in.
‘That’s her,’ Belinda agreed. I gave up. I believed them. When one good-looking girl examines another good-looking girl her eyes are turned into long-range telescopes. ‘I followed her to the Kalverstraat,’ Belinda continued. ‘She went into a big store. She seemed to walk haphazardly through the ground floor but she wasn’t being haphazard really for she fetched up pretty quickly at a counter marked” SOUVENIRS: EXPORT ONLY“. The girl examined the souvenirs casually but I knew she was far more interested in the puppets than anything else.’
‘Well, well, well,’ I said. ‘Puppets again. How did you know she was interested?’
‘I just knew,’ Belinda said in the tone of one trying to describe various colours to a person who has been blind from birth. ‘Then after a while she started to examine a particular group of puppets very closely. After shilly-shallying for a while she made her choice, but I knew she wasn’t shilly-shallying.’ I kept prudent silence. ‘She spoke to the assistant who wrote something on a piece of paper.’
‘The time it would—’
‘The time it would take to write the average address.’ She’d carried on blandly as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘Then the girl passed over money and left.’
‘You followed her?’
‘No. Am I a good girl too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I wasn’t followed.’
‘Or watched? In the store, I mean. By, for instance, any big fat middle-aged man.’
Belinda giggled. ‘Lots of big—’
‘All right, all right, so lots of big fat middle-aged men spend a lot of time watching you. And lots of young thin ones, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ I paused consideringly. ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I love you both.’
They exchanged glances. ‘Well,’ Belinda said, ‘that is nice.’
‘Professionally speaking, dear girls, professionally speaking. Excellent reports from both, I must say. Belinda, you saw the puppet the girl chose?’
; ‘I’m paid to see things,’ she said primly.
I eyed her speculatively, but let it go. ‘Quite. It was a Huyler costumed puppet. Like the one we saw in the warehouse.’
‘How on earth — did you know?’
‘I could say I’m psychic. I could say “genius”. The fact of the matter is that I have access to certain information that you two don’t.’
‘Well, then, share it with us.’ Belinda, of course.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there are men in Amsterdam who could take you and put you in a quiet dark room and make you talk.’
There was a long pause, then Belinda said: ‘And you wouldn’t?’
‘I might at that,’ I admitted. ‘But they wouldn’t find it so easy to get me into that quiet dark room in the first place.’ I picked up a batch of the invoices. ‘Either of you ever heard of the Kasteel Linden. No? Neither had I. It seems, however, that they supply our friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler with a large proportion of pendulum clocks.’
‘Why pendulum clocks?’ Maggie asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I lied frankly. ‘There may be a connection. I’d asked Astrid to try to trace the source of a certain type of clock – she had, you understand, a lot of underworld connections that she didn’t want. But she’s gone now. I’ll look into it tomorrow.’
‘We’ll do it today.’ Belinda said. ‘We could go to this Kasteel place and—’
‘You do that and you’re on the next plane back to England. Alternatively, I don’t want to waste time dragging you up from the bottom of the moat that surrounds this castle. Clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ they said meekly and in unison. It was becoming distressingly and increasingly plain that they didn’t regard my bite as being anywhere near as bad as my bark.
I gathered the papers and rose. ‘The rest of the day is yours. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’
Oddly, they didn’t seem too happy about getting the rest of the day to themselves. Maggie said: ‘And you?’
‘A car trip to the country. To clear my head. Then sleep, then maybe a boat trip tonight.’
Puppet on a Chain Page 14
