The matrons, all of them middle-aged or older, with faces curiously, almost frighteningly lacking in expression, began to move with a sort of ponderous precision. Shouldering their hayforks like rifles, they formed a straight line and began to clump heavily to and fro, their beribboned pigtails swinging as the music from the accordions swelled in volume. They pirouetted gravely, then resumed their rhythmic marching to and fro. The straight line, I saw, was now gradually curving into the shape of a half moon.
‘I’ve never seen a dance like this before.’ Maggie’s voice was puzzled. I’d never seen a dance like it either and I knew with a sick and chilling certainty that I would never want to see one again – not, it seemed now, that I would ever have the chance to see one again.
Trudi echoed my thoughts, but their sinister implication escaped Maggie.
‘And you will never see a dance like this again, Maggie,’ she said. ‘They are only starting. Oh, Maggie, they must like you – see, they want you!’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, Maggie. They like you. Sometimes they ask me. Today, you.’
‘I must go, Trudi.’
‘Please, Maggie. For a moment. You don’t do anything. You just stand facing them. Please, Maggie. They will be hurt if you don’t do this.’
Maggie laughed protestingly, resignedly. ‘Oh, very well.’
Seconds later a reluctant and very embarrassed Maggie was standing at the focal point as a semicircle of hayfork-bearing matrons advanced and retreated towards and from her. Gradually the pattern and the tempo of the dance changed and quickened as the dancers now formed a complete circle about Maggie. The circle contracted and expanded, contracted and expanded, the women bowing gravely as they approached most closely to Maggie, then flinging their heads and pigtails back as they stamped away again.
Goodbody came into my line of view, his smile gently amused and kindly as he participated vicariously in the pleasure of the charming old dance taking place before him. He stood beside Trudi, and put a hand on her shoulder: she smiled delightedly up at him.
I felt I was going to be sick. I wanted to look away, but to look away would have been an abandonment of Maggie and I could never abandon Maggie: but God only knew that I could never help her now. There was embarrassment in her face, now, and puzzlement: and more than a hint of uneasiness. She looked anxiously at Trudi through a gap between two of the matrons: Trudi smiled widely and waved in gay encouragement.
Suddenly the accordion music changed. What had been a gently lilting dance tune, albeit with a military beat to it, increased rapidly in volume as it changed into something of a different nature altogether, something that went beyond the merely martial, something that was harsh and primitive and savage and violent. The matrons, having reached their fully expanded circle, were beginning to close in again. From my elevation I could still see Maggie, her eyes wide now and fear showing in her face: she leaned to one side to look almost desperately for Trudi. But there was no salvation in Trudi: her smile had gone now, her cotton-clad hands were clasped tightly together and she was licking her lips slowly, obscenely. I turned to look at Marcel, who was busy doing the same thing: but he still had his gun on me, and watched me as closely as he watched the scene outside. There was nothing I could do.
The matrons were now stamping their way inwards. Their moonlike faces had lost their expressionless quality and were now pitiless, implacable, and the deepening fear in Maggie’s eyes gave way to terror, her eyes staring as the music became more powerful, more discordant still. Then abruptly, with military precision, the shoulder-borne pitchforks were brought sweeping down until they were pointed directly at Maggie. She screamed and screamed again but the sound she made was barely audible above the almost insanely discordant crescendo of the accordions. And then Maggie was down and, mercifully, all I could see was the back view of the matrons as their forks time and again jerked high and stabbed down convulsively at something that now lay motionless on the ground. For the space of a few moments I could look no longer. I had to look away, and there was Trudi, her hands opening and closing, her mesmerized entranced face with a hideous animal-like quality to it: and beside her the Reverend Goodbody, his face as benign and gently benevolent as ever, an expression that belied his staring eyes. Evil minds, sick minds that had long since left the borders of sanity far behind.
I forced myself to look back again as the music slowly subsided, losing its primeval atavistic quality. The frenzied activities of the matrons had subsided, the stabbing had ceased, and as I watched one of the matrons turned aside and picked up a forkful of hay. I had a momentary glimpse of a crumpled figure with a white blouse no longer white lying on the stubble, then a forkful of hay covered her from sight. Then came another forkful and another and another, and as the two accordions, soft and gentle and muted now, spoke nostalgically of old Vienna, they built a haystack over Maggie. Dr Goodbody and Trudi, she again smiling and chattering gaily, walked off arm in arm towards the village.
Marcel turned away from the gap in the planks and sighed. ‘Dr Goodbody manages those things so well, don’t you think? The flair, the sensitivity, the time, the place, the atmosphere – exquisitely done, exquisitely done.’ The beautifully modulated Oxbridge accent emanating from that snake’s head was no less repellent than the context in which the words were used: he was like the rest of them, quite mad.
He approached me circumspectly from the back, undid the handkerchief which had been tied round my head and plucked out the filthy lump of cotton that had been shoved into my mouth. I didn’t think that he was being motivated by any humanitarian considerations, and he wasn’t. He said offhandedly: ‘When you scream, I want to hear it. I don’t think the ladies out there will pay too much attention.’
I was sure they wouldn’t. I said: ‘I’m surprised Dr Goodbody could drag himself away.’ My voice didn’t sound like any voice I’d ever used before: it was hoarse and thick and I’d difficulty in forming the words as if I’d damaged my larynx.
Marcel smiled. ‘Dr Goodbody has urgent things to attend to in Amsterdam. Important things.’
‘And important things to transport from here to Amsterdam.’
‘Doubtless.’ He smiled again and I could almost see his hood distending. ‘Classically, my dear Sherman, when a person is in your position and has lost out and is about to die, it is customary for a person in my position to explain, in loving detail, just where the victim went wrong. But apart from the fact that your list of blunders is so long as to be too tedious to ennumerate, I simply can’t be bothered. So let’s get on with it, shall we?’
‘Get on with what?’ Here it comes now, I thought, but I didn’t much care: it didn’t seem to matter much any more.
‘The message from Mr Durrell, of course.’ Pain sliced like a butcher’s cleaver through my head and the side of my face as he slashed the barrel of his gun across it. I thought my left cheekbone must be broken, but couldn’t be sure: but my tongue told me that two at least of my teeth had been loosened beyond repair.
‘Mr Durrell,’ Marcel said happily, ‘told me to tell you that he doesn’t like being pistol-whipped.’ He went for the right side of my face this time, and although I saw and knew it was coming and tried to jerk my head back I couldn’t get out of the way. This one didn’t hurt so badly, but I knew I was badly hurt from the temporary loss of vision that followed the brilliant white light that seemed to explode just in front of my eyes. My face was on fire, my head was coming apart, but my mind was strangely clear. Very little more of this systematic clubbing, I knew, and even a plastic surgeon would shake his head regretfully: but what really mattered was that with very little more of this treatment I would lose consciousness, perhaps for hours. There seemed to be only one hope: to make his clubbing unsystematic.
I spat out a tooth and said: ‘Pansy.’
For some reason this got him. The veneer of civilized urbanity couldn’t have been thicker than an onion skin to begin with and it just didn’t slough off, it vanished in an
instant of time and what was left was a mindless beserker savage who attacked me with the wanton, unreasoning and insensate fury of the mentally unhinged, which he almost certainly was. Blows rained from all directions on my head and shoulders, blows from his gun and blows from his fists and when I tried to protect myself as best I could with my forearms he switched his insane assault to my body. I moaned, my eyes turned up, my legs turned to jelly and I would have collapsed had I been in a position to: as it was, I just hung limply from the rope securing my wrists.
Two or three more agony-filled seconds elapsed before he recovered himself sufficiently to realize that he was wasting his time: from Marcel’s point of view there could be little point in inflicting punishment on a person who was beyond feeling the effects of it. He made a strange noise in his throat which probably indicated disappointment more than anything else, then just stood there breathing heavily. What he was contemplating doing next I couldn’t guess for I didn’t dare open my eyes.
I heard him move away a little and risked a quick glance from the corner of my eye. The momentary madness was over and Marcel, who was obviously as opportunistic as he was sadistic, had picked up my jacket and was going through it hopefully but unsuccessfully, for wallets carried in the inner breast pocket of a jacket invariably fall out when that jacket is carried over the arm and I’d prudently transferred my wallet with its money, passport and driving licence to my hip pocket. Marcel wasn’t long in arriving at the right conclusion for almost immediately I heard his footsteps and felt the wallet being removed from my hip pocket.
He was standing by my side now. I couldn’t see him, but I was aware of this. I moaned and swung helplessly at the end of the rope that secured me to the rafter. My legs were trailed out behind me, the upper parts of the toes of my shoes resting on the floor. I opened my eyes, just a fraction.
I could see his feet, not more than a yard from where I was. I glanced up, for the fleeting part of a second. Marcel, with an air of concentration and pleased surprise was engrossed in the task of transferring the very considerable sums of money I carried in my wallet to his own pocket. He held the wallet in his left hand, while his gun dangled by the trigger-guard from the crooked middle finger of the same hand. He was so absorbed that he didn’t see my hands reach up to get a better purchase on the securing ropes.
I jack-knifed my body convulsively forward and upwards with all the hate and the fury and the pain that was in me and I do not think that Marcel ever saw my scything feet coming. He made no sound at all, just jack-knifed forward in turn as convulsively as I had done, fell against me and slithered slowly to the floor. He lay there and his head rolled from side to side whether in unconscious reflex or in the conscious reflex of a body otherwise numbed in a paroxysm of agony I could not say but I was in no way disposed to take chances. I stood upright, took a long step back as far as my bonds would permit and came at him again. I was vaguely surprised that his head still stayed on his shoulders: it wasn’t pretty but then I wasn’t dealing with pretty people.
The gun was still hooked round the middle finger of his left hand. I pulled it off with the toes of my shoes. I tried to get a purchase on the gun between my shoes but the friction coefficient between the metal and the leather was too low and the gun kept sliding free. I removed my shoes by dragging the heels against the floor and then, a much longer process, my socks by using the same technique. I abraded a fair amount of skin and collected my quota of wooden splinters in so doing, but was conscious of no real sensation of hurt: the pain in my face made other minor irritation insignificant to the point of non-existence.
My bare feet gave me an excellent purchase on the gun. Keeping them tightly clamped together I brought both ends of the rope together and hauled myself up till I reached the rafter. This gave me four feet of slack rope to play with, more than enough. I hung by my left hand, reached down with my right while I doubled up my legs. And then I had the gun in my hand.
I lowered myself to the floor, held the rope pinioning my left wrist taut and placed the muzzle of the gun against it. The first shot severed it as neatly as any knife could have done. I untied all the knots securing me, ripped off the front of Marcel’s snow-white shirt to wipe my bloodied face and mouth, retrieved my wallet and money and left. I didn’t know whether Marcel was alive or dead, he looked very dead to me but I wasn’t interested enough to investigate.
TWELVE
It was early afternoon when I got back to Amsterdam and the sun that had looked down on Maggie’s death that morning had symbolically gone into hiding. Heavy dark cloud rolled in from the Zuider Zee. I could have reached the city an hour earlier than I did, but the doctor in the outpatients department of the suburban hospital where I’d stopped by to have my face fixed had been full of questions and annoyed at my insistence that sticking-plaster – a large amount of it, admittedly – was all I required at the moment and that the stitching and the swathes of white bandaging could wait until later. What with the plaster and assorted bruises and a half-closed left eye I must have looked like the sole survivor from an express train crash, but at least I wasn’t bad enough to send young children screaming for their mothers.
I parked the police taxi not far from a hire-garage where I managed to persuade the owner to let me have a small black Opel. He wasn’t very keen, as my face was enough to give rise in anyone’s mind to doubts about my past driving record, but he let me have it in the end. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall as I drove off, stopped by the police car, picked up Astrid’s handbag and two pairs of handcuffs for luck, and went on my way.
I parked the car in what was by now becoming a rather familiar side-street to me and walked down towards the canal. I poked my head around the corner and as hastily withdrew it again: next time I looked I merely edged an eye round.
A black Mercedes was parked by the door of the Church of the American Huguenot Society. Its capacious boot was open and two men were lifting an obviously very heavy box inside: there were already two or three similar boxes deeper inside the boot. One of the men was instantly identifiable as the Reverend Goodbody: the other man, thin, of medium height, clad in a dark suit and with dark hair and a very swarthy face, was as instantly recognizable: the dark and violent man who had gunned down Jimmy Duclos in Schiphol Airport. For a moment or two I forgot about the pain in my face. I wasn’t positively happy at seeing this man again but I was far from dejected as he had seldom been very far from my thoughts. The wheel, I felt, was coming full circle.
They staggered out from the church with one more box, stowed it away and closed the boot. I headed back for my Opel and by the time I’d brought it down to the canal Goodbody and the dark man were already a hundred yards away in the Mercedes. I followed at a discreet distance.
The rain was falling in earnest now as the black Mercedes headed west and south across the city. Though not yet mid-afternoon, the sky was as thunderously overcast as if dusk, still some hours away, was falling. I didn’t mind, it made for the easiest of shadowing: in Holland it is required that you switch your lights on in heavy rain, and in those conditions one car looked very like the dark shapeless mass of the next.
We cleared the last of the suburbs and headed out into the country. There was no wild element of pursuit or chase about our progress. Goodbody, though driving a powerful car, was proceeding at a very sedate pace indeed, hardly surprising, perhaps, in view of the very considerable weight he was carrying in the boot. I was watching road signs closely and soon I was in no doubt as to where we were heading: I never really had been.
I thought it wiser to arrive at our mutual destination before Goodbody and the dark man did, so I closed up till I was less than twenty yards behind the Mercedes. I had no worry about being recognized by Goodbody in his driving mirror for he was throwing up so dense a cloud of spray that all he could possibly have seen following him was a pair of dipped headlamps. I waited till I could see ahead what seemed to be a straight stretch of road, pulled out and accelerated past the Merc
edes. As I drew level Goodbody glanced briefly and incuriously at the car that was overtaking him, then looked as incuriously away again. His face had been no more than a pale blur to me and the rain was so heavy and the spray thrown up by both cars so blinding that I knew it was impossible that he could have recognized me. I pulled ahead and got into the right-hand lane again, not slackening speed.
Three kilometres further on I came to a righthand fork which read ‘Kasteel Linden 1 km’. I turned down this and a minute later passed an imposing stone archway with the words ‘Kasteel Linden’ engraved in gilt above it. I carried on for perhaps another two hundred yards, then turned off the road and parked the Opel in a deep thicket.
I was going to get very wet again but I didn’t seem to have much in the way of options. I left the car and ran across some thinly wooded grassland till I came to a thick belt of pines that obviously served as some kind of wind-break for a habitation. I made my way through the pines, very circumspectly, and there was the habitation all right: the Kasteel Linden. Oblivious of the rain beating down on my unprotected back, I stretched out in the concealment of long grass and some bushes and studied the place.
Immediately before me stretched a circular gravelled driveway which led off to my right to the archway I’d just passed. Beyond the gravel lay the Kasteel Linden itself, a rectangular four-storeyed building, windowed on the first two storeys, embrasured above, with the top turreted and crenellated in the best medieval fashion. Encircling the castle was a continuous moat fifteen feet in width and, according to the guide-book, almost as deep. All that was lacking was a drawbridge, although the chain pulleys for it were still to be seen firmly embedded in the thick masonry of the walls: instead, a flight of about twenty wide and shallow stone steps spanned the moat and led to a pair of massive closed doors, which seemed to be made of oak. To my left, about thirty yards distant from the castle, was a rectangular, one-storey building in brick and obviously of fairly recent construction.
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