Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  The black Mercedes appeared through the gateway, crunched its way on to the gravel and pulled up close to the rectangular building. While Goodbody remained inside the car, the dark man got out and made a complete circuit of the castle: Goodbody never had struck me as the kind of man to take chances. Goodbody got out and together the two men carried the contents of the boot into the building: the door had been locked but obviously Goodbody had the right key for it and not a skeleton either. As they carried the last of the boxes inside the door closed behind them.

  I rose cautiously to my feet and moved around behind the bushes until I came to the side of the building. Just as cautiously I approached the Mercedes and looked inside. But there was nothing worthy of remark there – not what I was looking for anyway. With an even greater degree of caution I tip-toed up to a side window of the building and peered inside.

  The interior was clearly a combination of workshop, store and display shop. The walls were hung with old-fashioned – or replicas of old-fashioned – pendulum clocks of every conceivable shape, size and design. Other clocks and a very large assortment of parts of other clocks lay on four large work-tables, in the process of manufacture or reassembly or reconstruction. At the far end of the room lay several wooden boxes similar to the ones that Goodbody and the dark man had just carried inside: those boxes appeared to be packed with straw. Shelves above those boxes held a variety of other clocks each having lying beside it its own pendulum, chain and weights.

  Goodbody and the dark man were working beside those shelves. As I watched, they delved into one of the open boxes and proceeded to bring out a series of pendulum weights. Goodbody paused, produced a paper and proceeded to study it intently. After some time Goodbody pointed at some item on this paper and said something to the dark man, who nodded and went on with his work: Goodbody, still studying the paper as he went, passed through a side door and disappeared from sight. The dark man studied another paper and began arranging pairs of identical weights beside each other.

  I was beginning to wonder where Goodbody had got to when I found out. His voice came from directly behind me.

  ‘I am glad you haven’t disappointed me, Mr Sherman.’

  I turned round slowly. Predictably, he was smiling his saintly smile and, equally predictably, he had a large gun in his hand.

  ‘No one is indestructible, of course,’ he beamed, ‘but you do have a certain quality of resilience, I must confess. It is difficult to underestimate policemen, but I may have been rather negligent in your case. Twice in this one day I had thought I had got rid of your presence, which, I must admit was becoming something of an embarrassment to me. However, I’m sure third time, for me, will prove lucky. You should have killed Marcel, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t?’

  ‘Come, come, you must learn to mask your feelings and not let your disappointment show through. He recovered for a brief moment but long enough to attract the attention of the good ladies in the field. But I fear he has a fractured skull and some brain haemorrhage. He may not survive.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘But he appears to have given a good account of himself.’

  ‘A fight to the death,’ I agreed. ‘Must we stand in the rain?’

  ‘Indeed not.’ He ushered me into the building at the point of his gun. The dark man looked around with no great surprise: I wondered how long had elapsed since they had the warning message from Huyler.

  ‘Jacques,’ Goodbody said. ‘This is Mr Sherman – Major Sherman. I believe he is connected with Interpol or some other such futile organization.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ Jacques grinned.

  ‘Of course. How forgetful of me.’ Goodbody pointed his gun at me while Jacques took mine away.

  ‘Just the one,’ he reported. He raked the sights across my cheek, tearing some of the plaster away, and grinned again. ‘I’ll bet that hurts, eh?’

  ‘Restrain yourself, Jacques, restrain yourself,’ Goodbody admonished. He had his kindly side to him; if he’d been a cannibal he’d probably have knocked you over the head before boiling you alive. ‘Point his gun at him, will you?’ He put his own away. ‘I must say I never did care for those weapons. Crude, noisy, lacking a certain delicacy—’

  ‘Like hanging a girl from a hook?’ I asked. ‘Or stabbing one to death with pitchforks.’

  ‘Come, come, let us not distress ourselves.’ He sighed. ‘Even the best of you people are so clumsy, so obvious. I had, I must confess, expected rather more from you. You, my dear fellow, have a reputation which you’ve totally failed to live up to. You blunder around. You upset people, fondly imagining you are provoking reactions in the process. You let yourself be seen in all the wrong places. Twice you go to Miss Lemay’s flat without taking precautions. You rifle pockets of pieces of paper that were put there for you to discover, and there was no need,’ he added reproachfully, ‘to kill the waiter in the process. You walk through Huyler in broad daylight – every person in Huyler, my dear Sherman, is a member of my flock. You even left your calling card in the basement of my church the night before last – blood. Not that I bear you any ill-will for that, my dear fellow – I was in fact contemplating getting rid of Henri, who had become rather a liability to me, and you solved the problem rather neatly. And what do you think of our unique arrangements here – those are all reproductions for sale …’

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘No wonder the churches are empty.’

  ‘Ah! But one must savour those moments, don’t you think? Those weights there. We measure and weigh them and return at suitable times with replacement weights like those we brought tonight. Not that our weights are quite the same. They have something inside them. Then they’re boxed, Customs inspected, sealed and sent on with official Government approval to certain – friends – abroad. One of my better schemes, I always maintain.’

  Jacques cleared his throat deferentially. ‘You said you were in a hurry, Mr Goodbody.’

  ‘Ever the pragmatist, Jacques, ever the pragmatist. But you’re right, of course. First we attend to our – ah – ace investigator, then to business. See if the coast is clear.’

  Goodbody distastefully produced his pistol again while Jacques made a quiet reconnaissance. He returned in a few moments, nodding, and they made me precede them out of the door, across the gravel and up the steps over the moat to the massive oaken door. Goodbody produced a key of the right size to open the door and we passed inside. We went up a flight of stairs, along a passage and into a room.

  It was a very big room indeed, almost literally festooned with hundreds of clocks. I’d never seen so many clocks in one place and certainly, I knew, never so valuable a collection of clocks. All, without exception, were pendulum clocks, some of a very great size, all of great age. Only a very few of them appeared to be working, but, even so, their collective noise was barely below the level of toleration. I couldn’t have worked in that room for ten minutes.

  ‘One of the finest collections in the world,’ Goodbody said proudly as if it belonged to him, ‘if not the finest. And as you shall see – or hear – they all work.’

  I heard his words but they didn’t register. I was staring at the floor, at the man lying there with the long black hair reaching down to the nape of his neck, at the thin shoulder-blades protruding through the threadbare jacket. Lying beside him were some pieces of single-core rubber-insulated electrical cable. Close to his head lay a pair of sorborubber-covered earphones.

  I didn’t have to be a doctor to know that George Lemay was dead.

  ‘An accident,’ Goodbody said regretfully, ‘a genuine accident. We did not mean it to happen like this. I fear the poor fellow’s system must have been greatly weakened by the privations he has suffered over the years.’

  ‘You killed him,’ I said.

  ‘Technically, in a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because his high-principled sister – who has erroneously believed for years that we have evidence leading to the proof of her brother’s
guilt as a murderer – finally prevailed upon him to go to the police. So we had to remove them from the Amsterdam scene temporarily – but not, of course, in such a way as to upset you. I’m afraid. Mr Sherman, that you must hold yourself partly to blame for the poor lad’s death. And for that of his sister. And for that of your lovely assistant – Maggie, I think her name was.’ He broke off and retreated hastily, holding his pistol at arm’s length. ‘Do not throw yourself on my gun. I take it you did not enjoy the entertainment? Neither, I’m sure, did Maggie. And neither, I’m afraid, will your other friend Belinda, who must die this evening. Ah! That strikes deep, I see. You would like to kill me, Mr Sherman.’ He was smiling still, but the flat staring eyes were the eyes of a madman.

  ‘Yes,’ I said tonelessly, ‘I’d like to kill you.’

  ‘We have sent her a little note.’ Goodbody was enjoying himself immensely. ‘Code word “Birmingham”, I believe … She is to meet you at the warehouse of our good friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who will now be above suspicion for ever. Who but the insane would ever contemplate perpetrating two such hideous crimes on their own premises? So fitting, don’t you think? Another puppet on a chain. Like all the thousands of other puppets throughout the world – hooked and dancing to our tune.’

  I said: ‘You know, of course, that you are quite mad?’

  ‘Tie him up,’ Goodbody said harshly. His urbanity had cracked at last. The truth must have hurt him.

  Jacques bound my wrists with the thick rubber-covered flex. He did the same for my ankles, pushed me to one side of the room and attached my wrists by another length of rubber cable to an eyebolt on the wall.

  ‘Start the clocks!’ Goodbody ordered. Obediently, Jacques set off around the room starting the pendulums to swing: significantly, he didn’t bother about the smaller clocks.

  ‘They all work and they all chime, some most loudly,’ Goodbody said with satisfaction. He was back on balance again, urbane and unctuous as ever. ‘Those earphones will amplify the sound about ten times. There is the amplifier there and the microphone there, both, as you can see, well beyond your reach. The earphones are unbreakable. In fifteen minutes you will be insane, in thirty minutes unconscious. The resulting coma lasts from eight to ten hours. You will wake up still insane. But you won’t wake up. Already beginning to tick and chime quite loudly, aren’t they?’

  ‘This is how George died, of course. And you will watch it all happen. Through the top of that glass door, of course. Where it won’t be so noisy.’

  ‘Regrettably, not all. Jacques and I have some business matters to attend to. But we’ll be back for the most interesting part, won’t we, Jacques?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Goodbody,’ said Jacques, still industriously swinging pendulums.

  ‘If I disappear—’

  ‘Ah, but you won’t. I had intended to have you disappear last night in the harbour but that was crude, a panic measure lacking the hallmark of my professionalism. I have come up with a much better idea, haven’t I, Jacques?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Mr Goodbody.’ Jacques had now almost to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘The point is you’re not going to disappear, Mr Sherman. Oh, dear me, no. You’ll be found, instead, only a few minutes after you’ve drowned.’

  ‘Drowned?’

  ‘Precisely. Ah, you think, then the authorities will immediately suspect foul play. An autopsy. And the first thing they see are forearms riddled with injection punctures – I have a system that can make two-hour-old punctures look two months old. They will proceed further and find you full of dope – as you will be. Injected when you are unconscious about two hours before we push you, in your car, into a canal, then call the police. This they will not believe. Sherman, the intrepid Interpol narcotics investigator? Then they go through your luggage. Hypodermics, needles, heroin, in your pockets traces of cannabis. Sad, sad. Who would have thought it? Just another of those who hunted with the hounds and ran with the hare.’

  ‘I’ll say this much for you,’ I said, ‘you’re a clever madman.’

  He smiled, which probably meant he couldn’t hear me above the increasing clamour of the clocks. He clamped the sorbo-rubber earphones to my head and secured them immovably in position with literally yards of Scotch tape. Momentarily the room became almost hushed – the earphones were acting as temporary sound insulators. Goodbody crossed the room towards the amplifier, smiled at me again and pulled a switch.

  I felt as if I had been subjected to some violent physical blow or a severe electrical shock. My whole body arched and twisted in convulsive jerks and I knew what little could be seen of my face under the plaster and Scotch tape must be convulsed in agony. For I was in agony, an agony a dozen times more piercing and unbearable than the best – or the worst – that Marcel had been able to inflict upon me. My ears, my entire head, were filled with this insanely shrieking banshee cacophony of sound. It sliced through my head like white-hot skewers, it seemed to be tearing my brain apart. I couldn’t understand why my eardrums didn’t shatter. I had always heard and believed that a loud enough explosion of sound, set off close enough to your ears, can deafen you immediately and for life: but it wasn’t working in my case. As it obviously hadn’t worked in George’s case. In my torment I vaguely remembered Goodbody attributing George’s death to his weakened physical condition.

  I rolled from side to side, an instinctive animal reaction to escape from what is hurting you, but I couldn’t roll far, Jacques had used a fairly short length of rubber cable to secure me to the eyebolt and I could roll no more than a couple of feet in either direction. At the end of one roll I managed to focus my eyes long enough to see Goodbody and Jacques, now both outside the room, peering at me with interest through the glass-topped door: after a few seconds Jacques raised his left wrist and tapped his watch. Goodbody nodded in reluctant agreement and both men hurried away. I supposed in my blinding sea of pain that they were in a hurry to come back to witness the grand finale.

  Fifteen minutes before I was unconscious, Goodbody had said. I didn’t believe a word of it, nobody could stand up to this for two or three minutes without being broken both mentally and physically. I twisted violently from side to side, tried to smash the earphones on the floor or to tear them free. But Goodbody had been right, the earphones were unbreakable and the Scotch tape had been so skilfully and tightly applied that my efforts to tear the phones free resulted only in reopening the wounds on my face.

  The pendulums swung, the clocks ticked, the chimes rang out almost continuously. There was no relief, no let-up, not even the most momentary respite from this murderous assault on the nervous system that triggered off those uncontrollable epileptic convulsions. It was one continuous electric shock at just below the lethal level and I could now all too easily give credence to tales I had heard of patients undergoing electric shock therapy who had eventually ended up on the operating table for the repair of limbs fractured through involuntary muscular contraction.

  I could feel my mind going, and for a brief period I tried to help the feeling along. Oblivion, anything for oblivion. I’d failed, I’d failed all along the line, everything I’d touched had turned to destruction and death. Maggie was dead, Duclos was dead, Astrid was dead and her brother George. Only Belinda was left and she was going to die that night. A grand slam.

  And then I knew. I knew I couldn’t let Belinda die. That was what saved me, I knew I could not let her die. Pride no longer concerned me, my failure no longer concerned me, the total victory of Goodbody and his evil associates was of no concern to me. They could flood the world with their damned narcotics for all I cared. But I couldn’t let Belinda die.

  Somehow I pushed myself up till my back was against the wall. Apart from the frequent convulsions, I was vibrating in every limb in my body, not just shaking like a man with the ague, that would have been easily tolerated but vibrating as a man would have been had he been tied to a giant pneumatic drill. I could no longer focus for more than a second or two, but I d
id my best to look fuzzily, desperately around to see if there was anything that offered any hope of salvation. There was nothing. Then, without warning, the sound in my head abruptly rose to a shattering crescendo – it was probably a big clock near the microphones striking the hour – and I fell sideways as if I’d been hit on the temple by a two-by-four. As my head struck the floor it also struck some projection low down on the skirting board.

  My focusing powers were now entirely gone, but I could vaguely distinguish objects not less than a few inches away and this one was no more than three. It says much for my now almost completely incapacitated mind that it took me several seconds to realize what it was, but when I did I forced myself into a sitting position again. The object was an electrical wall-socket.

  My hands were bound behind my back and it took me for ever to locate and take hold of the two free ends of the electrical cable that held me prisoner. I touched their ends with my fingertips: the wire core was exposed in both cases. Desperately, I tried to force the ends into the sockets – it never occurred to me that it might have been a shuttered plug, although it would have been unlikely in so old a house as this – but my hands shook so much that I couldn’t locate them. I could feel consciousness slipping away. I could feel the damned plug, I could feel the sockets with my fingertips, but I couldn’t match the ends of the wire with the holes. I couldn’t see any more, I had hardly any feeling left in my fingers, the pain was beyond human tolerance and I think I was screaming soundlessly in my agony when suddenly there was a brilliant bluish-white flash and I fell sideways to the floor.

  How long I lay there unconscious I could not later tell: it must have been at least a matter of minutes. The first thing I was aware of was the incredible glorious silence, not a total silence, for I could still hear the chiming of clocks, but a muffled chiming only for I had blown the right power fuse and the earphones were again acting as insulators. I sat up till I was in a half-reclining position. I could feel blood trickling down my chin and was to find later that I’d bitten through my lower lip: my face was bathed in sweat, my entire body felt as if it had been on the rack. I didn’t mind any of it, I was conscious of only one thing: the utter blissfulness of silence. Those lads in the Noise Abatement Society knew what they were about.