Nemesis

by Rory Clements

  They wore black SS uniforms and they were clapping their hands in appreciation. One of them stepped forward and put an arm around Marfield’s shoulder, like a cricket captain congratulating his opening batsman.

  And then the film ran out and all that was left was the burning light of the projector lamp and the incessant clattering of the turning spool and cogs.

  Wilde flipped the switches and the projector ground to a halt. He sat on his haunches beside the machine and took a deep breath. Nothing could have prepared him for the sight that had just assailed his eyes.

  The silence was broken by the staged clearing of a throat.

  Wilde turned slowly. Marcus Marfield filled the doorway, his left shoulder against the frame, his right hand holding the butt of a pistol loosely at his side.

  ‘Professor Wilde.’

  ‘Is it real? Did this happen?’

  ‘You decide.’

  ‘You bastard, Marfield.’ Wilde looked at the beautiful face that had won so many hearts and saw only putrescence and depravity. It was as if the skin had been drawn back and the crawling insects and worms just below the surface were visible.

  Marfield stepped into the room and raised the weapon. Wilde knew there was nothing he could do to prevent his own death. All the tricks he had learnt in the boxing ring, all the muscle honed into his arms, none of it would help him now.

  ‘Lie down flat, on your belly, arms above your head.’

  ‘And make it easier for you? Why would I do that?’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ Marfield said. ‘Not unless you force me to.’

  Slowly, Wilde obeyed. He was computing the possibilities. Every second of life might bring an opportunity. An upward kick that dislodged the weapon, a careless moment by Marfield.

  From outside there was a screech of tyres, a car pulling to a halt. Marfield tensed.

  ‘The police. I left word that I was coming here,’ Wilde lied.

  Marfield pulled the reel of film from the projector and thrust it into his jacket pocket. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You will stand up slowly. No sudden movements.’

  Once again, he obeyed, and rose to his feet, his arms still above his head.

  Marfield picked up Wilde’s flashlight and went to the window, shielding the beam of the torch as he carefully pulled back the blackout curtain an inch, then replaced it almost immediately.

  He shone the torch on his captive. ‘You were right. There’s a police car. I don’t know why it’s here, but we are going to leave, quickly, by the back door, and you are going to help me. You know the alternative.’

  Wilde understood. Marfield didn’t want a body found here. Nor did he want to shoot police officers. A murder now would only intensify the hunt for him and compromise his plans, whatever they were. Once they were away from here, of course, it would be another matter altogether.

  *

  Lydia had been worried all day. In the evening she called Eaton at the hotel and he told her that he’d asked Wilde to drive to Ipswich to try to get a photograph from Marfield’s mother.

  ‘Why not ask Claire?’

  ‘Who is Claire?’

  ‘Claire Marfield. Marcus’s wife. But she’s away.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Oh – you didn’t know about her, did you, Mr Eaton? Tom didn’t tell you . . .’

  ‘But you will. And the sooner you do, the better. I’ll come around.’

  CHAPTER 28

  From the back door, they crossed the garden and found a gap in the hedge into the orchard. Behind them, they heard the sound of voices in the house. The police would have no evidence that anyone had been there, although at least one of the doors was unlocked. If someone touched the projector, of course, the heat would give the game away, but even then they would find nothing. Wilde wondered about the arrival of the police. Few people knew about the link between Marfield and this place. One of them was Lydia. But why would she send the police here?

  Out in the orchard, Marfield pushed him to his knees. Wilde did not resist. He lay flat out on the damp, dewy grass, the muzzle of the pistol, hard and metallic, at the back of his head.

  ‘Not a sound,’ Marfield said, his voice neither urgent nor emotional. ‘Not a cough or a sigh.’

  No one who had seen the film of Marcus Marfield on a rock by a farmhouse somewhere in Spain could ever again doubt his deadly intent. Wilde found himself wondering about Rosa. That was why the woman in the film had seemed familiar: she looked like Rosa. Sisters? Cousins? It would give her a motive for shooting Marfield through the wire at Le Vernet. It would give her a motive for following him to England.

  Had she somehow come into possession of the film? If so, had she brought it to show Claire to warn her about the man to whom she was married? Perhaps he, Wilde, had unwittingly led Rosa here. And if Claire had wat-ched the film, she must have been terrified – which was why she had fled.

  The minutes dragged on. Wilde tried counting to gauge the time. He heard the sound of car doors opening and closing, of an engine firing up and then the growl of a police car being driven away.

  ‘Get up. We’re going for a ride on your motorbike.’

  They waited, standing in the trees, for five minutes, then Marfield jabbed his captive in the back with the weapon. ‘Move. And take very great care. Your life is hanging by a slender thread, Professor. But you already know that, don’t you?’

  Yes, he knew that.

  ‘You will also know that I mean it when I say that if you cross me in any way I will make it my business to find Lydia Morris. I’ll let you imagine the rest.’

  He said it so calmly and coldly that Wilde knew that Dr Charlecote’s diagnosis was almost certainly accurate: this man was a psychopath.

  They moved from the orchard, Wilde in front, Marfield behind him. At the edge of the road, Marfield grabbed his arm. ‘We move at a steady pace, towards your motorbike. You climb on and I will ride pillion. You start the engine and you drive slowly where I direct you. You will do nothing to attract attention.’

  Wilde nodded.

  ‘Now go.’

  Wilde mounted the Rudge, followed immediately by Marfield on the pillion. There was no prodding of the gun muzzle in his back; there was no need. Wilde knew what would happen. He knew, too, what would happen when they were away from here, somewhere a gunshot to the head would not be heard.

  He kicked the engine into life and prepared to go wherever he was ordered. As he did so, the headlights of a car lit up further along the street.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Marfield demanded.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You came alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No headlights. Move away. Keep to thirty. Turn first right then left.’

  Wilde twisted the throttle gently and set off, taking the first right into a street of detached houses, then left, and quickly found himself at the edge of the urban area, heading north into open country. Without lights, he had to strain to see the road markings.

  The road lit up. The car was following them.

  ‘Unmarked police car,’ Marfield said, his mouth close to Wilde’s ear. ‘Now, when I indicate, switch on the lights, then full throttle and keep to this road. We’ll hit Cottenham, but don’t slow down – straight through and keep on until I stop you.’ He jabbed Wilde’s back. ‘Go.’

  Wilde clicked the lights, wrenched the accelerator and the Rudge leapt forward like a sprinter from the blocks.

  The road was almost straight and empty of traffic. But potholes, mud and farm waste made it treacherous and juddery. Even without bends to negotiate, Wilde had to fight his way out of skids. The police car had accelerated in pursuit, but it couldn’t match the Rudge on this road, and by the time they were in Cottenham, less than five minutes later, there was no sign of it.

  He instinctively slowed down as he hit the sharp bends of the large village, but Marfield screamed in his ear. ‘Faster!’

  Wilde pushed his head dow
n and rode through Cottenham like a racer, taking the bends at upwards of sixty miles an hour. It was Sunday evening, so few people were about, but ahead of them a shadow crossed the road from the war memorial. Wilde swerved and only just missed a man walking his dog. On his left a row of thatched cottages, then up ahead loomed the church with its distinctive and strange gothic tower.

  ‘Keep to the left. Then take the right fork.’

  Wilde knew this part of Cambridgeshire well. They were heading for the Fens, where he went to birdwatch when he needed a little peace. All the roads and places around here had strange, slightly sinister names. Setchel Drove, Grunty Fen Road, Wicken Fen. They spoke of a time when these vast acres were more sea than land, before the drainages of the seventeenth century and beyond had made the land fit for agriculture.

  The bike shuddered and spluttered.

  ‘Keep going.’ The sweet voice had turned sharp like bile.

  ‘We’re running out of fuel.’

  ‘You had better be lying, because if we stop . . .’

  Wilde sighed. ‘No option.’ The Rudge ground to a halt, the engine dead. He sat there, legs astride, feet on the tarmac road, at the edge of a deep drainage ditch. How bloody convenient. So this was where it ended: Twenty Pence Road. Life was cheap to men like Marfield. Wilde turned around. ‘Well, get on with it.’

  Marfield dismounted, the pistol in his left hand, loose at his side, glinting a little in the merest sliver of moon. Marfield had brought Wilde’s torch and switched it on, sweeping it in a circle to get his bearings. He nodded towards an old farm wagon in the field on the far side of the road.

  ‘Wheel the bike behind the wagon.’

  Wilde had expected to be forced to roll it into the eight-foot-deep ditch, but perhaps Marfield had ideas of finding petrol and using it again. He rested it on its stand in the field; he did not expect to see it again.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now we walk. You go ahead. If we see car lights, we get off the road.’

  They strode northwards at a steady pace. The night was not cold. Wilde was in front, Marfield behind and a little to the side. The torch was off.

  ‘You might at least answer one or two questions, Marfield. It’ll pass the minutes.’

  Marcus did not reply.

  Wilde was under no illusions about his fate. Trying to win sympathy from a man whose blood ran as cold as a viper’s was pointless. But he was curious. ‘The woman you shot, her face was familiar. Was she Rosa’s sister by any chance?’

  No reply.

  ‘I went across to Ipswich today and met your mother. Didn’t fill up, I’m afraid, which is why I ran out of fuel.’

  Again, no response.

  ‘She’s burnt all your pictures, you know. Nothing left. She won’t acknowledge your existence. The strange thing is she’s like you in so many ways. I rather think you have more in common than either of you realise.’

  ‘Stop here.’

  ‘Am I talking too much? You can easily put paid to that.’

  ‘Stop. There’s a house over there, across the field. We’re going there, in silence. Not a sound. They will have either a vehicle or fuel or both. If there are people there, no harm needs come to them, but that’s up to you. Do you understand?’

  *

  It was a modest farmworkers’ cottage of poor construction, like so many of the isolated properties in this part of England. The blackouts had been badly fixed. Light escaped at all the edges and corners of the downstairs windows. Upstairs, it did not even look as though any attempt had been made to cover the windows, other than with flimsy cotton floral curtains. But then Herr Goering was unlikely to target a solitary house in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

  Wilde nodded towards a car on the forecourt. If the car keys weren’t in the ignition, it could be hotwired and they’d be gone in a matter of moments. But looking closer, such hopes were dashed. The vehicle was raised on makeshift jacks and had no tyres. The only mode of transport available was a bicycle that had been leant against the wall of the house.

  Marfield ignored Wilde and crept to the window. He laughed. ‘He’s some sort of police officer,’ he said quietly, half to himself, half to Wilde. ‘I can see his uniform hanging up.’

  Wilde pointed to the forecourt again. Perhaps there would be another car. At the very least there must be some petrol they could steal and use in the Rudge. This house was occupied by innocent people. They had no need to be any part of this.

  ‘Down. Flat on your belly. Remember what I said.’

  Wilde sank to his knees, then stretched out flat.

  ‘Stay there. Don’t speak. Don’t move.’

  Until now, Wilde had not thought of escape. He was unarmed against a man with a pistol, a man who would undoubtedly think nothing of killing Lydia if crossed. But having survived this long, it was beginning to dawn on Wilde that there was an option: what if he were to take Marfield down?

  The thought did not last more than a few moments. His breath was taken away as Marfield’s knee cracked down into the small of his back. He heard the jangle of handcuffs, then cold metal snapped around his right wrist. His left leg was tugged back roughly and the other cuff was ratcheted tight around his ankle, so that the sharp steel dug into his flesh. Wilde immediately suffered a spasm of cramp: the pain was excruciating and he had to force himself not to cry out.

  Marfield wrenched back Wilde’s hair so that his face was lifted from the earth, and then rammed the muzzle of the pistol hard into the centre of his face.

  ‘Be good, Professor. No noise.’ Marfield strode off towards the front door of the little house.

  Flexing the palm of his left hand into the grass, Wilde pushed himself to one side to take the strain off his cuffed wrist and ankle. The cramp eased slightly, but he would not be able to stay here long. His eardrums were thundering like a rushing waterfall and his breathing was laboured. He stretched his neck to see that the front door of the house was now open and in the light that spilled out he saw Marfield pointing the gun at someone. Then he stepped inside and for a few moments there was nothing to see or hear. The silence did not last long.

  A scream, deep like a man’s not a woman’s, cut short almost instantly. God, what had Marfield done in there? No gunshot – knives? Wilde waited, helpless and impotent, forgetting his own pain in the terror of what might be going on inside the house.

  Minutes later Marfield was back at the entrance in the light of the yellow hallway. The gun and torch were no longer in his hands, but the reel of film was, along with a bundle of newspapers and some sticks. Wilde watched as he scrunched the newspaper up into balls, laid the sticks as kindling, then struck a match and lit a fire on the doorstep. As it flared up and blazed he unwound the film and coiled it slowly into the fire, frame by frame, until it was all burned and utterly destroyed.

  ‘What have you done, Marfield?’ shouted Wilde in desperation. ‘Please God you haven’t hurt anyone.’

  Their eyes met. Marfield pulled his right index finger across his throat. ‘What sort of copper doesn’t have a phone, Mr Wilde? Answer me that, if you would.’

  CHAPTER 29

  In the early hours, Juliet Vanderberg awoke from a fitful sleep and knew she was losing her younger son. He was burning up in her arms.

  The dinghy seemed to sink an inch lower in the water with every hour that passed, and must sink soon, for they were no longer able to bail fast enough and by now the sea was lapping about their feet and ankles. The waves were getting up and tossing them about, pushing them with the current towards who knew where. The fog had lifted, but that was no help. If a freighter or a warship ploughed its way through these waves, it would cut them in half without even noticing what it had done. In the vastness of the sea, their three lives were nothing.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Joyce Harman paused her bailing. ‘Do you see that, Mrs Vanderberg? Rocks. Right ahead of us.’

  *

  Tom Wilde had lost all track of time and direction of travel. Having been freed from the
leg cuff, his hands had been locked together and he and Marfield had set off walking across the fields. Wilde wondered if he was being kept alive for some purpose – as a hostage perhaps – but it was hard to imagine circumstances in which Marfield would need one.

  He thought they had been walking for two or three hours and had covered five or six miles, perhaps more. Crossing a rail track Wilde felt an insane surge of hope, but instead they pushed on across the flat black earth. They skirted two villages, and found a bridge over a river – the Ouse or the Cam perhaps? Sometimes they had difficulty traversing ditches and boggy fens. For a while they seemed to be going north, then eastwards, usually without light though every few minutes Marfield switched on the torch to get the lie of the land. At about one in the morning, a few hundred yards from a hamlet of a dozen houses or so, he stopped. What looked like a small windmill loomed out of the dark.

  Marfield pushed Wilde inside through the low doorway, and secured him with the cuffs to some rigid part of the winding mechanism. Then he played the torch around the space, turned and left, leaving Wilde alone in the pitch dark.

  Wilde had seen mills like this before. They were used as drainage pumps, a familiar part of the flat fenland landscape. This one, like so many of the others, had fallen into disrepair with the collapse of the peat and turf industries. And yet even in their dilapidation, they retained a certain charm in an otherwise bleak terrain. Tonight, it was a prison.

  Twenty minutes later, Marcus Marfield returned. He shone the torch into Wilde’s eyes.

  ‘What now?’ Wilde asked.

  ‘We wait.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’ll see. Or perhaps you won’t.’ Marfield pulled two beer bottles from his pocket and removed the tops. He handed one to Wilde. ‘Here, don’t say I don’t do anything for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Even handcuffed, Wilde found he was able to drink the beverage. It was cool and welcome to his parched throat. ‘That’s good. The best beer I’ve ever tasted.’

  ‘There’s a little pub along the way. Dozen or more crates of beers outside. Shame not to take what’s offered.’