The Silver Castle

by Nancy Buckingham

  “No. He was killed before he had the chance.”

  “But you suspect someone?”

  I hung back from answering, having to fight against my reluctance, against a strange, ridiculous feeling of disloyalty. Then in a rush, I said, “It must have been Anton. Who else had a motive? And who else had the opportunity to kill poor Willi, too?”

  “So you’ve worked it out that Willi’s death was no accident? I wondered if you’d be suspicious after my first attempt, but you kept so quiet about it that I thought I was safe.”

  “You!”

  “Oh yes, Gail ... it was me.”

  “You mean ... everything? My father ... Valencienne?”

  He said, after a pause, “And now you.”

  The threat seemed to wash right over me, unheeded. Instead it felt as if my heart had been unleashed, freed from an intolerable burden. Anton was innocent. It was as if Ernst had given me a reprieve, not a sentence of death.

  “Have you nothing to say, Gail?” Ernst sounded irritated. “Do you not care that you’re going to die?”

  I stifled my joy and faced reality. If I were to emerge alive, if I were ever to see Anton again, I somehow had to trick Ernst into letting me escape. At that moment I had no idea of how it could be done.

  I talked, forcing out the words. Talking, and playing for moments more of time, was my only hope.

  “I can see that you had a motive for killing my father. And Willi too ... to silence the poor boy. But why Valencienne? How was she involved?”

  He chuckled. “She wasn’t involved with Benedict, if that’s what you’re wondering. Valencienne and I had been having an affair for several months, but she was getting too damned possessive. Then the idea came to me that I could kill two birds with one stone ... if you’ll forgive the rather crude English metaphor. With the reputation they both of them had, nobody was going to be particularly surprised if it emerged that Benedict and Valencienne had been together.”

  My torch beam cast his shadow on the wall behind him. It seemed to loom over me, a gigantic, demonic figure.

  “How did you kill them?” I asked shakily. I mean ... together, as if ... ?”

  “I had to drug them first, but it wasn’t difficult. I asked Benedict to meet me on the launch, secretly, saying that I’d had a new idea about recovering the painting from America. As for Valencienne ... she and I had often used the launch as a rendezvous. I gave them both primed drinks, and when they passed out I stripped off their clothes. Then I spiked a hole in the boat’s hull and left it to sink. The water that night, I remember, was distinctly chilly as I swam ashore.”

  “And Willi witnessed it all,” I said.

  “I saw the boy hanging around when I was in my car changing into dry clothes. I wasn’t really bothered at the time. Even if he had seen anything, I thought he was too simple-minded to understand.”

  “So what made you suspect that Willi did understand?”

  “It was the way you talked about him that afternoon at our house, about there being ways of communicating with someone as gifted as he was. After that I kept watching the two of you together. But it was when I found those carvings he’d done, that I knew I was in real danger. I missed my chance of disposing of you both together, because you somehow managed to throw yourselves clear of my car. But I got Willi the next evening.”

  I conquered a feeling of faintness. Keep him talking ... that’s what I had to do. Not listen to the terrible things he was telling me.

  “The phone call Anton received that night... I suppose you must have imitated my father’s voice?”

  Ernst laughed again, delighted with himself. “You give me too much credit, Gail, I’m no mimic. It was Benedict’s own voice that Anton heard.”

  “How was that possible?”

  “On tape. I recorded it the day before. There was no problem getting Benedict to say the sort of things I wanted, considering the excitable state he was in. I just started him off and prodded the odd word here and there. Of course I needed to do a good deal of editing with a razor blade and tape, but I was able to patch up quite a convincing performance.”

  Is that you, Anton? my father had gabbled. Listen, I’ve got to make you understand ... and on and on about it being too late for arguments and evasions, shouting wildly that things were beyond bearing, that he had to end it all. Sentences and phrases chopped about, single words even ... all strung together on the tape to give totally the wrong impression.

  Ernst’s voice became clipped and brisk. “I’ve indulged you for long enough, Gail. I can’t hang around here all evening.”

  I said feverishly, snatching at a stray thought, “How did you get a key to the Schloss?”

  “How did you get one?”

  “From a table drawer under the telephone in the hall.”

  “So did I. When I first learned that those paintings existed I decided I might find it useful, so I took the key just in case, and had a duplicate made before putting it back ”

  “What about the keys to the turret door, and the cupboard there?”

  “Now that was a bit more difficult. I had to call in some help.”

  “Who helped you?”

  “We can’t always choose our partners in crime, Gail. I don’t like the man any more than you do, but ...”

  “Are you talking about Karl?”

  “No, not Karl ... our uncouth friend Josef. He knew where Karl kept those keys, and I showed him how to take an impression in a bar of soap.”

  “I suppose you paid him well?” I said bitingly.

  “It was more a matter of Josef paying me. I knew enough about Josef to put him in real trouble with the law, if I’d wanted to.”

  Ernst took a flat torch from his pocket and shone it on the stack of paintings. Bending, he started to pull aside the sacking. In the fragment of a second that he was off his guard, my plan was crystallised. Raising my arm I flung my heavy torch at his head. Then in a single movement I spun around and hurled myself through the doorway, pulling the door shut behind me. I heard him shout as I scrambled for the bolt and rammed it home.

  I was pelting up the pitch-dark stairs, stumbling, fumbling, grazing my knuckles on the rough stone wall. My pulse quickened and my breath came in painful gasps as I desperately sought to escape from him. Too late, I realised that in the darkness I had come too far. I had passed the door which led back into the house.

  Below me Ernst was violently kicking the door of his cell, and in the instant that I turned back I heard it give with a splintering crash. I had no time to escape that way. He had light, he would catch me at once.

  So I took the only alternative open to me. I ran on up the stairs right into the belfry itself, banging my shoulders as I scrambled up through the trap door. I slammed it shut behind me. But how to keep it shut? My trembling fingers felt for a bolt, then I realised that even if there was one it would be on the underside.

  An ice-keen wind cut through the windowless embrasures, but a faint luminosity from the clouded sky paled the total darkness. To one side of me I could make out a bulky shape, and I remembered the crate where Raimund had perched himself that day he’d brought me up here. I dragged at it madly, shifting it only inches with each heave. Ernst was already coming up the final flight of stairs as I slid the edge of the crate over the trap. Then with one last effort I hauled it into place. Breathless and panting, I slumped myself on it for extra weight.

  Ernst was trying to force the trap door open, but it shifted only a fraction of an inch. I felt no sense of triumph, though, for I knew I’d only won a short respite. I was imprisoned here, and Ernst had time to break in at his leisure.

  I moved to shift my weight more squarely on the crate and felt something against my hair. I recoiled, then realised it was the chain that held the bell in its throat-up position. If I could release this, the bell would toll.

  Not daring to take my extra weight off the crate, I reached up an arm until I found the point where the chain was attached to a wall cleat. At firs
t I couldn’t get it clear, then suddenly the chain was whipped from my hand as the bell swung swiftly down. The deep sonorous boom it made reverberated through my brain.

  I groped for the bell as it swung back, caught its rim and thrust it forward again. After one or two clumsy attempts I found the rhythm, like pushing a child on a playground swing. Against the clamour of the bell I couldn’t hear what Ernst was doing. But I tried to thrust away all thoughts of him and concentrate instead on sending my alarm signal ringing across the countryside.

  Minutes crawled by, seeming endless, then I caught a flash of light through one of the embrasures. Craning my neck to peer down, I caught another flash, and another ... the headlights of a car racing down the drive towards the road. Ernst, making his escape.

  My mind almost numb with fear and fatigue, I kept the bell ringing. Ringing into the night, on and on until my arms felt exhausted and my muscles cried out for rest... on and on until I felt the crate judder as someone heaved on the trap beneath me.

  For an instant I felt a flash of new panic. Then relief. Someone had come in answer to the summons of the bell. I halted my rhythmic pushing movement and let the clamour die away.

  A voice—Anton’s voice—shouted, “Gail, is it you up there?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Though Anton held me cradled in his arms it was a long time before my trembling ceased. The terror was still too close.

  I gasped out about Ernst trying to kill me ... about Ernst and Valencienne ... about Ernst killing her and my father, and then Willi ... about the turret fire and the stolen paintings. Anton listened, appalled, and held me even closer.

  My story must have been almost incomprehensible to him, yet he asked only a few brief questions and didn’t press me for details. When I was calm enough he led me down from the tower and back through the corridors and down the stairs.

  We found the courtyard full of people. They’d come as I had prayed they would come in response to the summons of the tolling bell, just as their ancestors had done in centuries gone by. Anton had a word with them, expressing our thanks and explaining that the emergency was now over. Presently they went away and left the two of us alone.

  The events of the next few hours are still a dissolving chaos in my memory. Anton phoned the police, I recall, and then rang Raimund at Helga’s house. And afterwards I sat with him on a gold-brocaded sofa in the salon, pouring out my story again in a tumbled torrent of words.

  And somehow I found the courage to make my dreadful confession.

  “I thought it was you, Anton, don’t you understand? Those terrible things that had happened ... they all seemed to point to you.”

  “Hush, Liebes,” he murmured. “You mustn’t think about that now.”

  I learned what had caused Anton to come searching for me.

  He had been afraid, when I didn’t turn up for the dinner party, that I might be running away.

  “It was the only explanation I could think of,” he said. “Either that, or you’d had an accident. Ernst phoned Helga to say he’d be delayed on business, but when there was no word from you I began to get worried. I kept thinking of the strange way you had been behaving, especially since the night of the fire, and I had to know what had happened to you. I decided to come back here and see if your clothes were gone. I was still a couple of kilometres away when I heard the bell tolling, and I knew that something was seriously wrong.”

  And down in the hall I had been on the point of phoning Helga with a plausible excuse for my absence when Ernst arrived. If he had come just a few minutes later, I would already have phoned.

  I was aware of Karl and Ursula arriving back, their faces expressing anxious concern when Anton briefly told them what had happened. And two policemen came to ask questions, on and on until my mind was a whirlpool and Anton insisted that I’d had enough. Later, somewhere around midnight, I think, Sigrid and Raimund arrived home bringing Helga with them. She stared at me in silence, looking so lost and bewildered that I felt a reluctant stirring of sympathy.

  It was the early hours of the morning when news of Ernst came through. His car had skidded off a twisting mountain road near the Austrian border and plunged to the lonely valley below, bursting into flames. His charred body had been found in the wreckage. A few days later forensic experts were able to identify traces of artists’ canvas, enough to confirm that Benedict Sherbrooke’s counterfeit paintings had been destroyed in the blaze. I did not regret their loss. It seemed like an act of poetic justice

  ****

  A shaft of early sunlight cast a bar of gold across Anton’s face on the pillow beside me. I lay and watched him sleeping, as I had secretly watched him on other mornings. But today, for the first time since our marriage three weeks ago, my happiness was blurred with faint misgivings.

  Thus far we had come through safely. As soon as possible after that night I had returned to London and picked up the threads of my working life, though Colin grumbled that my illustrations lacked the sparkle he expected from me.

  As spring advanced into summer Anton phoned me frequently, and several times he flew over to see me. One weekend in July, when we fixed the date of our wedding, Anton suggested that I return with him to stay at the Schloss Rietswil for a few days to break the news to his family. I agreed with some trepidation.

  Sigrid held out her hands for me to come and kiss her. “So it’s to be September. I’m very happy for you both.” Her glance flickered in Raimund’s direction and I knew what she was thinking. Raimund made the point himself with a rueful laugh.

  “I was hoping it would be me, Gail. Still, you’ll be in the family and that’s some consolation.”

  Helga, living at the Schloss now, looked on with smouldering eyes. She blames me for everything, I thought with dismay, and wondered how the two of us would ever manage to coexist under the same roof.

  On the wall on each side of the carved stone mantel, where before there had been blank spaces, hung paintings by my father. They were mountain scenes of spring and autumn, charmingly executed.

  Sigrid said almost apologetically, “I thought it would be nice to rehang them there until you decided what you wanted done. But I’ll have them taken down at once, if you wish.”

  “No don’t. I like them there.”

  “Do you want to see the one that was returned from America,” she asked me. “The copy of the George Frederic Watts?”

  Anton intervened quickly. “I think Gail would prefer to leave it for now, Sigrid.”

  I gave him a grateful smile. “One day I’ll be interested to look at it,” I told her. “But not quite yet.”

  Through the window I could see a man on a stepladder clipping a yew hedge.

  “Has there been any further news of Josef?” I asked.

  Anton said, “There’s a rumour going around that he’s been seen in Italy, in a village not far from Milan.”

  “Bad luck for the Italians.”

  After lunch when Raimund had returned to the silk mill, Helga muttered something about having things to do and disappeared. Sigrid said in an imperious voice, “Now, Anton, I want to have a private talk with Gail, so perhaps you would leave us, too.”

  He glanced at me swiftly, and I nodded that I didn’t mind.

  Alone with Sigrid, I thought how pale she looked, how thin and gaunt she had become, but the beauty of her face was indestructible.

  She came directly to the point. “Gail, my dear, I want you to know that when you and Anton are married I shall no longer be living here. I’m taking Helga with me to my family home in Winterthur.”

  Guiltily, I tried to stifle the leap of pleasure I felt at this news.

  “But why, Frau Kreuder? I don’t understand.”

  Her fingers smoothed the silk fabric of her long skirt. I have given the matter much thought and it seems best all around. My widowed brother, Ludwig, lives there alone, and he is semi-retired now from the firm. It’s a huge old house, so we shan’t get in each other’s way.”

 
; I said, prompted by my conscience, “This too is a huge house. More than big enough for all of us.”

  She pursed her lips into an unbelieving little smile. “I wonder if you really think that, my dear?”

  “Of course I do,” I lied.

  She shook her head, and said, “Ludwig has already been alone too long, and he’s growing into quite a crusty old man. It will be good for him to have some female company. Besides, I will be able to devote more time to Helga. Perhaps I have been at fault in the past in not giving her enough of my attention, and I shall try to make amends.”

  Or do you mean, I wondered with a cynicism which made me feel ashamed, that you need someone whom you can shape and mould and bend to your will, as you did my father? I thrust away the unkind thought.

  “I hope it will work out well for you all,” I said sincerely. I hesitated, then added, “You must take whichever of my father’s paintings you wish. As many as you like.”

  She was overcome with delight. “Are you really sure, Gail?”

  “Yes, of course. There are plenty for us both, and I know how much his paintings mean to you. There’s only one I lay any special claim to.”

  “Which is that?”

  “The one of my brother....” It gave me pleasure to say those two words. “My brother and his little cat. I took it to London and had it framed, and now it’s hanging in my studio.”

  Sigrid nodded. “I believe Willi was very fond of the cat. They say it ran away after his death.”

  I said nothing. It was best to say nothing.

  Anton and I were married quietly in London, with only Colin and Raimund as our witnesses. Anton had told me a week or so before that Raimund had decided to quit his job in the family silk mill to join a university friend in a new venture, making precision optical equipment at a small factory in Berne.

  “But does he know anything about optical equipment?” I asked in surprise.

  “No, the other chap is the technical expert. Raimund is to be the business brain. He says he wants to run his own show.”

  I looked at Anton and knew that he was wondering what I myself was wondering ... whether Raimund’s enthusiasm would last the course. He’d never before shown any signs of dedication to hard work.