“Yasmin, my dear. Come with me to the dispensary. I have something there that will relieve your stiffness for a little while.”
While he was gone, the guards sat Carver in a steel framed chair and fastened his handcuffs to the side-members. At least, he thought, he now had circulation back in his hands and fingers. They were throbbing and prickling as the returning blood crept down the arteries, but they were functioning.
He flexed the muscles in his forearms once, twice and could find no give in his fetters. It was no more than he had expected. But the implication that he was about to be a mere onlooker to something puzzled him. He saw that in the brightly lit gymnasium, seats were provided for spectators, but that there were only enough for four onlookers including himself.
Luther was also coming to the same conclusion. Carver watched him fighting through the fog of what looked like a minor concussion to interpret what was happening around him.
Kiti and Amy had been shown to two of the remaining chairs, and the fourth, larger than the rest and designed like a director’s chair on a film set, was obviously intended for Sigmund Dark.
While one man remained on guard, his sub machine gun hanging from his shoulder, the other two put their weapons down and busied themselves unrolling and spreading a plasticised sheet over the practice mats on the floor. They fastened it down with great care, as though the whole area was about to be subjected to a great strain.
None of the guards at any time looked directly at Luther, who remained isolated in front of the doorway. The implications of the situation were becoming more and more disturbing to the man.
“Are we all ready then? Good. Let us begin,” said Sigmund Dark coming from the dispensary at the end of the room with an expression like a missionary who has just cleared up a smallpox epidemic, convinced the locals he has the power to cause eclipses, and made a hundred converts in the process.
He took his place in the director’s chair and rubbed his hands.
“Some of my girls have hidden talents their owner would never guess at,” he purred, to nobody in particular. “I am particularly keen that from time to time they get a chance to test those talents. It is also useful to demonstrate to those girls just how effective their talents can be. Girls!”
With a whisper of bare feet, two girls appeared from the doorway. They were Gudrun and Satya and each wore gymnastics practice clothes of leotard and glossy tights, with leg-warmers. They looked, with their hair pulled back in headbands, like a particularly sexy pair of professional gymnasts, frighteningly fit and glowing with health.
The contrast when Yasmin came from the dispensary was poignant.
They were two girls in their finest flush of health and physical perfection. She was grotesque by comparison.
Instead of wholesome practice clothes, Yasmin was wearing nothing but a pair of bikini briefs. Her ruined face was already horrifying, but Carver could now see her back and legs were hideously marked, the bruises fading from their original angry purple to a black-and-yellow nightmare.
From beside Carver, Gudrun gave one sharp bark of surprise and revulsion, and Satya made a noise like a startled cat. Then both of them turned their eyes on Carver with such fury that his hair stood on end.
“Hey, don’t look at me. I never met the lady,” he protested.
Sigmund Dark growled with laughter.
“No, no, children. You have the wrong man. On this occasion you have the wrong man,” he chuckled.
“You sure have. Beating up ladies ain’t in my line,” said Carver insincerely. He had a very clear picture in his mind of a certain Paris bedroom and the terror in the lovely eyes of the now-dead decoy girl. Glancing sideways at Sigmund Dark’s amused tawny gaze, he wondered if the picture was in his mind, too.
But Luther was already providing a diversion.
“What the hell is this all about?” he snapped, suddenly.
He seemed to be shaking off the combined effects of last night’s excesses and this morning’s beating remarkably quickly and Carver wondered what had been in the little glass from which Luther had been drinking upstairs.
That it was some kind of pick-me-up was clear. But the only stimulants which would have this much effect this quickly were dangerous to play with. He hoped very sincerely that Luther had been given one of those. It would leave him hors de combat later.
“Ducher,” said Dark suddenly, and jerked his head.
One of the guards stepped forward and took Luther by the arm, preparatory to leading him into the centre of the mats. With a speed which surprised everybody watching, Luther whipped his arm out of the way, and smashed his elbow into the man’s stomach.
The German was a muscular, powerful man, but the blow caught him completely by surprise, and he folded forward with a cough of agony.
There was an exclamation of surprise from Amy, but the sound of the bolts on both Uzi machine pistols being cocked sounded suddenly deafening in the rock chamber. Carver’s stomach cringed in anticipation of a lethal burst of machine gun fire which would have turned the chamber into a deathtrap of rebounding slugs and Sigmund Dark shouted: “Don’t fire!”
Luther took advantage of the moment of immobility to step away from the doubled-over form of Ducher and launch a savage kick at the side of the man’s head. The step put him into the centre of the mat space.
Yasmin hit him in the face.
Even Carver gave a little hiccough of surprise at the action. At one moment the half-naked girl was standing, relaxed, at the corner of the mat. The next, she was standing next to Luther.
The blow sounded like a butcher cutting meat with a blunt cleaver, and the effect of it on Luther’s face was very similar.
Blood spurted from his broken nose instantly in a fine spray, and the nose itself parted in a line across the bridge.
He gave a bellow of pain and rage, and swung his foot viciously across to break her leg at the knee.
Except that the knee was not there any more. The impetus of the kick swung Luther round off balance, and as he turned Gudrun took a little run and cart wheeled into him.
One foot took the turning man in the mouth, and Carver distinctly heard the crunch of breaking teeth. The other lanced into his stomach.
As he folded forward, there was a high, thin “yip” of sound and Satya bounced across the mat in a high speed flicflac, hands and feet pointed, and hit him in the back.
Both kidneys must have ruptured at once with the immense speed and power of the attack, and Luther’s roar of agony turned into a continuous howl of protest as Yasmin hit him again with both pointed fists just below the junction of his rib cage.
Carver had once seen a man receive a measured beating with pick-axe handles in Belfast, and had felt sick for hours afterwards at the measured, almost technical ferocity of the attack. It had gone on for ten suffering-filled minutes and left the victim a barely recognisable hulk in the street.
But even that awful onslaught faded in horror when compared to this calculated, scientific rupturing of a man’s vital organs by cheering, colourful windmilling girls.
Only Yasmin’s face showed any kind of animosity towards their victim. On her lopsided face, a savagery of inhuman intensity stamped out even the last vestiges of beauty.
The other two behaved exactly as though they were giving a gymnastic demonstration at the Olympics.
They cheered one another’s tricks, rounded off their own evolutions in graceful, exhibition positions, danced and squealed delightedly when a particular complex movement resulted in a spectacularly heavy hit.
Yet Luther was not allowed to die or even mercifully to lose consciousness.
His cries had long since blended into one continuous shriek of unbearable suffering punctuated only by the slobbering breaths he was forced to draw. His fingers broken, his nose a blob of raw meat, one eyeball bouncing on a broken cheekbone, he no longer looked even remotely human.
“For God’s sake, kill him,” Car
ver said, disgusted beyond bearing at the spectacle.
Sigmund Dark turned a stony face to him.
“This man beat and defaced one of my own girls, he is not to be allowed to die ... yet.”
He turned back to the mats and nodded at Yasmin. She turned to face Luther, poised like a naked Olga Korbutt on the bar, and flew into a buzz saw of arms and legs.
At the last moment, Luther must have realised what was to happen, for he turned away and the full weight of the flying girl hit him in the small of the back.
Carver heard his spine snap like a wet log, and the man folded in half falling to the floor. For the first time since the macabre exhibition started, he was silent.
Dark gave an order, and Ducher unfastened Carver’s handcuffs.
The other two men reached down to pick Luther up by the armpits, and Carver realised with horror that the wretched man was still not dead. A low moan came from the smashed face.
His feet trailing along the floor, they dragged him to the far end of the room, past the dispensary, and through the dark studded door of the old torture chamber.
With Ducher’s sawn-off shotgun grinding into his kidneys, Carver followed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On the other side of the door was a nightmare from another century. The old torture chamber had been reconstructed with a loving attention to detail. Except that here the ropes and straps, the spikes and screws, were new and dust free. There was an iron maiden against the far wall, and the ugly paraphernalia of pain hanging, lying and standing around.
The most remarkable device was an iron chair, standing on a small pedestal by a niche at the side of the room. A set of iron straps built into the thing could be adjusted to hold the victim totally immobilised at neck, waist, arm and knee. Attached to the high back of the chair was a scold’s bridle, an ugly cage of iron bars designed to hold the head rigid and the mouth silent.
A series of mock oil lamps hung from the ceiling, but the real illumination came eerily from hidden lights around the walls.
The result was macabre and effective. Carver’s skin crept and somewhere at the back of his ancestry, a wolf awakened and snarled.
“Not original, of course,” said Dark, waving an expansive hand around the shadowed chamber. “Merely a whimsy of mine. Sometimes we have visiting parties to the Château, and you would be surprised how many ask to see the torture chamber. A touch Grand Guignol, I’ll grant you, but it caters to a surprisingly common taste.”
He chuckled as he patted a piece of equipment of a shape to give a woman hysterics.
“Would you believe most of it is quite legally made in England? We get half of it from Birmingham. The fetters and items of restraint as they delicately call them. The larger items, of course, are custom built.”
“Nice to know the old crafts are not dying out,” said Carver.
Dark grinned. “Indeed they are not, as you shall shortly discover. Josef Lefeu is a master of his art. Nothing to do with this lot, of course. The art has progressed. But I digress. Come along!”
He gestured like a man leading a wagon train and the guards dragged Luther forward to the far corner of the room, where Dark stopped by an alcove in the wall. Chains rattled and pulleys squealed.
Ducher jabbed with his shotgun, and Carver followed, gagging slightly as a hideous, charnel-house stench suddenly billowed round him.
The whole floor of the alcove was one huge trapdoor, he saw. The door itself was made of old timber baulks backed with a modern steel pan, and the hole it filled was surrounded with a thick rubber seal. The door was supported against the wall by an arrangement of chain and pulleys. Sigmund Dark was holding the end of the chain.
“The oubliette of the Rocher Bram,” said Sigmund Dark. “It is ... the other way out of the castle, if you like. Except that nobody who has been thrown down there ever came up again.”
He nodded, and the two guards lifted Luther’s drooping figure, and pitched it head forward through the trap. There was a despairing, wailing cry from the hole, an indescribable sound of impact, and silence.
“Dead at last, I trust,” said Dark lightly. He let go of the chain, and the old pulleys sparked and squealed as the heavy door fell closed. “The drop itself is not long – it was only twenty feet when we investigated it after taking over the building. Plus sixteen feet of bones. It widens towards the bottom, of course.”
“Bones?” said Carver.
“Originally a Neolithic midden pit, they tell me. Then when the castle was built around the original caves, it became what it is now: the oubliette. My predecessors as castellan were busy, busy men. During the time of the Inquisition, which was headquartered at Carcassonne, a good deal of questioning was done at this castle. In this very place. It was a peculiarity of the castellan of the day that he interrogated only very rich Cathar heretics. There were plenty of them. The Cathars were numerous round here. His own riches increased immeasurably during the period, I read with interest. Few of his victims were ever seen again. But I think we know where they are don’t we? They went the way of the unlovable Luther.
“There are times,” he said, as he shouldered his way out of the alcove and led the way into the light of the exercise room, “when I really do despair of getting halfway competent staff. Would you believe that I offered that young man a partnership in my business – and he threw it all away for the sake of a night getting brutishly drunk and beating up Yasmin?”
He shook his head, and gestured towards the stairway.
Across the big room, Carver could see the two young girls, their brightly coloured leotards and tights now spattered and splashed with dark stains, carefully folding the tarpaulin which had protected the mats.
“They have to take that upstairs to clean it. There are no drains down here. Everything always finishes up in the oubliette and as you will understand, we try and keep that as dry as possible. The smell, you know.
“I can understand a man becoming enslaved by alcohol,” continued Sigmund Dark as they climbed the stairs past the slaves’ cells and emerged into the heat of the day. It is a narcotic, similar in its effect to other narcotics. I blame the various governments of the world for allowing the wholesale production and sale of the stuff. It causes untold misery to families, and one look at the road death statistics – have you seen that more than 1,000 deaths were attributable to alcohol in Britain last year alone? – tells the story of what it does to society.”
He paused with a pleased look on his face as two cars pulled through the gatehouse and stopped in the courtyard. From one of them came Lefeu and Gehn, and from the other Brinkman, the man sent to find them.
“Ah! Josef! I have a job for you,” Dark said in French. There followed quick flow of accented French, and the Jersey man’s eyes glinted as he turned to look at Carver. Then he followed his countrymen into the gatehouse tower.
“Now we will take a little lunch, I think, and maybe you and I can come to some arrangement over the exchange of information,” said Dark. Beaming, he led the way up the steps to the keep and into the great hall.
The place was another revelation. In this great chamber, Dark had designed a memorial to the once great lords who had lived here.
The Hall was oblong and took up one whole floor of the building. Its vaulted ceiling climbed to the fighting deck on top of the castle itself.
Within it had been created a living museum. Flags and banners hung down from the massive rafters, and racks and displays of arms adorned the walls.
The floor had been laid out for a medieval banquet, with massive oak tables arranged in a U shape around the square of vast flags in the middle of the floor where once the fire had burned.
“Tomorrow, our guests will eat here,” said Dark. “And when they have eaten and made their selection, and gone their way, you and I will have our own little ceremony. Unless, of course, we can come to some more civilised arrangement beforehand.”
He led the way through the ha
ll and out of the door on the opposite side. They descended a spiral stair and emerged in Sigmund Dark’s own apartment. There, a table had been laid and chairs arranged for a lunch.
In the middle of the table was a vast platter of cold meats – pink lamb cutlets, red beef, slices of ham and mixed salamis, all jostling for space between portions of chicken and duck – and two dishes of green salad.
Between the plates stood huge goblets and there were iced bottles of Perrier water and jugs of fruit juice.
“Sit. Eat,” said Dark, positioning himself at the head of the table and waving Carver to a chair. Amy, unbidden, settled at the other side of the table. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the food.
Carver sat where he was hidden and took one of the chunks of fresh bread from a basket.
“We do not have a permanent chef here,” said Dark, filling his own goblet with orange juice from a tinkling jug.When I am away the staff look after their own food. Schwenke was a cook in the Legion, and his food is surprisingly good. When I am in residence, and when we have to entertain, I borrow a chef and his staff from a French friend of mine who lives just up the coast...”
“LeCorbiere,” nodded Carver. “Does he still keep a private plane at Beziers?”
There was a frozen silence around the table, broken by the sharp clink of metal against porcelain as Dark put down his knife.
“I think you had better tell me how you discovered that name,” he said in a voice pitched just a little above a purr.
“Sure. French police told me,” said Carver, making a long arm to help himself to a pile of beef and ham. “You mind passing the salad, Amy? Gee, thanks.”
He helped himself to the salad, poured Perrier into his glass and swilled it down, refilled the glass. At no time did he give the slightest hint he had noticed the tension which made the air ugly.
“I would be obliged for a more exact explanation,” said Dark, unmoving.
“How much more exact? The French police gave me a briefing before I came down here, and part of it was the list of names of your known associates. The only one who lives along the coast is LeCorbiere, who used at one time to keep a private plane at the air strip at Bez...”
The Guardian Page 19
