The Old Vengeful

by Anthony Price

  It was all happening too quickly—and it was also so well organised to be inescapable that all Elizabeth’s suspicions started to swirl again deep within her, not quite surfacing, but disturbing her calm.

  “Well …” She cast around for an excuse, but her wits seemed to have deserted her.

  “I’ll call at your home, then.” Dr Mitchell looked at his watch. “Shall we say 6.45?”

  She could feel the trap closing on her. She could still be too tired, or have a headache, or plead her mourning state, or simply be rude.

  Or was it that she didn’t want to plead an excuse—didn’t want to, even though everything right and respectable and explicable about Dr Paul Mitchell still added up to a sum total in which she instinctively disbelieved?

  “Very well—6.45,” she said, snapping the trap herself.

  II

  IT WASN’T TRUE that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, thought Elizabeth as she parked on the yellow line outside Margaret’s bookshop: the law was the same, it was simply that the punishment no longer mattered. Besides which, anyway, the restriction time had only another ten minutes to run, and the street was empty of cars not for fear of a questing traffic warden, but because all the shops had closed.

  Margaret’s was no exception, but Elizabeth hammered on the glass door, confident in the knowledge that if friendship wasn’t enough to summon her, the thought of next term’s sixth form reading list would do the trick.

  Sure enough, one look over the “Closed” sign transformed the bookseller’s grimace into a welcoming expression.

  “Elizabeth dear—I shalln’t say ‘we’re shut’ to you, even though you have spent your afternoon ruining my business with unfair cut-price competition at that sale of yours.” Margaret re-bolted the door. “Have you come to apologise, or is this a social call?”

  Elizabeth smiled at her warily. The social call Margaret was half expecting might well be for her answer to that tentative offer of partnership “if ever you found yourself free to consider it”, which Margaret had made over coffee last year. But that “free” had also meant “and with sufficient capital to buy in”, and now that she had both freedom and capital selling books didn’t seem so enticing after all.

  “My dear, you’ve no call to worry—“ the thought of books recalled her to her intention “—you wouldn’t have given house-room to the books I sold, and I didn’t sell many of them either … Besides which I’m here as a potential customer, if you’re open for business—and if you’ve got what I want… which you probably haven’t.”

  “I never turn a customer away.” Margaret swept a hand towards the shelves and the piled tables. “Take your pick—the usual discount for the school, two-thirds to you, dear. What’s the title?”

  “I don’t know the title, but the author’s name is Mitchell with a ‘t’.

  “Mitchell …” Margaret thought for a moment. “Lots of Mitchells—but Gone with the Wind I haven’t got, so cross off Margaret Mitchell… But there’s Julian for novels, and Adrian for poetry, and Gladys for whodunits, and Paul for battles—“

  “Paul?”

  “Not your cup of tea, my dear—History, Military, twentieth century … I’m sure there’s another Mitchell somewhere—“ she frowned at her shelves.

  “Paul Mitchell,” said Elizabeth. “Have you got his book?”

  “I’ve got two of his titles. But don’t tell me you’re changing your A-level syllabus next term, for heaven’s sake! I’ve just stocked up for the Tudors and the Stuarts.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “This is personal. Can I see them?”

  “Of course.” Margaret scanned her shelves again. “The Breaking of the Hindenburg Line is just out in paperback—that’ll save you a few pounds. But I’ll show you the hardback first … Let’s see now— Marder, Mattingly … Middlebrook—Mitchell, Paul—here you are—The Breaking of the Hindenburg Line.” She regarded Elizabeth curiously.

  It was a substantial book, its dust-jacket festooned with barbed-wire, stark black on white, leading her to the blurb inside.

  “On the morning of April 9th, 1917, the men of the British Fourth and Fifth armies had their first sight of a new German defensive position which was named by its builders the Siegfried Stellung, but which became known to the British as the Hindenburg Line.

  “Sergeant Alfred Hannah, of the 2nd/4th Royal Mendips, saw the morning sunlight shimmering on what seemed like a river separating him from the village of Fontaine-du-Bois in the distance. Yet it was not water which had caught the light, but the sharpened points of a jungle of new barbed-wire 75 yards wide …”

  Elizabeth’s flesh crawled as she remembered how she had torn her second-best skirt on a single strand of barbed-wire on a ramble beyond the Trundles. Not your cup of tea was right!

  She turned to the back flap, and Dr Paul Mitchell stared at her from it—a younger version, unlined and fuller-faced, and more arrogant too, but unmistakably the same man.

  “Paul Mitchell was born in Gloucestershire on September 29th, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day after his grandfather was killed in action while commanding a battalion during the crossing of the St Quentin Canal. Dr Mitchell was educated at—“

  So here, encapsulated, was all the research she had hoped to do, easily come by: school—grammar school or very minor public school, she couldn’t recognise the name—Cambridge and a British Commonwealth Institute fellowship; then a research post with the Ministry of Defence (where did the Home Office come in?) and ‘now researching the battle of the Ancre, the hard-won victory which led to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line’ , . . Definitely not her cup of tea, any of it; and yet the obsession with the 1914-18 War was here made explicable, even if she couldn’t quite grasp the Theory of Contemporaneity which had drawn him from the Hindenburg Line to Jutland and HMS Vengeful.

  “And here’s the other one,” said Margaret. “And the paperback of the one you’ve got there.”

  The Battle of the Ancre was slimmer, but although Elizabeth had already had her fill of carnage it offered her critical assessments of the first book.

  “Is this the Mitchell you want?” said Margaret doubtfully.

  The critics appeared to have approved of Dr Mitchell’s work; though of course the publishers would naturally have picked their quotations with care, for effect.

  She looked at Margaret. “Do many people buy this sort of thing?”

  Margaret shrugged. “About the same as for your father’s books, allowing for the fact that Portsmouth’s just down the road from here, so I expect to sell more naval books. It’s surprising how well all the war books go—astonishing, even.”

  Margaret was CND—anti-Polaris, anti-Trident, anti-Cruise, anti-practically everything … Elizabeth had to make allowance for that, just as Margaret did her best to make allowance for Elizabeth being her father’s daughter.

  “And he’s got another coming out in the autumn—I think I read about it in The Bookseller.” Astonished or not, Margaret never let her principles get in the way of her bookselling. “I can’t remember the title, but it has something to do with the Irish.”

  “ Watch by the Liffey,” said Elizabeth.

  “That’s it. But how—“

  “I’ll take the two hardcovers. Put them on my account, dear.”

  Margaret was still registering surprise at her unsuspected specialist knowledge, and the temptation to increase the score was irresistible.

  “It comes from what the Irish soldiers did in France in 1914—the Germans were singing their ‘Wacht am Rhein’ in the trenches, so the Irish gave them back ‘Watch by the Liflfey’, Dr Mitchell says.” She smiled sweetly at her friend. “And I need the books, you see, because he’s taking me out to dinner tonight—“

  There was no ticket on the car and no traffic warden in sight, and the street was still empty except for a car parked even more blatantly further down, where the yellow lines were doubled, no doubt encouraged by her example.

  S
he sat for a moment, reading more of the dust-jacket blurb:

  “Seventeen months later, when he next laid eyes on that same piece of the Hindenburg Line, Lieutenant Alfred Hannah of the West Hampshires failed to recognise it at first: the village of Fontaine-du-Bois had vanished off the face of the earth, and rust had dulled the barbs of the wire. But the wire was still there, unbroken …”

  What was it, she wondered, which drew men like Dr Mitchell—he wasn’t much older than she was—to the contemplation of such horrors? With Father it had been different—it had all been part of re-living glory for him, as well as pain. But Dr Mitchell …

  She drove homewards abstractedly, her mind hardly on the road but ranging more on that conundrum, and then on her own recklessness in allowing herself to be propositioned so easily by a stranger. And such a strange stranger …

  Then, suddenly and out of nowhere, a brace of leather-suited teenage motor-cyclists from Leigh Park roared past her, waking her up to the discovery that she was out of town already and on the edge of Father’s woods—her woods, now.

  Shocked by her own inattention, she checked her driving mirror carefully for further motor-cyclists before she turned into the concealed drive. But there was only a car way behind her, and that was pulling into the verge … It looked not unlike the same car she had observed in the street below Margaret’s, and she wondered for a moment if it might not be Dr Mitchell at the wheel solving the problem of locating her home simply by following her, since she had clean forgotten to give him any directions. But then she dismissed the thought as pure imagination: the Vicar could supply those directions just as well, and she couldn’t see a man like Dr Mitchell worrying about such a small matter anyway.

  She sighed as she searched in her bag for her key. It was no good dreaming dreams about Dr Mitchell merely because he was going to take her out to dinner. In another second or two she would step into the hall, and put her bag on the table under the mirror as she always did, and would look into the mirror to check her appearance, as she also always did out of pure habit. And the mirror would then tell her all she needed to know, as it too always did—and this time it would also remind her that it was Father’s research in which Dr Mitchell was interested, not her … not her …

  She sighed again, and turned the key. Perhaps it would be better to vary the habit this time, and not bother to look in the mirror.

  She put the bag down on the table—

  There was a sudden flurry of movement in the mirror—she glimpsed something—and then darkness descended on her and arms crushed her—

  “Don’t scream, girl—an’ don’t struggle neither.” The voice was as rough as the hands, but unhurried. “If yer do then I’ll give yer somethin’ to scream about—I’ll break yer bleedin’ arm. Got it?”

  Elizabeth wasn’t aware that she had made any sound since the bag—or whatever it was—had descended on her head, surrounding her with impenetrable dark. Nor, for that matter, had she attempted to struggle, for the hands and the rock-like bulk of their owner left no scope for resistance: it was like being grabbed by a gorilla.

  But perhaps she had cried out in surprise and pain, and the gorilla had misinterpreted both the sound and the weakness in her knees.

  “Got it?” The voice grated in her ear and the pressure on her shoulder-blades increased agonisingly.

  This time she heard herself cry out—almost as much in astonishment as in pain as her brain started to sort out the unbelievable signals it was receiving: nobody had ever done anything like this before to her—no one had ever held her like this, hurt her like this!

  “You’re-hurting-me!” she gasped.

  The pressure relaxed to its original implacable grip. “Just so you know this ain’t nothin’ to what I can do, eh?”

  She was being robbed—freed from pain she fought against rising panic—she was being robbed, and she must keep her head … or he would beat her into a pulp … or … she felt the fear of what he might also do to her spreading inside her—the fear founded and fed on a hundred newspaper headlines—

  She must keep her head—she must remember what to do, even though the fear was choking her!

  But she couldn’t think straight any more. Was it better to fight, and risk injury—or did submission encourage them to do what they might not have intended to do in the first place?

  But trying to fight this sort of strength would be sheer insanity—

  “I’ve got ‘er—an’ she’s got the message I reckon.”

  The voice outside the darkness wasn’t directed at her: Oh, God help me! thought Elizabeth, despairingly—not him, but them!

  “Bring her in here, then.” The new voice wasn’t rough, like that of her captor: it was educated, but at the same time unidentifiably classless.

  Before she could deduce anything more about it—before even she could decide whether to derive hope or greater fear from it—Elizabeth was man-handled round in a new direction and propelled forwards.

  “Sit her down there,” commanded the educated voice.

  Again she was manoeuvred, until the back of her legs came up against something hard—the edge of a chair—and then forced down into it… on to it—a hard chair, with arms.

  Inside the hood she hadn’t known where she was, but this chair reduced the choice to the dining room or the study, though without sense of smell it was impossible to tell which.

  “Well, Miss Loftus, we weren’t expecting you back so soon. But, now that you’re here, we can turn that to advantage I think.” The voice paused for an instant. “Indeed, I don’t think—I know that you will help uss.”

  Half of Elizabeth was irrationally terrified by the confidence in the voice, and by its smoothness, in which the sibilants hissed and slithered snake-like. But the other half whispered robbery to her, discounting rape and unnecessary violence.

  Even, it was easy to imagine what had brought them, for it must be common knowledge now that she was alone, and a lone woman in a large secluded house would be an open invitation to men like this. She should have thought of that before, but now it was too late.

  So … better to get it over with. Because even if she could spin out the agony until Dr Mitchell came knocking on the door, she didn’t fancy his chances against the gorilla who had grabbed her.

  “There’s … there’s money in a box upstairs—a wooden box under my bed.” There was no point in directing them to the silver in the dining room and the sitting room, they would have seen that at once and would have got it already.

  “Under the bed? Tut-tut! How very bourgeois and careless!” The voice hissed the double-s at her contemptuously.

  “A lot of money—more than two thousand pounds.” The contempt stung her. “Just take it and go, can’t you? There’s nothing else worth taking—except the silver.”

  “Nothing else?” No sound penetrated the hood except the voice. “You’re sure of that?”

  Fear returned, instantly dissolving the contempt. “I—I promise you that there isn’t—you can see for yourself… I haven’t got any jewellery.” It was hot inside the hood, she could feel her cheeks burning.

  “Nothing else?” That hateful hiss again.

  She shook the hood. “I swear it. Honestly—please!”

  For a moment she thought he had accepted the plain truth. Then, without warning, her hands were seized from her lap and held on the arms of the chair. Something sharp bit into each wrist in turn, and then into each ankle.

  Nightmare! She couldn’t see and she couldn’t move! She couldn’t even rock the chair—something, or someone, was holding it steady, and the very effort of trying to rock it stung her wrists.

  “Don’t struggle, Miss Loftus. You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  Elizabeth sat rigid. “Please—I’ve told you—“

  “Shut up—and listen! I don’t intend to waste a lot of time, Miss Loftus, so just listen … We don’t want your silver, and we don’t want your money—we’ll take it, but we don’t want it—do you understand
? You know what we want. So just tell us what we want to know, and then we’ll go.”

  Elizabeth heard herself sob.

  “Don’t be silly, Miss Loftus. Crying won’t help you—and saying ‘please’ won’t help you either. Because there’s only you and me, and I’m not a kind-hearted man—quite the opposite, in fact. Do you understand?”

  With an enormous effort Elizabeth brought herself under control. “W-what do you w-want to know?”

  “That’s better.” He sounded curiously disappointed. “But just remember now … two things: I never give anyone a second chance … and I’m very good at hurting people. Do you understand?”

  Elizabeth nodded dumbly. Whatever it was that he wanted to know, she would tell him.

  “Good. Then tell me all about the Vengeful, and those trips your father made to France.”

  The Vengeful? Those trips—? The questions simultaneously took her by surprise and also horrified her.

  “Come on, Miss Loftus. I have his notes, and there’s nothing in them. What I want is inside your head.”

  It wasn’t the safe deposits at all—it wasn’t the safe deposits at all! And there was nothing inside her head except blind panic now.

  “But I don’t know what you mean—“

  “Ah! Now there—I told you, didn’t I?” Suddenly he sounded brisker, almost happier. “You can’t sssay I didn’t tell you!”

  “But I don’t!” wailed Elizabeth. “He did research—he did research—I didn’t go with him—I don’t understand—“

  “Of course you don’t! You don’t remember anything—of course you don’t!” The snake-voice paused. “Your memory has suddenly deserted you entirely. Hold her!”

  Hands clamped down on Elizabeth’s shoulders from behind, pressing her back against the chair.

  “W-what are you doing?” She began to struggle instinctively, but the pressure on her shoulders merely increased. “Please!”

  “Please!” The snake-voice mocked her. “Thiss is a little problem I often encounter, you know. But I’m very good at ssolving it … I’m going to help you get your memory back, Misss Loftusss. That’s all!”