by Alex Howard
There, silhouetted against the light of the hall behind, was the sinister form of fat and jolly Dr Kellner, beaming at her with his blubbery lips, his eyes bright behind his thick glasses.
He closed the door behind him and made his way carefully down the stairs, moving slowly and purposefully. Huss could see that his cheeks were flushed and he kept his eyes unnervingly fixed on her tethered form.
He paused at the table by the wall and switched on a desk lamp. Kellner’s shadow was thrown monstrously against the wall.
He advanced towards her in the semi-darkness until he was standing looking down at her face. She watched as he licked his thick lips slowly with his fat, pink tongue, and ran his gaze slowly, inch by inch, from her bound ankles to the crown of her head.
She could smell him, a mix of eau de cologne, sweat and cigar smoke, overlaid with the stale fumes of brandy.
He leaned over her and ran the back of his plump hand that smelled of soap over her cheek. Huss gagged.
‘Oh, dear, DI Huss,’ he said softly, licking his lips again, savouring her helplessness. ‘What is it you say in English? “Curiosity killed the cat.”’
Huss glared at him with hatred. He smiled at her.
‘You really are a very attractive woman, DI Huss, very attractive indeed.’
He licked his lips salaciously, then leaned over her so his face was very close to hers. She could smell his sweat and she could see the thick hairs that sprouted inside his nose as he inhaled her perfume. She felt like throwing up.
‘You smell delightful, meine liebling Frau. Und dein Arsch ist schönsten.’ His hand hovered over her breasts. ‘Und deine Brust...’
*
Hinds had moved round the side of the house and peered in the narrow, rectangular window at ground level that belonged to the treatment room. My God, he thought, it’s Huss.
She was strapped to a table and it was obvious what was about to happen. The Germans had Huss captive? Why? Myriad thoughts whirled through his head. Well, it had to be something to do with Georgie, she had Huss’s keys, after all.
He saw the fat guy’s trousers fall to his ankles and frantically thought of ways to intervene. He couldn’t phone anyone, his own phone was in Huss’s car.
He looked around him for inspiration.
Run and get help, he thought. The police would nick him, but at least he knew where Huss was. They’d have to go and check. It’d be too late in one sense, but at least she’d still be alive.
He stood up and crouched down, keeping low, and then heard the crunch of steps on the gravel.
In the lights that illuminated the driveway he could see the huge shape of Muller closing the gate that had been open when he had arrived – there was no sign of the dog.
He was trapped within the precincts of the lodge. The gate was unclimbable, the hedge solid hawthorn, impenetrable.
Hinds realized that Adams had to be in league with Schneider. How or why scarcely mattered. He tried to come up with something. He thought wildly of kicking the window in. That would, at least, distract Kellner. It would also bring Frank, Schneider and the Presa.
His heart sank. There was nothing that he could do, nothing at all.
Miserably he watched through the window as Kellner bent over the bound form of Melinda Huss.
47
The BA flight touched down at Heathrow. Serg had used whatever arcane influence he commanded to get her an utterly pointless upgrade, allowing her to sit in the front row and have her jacket hung up on a coat hanger and her coffee from a china cup instead of a paper one.
An hour and a half between Stuttgart and London. As she sat in her car stuck in heavy traffic between Heathrow and Oxford, it struck her that it was probably going to take nearly as long to drive the forty or so miles down to the Rosemount.
She tried her phone again – would Huss never pick up? Annoyance was giving way to concern. She called Enver. His phone was off too. Maybe that was it, thought Hanlon. She was staying at his place in London.
Traffic started moving and Hanlon drove up the slip road to the M25. She put her hand back into her handbag and touched the small canister that Serg had given her. She had inspected it in the bedroom of the safe house in Berlin, the Cyrillic script meaningless, the skull and crossbones logo, however, needing no translation.
‘Does it work?’ she said dubiously.
‘Yes,’ said Serg. ‘It even works on bears.’
‘How do they know?’
‘They got some guy to test it, in Perm, in Siberia. They rounded up a couple of bears, starved them a bit, then put him in with them.’
‘That was brave of him.’
‘I don’t think he had any say in the matter,’ said Serg. ‘Anyway, it worked. For God’s sake, don’t inhale any.’
They had kissed goodbye and she had been driven to the airport by Nikolei Gennadyovich Kamenev, the man who’d masterminded her surveillance.
She drove round the M25 and then down the M40. The traffic was light and the Audi felt good on the road. She took the spur road for Oxford and then the main road that led near to the Rosemount.
Hanlon had no clear plan in mind, but she did want to check on the Germans who she knew were scheduled to leave soon. What Lottie had told her was unsubstantiated, but she believed her, and there was photographic evidence held by Georgie Adams. She had a feeling things were coming to a head fairly soon.
She turned off the main road a couple of miles from the hotel and took the B road to where the anarchist campsite had been and pulled over in a lay-by. She got out of her car and changed into more suitable clothing – steel-toed army boots, combat trousers, jacket and a balaclava – and dropped several items into a small rucksack, then she set off up the track to where the caravans had been parked. From there, she would head through the woods, the way that she had come the other day when she had been pursued by Gregory.
She could see a dark car parked up ahead. It was the only vehicle, the anarchists were long gone. She approached it warily, her feet silent on the fallen leaves that littered the track, her body invisible against the dark line of the hawthorn hedge that bounded the rutted way.
A VW Golf, the plates she knew, Huss’s car. Hanlon’s pulse quickened, this was not good. She walked up to it and looked inside. Huss’s bag, her phone visible.
Hanlon started to run up the hill to the lodge. She had run fast with Stevens behind her, armed and dangerous, but not as fast as she was running now.
48
Huss watched Kellner’s face moving closer to her own. Nearer and nearer it came, the doctor moving with sadistic slowness. She closed her eyes, flinching, her skin crawling as she waited for his hands to touch her, then, suddenly,
‘Florian!’
Schneider’s voice was like a whipcrack. Kellner straightened up and Huss opened her eyes. Schneider had appeared at the top of the stairs, interrupting his deputy. There was a furious exchange of German and then Kellner, with a reddened and enraged face, like a scolded adolescent, bent down, pulled up his underpants and trousers, fastening himself with hasty movements, and then stamped heavily away up the stairs.
Outside, Hinds let out a sigh of relief. He started to examine the long window in great detail. He was a Hinds, breaking and entering ran in the family. The window wouldn’t pose much of a problem.
Schneider walked up to Huss, his face frowning with anger.
‘I must apologize for my colleague. I’ll stay with you until Adams gets back. We are an honourable organization but sometimes I have little say in the choice of my colleagues. I think soon I may have to have a bit of a purge, but that is for another time.’
He started to wander around the room, drumming his fingers on things. Huss could now see he was a man under a great deal of strain. He had a dead body in a freezer and a policewoman bound on a table, a loose-cannon potential rapist and a psychotic minder together with a psychotic dog. And God alone knew where Adams fitted in.
Schneider turned to address her, to exp
lain himself. ‘All I wanted to do was save Germany from the niggers and the Muslims and stand up to the Russians. Save us from ourselves really.’
More walking around, more pushing his fingers through his hair. He turned to her and he had tears in his eyes. ‘I really respect you, DI Huss, and I hate the fact that you’re going to have to die.’
So do I, thought Huss. Part of her, though, was flooded with relief, almost gratitude that he had saved her from Kellner. She thought, It’s like Stockholm syndrome, don’t be grateful, this man is going to kill you!
Schneider’s crocodile tears weren’t helping either. If you feel that badly about it, thought Huss, let me go. Lose this nauseating self-pity, this ‘now look what you’ve made me do’ attitude.
He sat down on a chair near her head, a man unburdening himself, anxious to explain. I suppose he can afford to tell me everything, thought Huss bitterly, since I’ll be taking his secrets with me to the grave.
‘Kellner started it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know at first that he was bankrolling the party by laundering money for the Russian Mafia – that was Georgie Adams’s idea. She has political connections in Germany through the international anarchist movement and it was her idea to use us to launder Russian Mafia money. She approached Kellner as a middle man, I mean woman. She got a cut, we got a cut,’ said Schneider.
So now it’s Kellner’s fault, is it? thought Huss. So it was Kellner’s idea to accept Georgie Adams’s offer of money from the Russian Mafia disguised as party donations, not yours, Schneider. You were too busy formulating policy to worry about the nuts and bolts of party finance.
Schneider continued his self-justifying explanation. ‘We’d charge three euros for every one we took from them, put the money they gave us as party donations through our accounts for tax purposes and reinvest the clean money in their legit businesses.’ He laughed. ‘People assume it’s the big konzerns behind us, industrial backers, but it’s Mafia money. Russian money. And then Hart got wind of it – we were old friends, from when we were kids, we grew up together, partied together, he knew everything about me – so she killed him and invented the Al-Akhdaar organization, let the Muslims take the heat, and that was genius.’
He poured himself a glass of water.
Huss lay there immobile, silent, the perfect audience for Schneider. She was like a priest in a confessional and soon she would be bound by more than a vow of silence. She would be dead.
It was undeniably clever. Her respect for Adams grudgingly increased. Who would imagine that a far-right German nationalist party would be financed by Russian organized crime? Who would suspect the anarchists of anything so organized, so capitalist? And then to pin the deaths on the bogeymen of Islam. Even though Al-Akhdaar didn’t actually exist, ISIS sources had claimed the executions as theirs.
‘So we invented Al-Akhdaar and, as you can see, everyone believes us. Why wouldn’t they? And, I’m afraid, DI Huss, that it’s Al-Akhdaar that are going to kill you.’
Schneider was right, it was genius.
‘And then that idiot Hinds somehow stumbled across a connection. He didn’t know Al-Akhdaar were a fiction, but he knew Eleuthera were linked somehow and Georgie was involved. To be honest, we didn’t know how much he did know, that’s why he had to be discredited. No one would believe him as a paranoid murderer.’
Schneider heard voices upstairs.
‘I’m just sorry about you, but at least I can ensure your death will be dignified and painless. I promise I’ll make sure of that. I won’t ask you to forgive me, but I hope now you can see why I acted as I did. I simply had no choice. I will leave you now.’
He turned and she watched his back disappear up the stairs.
I don’t want to die, thought Huss. She could feel tears in her eyes but she refused to shed them.
There was a click as the door shut behind Schneider.
Huss closed her eyes in despair, then shivered as a cold draught blew across her. That was unusual.
She heard a scraping noise. She opened her eyes and turned her head.
Her heart leapt with adrenaline-fuelled excitement. The long, narrow window had opened and as she watched, first she saw a hand, then an arm, then the back of a head as a slim figure of a man squeezed himself through the aperture with agonizing slowness. There was only just enough clearance for his head. Back of head, left arm and shoulder, back and buttocks, leg until he lay along the window ledge. Then he swung round, feet first, still with his back to her. He dropped lithely on to the floor and turned round.
Marcus Hinds. He grinned at her triumphantly.
Thank you, God! thought Huss.
49
Hanlon ran up the dark silent track that ran through the field and up to the maize strip that shivered mournfully in the cold night air. She rounded a bend and found the footpath that led through the woods to the Rosemount easily enough. There was a sign and a stile by a gap in the hedgerow.
She climbed over the stile and dropped down on to the frozen ground on the other side.
The path would eventually skirt the base of the hotel’s large formal gardens and the edge of the lodge. It was narrow but clearly defined, lined on one side with the leafy tracery of dead ferns and low bramble bushes that had a covering of frost, which glinted in the moonlight from above. On both sides stretched the frozen trees of the woods.
It was about ten minutes along the track that she first saw the lodge over the top of the hawthorn. It was a clear night and the roof and upper storey were plainly visible. Lights were on in one of the rooms and there was another blaze of light from the window above the front door.
Her breath steamed as she ran through the frozen leaves. Hanlon clambered through the dead foliage by the side of the path to examine the structure of the hedge. The dead bracken and nettles crunched beneath her army boots and the thorns of the brambles snagged on her camouflage combat trousers. The ground was treacherously uneven under her feet and she could feel the ridges of mud, hard as iron. Iced water shone where puddles had formed and frozen over on the dark ribbon of the track.
She approached the hedge and examined it, anxious to make sure the Presa wasn’t going to burst through at some unexpected juncture. The neatly trimmed branches rose silently above her head – she guessed it was about three metres in height. The foliage was dense, impenetrable, with vicious thorns strong enough to pierce leather. There was no way to clamber through that. She moved back to the path and a little way further down found what she was looking for.
Just about visible by day, if you didn’t know that the shelter was there, by night you would never have noticed it. It was almost in complete darkness but she didn’t want to use her torch for fear of attracting the dog. What was easy to see by day was less so now. Brambles had fallen back over the door and the flight of steps leading to it a couple of metres from the path.
Hanlon descended the concrete steps, feeling the way cautiously with her booted feet for a couple of metres, trampling the foliage underfoot, until she could see the steel door.
She had a lightweight rucksack slung over her shoulder. She unslung the bag and took a torch out, opened the door and went inside.
The first thing she noticed was the absolute darkness and silence of the place. It was like being inside a tomb. She shone the powerful flashlight around experimentally. She had more time now than when she was last here.
The shelter was empty of everything except a couple of stacks of old metal-framed plastic chairs and some rusting machinery of indeterminate purpose. The air was damp and smelled of mould.
Hanlon walked the length of the shelter, some twenty-five metres, she guessed, to where the dancing beam of the torch had picked out the form of the other door. She also saw the empty window frame through which she had wriggled a few days previously. Now that she had time she thought she’d get the door open. She wasn’t sure that she might not need it.
When she reached the door that opened out to the garden, she examined it closely. It was a s
heet of old, rusty steel, much thicker than the one she had come through. She tapped it experimentally with the side of her fist. It felt rock solid.
The handle was rusted immobile, there was no give in it at all. She turned her attention to the hinges. These looked far more promising. The door frame was wood with a concrete surround, the wood itself rotten and the concrete cracked. She unslung her small rucksack and took out the cold chisel. There was no need to bring out the small, heavy hammer she’d packed.
She prised the hinges out of their surround, the wood flaking away easily. It had been there for over seventy years and it had turned to powder. She felt the heavy door move. She hooked her fingers around it and pulled it inwards until she had created a gap big enough for her to squeeze through. She looked through the space she had created into the garden of the house.
*
The moonlight illuminated the lawn that lay outside the shelter as effectively as floodlights. There was virtually no cover between where she was and the silent shape of the lodge before her. There were no lights showing.
She squeezed out of the gap where the door had fallen slightly forward, still attached by the rusted lock. One of the bushes, a rhododendron she guessed by the evergreen foliage, screened her as she stood there thoughtfully.
She was now opposite the front of the lodge. She decided to skirt round the perimeter of the garden till she was at the rear. She could see lights on in the two rooms flanking the front door and two in the upstairs bedrooms. One was a rectangular window over the front door, so she assumed that the hall lights were blazing and the other one had curtains drawn.
She had no particular plan beyond trying to ascertain if Huss was inside.
Hanlon was in her dark clothes, combat trousers, a winter fleece, fingerless gloves, and she now pulled on her balaclava, which she had removed for her run. Only her eyes were visible. Around her left arm she had wrapped a long, very thick weightlifter’s belt that belonged to Serg so her forearm was strapped tight. A little like one of those Roman gladiators. She slung the small rucksack over her shoulder and set off parallel to the hedge.
