Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

‘Astrid Lemay?’ I said.

‘She was here this morning.’ His voice came as a hoarse whisper but audible enough all the same. ‘She said that very urgent family matters had come up. She had to leave the country.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, with her brother.’

‘He was here?’

‘No.’

‘Where did she say she was going?’

‘Athens. She belonged there.’

‘She came here just to tell you this?’

‘She had two months’ back pay due. She needed it for the fare.’

I told him to get back inside the safe. I had a little trouble with him, but he finally decided that it offered a better chance than a bullet, so he went. I didn’t want to terrify him any more. I just didn’t want him to hear what I was about to say.

I got through to Schiphol on a direct line, and was finally connected with the person I wanted.

‘Inspector van Gelder, Police HQ here,’ I said. ‘An Athens flight this morning. Probably KLM. I want to check if two people, names Astrid Lemay and George Lemay, were on board. Their descriptions are as follows – what was that?’

The voice at the other end told me that they had been aboard. There had been some difficulty, apparently, about George being allowed on the flight as his condition was such that both medical and police authorities at the airport had questioned the wisdom of it, but the girl’s pleading had prevailed. I thanked my informant and hung up.

I opened the door of the safe. It hadn’t been shut more than a couple of minutes this time and I didn’t expect to find them in such bad shape and they weren’t. Durrell’s complexion was no more than puce, and Marcel had not only recovered consciousness but recovered it to the extent of trying to lug out his underarm gun, which I had carelessly forgotten to remove. As I took the gun from him before he could damage himself with it, I reflected that Marcel must have the most remarkable powers of recuperation. I was to remember this with bitter chagrin on an occasion that was to be a day or so later and very much more inauspicious for me.

I left them both sitting on the floor, and as there didn’t seem to be anything worthwhile to say none of the three of us said it. I unlocked the door, opened it, closed and locked it behind me, smiled pleasantly at the faded blonde and dropped the key through a street grille outside the Balinova. Even if there wasn’t a spare key available, there were telephones and alarm bells still operating from inside that room and it shouldn’t take an oxyacetylene torch more than two or three hours to open it. There should be enough air inside the room to last that time. But it didn’t seem very important one way or another.

I drove back to Astrid’s flat and did what I should have done in the first place – asked some of her immediate neighbours if they had seen her that morning. Two had, and their stories checked. Astrid and George with two or three cases had left two hours previously in a taxi.

Astrid had skipped and I felt a bit sad and empty about it, not because she had said she would help me and hadn’t but because she had closed the last escape door open to her.

Her masters hadn’t killed her for two reasons. They knew I could have tied them up with her death and that would be coming too close to home. And they didn’t have to because she was gone and no longer a danger to them: fear, if it is sufficiently great, can seal lips as effectively as death.

I’d liked her and would have liked to see her happy again. I couldn’t blame her. For her, all the doors had been closed.

The view from the top of the towering Havengebouw, the skyscraper in the harbour, is unquestionably the best in Amsterdam. But I wasn’t interested in the view that morning, only in the facilities this vantage point had to offer. The sun was shining, but it was breezy and cool at that altitude and even at sea-level the wind was strong enough to ruffle the blue-grey waters into irregular wavy patterns of white horses.

The observation platform was crowded with tourists, for the most part with wind-blown hair, binoculars and cameras, and although I didn’t carry any camera I didn’t think I looked different from any other tourist. Only my purpose in being up there was.

I leaned on my elbows and gazed out to sea. De Graaf had certainly done me proud with those binoculars, they were as good as any I had ever come across and with the near-perfect visibility that day the degree of definition was all that I could ever have wished for.

The glasses were steadied on a coastal steamer of about a thousand tons that was curving into harbour. Even when I first picked her up I could detect the large rust-streaked patches on the hull and see that she was flying the Belgian flag. And the time, shortly before noon, was right. I followed her progress and it seemed to me that she was taking a wider sweep than one or two vessels that had preceded her and was going very close indeed to the buoys that marked the channel: but maybe that was where the deepest water lay.

I followed her progress till she closed on the harbour and then I could distinguish the rather scarred name on the rusty bows. Marianne the name read. The captain was certainly a stickler for punctuality, but whether he was such a stickler for abiding by the law was another question.

I went down to the Havenrestaurant and had lunch. I wasn’t hungry but meal-times in Amsterdam, as my experience had been since coming there, tended to be irregular and infrequent. The food in the Havenrestaurant is well spoken of and I’ve no doubt it merits its reputation: but I don’t remember what I had for lunch that day.

I arrived at the Hotel Touring at one-thirty. I didn’t really expect to find that Maggie and Belinda had returned yet and they hadn’t. I told the man behind the desk that I’d wait in the lounge, but I don’t much fancy lounges, especially when I had to study papers like the papers I had to study from the folder we’d taken from Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s, so I waited till the desk was momentarily unmanned, took the lift to the fourth floor and let myself into the girls’ room. It was a fractionally better room than the previous one they’d had, and the couch, which I immediately tested, was fractionally softer, but there wasn’t enough in it to make Maggie and Belinda turn cartwheels for joy, apart from the fact that the first cartwheel in any direction would have brought them up against a solid wall.

I lay on that couch for over an hour, going through all the warehouse’s invoices and a very unexciting and innocuous list of invoices they turned out to be. But there was one name among all the others that turned up with surprising frequency and as its products matched with the line of my developing suspicions, I made a note of its name and map location.

A key turned in the lock and Maggie and Belinda entered. Their first reaction on seeing me seemed to be one of relief, which was quickly followed by an unmistakable air of annoyance. I said mildly: ‘Is there something up, then?’

‘You had us worried,’ Maggie said coldly. ‘The man at the desk said you were waiting for us in the lounge and you weren’t there.’

‘We waited half an hour.’ Belinda was almost bitter about it. ‘We thought you had gone.’

‘I was tired. I had to lie down. Now that I’ve apologized, how did your morning go?’

‘Well–’ Maggie didn’t seem very mollified ‘we had no luck with Astrid–’

‘I know. The man at the desk gave me your message. We can quit worrying about Astrid. She’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ they said.

‘Skipped the country.’

‘Skipped the country?’

‘Athens.’

‘Athens?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the vaudeville act for later. ‘She and George left Schiphol this morning.’