Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

‘Police headquarters,’ I shouted. ‘Colonel de Graaf. Never mind who the hell I am. Hurry, man, hurry!’ There was a long and infuriating silence as I weaved through the morning rush-hour traffic and then a voice on the earphones said: ‘Colonel de Graaf is not in his office yet.’

‘Then get him at home!’ I shouted. Eventually they got him at home. ‘Colonel de Graaf? Yes, yes, yes. Never mind that. That puppet we saw yesterday. I have seen a girl like that before. Astrid Lemay.’ De Graaf started to ask questions but I cut him short. ‘For God’s sake, never mind that. The warehouse – I think she’s in desperate danger. We’re dealing with a criminal maniac. For God’s sake, hurry.’

I threw the earphones down and concentrated on driving and cursing myself. If you want a candidate for easy outwitting, I thought savagely, Sherman’s your man. But at the same time I was conscious that I was being at least a degree unfair to myself: I was up against a brilliantly directed criminal organization, that was for sure, but an organization that contained within it an unpredictable psychopathic element that made normal prediction almost impossible. Sure, Astrid had sold Jimmy Duclos down the river, but it had been Duclos or George, and George was a brother. They’d sent her to get to work on me, for she herself could have had no means of knowing that I was staying at the Rembrandt, but instead of enlisting my aid and sympathy she’d chickened out at the last moment and I’d had her traced and that was when the trouble had begun, that was when she had begun to become a liability instead of an asset. She had begun seeing me – or I her – without their ostensible knowledge. I could have been seen taking George away from that barrel-organ in the Rembrandtplein or at the church or by those two drunks outside her flat who weren’t drunks at all.

They’d eventually decided that it was better to have her out of the way, but not in such a fashion that would make me think that harm had come to her because they probably thought, and rightly, that if I thought she’d been taken prisoner and was otherwise in danger I’d have abandoned all hope of achieving my ultimate objective and done what they knew now was the very last thing I wanted to do – go to the police and lay before them all I knew, which they probably suspected was a great deal. This, too, was the last thing they wanted me to do because although by going to the police I would have defeated my own ultimate ends, I could so severely damage their organization that it might take months, perhaps years, to build it up again. And so Durrell and Marcel had played their part yesterday morning in the Balinova while I had overplayed mine to the hilt and had convinced me beyond doubt that Astrid and George had left for Athens. Sure they had. They’d left all right, been forced off the plane at Paris and forced to return to Amsterdam. When she’d spoken to Belinda, she’d done so with a gun at her head.

And now, of course, Astrid was no longer of any use to them. Astrid had gone over to the enemy and there was only one thing to do with people like that. And now, of course, they need no longer fear any reaction from me, for I had died at two o’clock that morning down in the barge harbour. I had the key to it all now, because I knew why they had been waiting. But I knew the key was too late to save Astrid.

I hit nothing and killed no one driving through Amsterdam, but that was only because its citizens have very quick reactions. I was in the old town now, nearing the warehouse and travelling at high speed down the narrow one-way street leading to it when I saw the police barricade, a police car across the street with an armed policeman at each end of it. I skidded to a halt. I jumped out of the car and a policeman approached me.

‘Police,’ he said, in case I thought he was an insurance salesman or something. ‘Please go back.’

‘Don’t you recognize one of your own cars?’ I snarled. ‘Get out of my damned way.’

‘No one is allowed into this street.’

‘It’s all right.’ De Graaf appeared round the corner and if I hadn’t known from the police car the expression on his face would have told me. ‘It’s not a very pleasant sight, Major Sherman.’

I walked past him without speaking, rounded the comer and looked upwards. From this distance the puppet-like figure swinging lazily from the hoisting beam at the top of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s warehouse looked hardly larger than the puppet I had seen yesterday morning, but then I had seen that one from directly underneath, so this one had to be bigger, much bigger. It was dressed in the same traditional costume as had been the puppet that had swayed to and fro there only so short a time ago: I didn’t have to get any closer to know that the puppet’s face of yesterday would be a perfect replica of the face that was there now. I turned away and walked round the corner, de Graaf with me.

‘Why don’t you take her down?’ I asked. I could hear my own voice coming as if from a distance, abnormally, icily calm and quite toneless.

‘It’s a job for a doctor. He’s gone up there now.’

‘Of course.’ I paused and said: ‘She can’t have been there long. She was alive less than an hour ago. Surely the warehouse was open long before–’

‘This is Saturday. They don’t work on Saturdays.’

‘Of course,’ I repeated mechanically. Another thought had come into my head, a thought that struck an even deeper fear and chill into me. Astrid, with a gun at her head, had phoned the Touring. But she had phoned with a message for me, and that message had been meaningless and could or should have achieved nothing, for I was lying at the bottom of the harbour. It could only have had a purpose if the message had been relayed to me. It would have only been made if they knew I was still alive. How could they have known I was still alive? Who could have conveyed the information that I was still alive? Nobody had seen me – except the three matrons on Huyler. And why should they concern themselves–

There was more. Why should they make her telephone me and then put themselves and their plans in jeopardy by killing Astrid after having been at such pains to convince me that she was alive and well? Suddenly, certainly, I knew the answer. They had forgotten something. I’d forgotten something. They forgot what Maggie had forgotten, that Astrid did not know the telephone number of their new hotel: and I’d forgotten that neither Maggie nor Belinda had ever met Astrid or heard her speak. I walked back round the corner. Below the gable of the warehouse the chain and hook still stirred slightly: but the burden was gone.

I said to de Graaf: ‘Get the doctor.’ He appeared in two minutes, a youngster, I should have thought, fresh out of medical school and looking paler, I suspected, than he normally did.

I said harshly: ‘She’s been dead for hours, hasn’t she?’

He nodded. ‘Four, five, I can’t be sure.’

‘Thank you.’ I walked away back round the corner, de Graaf accompanying me. His face held a score of unasked questions, but I didn’t feel like answering any of them.

‘I killed her,’ I said. ‘I think I may have killed someone else, too.’

‘I don’t understand,’ de Graaf said.

‘I think I have sent Maggie to die.’

‘Maggie?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you. I had two girls with me, both from Interpol. Maggie was one of them. The other is at the Hotel Touring.’ I gave him Belinda’s name and telephone number. ‘Contact her for me, will you, please? Tell her to lock her door and stay there till she hears from me and that she is to ignore any phone or written message that does not contain the word “Birmingham”. Will you do it personally, please?’