Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

The gun was still hooked round the middle finger of his left hand. I pulled it off with the toes of my shoes. I tried to get a purchase on the gun between my shoes but the friction coefficient between the metal and the leather was too low and the gun kept sliding free. I removed my shoes by dragging the heels against the floor and then, a much longer process, my socks by using the same technique. I abraded a fair amount of skin and collected my quota of wooden splinters in so doing, but was conscious of no real sensation of hurt: the pain in my face made other minor irritation insignificant to the point of non-existence.

My bare feet gave me an excellent purchase on the gun. Keeping them tightly clamped together I brought both ends of the rope together and hauled myself up till I reached the rafter. This gave me four feet of slack rope to play with, more than enough. I hung by my left hand, reached down with my right while I doubled up my legs. And then I had the gun in my hand.

I lowered myself to the floor, held the rope pinioning my left wrist taut and placed the muzzle of the gun against it. The first shot severed it as neatly as any knife could have done. I untied all the knots securing me, ripped off the front of Marcel’s snow-white shirt to wipe my bloodied face and mouth, retrieved my wallet and money and left. I didn’t know whether Marcel was alive or dead, he looked very dead to me but I wasn’t interested enough to investigate.

It was early afternoon when I got back to Amsterdam and the sun that had looked down on Maggie’s death that morning had symbolically gone into hiding. Heavy dark cloud rolled in from the Zuider Zee. I could have reached the city an hour earlier than I did, but the doctor in the outpatients department of the suburban hospital where I’d stopped by to have my face fixed had been full of questions and annoyed at my insistence that sticking-plaster – a large amount of it, admittedly – was all I required at the moment and that the stitching and the swathes of white bandaging could wait until later. What with the plaster and assorted bruises and a half-closed left eye I must have looked like the sole survivor from an express train crash, but at least I wasn’t bad enough to send young children screaming for their mothers.

I parked the police taxi not far from a hire-garage where I managed to persuade the owner to let me have a small black Opel. He wasn’t very keen, as my face was enough to give rise in anyone’s mind to doubts about my past driving record, but he let me have it in the end. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall as I drove off, stopped by the police car, picked up Astrid’s handbag and two pairs of handcuffs for luck, and went on my way.

I parked the car in what was by now becoming a rather familiar side-street to me and walked down towards the canal. I poked my head around the corner and as hastily withdrew it again: next time I looked I merely edged an eye round.

A black Mercedes was parked by the door of the Church of the American Huguenot Society. Its capacious boot was open and two men were lifting an obviously very heavy box inside: there were already two or three similar boxes deeper inside the boot. One of the men was instantly identifiable as the Reverend Goodbody: the other man, thin, of medium height, clad in a dark suit and with dark hair and a very swarthy face, was as instantly recognizable: the dark and violent man who had gunned down Jimmy Duclos in Schiphol Airport. For a moment or two I forgot about the pain in my face. I wasn’t positively happy at seeing this man again but I was far from dejected as he had seldom been very far from my thoughts. The wheel, I felt, was coming full circle.

They staggered out from the church with one more box, stowed it away and closed the boot. I headed back for my Opel and by the time I’d brought it down to the canal Goodbody and the dark man were already a hundred yards away in the Mercedes. I followed at a discreet distance.

The rain was falling in earnest now as the black Mercedes headed west and south across the city. Though not yet mid-afternoon, the sky was as thunderously overcast as if dusk, still some hours away, was falling. I didn’t mind, it made for the easiest of shadowing: in Holland it is required that you switch your lights on in heavy rain, and in those conditions one car looked very like the dark shapeless mass of the next.

We cleared the last of the suburbs and headed out into the country. There was no wild element of pursuit or chase about our progress. Goodbody, though driving a powerful car, was proceeding at a very sedate pace indeed, hardly surprising, perhaps, in view of the very considerable weight he was carrying in the boot. I was watching road signs closely and soon I was in no doubt as to where we were heading: I never really had been.

I thought it wiser to arrive at our mutual destination before Goodbody and the dark man did, so I closed up till I was less than twenty yards behind the Mercedes. I had no worry about being recognized by Goodbody in his driving mirror for he was throwing up so dense a cloud of spray that all he could possibly have seen following him was a pair of dipped headlamps. I waited till I could see ahead what seemed to be a straight stretch of road, pulled out and accelerated past the Mercedes. As I drew level Goodbody glanced briefly and incuriously at the car that was overtaking him, then looked as incuriously away again. His face had been no more than a pale blur to me and the rain was so heavy and the spray thrown up by both cars so blinding that I knew it was impossible that he could have recognized me. I pulled ahead and got into the right-hand lane again, not slackening speed.

Three kilometres further on I came to a righthand fork which read ‘Kasteel Linden 1 km’. I turned down this and a minute later passed an imposing stone archway with the words ‘Kasteel Linden’ engraved in gilt above it. I carried on for perhaps another two hundred yards, then turned off the road and parked the Opel in a deep thicket.

I was going to get very wet again but I didn’t seem to have much in the way of options. I left the car and ran across some thinly wooded grassland till I came to a thick belt of pines that obviously served as some kind of wind-break for a habitation. I made my way through the pines, very circumspectly, and there was the habitation all right: the Kasteel Linden. Oblivious of the rain beating down on my unprotected back, I stretched out in the concealment of long grass and some bushes and studied the place.

Immediately before me stretched a circular gravelled driveway which led off to my right to the archway I’d just passed. Beyond the gravel lay the Kasteel Linden itself, a rectangular four-storeyed building, windowed on the first two storeys, embrasured above, with the top turreted and crenellated in the best medieval fashion. Encircling the castle was a continuous moat fifteen feet in width and, according to the guide-book, almost as deep. All that was lacking was a drawbridge, although the chain pulleys for it were still to be seen firmly embedded in the thick masonry of the walls: instead, a flight of about twenty wide and shallow stone steps spanned the moat and led to a pair of massive closed doors, which seemed to be made of oak. To my left, about thirty yards distant from the castle, was a rectangular, one-storey building in brick and obviously of fairly recent construction.

The black Mercedes appeared through the gateway, crunched its way on to the gravel and pulled up close to the rectangular building. While Goodbody remained inside the car, the dark man got out and made a complete circuit of the castle: Goodbody never had struck me as the kind of man to take chances. Goodbody got out and together the two men carried the contents of the boot into the building: the door had been locked but obviously Goodbody had the right key for it and not a skeleton either. As they carried the last of the boxes inside the door closed behind them.