Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

‘Yes,’ I said tonelessly, ‘I’d like to kill you.’

‘We have sent her a little note.’ Goodbody was enjoying himself immensely. ‘Code word “Birmingham”, I believe … She is to meet you at the warehouse of our good friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who will now be above suspicion for ever. Who but the insane would ever contemplate perpetrating two such hideous crimes on their own premises? So fitting, don’t you think? Another puppet on a chain. Like all the thousands of other puppets throughout the world – hooked and dancing to our tune.’

I said: ‘You know, of course, that you are quite mad?’

‘Tie him up,’ Goodbody said harshly. His urbanity had cracked at last. The truth must have hurt him.

Jacques bound my wrists with the thick rubber-covered flex. He did the same for my ankles, pushed me to one side of the room and attached my wrists by another length of rubber cable to an eyebolt on the wall.

‘Start the clocks!’ Goodbody ordered. Obediently, Jacques set off around the room starting the pendulums to swing: significantly, he didn’t bother about the smaller clocks.

‘They all work and they all chime, some most loudly,’ Goodbody said with satisfaction. He was back on balance again, urbane and unctuous as ever. ‘Those earphones will amplify the sound about ten times. There is the amplifier there and the microphone there, both, as you can see, well beyond your reach. The earphones are unbreakable. In fifteen minutes you will be insane, in thirty minutes unconscious. The resulting coma lasts from eight to ten hours. You will wake up still insane. But you won’t wake up. Already beginning to tick and chime quite loudly, aren’t they?’

‘This is how George died, of course. And you will watch it all happen. Through the top of that glass door, of course. Where it won’t be so noisy.’

‘Regrettably, not all. Jacques and I have some business matters to attend to. But we’ll be back for the most interesting part, won’t we, Jacques?’

‘Yes, Mr Goodbody,’ said Jacques, still industriously swinging pendulums.

‘If I disappear–’

‘Ah, but you won’t. I had intended to have you disappear last night in the harbour but that was crude, a panic measure lacking the hallmark of my professionalism. I have come up with a much better idea, haven’t I, Jacques?’

‘Yes, indeed, Mr Goodbody.’ Jacques had now almost to shout to make himself heard.

‘The point is you’re not going to disappear, Mr Sherman. Oh, dear me, no. You’ll be found, instead, only a few minutes after you’ve drowned.’

‘Drowned?’

‘Precisely. Ah, you think, then the authorities will immediately suspect foul play. An autopsy. And the first thing they see are forearms riddled with injection punctures – I have a system that can make two-hour-old punctures look two months old. They will proceed further and find you full of dope – as you will be. Injected when you are unconscious about two hours before we push you, in your car, into a canal, then call the police. This they will not believe. Sherman, the intrepid Interpol narcotics investigator? Then they go through your luggage. Hypodermics, needles, heroin, in your pockets traces of cannabis. Sad, sad. Who would have thought it? Just another of those who hunted with the hounds and ran with the hare.’

‘I’ll say this much for you,’ I said, ‘you’re a clever madman.’

He smiled, which probably meant he couldn’t hear me above the increasing clamour of the clocks. He clamped the sorbo-rubber earphones to my head and secured them immovably in position with literally yards of Scotch tape. Momentarily the room became almost hushed – the earphones were acting as temporary sound insulators. Goodbody crossed the room towards the amplifier, smiled at me again and pulled a switch.

I felt as if I had been subjected to some violent physical blow or a severe electrical shock. My whole body arched and twisted in convulsive jerks and I knew what little could be seen of my face under the plaster and Scotch tape must be convulsed in agony. For I was in agony, an agony a dozen times more piercing and unbearable than the best – or the worst – that Marcel had been able to inflict upon me. My ears, my entire head, were filled with this insanely shrieking banshee cacophony of sound. It sliced through my head like white-hot skewers, it seemed to be tearing my brain apart. I couldn’t understand why my eardrums didn’t shatter. I had always heard and believed that a loud enough explosion of sound, set off close enough to your ears, can deafen you immediately and for life: but it wasn’t working in my case. As it obviously hadn’t worked in George’s case. In my torment I vaguely remembered Goodbody attributing George’s death to his weakened physical condition.

I rolled from side to side, an instinctive animal reaction to escape from what is hurting you, but I couldn’t roll far, Jacques had used a fairly short length of rubber cable to secure me to the eyebolt and I could roll no more than a couple of feet in either direction. At the end of one roll I managed to focus my eyes long enough to see Goodbody and Jacques, now both outside the room, peering at me with interest through the glass-topped door: after a few seconds Jacques raised his left wrist and tapped his watch. Goodbody nodded in reluctant agreement and both men hurried away. I supposed in my blinding sea of pain that they were in a hurry to come back to witness the grand finale.

Fifteen minutes before I was unconscious, Goodbody had said. I didn’t believe a word of it, nobody could stand up to this for two or three minutes without being broken both mentally and physically. I twisted violently from side to side, tried to smash the earphones on the floor or to tear them free. But Goodbody had been right, the earphones were unbreakable and the Scotch tape had been so skilfully and tightly applied that my efforts to tear the phones free resulted only in reopening the wounds on my face.

The pendulums swung, the clocks ticked, the chimes rang out almost continuously. There was no relief, no let-up, not even the most momentary respite from this murderous assault on the nervous system that triggered off those uncontrollable epileptic convulsions. It was one continuous electric shock at just below the lethal level and I could now all too easily give credence to tales I had heard of patients undergoing electric shock therapy who had eventually ended up on the operating table for the repair of limbs fractured through involuntary muscular contraction.

I could feel my mind going, and for a brief period I tried to help the feeling along. Oblivion, anything for oblivion. I’d failed, I’d failed all along the line, everything I’d touched had turned to destruction and death. Maggie was dead, Duclos was dead, Astrid was dead and her brother George. Only Belinda was left and she was going to die that night. A grand slam.

And then I knew. I knew I couldn’t let Belinda die. That was what saved me, I knew I could not let her die. Pride no longer concerned me, my failure no longer concerned me, the total victory of Goodbody and his evil associates was of no concern to me. They could flood the world with their damned narcotics for all I cared. But I couldn’t let Belinda die.

Somehow I pushed myself up till my back was against the wall. Apart from the frequent convulsions, I was vibrating in every limb in my body, not just shaking like a man with the ague, that would have been easily tolerated but vibrating as a man would have been had he been tied to a giant pneumatic drill. I could no longer focus for more than a second or two, but I did my best to look fuzzily, desperately around to see if there was anything that offered any hope of salvation. There was nothing. Then, without warning, the sound in my head abruptly rose to a shattering crescendo – it was probably a big clock near the microphones striking the hour – and I fell sideways as if I’d been hit on the temple by a two-by-four. As my head struck the floor it also struck some projection low down on the skirting board.