Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

‘Van Gelder is not down here. But neither is Belinda. So she’s up there with him – and when he does come down he’ll bring his living shield with him. I won’t be long.’

He made no further effort to restrain me. I left him by the church door, crossed into the building lot, reached the body of the crane and began to climb the endless series of diagonally placed ladders located within the lattice framework of the crane. It was a long climb and one that, in my present physical condition, I could well have done without, but there was nothing particularly exhausting or dangerous about it. Just a long and very tiring climb: the dangerous bit still lay ahead. About three quarters of the way up I paused to catch my breath and looked down.

There was no particular impression of height for the darkness was too complete, the faint street lamps along the canal were only pinpoints of light and the canal itself but a dully gleaming ribbon. It all seemed so remote, so unreal. I couldn’t make out the shape of any of the individual houses: all I could discern was the weathercock on the tip of the church steeple and even that was a hundred feet beneath me.

I looked up. The control cabin of the crane was still fifty feet above me, a vaguely seen rectangular darkness against a sky almost as dark. I started to climb again.

Ten feet only separated me from the trapdoor inset in the floor of the cabin when a gap appeared in the clouds and a low moon shone through, a half-moon only, but the contrasting brightness bathed the yellow-painted crane and its massive boom in an oddly garish flood of light that highlit every girder and cross-member of the structures. It also highlit me and had the peculiar effect of making me feel as aircraft pilots feel when caught up in a search-light, of being pinned to a wall. I looked up again and could see every rivethead in the trapdoor and the thought occurred to me that if I could see so well upwards anyone inside could see just as well downwards, and as the more time spent in that exposed position increased the chances of discovery I took my gun from its holster and crept silently up the last few steps of the ladder. I was less than four feet away when the trapdoor lifted a little and a long and very ugly-looking gun barrel protruded through the crack. I should, I know, have felt the chagrin and sickness which comes with the despair of the knowledge of ultimate defeat, but I’d been through too much that day, I’d used up all my emotions, and I accepted the inevitable with a fatalism that surprised even myself. It wasn’t any question of willing submission, give me half a chance and I’d have shot it out with him. But I had no chance at all and I just accepted that.

‘This is a twenty-four-shot riot gun,’ van Gelder said. His voice had a metallically cavernous ring to it with sepulchral overtones that didn’t seem at all out of place. ‘You know what that means?’

‘I know what that means.’

‘Let me have your gun, butt first.’

I handed over my gun with the good grace and expertise that came from long experience of handing over guns.

‘Now that little gun in your sock.’

I handed over the little gun in my sock. The trapdoor opened and I could see van Gelder quite clearly in the moonlight shining through the cabin windows.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

I clambered up into the cabin. As van Gelder had said, there was plenty of room, the cabin could have accommodated a dozen people at a pinch. Van Gelder, his usual calm and unruffled self, carried a shoulder-slung and very unpleasant-looking automatic gun. Belinda sat on the floor in a corner, pale-faced and exhausted, with a large Huyler puppet lying beside her. Belinda tried to smile at me but her heart wasn’t in it: she had that defenceless and forlorn air about her that near as a toucher had me at van Gelder’s throat, gun or no gun, but sanity and a swift estimate of the distance involved made me settle for lowering the trapdoor gently and straightening up in an equally circumspect manner. I looked at the gun.

‘I suppose you got that from the police car?’ I said.

‘You suppose right.’

‘I should have checked on that.’

‘You should.’ Van Gelder sighed. ‘I knew you would come, but you’ve come a long way for nothing. Turn round.’

I turned round. The blow that struck the back of my head was delivered with nothing like the vigour and the pride in his handiwork that Marcel had displayed, but it was still enough to stun me for a moment and bring me to my knees. I was vaguely conscious of something cold and metallic encircling my left wrist and when I began to take an active interest in what was going on around me again I found that I was sitting almost shoulder to shoulder with Belinda, handcuffed to her right wrist and with the chain passing through the metal hand grip above the trapdoor. I rubbed the back of my head tenderly: what with the combined efforts of Marcel and Goodbody and now van Gelder, it had had a rough passage that day and ached abominably just about wherever a head could ache.

‘Sorry about the head,’ van Gelder said. ‘But I’d as soon have put handcuffs on a conscious tiger. Well, the moon’s almost obscured. One minute and I’ll be gone. Three minutes and I’ll be on terra firma .’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’re going down?’

‘What else? But not quite in the way you imagine. I’ve seen the police cordon getting in position – but no one seems to have caught on to the fact that the tip of the crane extends over the canal and at least sixty feet beyond the cordon. I have already lowered the hook to ground level.’

My head hurt too much for me to come up with a suitable comment: in the circumstances, there probably was none. Van Gelder slung his gun crosswise over one shoulder and secured the puppet with cord over his other shoulder. Then he said softly: ‘Ah, the moon is gone.’

It was. Van Gelder was only a vaguely seen shadow as he crossed to the door let into the front of the cabin near the control panel, opened it and stepped outside.

‘Goodbye, van Gelder,’ I said. He said nothing. The door closed and we were alone. She caught my handcuffed hand.

‘I knew you would come,’ she whispered, then, with a flash of the old Belinda: ‘But you did take your time about it didn’t you?’

‘It’s like I told you the managerial classes always have things to attend to.’

‘And did you – did you have to say goodbye to a man like that?’

‘I thought I’d better – I’ll never see him again. Not alive.’ I fumbled in my right-hand pocket. ‘Who would have thought it? Van Gelder, his own executioner.’

‘Please?’

‘It was his idea to lend me a police taxi – so that I would be instantly recognizable and easily tailed wherever I went. I had handcuffs – I used them to secure Goodbody. And keys for the handcuffs. These.’

I unlocked the handcuffs, rose and crossed to the front of the cabin. The moon was behind a cloud, true enough, but van Gelder had overestimated the density of the cloud: admittedly, there was no more than a pale wash of light in the sky but enough to let me see van Gelder, about forty feet out now, the tails of his jacket and the gown of the puppet being tugged by the high wind, as he scuttled like a giant crab across the lattice framework of the boom.

My pencil flash was one of the few things that hadn’t been taken from me that day. I used it to locate an overhead breaker and pulled the lever down. Lights glowed in the control panel and I studied it briefly. I was aware that Belinda was now standing by my side.

‘What are you going to do?’ She was back at her whispering again.

‘Do I have to explain?’

‘No! No! You can’t!’ I don’t think she knew exactly what I intended to do, but from what must have been some element of irrevocable finality in my voice she clearly guessed that the results of whatever action I took would be of a very permanent nature. I looked again at van Gelder, who was by now three quarters of the way out towards the tip of the boom, then turned to Belinda and put my hands on her shoulders.