Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

He flicked the lighter, and the flame caught immediately. Franze was slumped on the ground where he had been pushed, conscious but in shock. Blood was pouring from the stump of his left arm. It had been severed above the elbow.

Fitzduane removed his belt and tightened it above the stump until the flow had almost stopped. It was tricky work because he needed both hands for the tourniquet, so he had to let the lighter go out and work in darkness. His hands and clothing became saturated in blood. He spoke reassuringly to Franze, but there was no response, and the policeman's skin felt cold. He needed medical attention immediately. The wound itself wasn’t fatal, but Fitzduane had seen lesser casualties go into deep shock and die after the loss of so much blood, and the sergeant was no longer young.

He helped the policeman back along the passage to the outer doorway. His spirits lifted when he saw the glimmer of light that signaled they were approaching the iron door and the road. It was difficult work. Franze was heavy. He lacked the strength of help himself, so in the end Fitzduane carried him in a fireman's lift. When he tried to open the iron door, he found with a sickened feeling that it was locked on the outside.

He moved the policeman back about ten paces and then went to retrieve his shotgun. Franze's arm lay close by. He left it where it lay and then, not sure what could be accomplished with microsurgery, took off his ski jacket, wrapped the arm in it, and, with the shotgun in his other hand, returned to Franze. "Keep your head down," he said. The policeman barely reacted.

Fitzduane had little faith that the shotgun would have much effect against the iron door, but it was worth trying. He stood about two meters back and pointed his weapon at the lock. He fired twice, working the slide quickly to deliver two concentrated blows in the minimum time.

The results lived up to Kilmara's promise. The brittle iron of the door shattered like a shell casing when the XR-18's 450-grain sabot rounds struck it. Shards of iron clanged onto the roadway, and light flooded into the passage. Fitzduane pushed the remains of the door open and helped Franze outside.

A few yards up the road Muller had just gotten out of his car. The master cheese maker had a presentation box in his hand. He looked at Fitzduane, shotgun still smoking, covered in blood and supporting the policeman. His brain couldn’t take in the situation at first, his face registering total disbelief; then he dropped the presentation box and ran forward. Together they helped Franze into the car and covered him with a blanket.

"A flashlight?" said Fitzduane. Have you got one?" He searched for the right word in German and cursed his lack of languages. He pantomimed what he wanted. Muller nodded, opened the trunk of his car, and extracted a powerful battery searchlight. Fitzduane grabbed it and pushed Muller into the driver's seat.

"Hospital and police – Hospital und Polizei – go!" shouted Fitzduane. He banged on the roof of the car, and Muller roared away, one arm extended in a wave of acknowledgment.

Fitzduane replaced the two spent cartridges and moved back into the passage. He advanced up it in combat fashion, the Remington held at the ready. He doubted that there was any remaining danger, but he could see no reason for behaving like a total fool. He knew if he had any real sense of self-preservation, he would have waited for the police, but he hadn't the patience.

He saw that every light along the passageway had been systematically broken. This served the double purpose of providing the cover of darkness for an escape and an early-warning system; any new arrival would have to crunch across the glass. The door into the cheese maturing room was open. It was a long, narrow room filled with row after row of wooden racking, each rack filled with wheels of cheese and graded by type and age and size.

There was a pair of large porcelain sinks in the far corner of the room. He shone the powerful light toward them. The sinks and the tiling around them were splashed with fresh blood. He played the beam downward, following the splash marks. A body, dressed in a once-white overall now sodden with blood, lay slumped on the floor. The corpse was headless. Fitzduane moved closer to examine the body but remained several paces away. The tiled floor was sticky with blood. It looked as though the victim had been bent headfirst over the sink as if for a ritual execution. Fitzduane could imagine the horror of the doomed man as his neck was pressed against the cold surface.

He looked into the sinks, but there was no sign of the head. He examined the floor, also with negative results, and began to wonder why the head had been taken away. As proof of a job completed? To the bizarre sense of humor displayed there, and he knew what he would find. He moved the light back to the racks of cheeses and began examining each row of impeccably aligned wheels. It didn't take long. Though he was prepared for the sight, the reality made his stomach turn. Felix Krane's head stared at him from between two maturing wheels of Muller's Finest High Pasture.

Fitzduane went back to the road and waited for the police. The parked van was gone. He didn’t remember its being there when he had emerged from the tunnel with Franze. The presentation box of cheese lay on the ground where Muller had dropped it. Fitzduane left it there.

"Be prepared," said Kadar to no one in particular, for he was alone, and he gave a three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

The deep freeze, a catering-size chest unit over two meters long, was kept in a concealed and locked storage room in the adjoining premises, owned by Kadar but registered to a cutout. In fact, in keeping with his normal practice of having an escape route always available, Kadar owned the entire small block. By way of hidden doors, he could travel from one end of the block to the other without ever having to use the street. Kadar wasn't entirely happy having the freezer with its incriminating contents so near, but he considered his precautions reasonable, and the important point was that he could get at what he wanted without delay.

He entered the small, brightly lit room and closed and relocked the door behind him before punching in the code that would release the freezer lid. He glanced at the abundance of food inside. The top layer was sorted by category in wire baskets. He liked things neat. He removed a wire basket of frozen vegetables and then one of fish. The next contained poultry. The last basket was filled with game birds, mainly pheasant although quail and several other species were also represented. He had gone though a pheasant phase not so long ago, until he chipped a tooth on a piece of buckshot – the idiot hunter must have thought pheasants were the size of vultures because the shot was from a number four load – and was forced to visit the dentist. This boring experience had not been without its advantages, though it had put him off pheasant for a while. While lying back in the dentist's chair, he had begun to plan his own death. This exercise was not unenjoyable, despite the circumstances, for it involved the dentist's death, too.

He admitted to himself that the basic idea wasn't original, but he didn't suffer from the classic engineers' disease of NIH – “Not Invented Here,” and therefore useless. In any case he had improved on the original pattern, thanks to his casual discovery – through the one-sided small talk that dentists enjoy while the victim lies gagged and helpless – that this particular dentist, the appallingly expensive but highly successful Dr. Ernst Wenger, was an unusually prudent man. Swiss to the core and Bernese from toe to toupee, he not only kept excellent dental records in his office – what else would you expect of someone who was also a supply officer, a major in fact, in the Swiss Army? – but kept a reserve set, updated weekly, in his bank. Dr. Wenger kept a substantial portfolio of bearer bonds and other securities in the same location, but considering the success of his practice, if he had been asked to choose which he would prefer to lose – dental records or financial papers – it would have been no contest. His dental records were the key to what he called his “private gold mine.” Dr. Wenger enjoyed his little jokes. His patients, on average, did not.