Alistair MacLean - Puppet on a Chain

Suddenly the accordion music changed. What had been a gently lilting dance tune, albeit with a military beat to it, increased rapidly in volume as it changed into something of a different nature altogether, something that went beyond the merely martial, something that was harsh and primitive and savage and violent. The matrons, having reached their fully expanded circle, were beginning to close in again. From my elevation I could still see Maggie, her eyes wide now and fear showing in her face: she leaned to one side to look almost desperately for Trudi. But there was no salvation in Trudi: her smile had gone now, her cotton-clad hands were clasped tightly together and she was licking her lips slowly, obscenely; I turned to look at Marcel, who was busy doing the same thing: but he still had his gun on me, and watched me as closely as he watched the scene outside. There was nothing I could do.

The matrons were now stamping their way inwards. Their moonlike faces had lost their expressionless quality and were now pitiless, implacable, and the deepening fear in Maggie's eyes gave way to terror, her eyes staring as the music became more powerful, more discordant still. Then abruptly, with military precision, the shoulder-borne pitchforks were brought sweeping down until they were pointed directly at Maggie. She screamed and screamed again but the sound she made was barely audible above the almost insanely discordant crescendo of the accordions. And then Maggie was down and, mercifully, all I could see was the back view of the matrons as their forks time and again jerked high and stabbed down convulsively at something that now lay motionless on the ground. For the space of a few moments I could look no longer. I had to look away, and there was Trudi, her hands opening and closing, her mesmerized entranced face with a hideous animal-like quality to it: and beside her the Reverend Goodbody, his face as benign and gently benevolent as ever, an expression that belied his staring eyes. Evil minds, sick minds that had long since left the borders of sanity far behind.

I forced myself to look back again as the music slowly subsided, losing its primeval atavistic quality. The frenzied activities of the matrons had subsided, the stabbing had ceased, and as I watched one of the matrons turned aside and picked up a forkful of hay. I had a momentary glimpse of a crumpled figure with a white blouse no longer white lying on the stubble, then a forkful of hay covered her from sight. Then came another forkful and another and another, and as the two accordions, soft and gentle and muted now, spoke nostalgically of old Vienna, they built a haystack over Maggie. Dr Goodbody and Trudi, she again smiling and chattering gaily, walked off arm in arm towards the village.

Marcel turned away from the gap in the planks and sighed. 'Dr Goodbody manages those things so well, don't you think? The flair, the sensitivity, the time, the place, the atmosphere — exquisitely done, exquisitely done.' The beautifully modulated Oxbridge accent emanating from that snake's head was no less repellent than the context in which the words were used: he was like the rest of them, quite mad.

He approached me circumspectly from the back, undid the handkerchief which had been tied round my head and plucked out the filthy lump of cotton that had been shoved into my mouth. I didn't think that he was being motivated by any humanitarian considerations, and he wasn't. He said offhandedly: 'When you scream, I want to hear it. I don't think the ladies out there will pay too much attention.'

I was sure they wouldn't. I said: 'I'm surprised Dr-Goodbody could drag himself away.' My voice didn't sound like any voice I'd ever used before: it was hoarse and thick and I'd difficulty in forming the words as if I'd damaged my larynx.

Marcel smiled. 'Dr Goodbody has urgent things to attend to in Amsterdam. Important things.'

'And important things to transport from here to Amsterdam.'

'Doubtless.' He smiled again and I could almost see his hood distending. 'Classically, my dear Sherman, when a person is in your position and has lost out and is about to die, it is customary for a person in my position to explain, in loving detail, just where the victim went wrong. But apart from the fact that your list of blunders is so long as to be too tedious to enumerate, I simply can't be bothered. So let's get on with it, shall we?'

'Get on with what?' Here it comes now, I thought, but I didn't much care: it didn't seem to matter much any more.

'The message from Mr Durrell, of course.' Pain sliced like a butcher's cleaver through my head and the side of my face as he slashed the barrel of his gun across it. I thought my left cheekbone must be broken, but couldn't be sure: but my tongue told me that two at least of my teeth had been loosened beyond repair.

'Mr Durrell,' Marcel said happily, 'told me to tell you that he doesn't like being pistol-whipped.' He went for the right side of my face this time, and although I saw and knew it was coming and tried to jerk my head back I couldn't get out of the way. This one didn't hurt so badly, but I knew I was badly hurt from the temporary loss of vision that followed the brilliant white light that seemed to explode just in front of my eyes. My face was on fire, my head was coming apart, but my mind was strangely clear. Very little more of this systematic clubbing, I knew, and even a plastic surgeon would shake his head regretfully: but what really mattered was that with very little more of this treatment I would lose consciousness, perhaps for hours. There seemed to be only one hope: to make his clubbing unsystematic.

I spat out a tooth and said: 'Pansy.'

For some reason this got him. The veneer of civilized urbanity couldn't have been thicker than an onion skin to begin with and it just didn't slough off, it vanished in an instant of time and what was left was a mindless beserker savage who attacked me with the wanton, unreasoning and insensate fury of the mentally unhinged, which he almost certainly was. Blows rained from all directions on my head and shoulders, blows from his gun and blows from his fists and when I tried to protect myself as best I could with my forearms he switched his insane assault to my body. I moaned, my eyes turned up, my legs turned to jelly and I would have collapsed had I been in a position to: as it was, I just hung limply from the rope securing my wrists.

Two or three more agony-filled seconds elapsed before he recovered himself sufficiently to realize that he was wasting his time: from Marcel's point of view there could be little point in inflicting punishment on a person who was beyond feeling the effects of it. He made a strange noise in his throat which probably indicated disappointment more than anything else, then just stood there breathing heavily.

What he was contemplating doing next I couldn't guess for I didn't dare open my eyes.

I heard him move away a little and risked a quick glance from the corner of my eye. The momentary madness was over and Marcel, who was obviously as opportunistic as he was sadistic, had picked up my jacket and was going through it hopefully but unsuccessfully, for wallets carried in the inner breast pocket of a jacket invariably fall out when that jacket is carried over the arm and I'd prudently transferred my wallet with its money, passport and driving licence to my hip pocket. Marcel wasn't long in arriving at the right conclusion for almost immediately I heard his footsteps and felt the wallet being removed from my hip pocket.

He was standing by my side now. I couldn't see him, but I was aware of this. I moaned and swung helplessly at the end of the rope that secured me to the rafter. My legs were trailed out behind me, the upper parts of the toes of my shoes resting on the floor. I opened my eyes, just a fraction.

I could see his feet, not more than a yard from where I was, I glanced up, for the fleeting part of a second. Marcel, with an air of concentration and pleased surprise was engrossed in the task of transferring the very considerable sums of money I carried in my wallet to his own pocket. He held the wallet in his left hand, while his gun dangled by the trigger-guard from the crooked middle finger of the same hand. He was so absorbed that he didn't see my hands reach up to get a better purchase on the securing ropes.