Alistair MacLean - Puppet on a Chain

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.

I rose cautiously to my feet and moved around behind the bushes until I came to the side of the building. Just as cautiously I approached the Mercedes and looked inside. But there was nothing worthy of remark there — not what I was looking for anyway. With an even greater degree of caution I tip-toed up to a side window of the building and peered inside.

The interior was clearly a combination of workshop, store and display shop. The walls were hung with old-fashioned — or replicas of old-fashioned — pendulum clocks of every conceivable shape, size and design. Other clocks and a very large assortment of parts of other clocks lay on four large work-tables, in the process of manufacture or reassembly or reconstruction. At the far end of the room lay several wooden boxes similar to the ones that Goodbody and the dark man had just carried inside: those boxes appeared to be packed with straw. Shelves above those boxes held a variety of other clocks each having lying beside it its own pendulum, chain and weights.

Goodbody and the dark man were working beside those shelves. As I watched, they delved into one of the open boxes and proceeded to bring out a series of pendulum weights. Goodbody paused, produced a paper and proceeded to study it intently. After some time Goodbody pointed at some item on this paper and said something to the dark man, who nodded and went on with his work: Goodbody, still studying the paper as he went, passed through a side door and disappeared from sight. The dark man studied another paper and began arranging pairs of identical weights beside each other.

I was beginning to wonder where Goodbody had got to when I found out. His voice came from directly behind me.

'I am glad you haven't disappointed me, Mr Sherman.'

I turned round slowly. Predictably, he was smiling his saintly smile and, equally predictably, he had a large gun in his hand.

'No one is indestructible, of course,' he beamed, 'but you do have a certain quality of resilience, I must confess. It is difficult to underestimate policemen, but I may have been rather negligent in your case. Twice in this one day I had thought I had got rid of your presence, which, I must admit was becoming something of an embarrassment to me., However, I'm sure third time, for me, will prove lucky. You should have killed Marcel, you know.'

'I didn't?'

'Come, come, you must learn to mask your feelings and not let your disappointment show through. He recovered for a brief moment but long enough to attract the attention of the good ladies in the field. But I fear he has a fractured skull and some brain haemorrhage. He may not survive.' He looked at me thoughtfully. 'But he appears to have given a good account of himself.'

'A fight to the death,' I agreed. 'Must we stand in the rain?'

'Indeed not.' He ushered me into the building at the point of his gun. The dark man looked around with no great surprise: I wondered how long had elapsed since they had the warning message from Huyler.

'Jacques,' Goodbody said. 'This is Mr Sherman — Major Sherman. I believe he is connected with Interpol or some other such futile organization.'

'We've met,' Jacques grinned.

'Of course. How forgetful of me.' Goodbody pointed his gun at me while Jacques took mine away.

'Just the one,' he reported. He raked the sights across my cheek, tearing some of the plaster away, and grinned again. 'I'll bet that hurts, eh?'

'Restrain yourself, Jacques, restrain yourself,' Goodbody admonished. He had his kindly side to him; if he'd been a cannibal he'd probably have knocked you over the head before boiling you alive. 'Point his gun at him, will you?' He put his own away. 'I must say I never did care for those weapons. Crude, noisy, lacking a certain delicacy — '

'Like hanging a girl from a hook?' I asked. 'Or stabbing one to death with pitchforks.'

'Come, come, let us not distress ourselves.' He sighed. 'Even the best of you people are so clumsy, so obvious. I had, I must confess, expected rather more from you. You, my dear fellow, have a reputation which you've totally failed to live up to. You blunder around. You upset people, fondly imagining you are provoking reactions in the process. You let yourself be seen in all the wrong places. Twice you go to Miss Lemay's flat without taking precautions. You rifle pockets of pieces of paper that were put there for you to discover, and there was no need,' he added reproachfully, 'to kill the waiter in the process. You walk through Huyler in broad daylight — every person in Huyler, my dear Sherman, is a member of my flock. You even left your calling card in the basement of my church the night before last — blood. Not that I bear you any ill-will for that, my dear fellow — I was in fact contemplating getting rid of Henri, who had become rather a liability to me, and you solved the problem rather neatly. And what do you think of our unique arrangements here — those are all reproductions for sale…'

'My God,' I said. 'No wonder the churches are empty.' 'Ah! But one must savour those moments, don't you think? Those weights there. We measure and weigh them and return at suitable times with replacement weights — like those we brought tonight. Not that our weights are quite the same. They have something inside them. Then they're boxed, Customs inspected, sealed and sent on with official Government approval to certain — friends — abroad. One of my better schemes, I always maintain.'

Jacques cleared his throat deferentially. 'You said you were in a hurry, Mr Goodbody.'

'Ever the pragmatist, Jacques, ever the pragmatist. But you're right, of course. First we attend to our — ah — ace investigator, then to business. See if the coast is clear.'

Goodbody distastefully produced his pistol again while Jacques made a quiet reconnaissance. He returned in a few moments, nodding, and they made me precede them out of the door, across the gravel and up the steps over the moat to the massive oaken door. Goodbody produced a key of the right size to open the door and we passed inside. We went up a flight of stairs, along a passage and into a room.

It was a very big room indeed, almost literally festooned with hundreds of clocks. I'd never seen so many clocks in one place and certainly, I knew, never so valuable a collection of clocks. All, without exception, were pendulum clocks, some of a very great size, all of great age. Only a very few of them appeared to be working, but, even so, their collective noise was barely below the level of toleration. I couldn't have worked in that room for ten minutes.

'One of the finest collections in the world,' Goodbody said proudly as if it belonged to him, 'if not the finest. And as you shall see — or hear — they all work.'

I heard his words but they didn't register. I was staring at the floor, at the man lying there with the long black hair reaching down to the nape of his neck, at the thin shoulder-blades protruding through the threadbare jacket. Lying beside him were some pieces of single-core rubber-insulated electrical cable. Close to his head lay a pair of sorbo-rubber-covered earphones.

I didn't have to be a doctor to know that George Lemay was dead.

'An accident,' Goodbody said regretfully, 'a genuine accident. We did not mean it to happen like this. I fear the poor fellow's system must have been greatly weakened by the privations he has suffered over the years.'