Alistair MacLean - Puppet on a Chain

Goodbody moaned like some stricken animal and gazed with a horrified and shuddering revulsion at the two dead men who made him prisoner. I walked to the loading doors and glanced down.

Trudi was lying spreadeagled on the pavement below. I didn't spare her a second glance. Across the street van Gelder was leading Belinda towards the police van. At the door of the van he turned, looked up, saw me, nodded and opened the door.

I turned away from the loading doors, crossed to the still groggy de Graaf, helped him to his feet and towards the head of the stairs. There, I turned and looked back at Goodbody. His eyes were staring in a fear-crazed face and he was making strange hoarse noises deep in his throat. He looked like a man lost for ever in a dark and endless nightmare, a man pursued by fiends and knowing he can never escape.

Darkness had almost fallen on the streets of Amsterdam. The drizzle was only light, but penetratingly cold as it was driven along by the high gusting wind. In the gaps between the wind-torn clouds the first stars winked palely: the moon was not yet up.

I sat waiting behind the driving wheel of the Opel, parked close to a telephone-box. By and by the box door opened and de Graaf, dabbing with his handkerchief at the blood still oozing from the gash on his forehead, came out and entered the car. I glanced up at him interrogatively.

The area will be completely cordoned within ten minutes. And when I say cordoned, I mean escape-proof. Guaranteed.' He mopped some more blood. 'But how can you be so sure — '

'Hell be there.' I started the engine and drove off. 'In the first place, van Gelder will figure it's the last place in Amsterdam we'd ever think of looking for him. In the second place Goodbody, only this morning, removed the latest supply of heroin from Huyler. In one of those big puppets, for a certainty. The puppet wasn't in his car out at the castle, so it must have been left in the church. He'd no time to take it anywhere else. Besides, there's probably another fortune of the stuff lying about the church. Van Gelder's not like Goodbody and Trudi. He's not in the game for the kicks. He's in it for the money — and he's not going to pass up all that lovely lolly.'

'Lolly?'

'Sorry. Money. Maybe millions of dollars' worth of the stuff.'

'Van Gelder.' De Graaf shook his head very slowly. 'I can't believe it. A man like that! With a magnificent police record.'

'Save your sympathy for his victims,' I said harshly. I hadn't meant to speak like that to a sick man but I was still a sick man myself: I doubted whether the condition of my head was even fractionally better than that of de Graaf. 'Van Gelder's worse than any of them. You can at least say for Goodbody and Trudi that their minds were so sick and warped and diseased that they were no longer responsible for their actions. But van Gelder isn't sick that way. He does it all cold-bloodedly for money. He knows the score. He knew what was going on, how his psychopathic pal Goodbody was behaving. And he tolerated it. If he could have kept the racket going on for ever, he'd have tolerated Goodbody's lethal aberrations for ever. I looked at de Graaf speculatively. 'You know that his brother and wife were killed in a car smash in Curacao?'

De Graaf paused before replying. 'It was not a tragic accident?'

'It was not a tragic accident. Well never prove it, but I'd wager my pension that it was caused by a combination of his brother, who was a trained security officer, finding out too much about him and van Gelder's desire to be rid of a wife who was coming between him and Trudi — in the days before Trudi's more lovable qualities came to the surface. My point is that the man's an ice-cold calculator, quite ruthless and totally devoid of what we'd regard as normal human feelings.'

'You'll never live to collect your pension,' de Graaf said somberly.

'Maybe not. But I was right about one thing.' We'd turned into the canal street of Goodbody's church and there, directly ahead, was the plain blue police van. We didn't stop, but drove past it, parked at the door of the church and got out. A uniformed sergeant came down the steps to greet us and any reactions he had caused by the sight of the two crocks in front of him he hid very well.

'Empty, sir,' he said. 'We've even been up the belfry.' De Graaf turned away and looked at the blue van.

'If Sergeant Gropius says there's no one there, then there's no one there.' He paused, then said slowly: 'Van Gelder's a brilliant man. We know that now. He's not in the church. He's not in Goodbody's house. My men have both sides of the canal and the street sealed off. So, he's not here. He's elsewhere.'

'He's elsewhere, but he's here,' I said. 'If we don't find him, how long will you keep the cordon in position?'

'Till we've searched and then double-checked every house in the street. Two hours, maybe three.'

'And then he could walk away?'

'He could. If he was here.'

'He's here,' I said with certainty. 'It's Saturday evening. Do the building workers turn out on Sundays?'

'No.'

'So that gives him thirty-six hours. Tonight, even tomorrow night, he comes down and walks away.'

'My head.' Again de Graaf dabbed at his wound. 'Van Gelder's gun butt was very hard. I'm afraid — '

'He's not down here,' I said patiently. 'Searching the house is a waste of time. And I'm damned certain he's not at the bottom of the canal holding his breath all the time. So where can he be?'

I looked speculatively up into the dark and wind-torn sky. De Graaf followed my line of sight. The shadowy outline of the towering crane seemed to reach up almost to the clouds, the tip of its massive horizontal boom lost in the surrounding darkness. The great crane had always struck me as having a weirdly menacing atmosphere about it: tonight — probably because of what I had in mind — it looked awesome and forbidding and sinister to a degree.

'Of course,' de Graaf whispered. 'Of course.'

I said: 'Well, then, I'd better be going.'

'Madness! Madness! Look at you, look at your face. You're not well.'

'I'm well enough.'

'Then I'm coming with you,' de Graaf said determinedly.

'No.'

'I have young, fit police officers — '

'You haven't the moral right to ask any of your men, young and fit or not, to do this. Don't argue. I refuse. Besides, this is no case for a frontal assault. Secrecy, stealth — or nothing.'

'He's bound to see you.' Unwillingly or not, de Graaf was coming round to my point of view.

'Not bound to. From his point of view everything below must be in darkness.'

'We can wait,' he urged. 'He's bound to come down. Some time before Monday morning he's bound to come down.'

'Van Gelder takes no delight in death. That we know. But he's totally indifferent to death. That we know also. Lives — other people's lives — mean nothing to him.' 'So?'

'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.