Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
‘This is the road to Martigny,’ he replied, desperate to help, to please me.
‘Where does it go then?’
‘That depends. To France. Over the pass to Italy maybe. Or you can take the road by the river. That’s east.’
‘The river?’
‘The Rhône.’
I stared out through the windshield ahead of me. The Mercedes was in the distance on the narrow but straight road. It had its lights on now and that was almost all that could be seen of it. I began to worry. I was worried it would get away, I was worried that I had the young reporter on my hands; he was nervous and making me nervous too.
Suddenly I told him to stop and get out of the car.
He stopped quickly enough, but wouldn’t get out at first. I think he thought I was going to shoot him, and was paralysed with fear.
I shouted at him, told him to get out, told him to start walking home, and then he moved.
I matched his movements as he got out from the Renault, and when he was a few paces away I slid in behind the wheel and sped off to catch the Mercedes, which was now out of sight. The young reporter would take at least an hour to walk to the last village we’d passed. Even if he could call the police from there immediately, it would be a long time before they got themselves sorted out sufficiently to radio all across Switzerland and stop my car.
But there was the problem. Suppose he left Switzerland? The reporter had told me that both France and Italy were close by, and I had no passport.
I had to catch him before he made it to either frontier, force him to a stop and then do what I wanted to do.
I pushed the accelerator and moved a little faster, and was soon rewarded with the shape of the Mercedes’ tail lights ahead. There was no one else on the road, nothing to slow him down. Nothing to stop me getting closer, except that I couldn’t catch him.
The grey car swept on ahead of me, and I was struggling to keep up with it. As we came into Martigny, it slowed a little but I was still a way behind it as it approached the fork where it could turn for France or Italy. If it made either of those turns, I would be lost.
I held my breath as the big car slowed a fraction more, and thought about trying to pull alongside in the narrow streets and shoot through the window, but there were people on the pavement, cars coming the other way. Instead, I hung back a little and watched with relief as they passed the French and Italian turns, and took the road east instead, the Rue du Simplon, whose name I picked out in my headlights as I swung round the corner.
Martigny was small, and very soon we left it behind. A long straight road opened out in front of us, as flat as the wide river that lay somewhere to our left.
I put my foot to the floor.
The road was empty, it was darker by the minute, and it seemed my best chance.
For a moment or two I began to close in on the Mercedes, but then I wondered if he knew I was behind him, because suddenly the car pulled away from me easily, until I lost its lights around a slight bend half a mile or more in front of me.
I didn’t give up. The road was mostly straight, with few turnings, and I had a feeling that they were making a long journey somewhere east. There was still time for me to catch them.
I drove faster and faster, as fast as the old Renault could manage, trying to remember the geography that lay ahead. I’d never been there before, but my days of poring over maps had not been entirely wasted, and I could remember a little of it. There was at least one other pass south, over the Alps, to Italy, and if not, then the road must lead east, to Austria, perhaps. I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had only one hope: that they were held up, delayed, that their powerful car was slowed by bad roads and we would be on a more even footing. So I kept on, glancing at the petrol gauge from time to time, the speedometer, the tail lights ahead of me when I managed to get them into range once more.
I lost track of the time, but just beyond Brig we began to climb a little. Not much at first, but then without warning, round the next bend, the road tilted up steeply into the mountains. Tight bends wound through sections of dark forest, and then the road would open up again for stretches before taking another twisting series of curves, rapidly gaining more height.
I had the car in low gear more than once. The engine whined pathetically as I pushed it on and on, and every time I did, I saw the lights ahead of me, always disappearing into the gloom around the next bend.
The temperature gauge on the car began to climb, and I could smell the heat of the engine from behind the wheel. Then the road levelled off again, and even in the dark I could sense the wide-open space that had just unfolded around me. We had climbed up into a high mountain pass, flat and wide, and though the road ducked and wove over slight rises and falls, there was nothing to trouble the Renault. The needle began to fall back to normal again, but still I was not gaining on the Mercedes.
We drove on, now in some German-speaking region; the signs had changed language at some invisible barrier, though it mattered little to me unless we reached a national border.
But if I thought we were done with climbing, I was wrong. At Gletsch we crossed the Rhône and then in three loops the road ascended steeply once more. At the head of the valley we crossed a narrow-gauge railway, and then a tiny bridge. Furkastrasse, I read on a small road sign. And in English too, the Furka Pass, and a spot height of over
2000
metres.
Night had fallen, and the weak beams of the Renault’s headlights picked out little ahead. I thought I was dreaming, because I caught a glimpse of the Mercedes’ lights, but impossibly far above me, as if they were flying.
I watched, craning my head sideways as their lights seemed to cut back on themselves, and then vanish, but as I turned into a crazy hairpin bend, I knew they were ahead of me on a terrifying climb up the side of a mountain.
I dared not force the speed of the car higher, because the second hairpin was on me without warning, and I nearly put myself over the edge. The Mercedes was out of sight now, its lights only a memory, and I urged my car to go faster, ignoring the needle creeping higher again, the needle that showed the engine was overheating.
A third hairpin and the car began to complain terribly, the clutch sticky and the smell sickening, but then from the darkness a huge building loomed up on my right, a massive hotel overlooking the valley.
The hairpin looped around the end of the building, and then rose more gently, and before I knew what I was seeing I drove past the Mercedes, which had pulled into a parking space right on the road, at the back of the hotel.
Its lights were off, it was empty, and I knew they were inside already, out of a night that was cold, from the altitude if not the season.
I let the Renault recover by pulling over just a hundred yards past the hotel, where a slim parking bay hung over cold vertiginous space.
Turning the engine off, I waited a few moments and then climbed out of the car. There was no one around.
I pulled the revolver from my pocket and stole as quietly and as swiftly as I could back to his car.
The hotel towered above me in the cold air. Belvedere, I read on the side. Lights were on in some rooms, others were in darkness. There was a door to reception by the car park, on the side of the building that faced the mountain, and it suddenly spilled light as someone came out into the darkness.
I turned to the Mercedes as if it was mine, and pretended to fiddle with the boot lock, listening to the sounds of whoever it was receding, heading in the other direction.
Then there was a voice beside me.
‘Mein Herr?’
I didn’t even have time to turn.
That was the last thing I can remember.
FIVE
Unknown
1964
Pulling the key from the forbidden door, she let it fall to the ground, and when she took it up again, she saw that it was covered in blood. She tried to wipe it away, but no matter how hard she tried, some trace of it still remained.
Now, Bluebeard, his affairs having been resolved well, returned to his castle, and though she tried to hide the bloodstained key from him, she could not do so forever.
He took it in his hands.
‘How comes this blood upon my key?’ he roared.
after Charles Perrault,
Bluebeard
Chapter 1
I woke in darkness, in some dark, moving space, and as I tried to sit up, and failed, and then to stretch my legs out, and failed again, I knew I was shut in the boot of a car.
From the powerful hum of the engine I guessed it was the Mercedes. I had no idea how long I’d been out for, but my head throbbed, and feeling in the dark through my hair I touched a wound on my head, swollen and sticky.
I was sick immediately and sank back on to the thin carpet, feeling wretched.
The car was moving steadily, but it was hard to tell how fast; only when we took a corner did I get any sense of speed, but by then I no longer cared. I just wanted it to stop.
The air was thick and vile now. I could smell my own stink, and I began to bang on the wall of the boot, just beyond which would be the back seat of the car, where he would be sitting.
I begged them to stop.
We drove on.
Chapter 2
I lost all sense of time.
We drove on and on, and still it stayed dark inside the boot of the car. Perhaps it was day outside now, perhaps still night, I had no way of knowing. I was ill again, and lay still, shut up in that tiny space, coming and going from consciousness.
I was hungry and my head pounded from thirst; we might have been travelling for a day or more.
Only once was I aware that the car had stopped, and I banged on the lid of the boot, hoping that someone might hear me, and might investigate and set me free, but no one came, and I grew weak. It was getting harder to breathe, and there were slight exhaust fumes creeping in from somewhere. I tried to turn myself around, to place my feet against the seat backs and kick my way through, but I only succeeded in wrenching my ankle.
We drove on, and then, finally, there was a change.
The road had been getting worse for a while, for a long while in fact. It had become bumpy where before it had been relatively even, and even the soft suspension of the big car wasn’t enough to smooth out the potholes we were driving over. This had made my ordeal even more intolerable, but then it changed again.
There was the sound of gravel crunching underneath the tyres, and this went on for only a few minutes, and then we stopped.
The engine was turned off, and I heard doors open, and at least one shut again.
I braced myself, and I didn’t have long to wait.
The boot flew open, and rough hands pawed in at me. I tried to struggle, but it was dark and I could see little. A torch flashed in my face and then as I reached out, someone hit me on the jaw, and I fell limply back into the boot, my head pounding.
The hands reached in and pulled me bodily from the car, where they were joined by another pair of strong arms.
I was dragged across gravel, my feet scrabbling to stand but not managing it, and I saw the dim outline of a vast house appear from the gloom, a light here and there.
There was the faint smell of water, and I heard a bird call in the darkness, the sound of wingtips beating.
Then someone hit me on the wound on my head again, and I nearly passed out. I managed to stay awake as I was hauled down some stone steps, along a short passageway, and thrown on to a dirt floor.
I heard the rattle of a chain, and my arm was tugged to one side and a metal bracelet closed around my wrist.
I had the sense there were at least two men holding me, two men who had pulled me from the car, but what unnerved me more was the sense of a third man, standing at a distance, walking behind, watching it all.
As the two who’d manhandled me turned and left, the third man lingered. He stood in the doorway, watching me for a time.
It was him. I couldn’t even see him, but I knew, and when he spoke to me, I knew I’d been right.
‘There is no one to help you now,’ he said, then the door closed, and a key turned in the lock.
Chapter 3
The cellar was dark, save for a dim, bare bulb hanging from a beam across the centre of the ceiling.
It cast a weak light, showing the limits of my space. I lay on a loose earth floor, here and there made more uncomfortable by the presence of small lumps of coal, from a time when the cellar had been used to store fuel. There were a few dilapidated wooden wine racks set into the far wall, and there seemed to be a cramped brick funnel of a skylight sloping up to ground level outside.
I could reach none of these things, however, because my left arm was bound at the wrist by an iron manacle, and from there a short chain held me to a metal hoop in the wall.
The two men who’d pulled me from the car and put me in the cellar came back. I recognised one of them as the driver I’d followed out of Lausanne, a heavy man whose shoulders hunched over. I didn’t know the other. They walked up to me. The driver was holding a knife.