Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (17 page)

‘All right, so you left your wallet in the ditch. What good is it going to do you? Someone will spend your money and throw the rest away. I’ll believe in your English detective when I see him. And as for your police tail, Max with your hired job would have run head-on into it round the bend, and got word to me long ago.’

‘Maybe he did run into it, and they picked him up on the spot. Ever think of that? Better not write them off so easily, Aylwin, they were there, all right.’ It was his only anchor now, a frail one, but not an illusion. They had been there. God knew what had become of them now, but they might yet find their way where they were needed. ‘You haven’t a hope of getting out of here unseen. Why add more murders to the score? It’s long enough already. You might get away with Friedl. Touch Maggie Tressider, and they’ll hunt you to the end of the world.’

It was breath wasted. Even if he had been subject to intimidation, even if he had believed, Aylwin had gone too far now to turn back. He yawned elaborately in Francis’s face, and smiled, reaching up one hand to turn the shade of the lamp, and direct the light towards the darkest corner of the cellar. The circle of pallor flowed across the flagstones like a silent tide. Against the wall a heap of dark earth reared into view, and the rims of two of the stones showed black and thin as pen-strokes.

‘Get them up!’

They had crowbars and spades propped in the corner. The slanting light cast monstrous shadows from the stooped shoulders and heads of the two mountain men, as they leaned their weight almost languidly on the crowbars, and the thin black line at one end of the nearer stone broadened into a gash, a gaping rectangle of darkness.

For me, thought Francis, not for Maggie; he said they’d have to keep her until the Volga boatmen went home… Boatmen! Yes… so someone’s balking them from going near the lake.
At this hour
? A grain of hope clung obstinately to life within him, for the police might justify him yet, and come in time for Maggie, though not for him. Bargaining was out of the question, what had he to bargain with? Certainly not his own life, that was already forfeit. No means even of buying time. If he set out to sell his life as high as he could, there would be bullets flying here, and Aylwin might opt to cut his losses and change his plans, and hurry both his prisoners out of the world and into the ground together. No, nothing left to do but count on the Volga boatmen—whoever they were, thank God for them!—and submit without provocation, and pray that they might be police patrols who would never go home until she was found alive.

Robin Aylwin swung one long leg negligently from the edge of the settle, played with his little pistol, and watched his men at work. A job like any other. He paid no more attention to Francis, and Francis, arrived at the bleak conclusion that there was nothing he could do for Maggie but die submissively, had fallen mute. It was Maggie who broke the silence.

‘Francis!’

Never in his life had he heard his name spoken like that. A small, fine-spun, golden, intimate sound, like the marvellous
mezza voce
she could float clean to the back row of the remotest gallery of any opera house in the world, to pierce the last listener’s heart as if no one existed but himself and the singer. Out of the centre of one being, and aimed with certainty to reach the centre of another. For no one was present here now but Francis and Maggie. She had excised the others from her own consciousness and she banished them from his. There was only one thing left that she could do for Francis, and she was doing it as well as she knew how.

‘Francis, I’m sorry I ever got you into this. Forgive me! But I want to tell you that for my part I’m glad to have known you, even on these conditions. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I don’t have to say good-bye. I shan’t be long after you.’

Robin had turned his head to stare at her. The men leaning hard over the half-open grave froze, and hung watching and listening. And then Robin’s head went back with a toss like an angry horse balking, and he uttered a shout of brief and violent laughter. Something in the sound sent his men scurrying back to work on the second stone in haste. Never had Maggie looked at
him
like that, never spoken his name with that particular awareness that suddenly bestowed a greatly enlarged identity. Never had she turned on him this starry face, with blazing, recognising eyes wide-open to love. He had gone to the trouble to stage a beautiful declaration of love for her once, and she had not even heard him. A phoney love, of course! Still, by all the rules she ought to have succumbed.

The flagstones were propped back gently against the wall, uncovering the greyish, hard-packed earth, and the long, narrow hole from which the heap of soil had been dug out already in preparation for a new incumbent. Harsh darkness and a sinister bony light, distorted figures stooped over an open grave. Maggie’s mind drifted, recoiling from a present that was unbearable and a future that was non-existent. This was the dungeon scene from
Fidelio
. But Leonora had at least had a pistol, and here all the pistols were on the other side. She had nothing to fight with, nothing with which to defend her own or attack her enemy. ‘
Ich bin sein Weib
!’ No, this would be a
Fidelio
without any ecstatic love duet, without any final triumph for justice…

Robin slid from the settle and spread his feet firmly. She saw his thumb slide back the safety catch of the gun. He had forgotten her again; his attention was fixed on the open grave. Business as usual, he had his own affairs to look after, and no emotion had any part in them, not even offended vanity.

‘You won’t be lonely,’ he said pleasantly, his amber eyes measuring Francis, ‘you’ll be joining the sitting tenant. A fellow-countryman of yours who also got too nosy. The errand-boy always thinks he can run the business better than the managing director.’

He raised his hand without haste, and levelled the gun. The grave-diggers and their colleagues drew off from Francis and stood clear, waiting phlegmatically to fill in the hole again and replace the stones. The long finger on the trigger contracted gently.

Maggie awoke before it tightened to the firing-point. Nothing to fight with? But she
had
! She had one weapon, the ultimate weapon, not effective to stand off death, but a grenade exploding in Robin Aylwin’s orderly plans. She had a body he needed unmarked for his own purposes, with lungs that could still breathe in lake-water. She gathered it in a convulsion of vengeful energy, and flung it between Francis and the gun.

The gun went off, a sharp, spiteful waspish sound, lost in Robin’s startled cry. Maggie hung poised in front of Francis with spread arms, and felt him lurch and recover at her back, fending himself off from the wall. There was no pain, no impact, nothing. She had under-estimated the jungle speed of Robin’s reactions. In the instant that she moved he had divined her purpose, and methodical in everything he did, had adhered stubbornly to his own intent. The bullet must have been in motion when he flung up his wrist to let it whine in ricochet from the vault above, and bury itself in the wall. He could not avoid her without avoiding Francis, too. Frantically she reached back a hand to feel for Francis, to assure herself that he was there intact, if only for one instant of communion, and to fasten herself to him indivisibly so that he could not be killed without killing her. His arm groped its way about her waist and lifted her. She felt the hardness of his body, and heard him breathing in heavy, painful groans.

But all she saw was Robin’s face, and that she would never forget, however long she had for remembering. In the very moment that he had deflected his shot, to keep his prize suicide presentable for an autopsy surgeon and an inquest jury, everything in him had suddenly curdled and changed. Intelligence he had, it worked at the speed of light. The whine of the ricochet was still flittering about the vault like a disturbed bat when the true horror hit him, the thing that undid him utterly. He saw in a blinding vision the full significance of what she had done, and for once in a cold life he reacted without calculation, in a frenzy of irrational jealousy. He had never cared a damn for her, nor did he now, nor would he ever, for her or any woman. And yet it was an intolerable outrage to him that she, who felt nothing for him, should toss her life away willingly for another man. How could it matter to him? He had lived very successfully without need or respect or regard for love, and yet all that impressive erection suddenly crumbled to a mouthful of bitter ashes. It mattered, all right! It mattered to the heart, to the bone, to the marrow of the bone. She had tricked him, cheated him out of his whole achievement. She had done what no one else had ever done, made him feel.

He uttered a shriek of grief and rage, incredible from that composed and imperturbable throat of his, and the comely mask before her broke and crumpled horribly into ugliness. Two round, glaring, golden eyes in a grimacing chaos of hate levelled upon their target for once not coldly but in boiling fury. The bomb that had shattered him had shattered his plans with him. The only thing that mattered now was to kill Maggie Tressider. The little black pistol came up fast and accurately. He fired pointblank at her.

She had clamped her arm over the arm Francis had thrown round her, her hand gripping his hand, he could not throw her clear, she would not let go of him. All he could do was hold her fast and turn with her in his arms, putting her between him and the wall.

The bullet took him in the back of the left shoulder, a little high for where Maggie’s heart should have been. The impact drove them both forward against the wall. They slid down it, still linked, still clasping each other, and on the chill, soiled flagstones. Maggie drew herself clear, half-stunned by the fall and his weight upon her, and gathered him jealously into her arms. The heat of his blood jetted into the folds of her sleeve. His head lay in the crook of her elbow, his face half-smiling at her for one astonished instant, before all its precision of line dissolved into faintness, into a dream.

There were no more shots, and yet the vault above them was suddenly alive with discordant noises, none of them understood, none of them relevant. Francis and Maggie were alone in the centre of a whirlwind, in a cone of calm that was half shock and half the peace beyond exhaustion. For a moment she did not even realise that he was hit, she only held him like a trophy, like the palm after a long, hard race.

Then her senses cleared a little, enough to distinguish the hammering at the door, hysterical with alarm, and the clash of the bolts as the man in the raincoat opened. The man who burst in and slammed the door at his back she saw clearly. She saw him clawing at the bolts, turning the key again. Robin had called him Roker, and he spoke English, most likely he
was
English. Why not? They flourish everywhere. If ever they wanted a description of this one, she could give it, one that would find him wherever he ran. Her vision seemed to be inordinately clear, as in one kind of dream. He was a little, fast-moving, quiet man, who even screamed in a whisper; balding, nondescript, fortyish, tough as nylon rope and almost as synthetic, a product of his age. He was rattling out destructive sentences in a low, venomous monotone; and because of him, she and the man she held in her arms were forgotten.

‘Police… hordes, I tell you! You knew I had the trap open, God damn it, I
had
to! Any minute I might have had to drop in here fast. It wasn’t the shot so much… somebody screamed like a blasted woman. How could I know they were that close? Don’t
ask
me what brought them snooping round here… They
are
here! They homed on that squeal like on a radar fix. Don’t hope for it, they saw me drop, all right, they know where the stone is. Nothing’s going to keep them out of here now.
Sure
I locked and bolted the door up there. You think two doors will hold them long?’

Robin’s voice, riding high and authoritative above this hail of disaster, said clearly: ‘Out, the back way!’ All his disintegrated atoms had welded again into one efficient being at the first pressure from outside. He dropped his victims without hesitation, without another thought. If he stayed to silence them he would lose precious time, and leave the police two identifiable bodies and two all-too-provable murders, should he ever be taken to answer for them. If the police here were on to him, then the game in these parts was up for good. Take the gains, cut the losses, and get out clean. There were other continents besides Europe, and there was money already carefully distributed there.

‘They must have found the car in the coppice, they came up from that way… No, I tell you there wasn’t a sign… not until that fool yelled like a banshee. Who the hell
was
it? You
knew
I should leave the trap open! They came from everywhere, like greyhounds on a hare…’

‘All right, we’ve got the message. Open that door and get going. Scatter and make for Dornbirn.’

A crisp, cool, commanding voice, not at all the scream of a banshee now. And they were obeying him in something more than haste. The other door was open, Maggie felt the chill of outer air like a fine spray over her cheek and shoulder. Of course, a rear exit would be an elementary precaution, and simple here in a labyrinth of castle cellars. They were all slipping away like flickering ghosts, the taciturn man who had cleaned the gun, the two big, raw-boned Austrians, the slender young one in the raincoat, the distraught sentry, all vanishing, all receding into tiny, rapid footfalls swallowed up by the rock.

Give him this at least, Robin was the last to go. He saw all his men away before he extracted the key from the rear door by which they had withdrawn, and passed through it in his turn, closing it briskly after him. His foot, as he crossed the room, stepped in the slowly-gathering rivulet of blood that seeped along between the stones. Maggie heard the key turn in the lock, and then his long, light steps receding rapidly.

It was very quiet in the wine cellar for a few blank moments, during which she drifted towards collapse, and dragged herself back desperately to press her hand against the hole in Francis’s shoulder, where the blood pumped steadily out of him, sending thin, bright-red jets welling between her fingers. She hardly noticed when the new noises began, the shots that broke the lock of the outer door, the rush of feet advancing. Only when the battering at the nearer door began did she realise that the police were through one obstacle, and divided from her now only by that last barrier. She laid Francis down out of her arms gently, and went stumbling across the room to drag back the bolts. There were voices calling out to her from the other side, offering and demanding reassurance. She was almost too tired to understand or answer, but if she did not, Francis would die. She knew nothing about first-aid, but she knew arterial bleeding when she saw it.

‘They’ve gone… another entrance somewhere…’ Every word required an effort like shouldering the world. ‘He took the keys away…’

‘Miss Tressider, are you all right?’ That was an English voice, not just someone local speaking English. It made its way to the centres of energy in her exhausted mind, and she drew reviving breath. ‘Yes, I’m all right, but Francis… he’s badly hurt… shot… Hurry, I’m afraid he’ll bleed to death…’

‘We’re coming. We’ll get through to you as fast as we can. Maggie… is he well away from the door? We may have to shoot a way through.’

‘Yes, near the other end of the room… ten yards… to your left…’

‘Stay there with him, and keep down. Maggie… Maggie, can you hear me?
Where is he hit
?’ George Felse was on one knee with his mouth as near to the keyhole as he could get it, yelling through to her over the probing and grating and cursing of an experienced professional struggling with the lock.

‘In the left shoulder… an artery, I think… he’s bleeding terribly…’

‘Do you know where the pressure point is in the shoulder?’ He told her in the fewest words possible how to locate and compress the subclavian artery. ‘You’ll have to keep pressing… you’ll tire…’

‘I won’t tire.’ No, not when she knew what to do. Her voice called back to him this time from farther away, she was already on her knees, raising Francis in her arms against the wall to strip away collar and shirt from his neck and feel for the pump that was emptying him of blood before her eyes. ‘
But hurry
…!’

‘Good girl, we’ll be through soon to help you…’

But the door was the door of a fortress.

From the moment that they found the Mercedes, tucked away in a hollow coppice on the Bregenz side of the castle hill, Oberkofler had taken no chances. He had a cordon of armed men strung round the hill on every side, methodically narrowing their circle as they converged on the unimpressive and unlovely ruins. Those on the Scheidenau side had neither seen nor heard anything of note since the discovery of the car, and were still merely carrying out their orders with proper attention, and no immediate expectation of incident, when their colleagues from the Bregenz side were already below the flagstones of the unkempt courtyard and battering at the first locked door. Their turn, however, came some minutes later.

The snaggle-toothed outline of what had once been a bastion, now reduced to a ragged stone wall no more than six feet high at any point, and overgrown with grass and weeds, reared from the smooth dark side of the hill ahead of them. And out of it, vaulting the wall at a low place, burst suddenly the figure of a man, running head-down for the gully of trees below. After him surged another, and another.

Gladly the police closed in. The first shout of challenge caused the foremost fugitive to swerve away towards the lake, where willing hands gathered him in without resistance, and the later ones to balk, break in various directions, and open fire. The police returned the fire, picked off the enemy singly and undamaged where they could, and shot to bring them down where they must. Five in all, but the fifth was no more than poised on the wall when the volley of shots broke out. He was notably quick and resolute in making up his mind. The bullet he put through the left upperarm of the nearest policeman was meant to do worse than wound, if the marksman’s stance had not been so unstable. The policeman, firing back almost in the same instant, saw his opponent fall backward into the rubble and undergrowth inside the wall. But whether because he was hit or merely because he lost his balance no one was then clear.

By the time they had the other four secured, and came to look for the fifth, he had disappeared, though everyone was sure he had not emerged again anywhere round the perimeter. He had gone back, presumably, by the same way all five had come.

In the rank growth of early autumn it took them some time to find the broken place in the flooring within, and the steps leading down to the new, strong, locked door beneath.

He lay for a moment with the key still in his hand, feeling the waves of faintness approach and recede, and the slow drain of his blood seeping out of him. Here he could scarcely hear the shots from outside, and had no idea how long the skirmish continued; but he knew that they were all lost, every man of them. And he as certainly lost as they, though to another victor. All round the hill, waiting for them, the law. Down here in the rock, waiting for him…

How could it have happened, so unexpectedly and so finally?

Suddenly there were no continents left outside Europe, and Europe was crumbling away under his feet. All that carefully constructed kingdom, so firmly established, so long immune, wiped out in a night.

And all because of
her. She
had done this to him.

He did not know where the bullet in him had lodged, but he knew it was somewhere high in his chest, probably in the lungs. Bright red blood running out of his mouth, staining his hand, and the world sliding irrevocably away from him, and all at once this budding, proliferating pain where no pain had been, filling and overfilling him to the lips until he overflowed in blood.

He had always lived for his own advantage, pleasure and amusement, and in their cause everyone else had been expendable; and now that all these came down so catastrophically into one last small but sweet indulgence, he might as well continue consistent to the end, and rate himself as expendable, too. In any case he was all but spent. He knew he had not much time left, but he had time at least to kill the woman who had destroyed him.

With the last of his strength he set out along the passage, to crawl the ninety or so yards that separated him from Maggie Tressider.

Maggie, stiff and cold on the flagged floor by the open grave, holding Francis on her breast with his head carefully inclined and her thumb wedged hard down into the hollow of his collar-bone, heard the key grate in the lock of the rear door, clumsily and for some seconds abortively. She turned her head as if in a dream, without belief, and watched the door swing open, and no one come in. Nothing was quite real any more, except Francis, and the necessity to keep her thumb rammed into his gaunt flesh, and the awful, spurting flow stemmed. She did not move, even when she looked down from the place where the arriving face should have been, down below the lock, down to the creature who lay sprawled black and red across the threshold, with nothing live or human about him but the round, greenish-gold eyes in the ruined face, bent inexorably on her, and the right hand that still clutched the gun.