Gertrude slipped back though the tiny door into the small shaft of the spiral staircase and decided to head down to what she guessed was in fact the first floor. She wandered out through a similarly shrunken door and edged out into a much larger corridor than the one above. The floor was of polished wood rather than carpeted and the whitewashed walls were hung with shields and swords, pikes and muskets, the weaponry of bygone ages. Gertrude spied an open door through which a shaft of daylight was beaming, there must be a window there and she could look outside. She gently loped over to the door and poked her head around the corner, taking in the contents and décor of a large room that seemed to be configured for some of presentation or ceremony.
A huge fireplace built into the outside wall acted as the focal point of the room with a large raised stone plinth in front of it providing a platform on which a lectern stood. There were rows of chairs along the length of the room, all ready for an audience of which there was thankfully no sign. Massive iron candelabras hung from the heavily beamed ceiling and various life-sized statues of naked but winged men and women stared down from the walls, watching her every move, their faces locked in earnest and somewhat ominous reproach. Although they appeared angelic with attractively carved faces, they all had a demonic countenance.
Gertrude wandered to one of the large windows, squinting at the daylight that streamed in contrast to the dimly lit corridors she had come from. Looking out, she could see over an area of parkland and the aspect of the room obviously faced out from the castle rather than into it. She pressed her face against the modern double-glazed glass and tried to squint down to the base of the wall. All she could make out was a small terraced garden where a waist high wall dropped away to the real ground level and the curtain wall, beyond which was the moat that she assumed surrounded the whole castle. She ran her hands over the frame of the window, it was a sash that could be raised and lowered but it was securely locked and the key was nowhere in sight.
She could not waste time trying to find it and she certainly was not about to break the glass to clamber out. Besides, the drop to the garden terrace was much too far for her to jump safely. With her face flat against the panes, the only thing that had caught her attention as a possible escape route was a rope that had been strung from a room further along the corridor and tied up to a fixture on the curtain wall walkway. It appeared to have been used as part of a pulley system as there was a pile of building materials, cement or plaster, at the base of the wall and the rope had probably been tied up out of reach to stop inquisitive visitors from grabbing it and yanking on it. In spite of the opportunity that it offered, she decided to go down to the next floor to find an exit to the garden, from there, she could at least try to get to the curtain wall and find a way over it. If she had to swim the moat, then so be it.
The brush and twigs of the bush into which Pieter had dropped were still supporting him as he clambered over the brushy cushion. He had just recovered from a moment of urgent scrabbling, a few branches had given way and although he had managed to prevent himself from falling off completely, his left foot was soaked and stung from where it had dipped into the icy waters of the moat. Carefully reaching out, he managed to grab onto a trailing branch from an adjacent woody shrub that gave him the leverage to pull himself closer to the small bank at the foot of the wall. He judged that one more pull would suffice to land him on the bank and from there he would soon be able to creep around to the firs and thence to the oak tree to climb up to the parapet of the wall.
Pieter heaved and he slid over the poking spines of the bush, some of them catching at his clothes and digging into his stomach but he persevered. He was almost at the bank and one more over-hand pull would allow him to scramble from the bush onto the island. He gripped the branch and tensed his biceps, dragging his body until he could reach some long grass stalks that sprouted from the clumpy soil. Grabbing a handful, he pulled himself forward, the frozen blades tearing and shearing as he used them for leverage. Despite pulling away a great sheaf of grass, Pieter managed to get himself over, pistoning his legs to push himself off the bush and away from the danger of falling into the moat. A final stumbled leap and he was standing at the foot of the wall on a narrow bank that widened as it arced away from the gatehouse. He crouched and looked back across to the parkland but could not see anybody. He had not seen any CCTV cameras watching him and he had not yet heard an alarm that would signify that somebody knew what he was doing.
Pieter ran for the firs he had seen earlier and dived into the dense pine cover, taking a moment to catch his breath as he appraised the oak tree a few metres further along and how he had to climb it to get to the top of the wall. He coughed slightly as the cool air made his lungs tighten but kept examining the oak intently, mildly amused that the last time he had climbed a tree with such enthusiasm he had been a fourteen year old boy.
Gertrude was hiding, practically cowering. She had heard voices and decided to take cover, nimbly dodging into a small alcove and crouching into the shadows of the recess as a party of three gruff men wandered past. They were speaking German and she managed to catch some of their conversation as they chatted about the wiring in one of the rooms of the main turret. She was sure that they could not see her but she waited until the clumping footsteps of their heavy boots had reverberated to a dull thudding well away from her position before emerging from her hiding place, gasping slightly from holding her breath.
In her terror, she could not conceive that getting down the ground floor in safety would be possible, it was surely guarded and the close call with the trio of sentries had unnerved her to such an extent that she felt an overriding impulse get out as soon as possible from an exit on the first floor - any exit.
She scanned left and right in the long corridor and saw that it veered off at both ends, probably to the main rooms toward the centre of the building, however, directly ahead of her she was sure that one of the rooms would have a window that could open - one of them must have an exit to world outside. Getrude crept forwards and slid into the next door along.
Pieter was swinging wildly at the end of the branch that he had managed to climb to and which he had slid along to reach the wall. He had slightly misjudged the strength of the branch and although it comfortably held his weight, the whole limb was bouncing as he neared the end and he realised that he would need to make a small leap to grab the wall.
He crouched himself as near to the end as he dare and then deliberately bounced up and down. He needed to make the leap as the branch was rising, using some of the energy residing in the tension of the wood to at least prevent him from diving too low and simply smacking straight into the wall. He counted himself down, three, two, one, performing a violent surge up and away from the tree, kicking off from the branch with his shins and toes to dive forwards. His timing was accurate but not necessarily comfortably within margins and he scrabbled as his finger tips caught the top edge of the brickwork and his body swung down to lump heavily against the facing wall. He gasped, slightly winded, but managed to pull himself up, gaining purchase with his toes and driving his elbows into the brickwork to lever himself up. Feeling every scrape as he rolled over the parapet, he landed in a heap on a narrow walkway that ran around the top of the wall.
Pieter rested for a moment, wheezing slightly from the exertion of his activities and squinting as he tried to work out where he should go next. He was now at the top of the curtain wall that surrounded the castle complex but as he surveyed the grounds could see no obvious way into the main buildings. He could not see into the inner courtyard but he suddenly heard the rattle of a diesel engine starting up from cold. He caught the grating sound of machinery and guessed that the main gates just a few metres below and away from him were being opened via some automated entry system and sure enough, within a few moment a Renault van nosed out of the compound belching a black cloud of diesel fumes from the exhaust as the driver revved the engine to accelerate away. Pieter peered intently and recognised it as the van he had been tracking, noting the license plate and relieved that it matched the number he had been looking for.
He automatically crouched lower although it was unlikely that the driver would look back to the wall near the gatehouse and he was relieved as the van motored forwards and simply headed out of the the gatehouse portal, thrumming over the wooden bridge as the tyres drummed against the planks. The door started to crank and chudder again and he heard it clump shut. He suddenly had a horrible feeling that Gertrude Verker had just been driven away, but no matter, there was nothing he could do about the van for now, it was better to get into the castle and have a look around although he did not quite know what he expected to find.
Gertrude gasped as she looked through a window that she had discovered had been left unlocked. Swinging the double shutters wide open, she could stick her head out and get a good view of what she perceived as her only available route to freedom. The drop to the ground was at least ten metres and the curtain wall was around twenty metres away, connected by a single thick rope that was evidently a temporary fixture to allow workmen to pull up some building materials. She had imagined that her luck had turned when she had walked into the room; it was clearly under some form of decoration or renovation and filled with scaffold platforms and dust sheets and strewn with workmens' tools and paint equipment. The rope clearly offered a chance to get to the outside wall and from there - well - she would have to determine her options once she was out of the main building.
There was no way she could jump from the castle to the safety of the wall as it was just too far, but the rope was securely fixed to a hook on the exterior wall and just above the window lintel and all she had to do was swing hand-over-hand to the wall, just a few metres away.
Staring over the window sill into what might just have well been an abyss, she shivered slightly as the cold air gusting through the open window started to hit her, the adrenalin generated by her agitation wearing off and leaving her vulnerable to the elements. She had to try and get across, she could not keep running in circles or she might bump into one of her jailers, she had to try monkey-swinging over to reach the outer wall, then she could use the walkway to access the main gatehouse and freedom.
She reached up and tried to grip the rope but after only a few moments she jerked her hand back, it was stiff with ice and freezing cold and she knew that there was no way she could grip it for even a minute, especially if she was hanging from it. She suddenly remembered the room she was standing in and looked back at the jumbled collection of equipment stowed there, eyeing the dust-sheets as an idea came to her.
Running down the stones steps inside of the gatehouse, Pieter passed the electric motors that operated the main gates and crashed out though a wooden door leading to the main courtyard. He took a moment to orientate himself and then darted for the main entrance of the castle building, drawing his old service issue Walther P5 automatic pistol from a discretely hidden holster as he went. He did not want to engage in a gun fight, but his options were limited if he came up against any armed opponents.
Pieter reached the castle entrance and saw that the heavy wooden main doors were open, he barged through a set of glass interior doors into the reception hall and gazed about, immediately hit by the musky stone aroma of a building that was many centuries old. He heard a distant crash from one of the wings of the castle, the sound having echoed along corridors, bouncing off the vaulted ceilings. Running forwards, he decided that for now, he needed to avoid meeting anybody and simply concentrate on finding signs of Gertrude. The only way was up and he bounded up the staircase, leaping two steps at a time.
He knew that he was being irresponsible, but before he had left the German traffic police headquarters in Oberhausen, Pieter had requested that Detlef - or Steve as he had preferred to be known - should contact Chief Inspector Visser of
Den Haag Politie
to convey what they had found. He fully expected his chief to ignore the unofficial nature of Pieter's investigation and to pull the stops out to organise a police raid using the German police, but he was not prepared to have to wait until they turned up.
Bursting out onto the first floor, Pieter looked about as another crash boomed out, probably from somewhere on the ground floor but he could not be sure. He flipped off the safety catch of his firearm and moved forwards.
Gertrude jerked her weight up and down a couple of times to ensure that she had a good grip on the rope before launching herself from the safety of the window sill. She had ripped off some strips from a dust-sheet she found in the room and had tied them around her wrists, wrapping her hands in the material to create insulation from the numbing cold of the wind and the frozen fibres of the rope, but also tying a simple safety line through the belt hoops of her jeans to a hook which she could track along the pulley, simply needing to hang by one hand to shunt the hook along to ensure that it did not catch. It was not much and she was not even sure how long it would hold her weight if she really needed it, but it was better than nothing.
She started to edge out, keeping her motions steady and only slightly relying on her make-shift safety harness to relieve some of the weight from her arms. Swinging sideways, she was soon clear of the castle wall and for a moment she froze, berating herself for thinking that she could undertake such a dangerous task. She muttered to herself, urging herself on, telling herself that she had no choice and with a final grunt of encouragement from her inner voice she started to slide one hand at a time along the rope, creeping metre by metre to the safety of the curtain wall.