Puppet on a Chain

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I didn't make many friends on the way back out to Huyler but then I wasn't in the mood for making friends. Under normal circumstances, driving in the crazy and wholly irresponsible way I did, I should have been involved in at least half a dozen accidents, all of them serious, but I found that the flashing police light and siren had a near-magical effect of clearing the way in front of me. At a distance up to half a mile approaching vehicles or vehicles going in the same direction as I was would slow down or stop, pulling very closely in to the side of the road'. I was briefly pursued by a police car that should have known better, but the police driver lacked my urgency of motivation and he was clearly and sensibly of the opinion that there was no point in killing himself just to earn his weekly wage. There would be, I knew, an immediate radio alert, but I had no fear of road blocks or any such form of molestation: once the licence plate number was received at HQ I'd be left alone.

I would have preferred to complete the journey in another car or by bus, for one quality in which a yellow and red taxi is conspicuously lacking is unobtrusiveness, but haste was more important than discretion. I compromised by driving along the final stretch of the causeway at a comparatively sedate pace: the spectacle of a yellow and red taxi approaching the village at speed of something in the region of a hundred miles an hour would have given rise to some speculation even among the renownedly incurious Dutch.

I parked the car in the already rapidly filling car park, removed my jacket, shoulder-holster and tie, upended my collar, rolled up my sleeves, and emerged from the car with my jacket hung carelessly over my left arm: under the jacket I carried my gun with the silencer in place.

The notoriously fickle Dutch weather had changed dramatically for the better. Even as I had left Amsterdam the skies had been clearing and now there were only drifting cotton-wool puffs in an otherwise cloudless sky and the already hot sun was drawing up steam from the houses and adjoining fields. I walked leisurely but not too leisurely towards the building I'd asked Maggie to keep under observation. The door stood wide open now and at intervals I could see people, all women in their traditional costumes, moving around the interior: occasionally one emerged and went into the village, occasionally a man came out with a carton which he would place on a wheelbarrow and trundle into the village. This was the home of a cottage industry of some sort: what kind of industry was impossible to judge from the outside. That it appeared to be an entirely innocuous industry was evidenced by the fact that tourists who occasionally happened by were smilingly invited to come inside and look around. All the ones I saw go inside came out again, so clearly it was the least sinister of places. North of the building stretched an almost unbroken expanse of hayfields and in the distance I could see a group of traditionally dressed matrons tossing hay in the air to dry it off in the morning sun. The men of Huyler, I reflected, seemed to have it made: none of them appeared to do any work at all.

There was no sign of Maggie. I wandered back into the village, bought a pair of tinted spectacles — heavy dark spectacles instead of acting as an aid to concealment tend to attract attention, which is probably why so many people wear them — and a floppy straw hat that I wouldn't have been seen dead in outside Huyler. It was hardly what one could call a perfect disguise, for nothing short of stain could ever conceal the white scars on my face, but at least it helped to provide me with a certain degree of anonymity and I didn't think I looked all that different from scores of other tourists wandering about the village.

Huyler was a very small village, but when you start looking for someone concerning whose whereabouts you have no idea at all and when that someone may be wandering around at the same time as you are, then even the smallest village can become embarrassingly large. As briskly as I could without attracting attention, I covered every lane in Huyler and saw no trace of Maggie.

I was in a pretty fair way towards quiet desperation now, ignoring the voice in my mind that told me with numbing certainty that I was too late, and feeling all the more frustrated by the fact that I had to conduct my search with at least a modicum of leisure. I now started on a tour of all the shops and cafés although, if Maggie were still alive and well, I hardly expected to find her in any of those in view of the assignment I had given her. But I couldn't afford to ignore any possibility.

The shops and cafés round the inner harbour yielded nothing — and I covered every one of them. I then moved out in a series of expanding concentric circles, as far as one can assign so geometrical a term in the maze of haphazard lanes that was Huyler. And it was on the outermost of these circles that I found Maggie, finding her alive, well and totally unscathed: my relief was hardly greater than my sense of foolishness.

I found her where I should have thought to find her right away if I had been using my head as she had been. I'd told her to keep the building under surveillance but at the same time to keep in company and she was doing just that. She was inside a large crowded souvenir shop, fingering some of the articles for sale, but not really looking at them: she was looking fixedly, instead, at the large building less than thirty yards away, so fixedly, that she quite failed to notice me. I took a step to go inside the door to speak to her when I suddenly saw something that held me quite still and made me look as fixedly as Maggie was, although not in the same direction.

Trudi and Herta were coming down the street. Trudi, dressed in a sleeveless pink frock and wearing long white cotton gloves, skipped along in her customary childish fashion, her blonde hair swinging, a smile on her face: Herta, clad in her usual outlandish dress, waddled gravely alongside, carrying a large leather bag in her hand.

I didn't stand on the order of my going. I stepped quickly inside the shop: but not in Maggie's direction, whatever else happened I didn't want those two to see me talking to her: instead I took up a strategic position behind a tall revolving stand of picture-postcards and waited for Herta and Trudi to pass by.

They didn't pass by. They passed by the front door, sure enough, but that was as far as they got, for Trudi suddenly stopped, peered through the window where Maggie was standing and caught Herta by the arms. Seconds later she coaxed the plainly reluctant Herta inside the shop, took her arm away from Herta who remained hovering there brood-broodinglylike a volcano about to erupt, stepped forward and caught Maggie by the arm.

'I know you,' Trudi said delightedly. 'I know you!'

Maggie turned and smiled. 'I know you too. Hullo, Trudi.'

'And this is Herta.' Trudi turned to Herta, who clearly approved of nothing that was taking place. 'Herta, this is my friend, Maggie.'

Herta scowled in acknowledgment.

Trudi said: 'Major Sherman is my friend.'

'I know that,' Maggie smiled.

'Are you my friend, Maggie?'

'Of course I am, Trudi.'

Trudi seemed delighted. 'I have lots of other friends. Would you like to see them?' She almost dragged Maggie to the door and pointed. She was pointing to the north and I knew it could be only at the haymakers at the far end of the field. 'Look. There they are.'

'I'm sure they're very nice friends,' Maggie said politely.

A picture-postcard hunter edged close to me, as much as to indicate that I should move over and let him have a look: I'm not quite sure what kind of look I gave him but it certainly was sufficient to make him move away very hurriedly.

'They are lovely friends,' Trudi was saying. She nodded at Herta and indicated the bag she was carrying. 'When Herta and I come here we always take them out food and coffee in the morning.' She said impulsively: 'Come and see them, Maggie,' and when Maggie hesitated said anxiously: 'You are my friend, aren't you?'

'Of course, but — '

'They are such nice friends,' Trudi said pleadingly. 'They are so happy. They make music. If we are very good, they may do the hay dance for us.'

'The hay dance?'

'Yes, Maggie. The hay dance. Please, Maggie. You are all my friends. Please come. Just for me, Maggie?'

'Oh, very well.' Maggie was laughingly reluctant. 'Just for you, Trudi. But I can't stay long.'

'I do like you, Maggie.' Trudi squeezed Maggie's arm. 'I do like you.'

The three of them left. I waited a discreet period of time, then moved cautiously out of the shop. They were already fifty yards away, past the building I'd asked Maggie to watch and out into the hayfield. The haymakers were at least six hundred yards away, building their first haystack of the day close in to what looked, even at that distance, to be a pretty ancient and decrepit Dutch barn. I could hear the chatter of voices as the three of them moved out over the stubbled hay and all the chatter appeared to come from Trudi, who was back at her usual gambit of gambolling like a spring lamb. Trudi never walked: she always skipped.

I followed, but not skipping. A hedgerow ran alongside the edge of the field and I prudently kept this between myself and Herta and the two girls, trailing thirty or forty yards behind. I've no doubt that my method of locomotion looked almost as peculiar as Trudi's because the hedgerow was less than five feet in height and I spent most of the six hundred yards bent forward at the hips like a septuagenarian suffering from a bout of lumbago.

By and by the three of them reached the old barn and sat down on the west side, in the shadow from the steadily strengthening sun. I got the barn between them and the haymakers on the one hand and myself on the other, ran quickly across the intervening space and let myself in by a side door.

I hadn't been wrong about the barn. It must have been at least a century old and appeared to be in a very dilapidated condition indeed. The floor-boards sagged, the wooden walls bulged at just about every point where they could bulge and some of the original air-filtering cracks between the horizontal planks had warped and widened to the extent that one could almost put one's head through them.

There was a loft to the barn, the floor of which appeared to be in imminent danger of collapse: it was rotted and splintered and riddled with woodworm; even an English house-agent would have had difficulty in disposing of the place on the basis of its antiquity. It didn't look as if it could support an averagely-built mouse, far less my weight, but the lower part of the barn was of little use for observation, and besides, I didn't want to peer out of one of those cracks in the wall and find someone else peering in about two inches away, so I reluctantly took the crumbling flight of wooden steps that led up to the loft.

The loft, the east side of which was still half full of last year's hay, was every bit as dangerous as it looked but I picked my steps with caution and approached the west side of the barn. This part of the barn had an even better selection of gaps between the planks and I eventually located the ideal one, at least six inches in width and affording an excellent view. I could see the heads of Maggie, Trudi and Herta directly beneath: I could see the matrons, about a dozen in all, assiduously and expertly building a haystack, the tines of their long-handled hayforks gleaming in the sun: I could even see part of the village itself, including most of the car park. I had a feeling of unease and could not understand the reason for this: the haymaking scene taking place out on the field there was as idyllic as even the most bucolic-minded could have wished to see. I think the odd sense of apprehension sprang from the least unlikely source, the actual haymakers themselves, for not even here, in their native setting, did those flowing striped robes, those exquisitely embroidered dresses and snowy wimple hats appear quite natural. There was a more than faintly theatrical quality about them, an aura of unreality. I had the feeling, almost, that I was witnessing a play being staged for my benefit.

About half an hour passed during which the matrons worked away steadily and the three sitting beneath me engaged in only desultory conversation: it was that kind of day, warm and still and peaceful, the only sounds being the swish of the hayforks and the distant murmuring of bees, that seems to make conversation of any kind unnecessary. I wondered if I dared risk a cigarette and decided I dared: I fumbled in the pocket of my jacket for matches and cigarettes, laid my coat on the floor with the silenced gun on top of it, and lit the cigarette, careful not to let any of the smoke escape through the gaps in the planks.

By and by Herta consulted a wristwatch about the size of a kitchen alarm clock and said something to Trudi, who rose, reached down a hand and pulled Maggie to her feet. Together they walked towards the haymakers, presumably to summon them to their morning break, for Herta was spreading a chequered cloth on the ground and laying out cups and unwrapping food from folded napkins.

A voice behind me said: 'Don't try to reach for your gun. If you do, you'll never live to touch it.'

I believed the voice. I didn't try to reach for my gun.

'Turn round very slowly.'

I turned round very slowly. It was that kind of voice.

'Move three paces away from the gun. To your left.'

I couldn't see anyone. But I heard him all right. I moved three paces away. To the left.

There was a stirring in the hay on the other side of the loft and two figures emerged: the Reverend Thaddeus Goodbody and Marcel, the snakelike dandy I'd clobbered and shoved in the safe in the Balinova. Goodbody didn't have a gun in his hand, but then, he didn't need one: the blunderbuss Marcel carried in his was as big as two ordinary guns and, to judge from the gleam in the flat black unwinking eyes, he was busily searching for the remotest thread of an excuse to use it. Nor was I encouraged by the fact that his gun had a silencer to it: this meant that they didn't care how often they shot me, nobody would hear a thing.

'Most damnably hot in there,' Goodbody said complain-complainingly'And ticklish.' He smiled in that fashion that made little children want to take him by the hand. 'Your calling leads you into the most unexpected places, I must say, my dear Sherman.'

'My calling?'

'Last time I met you, you were, if I remember correctly, purporting to be a taxi-driver.'

'Ah, that time. I'll bet you didn't report me to the police after all.'

'I did have second thoughts about it,' Goodbody conceded generously. He walked across to where my gun lay and picked it up distastefully before throwing it into the hay. 'Crude, unpleasant weapons.'

'Yes, indeed,' I agreed. 'You now prefer to introduce an element of refinement into your killing.'

'As I am shortly about to demonstrate.' Goodbody wasn't bothering to lower his voice but he didn't have to, the Huyler matrons were at their morning coffee now and even with their mouths full they all appeared capable of talking at once. Goodbody walked across to the hay, unearthed a canvas bag and produced a length of rope. 'Be on the alert, my dear Marcel. If Mr Sherman makes the slightest move, however harmless it may seem, shoot him. Not to kill. Through the thigh.'

Marcel licked his lips. I hoped he wouldn't consider the movement of my shirt, caused by the accelerated pumping of my heart, as one that could be suspiciously interpreted. Goodbody approached circumspectly from the rear, tied the rope firmly round my right wrist, passed the rope over a rafter and then, after what seemed an unnecessarily lengthy period of readjustment, secured the rope round my left wrist. My hands were held at the level of my ears. Goodbody brought out another length of rope.

'From my friend Marcel here,' Goodbody said conversationally, 'I have learned that you have a certain expertise with your hands. It occurs to me that you might be similarly gifted with your feet.' He stooped and fastened my ankles together with an enthusiasm that boded ill for the circulation of my feet. 'It further occurs to me that you might have comment to make on the scene you are about to witness. We would prefer to do without the comment.' He stuffed a far from clean handkerchief into my mouth and bound it in position with another one. 'Satisfactory, Marcel, you would say?'

Marcel's eyes gleamed. 'I have a message to deliver to Sherman from Mr Durrell.'

'Now, now, my dear fellow, not so precipitate. Later, later. For the moment, we want our friend to be in full possession of his faculties, eyesight undimmed, hearing unimpaired, the mind at its keenest to appreciate all the artistic nuances of the entertainment we have arranged for his benefit.'

'Of course, Mr Goodbody,' Marcel said obediently. He was back at his revolting lip-licking. 'But afterwards — '

'Afterwards,' Goodbody said generously, 'you may deliver as many messages as you like. But remember — I want him still alive when the barn burns down tonight. It is a pity that we shall be unable to witness it from close quarters.' He looked genuinely sad. 'You and that charming young lady out there — when they find your charred remains among the embers — well, I'm sure they'll draw their own conclusions about love's careless young dream. Smoking in barns, as you have just done, is a most unwise practice. Most unwise. Goodbye, Mr Sherman, and I do not mean au revoir. I think I must observe the hay dance from closer range. Such a charming old custom. I think you will agree.'

He left, leaving Marcel to his lip-licking. I didn't much fancy being left alone with Marcel, but that was hardly of any importance in my mind at that moment. I twisted and looked through the gap in the planking.

The matrons had finished their coffee and were lumbering to their feet. Trudi and Maggie were directly beneath where I was standing.

'Were the cakes not nice, Maggie?' Trudi asked. 'And the coffee?'

'Lovely, Trudi, lovely. But I have been too long away. I have shopping to do. I must go now.' Maggie paused and looked up. 'What's that?'

Two piano accordions had begun to play, softly, gently. I could see neither of the musicians: the sound appeared to come from the far side of the haystack the matrons had just finished building.

Trudi jumped to her feet, clapping her hands excitedly. She reached down and pulled Maggie to hers.

'It's the hay dance!' Trudi cried, a child having her birthday treat. 'The hay dance! They are going to do the hay dance! They must like you too, Maggie. They do it for you! You are their friend now.'

The matrons, all of them middle-aged or older, with faces curiously, almost frighteningly lacking in expression, began to move with a sort of ponderous precision. Shouldering their hayforks like rifles, they formed a straight line and began to clump heavily to and fro, their beribboned pigtails swinging as the music from the accordions swelled in volume. They pirouetted gravely, then resumed their rhythmic marching to and fro. The straight line, I saw, was now gradually curving into the shape of a half moon.

'I've never seen a dance like this before.' Maggie's voice was puzzled. I'd never seen a dance like it either and I knew with a sick and chilling certainty that I would never want to see one again — not, it seemed now, that I would ever have the chance to see one again.

Trudi echoed my thoughts, but their sinister implication escaped Maggie.

'And you will never see a dance like this again, Maggie,' she said. They are only starting. Oh, Maggie, they must like you — see, they want you I'

'Me?'

'Yes, Maggie. They like you. Sometimes they ask me. Today, you.'

'I must go, Trudi.'

'Please, Maggie. For a moment. You don't do anything. You just stand facing them. Please, Maggie. They will be hurt if you don't do this.'

Maggie laughed protestingly, resignedly. 'Oh, very well.'

Seconds later a reluctant and very embarrassed Maggie was standing at the focal point as a semi-circle of hayfork-bearing matrons advanced and retreated towards and from her. Gradually the pattern and the tempo of the dance changed and quickened as the dancers now formed a complete circle about Maggie. The circle contracted and expanded, contracted and expanded, the women bowing gravely as they approached most closely to Maggie, then flinging their heads and pigtails back as they stamped away again.

Goodbody came into my line of view, his smile, gently amused and kindly as he participated vicariously in the pleasure of the charming old dance taking place before him. He stood beside Trudi, and put a hand on her shoulder: she smiled delightedly up at him.

I felt I was going to be sick. I wanted to look away, but to look away would have been an abandonment of Maggie and I could never abandon Maggie: but God only knew that I could never help her now. There was embarrassment in her face, now, and puzzlement: and more than a hint of uneasiness. She looked anxiously at Trudi through a gap between two of the matrons: Trudi smiled widely and waved in gay encouragement.

Suddenly the accordion music changed. What had been a gently lilting dance tune, albeit with a military beat to it, increased rapidly in volume as it changed into something of a different nature altogether, something that went beyond the merely martial, something that was harsh and primitive and savage and violent. The matrons, having reached their fully expanded circle, were beginning to close in again. From my elevation I could still see Maggie, her eyes wide now and fear showing in her face: she leaned to one side to look almost desperately for Trudi. But there was no salvation in Trudi: her smile had gone now, her cotton-clad hands were clasped tightly together and she was licking her lips slowly, obscenely; I turned to look at Marcel, who was busy doing the same thing: but he still had his gun on me, and watched me as closely as he watched the scene outside. There was nothing I could do.

The matrons were now stamping their way inwards. Their moonlike faces had lost their expressionless quality and were now pitiless, implacable, and the deepening fear in Maggie's eyes gave way to terror, her eyes staring as the music became more powerful, more discordant still. Then abruptly, with military precision, the shoulder-borne pitchforks were brought sweeping down until they were pointed directly at Maggie. She screamed and screamed again but the sound she made was barely audible above the almost insanely discordant crescendo of the accordions. And then Maggie was down and, mercifully, all I could see was the back view of the matrons as their forks time and again jerked high and stabbed down convulsively at something that now lay motionless on the ground. For the space of a few moments I could look no longer. I had to look away, and there was Trudi, her hands opening and closing, her mesmerized entranced face with a hideous animal-like quality to it: and beside her the Reverend Goodbody, his face as benign and gently benevolent as ever, an expression that belied his staring eyes. Evil minds, sick minds that had long since left the borders of sanity far behind.

I forced myself to look back again as the music slowly subsided, losing its primeval atavistic quality. The frenzied activities of the matrons had subsided, the stabbing had ceased, and as I watched one of the matrons turned aside and picked up a forkful of hay. I had a momentary glimpse of a crumpled figure with a white blouse no longer white lying on the stubble, then a forkful of hay covered her from sight. Then came another forkful and another and another, and as the two accordions, soft and gentle and muted now, spoke nostalgically of old Vienna, they built a haystack over Maggie. Dr Goodbody and Trudi, she again smiling and chattering gaily, walked off arm in arm towards the village.

Marcel turned away from the gap in the planks and sighed. 'Dr Goodbody manages those things so well, don't you think? The flair, the sensitivity, the time, the place, the atmosphere — exquisitely done, exquisitely done.' The beautifully modulated Oxbridge accent emanating from that snake's head was no less repellent than the context in which the words were used: he was like the rest of them, quite mad.

He approached me circumspectly from the back, undid the handkerchief which had been tied round my head and plucked out the filthy lump of cotton that had been shoved into my mouth. I didn't think that he was being motivated by any humanitarian considerations, and he wasn't. He said offhandedly: 'When you scream, I want to hear it. I don't think the ladies out there will pay too much attention.'

I was sure they wouldn't. I said: 'I'm surprised Dr-Goodbody could drag himself away.' My voice didn't sound like any voice I'd ever used before: it was hoarse and thick and I'd difficulty in forming the words as if I'd damaged my larynx.

Marcel smiled. 'Dr Goodbody has urgent things to attend to in Amsterdam. Important things.'

'And important things to transport from here to Amsterdam.'

'Doubtless.' He smiled again and I could almost see his hood distending. 'Classically, my dear Sherman, when a person is in your position and has lost out and is about to die, it is customary for a person in my position to explain, in loving detail, just where the victim went wrong. But apart from the fact that your list of blunders is so long as to be too tedious to enumerate, I simply can't be bothered. So let's get on with it, shall we?'

'Get on with what?' Here it comes now, I thought, but I didn't much care: it didn't seem to matter much any more.

'The message from Mr Durrell, of course.' Pain sliced like a butcher's cleaver through my head and the side of my face as he slashed the barrel of his gun across it. I thought my left cheekbone must be broken, but couldn't be sure: but my tongue told me that two at least of my teeth had been loosened beyond repair.

'Mr Durrell,' Marcel said happily, 'told me to tell you that he doesn't like being pistol-whipped.' He went for the right side of my face this time, and although I saw and knew it was coming and tried to jerk my head back I couldn't get out of the way. This one didn't hurt so badly, but I knew I was badly hurt from the temporary loss of vision that followed the brilliant white light that seemed to explode just in front of my eyes. My face was on fire, my head was coming apart, but my mind was strangely clear. Very little more of this systematic clubbing, I knew, and even a plastic surgeon would shake his head regretfully: but what really mattered was that with very little more of this treatment I would lose consciousness, perhaps for hours. There seemed to be only one hope: to make his clubbing unsystematic.

I spat out a tooth and said: 'Pansy.'

For some reason this got him. The veneer of civilized urbanity couldn't have been thicker than an onion skin to begin with and it just didn't slough off, it vanished in an instant of time and what was left was a mindless beserker savage who attacked me with the wanton, unreasoning and insensate fury of the mentally unhinged, which he almost certainly was. Blows rained from all directions on my head and shoulders, blows from his gun and blows from his fists and when I tried to protect myself as best I could with my forearms he switched his insane assault to my body. I moaned, my eyes turned up, my legs turned to jelly and I would have collapsed had I been in a position to: as it was, I just hung limply from the rope securing my wrists.

Two or three more agony-filled seconds elapsed before he recovered himself sufficiently to realize that he was wasting his time: from Marcel's point of view there could be little point in inflicting punishment on a person who was beyond feeling the effects of it. He made a strange noise in his throat which probably indicated disappointment more than anything else, then just stood there breathing heavily.

What he was contemplating doing next I couldn't guess for I didn't dare open my eyes.

I heard him move away a little and risked a quick glance from the corner of my eye. The momentary madness was over and Marcel, who was obviously as opportunistic as he was sadistic, had picked up my jacket and was going through it hopefully but unsuccessfully, for wallets carried in the inner breast pocket of a jacket invariably fall out when that jacket is carried over the arm and I'd prudently transferred my wallet with its money, passport and driving licence to my hip pocket. Marcel wasn't long in arriving at the right conclusion for almost immediately I heard his footsteps and felt the wallet being removed from my hip pocket.

He was standing by my side now. I couldn't see him, but I was aware of this. I moaned and swung helplessly at the end of the rope that secured me to the rafter. My legs were trailed out behind me, the upper parts of the toes of my shoes resting on the floor. I opened my eyes, just a fraction.

I could see his feet, not more than a yard from where I was, I glanced up, for the fleeting part of a second. Marcel, with an air of concentration and pleased surprise was engrossed in the task of transferring the very considerable sums of money I carried in my wallet to his own pocket. He held the wallet in his left hand, while his gun dangled by the trigger-guard from the crooked middle finger of the same hand. He was so absorbed that he didn't see my hands reach up to get a better purchase on the securing ropes.

I jack-knifed my body convulsively forward and upwards with all the hate and the fury and the pain that was in me and I do not think that Marcel ever saw my scything feet coming. He made no sound at all, just jack-knifed forward in turn as convulsively as I had done, fell against me and slithered slowly to the floor. He lay there and his head rolled from side to side whether in unconscious reflex or in the conscious reflex of a body otherwise numbed in a paroxysm of agony I could not say but I was in no way disposed to take chances. I stood upright, took a long step back as far as my bonds would permit and came at him again. I was vaguely surprised that his head still stayed on his shoulders: it wasn't pretty but then I wasn't dealing with pretty people.

The gun was still hooked round the middle finger of his left hand. I pulled it off with the toes of my shoes. I tried to get a purchase on the gun between my shoes but the friction coefficient between the metal and the leather was too low and the gun kept sliding free. I removed my shoes by dragging the heels against the floor and then, a much longer process, my socks by using the same technique. I abraded a fair amount of skin and collected my quota of wooden splinters in so doing, but was conscious of no real sensation of hurt: the pain in my face made other minor irritation insignificant to the point of non-existence.

My bare feet gave me an excellent purchase on the gun. Keeping them tightly clamped together I brought both ends of the rope together and hauled myself up till I reached the rafter. This gave me four feet of slack rope to play with, more than enough. I hung by my left hand, reached down with my right while I doubled up my legs. And then I had the gun in my hand.

I lowered myself to the floor, held the rope pinioning my left wrist taut and placed the muzzle of the gun against it. The first shot severed it as neatly as any knife could have done'. I untied all the knots securing me, ripped off the front of Marcel's snow-white shirt to wipe my bloodied face and mouth, retrieved my wallet and money and left. I didn't know whether Marcel was alive or dead, he looked very dead to me but I wasn't interested enough to investigate.