Trial Run

13

The dragon on the door was arguing with someone else when I went in. I shoved Stephen’s pass under her nose closely enough for her to see that it was a pass, and kept it moving. Her eyes hardly slid my way as her tongue lashed into some unfortunate offender, and I went on up the stairs as if I lived there.

Stephen’s cell-like room felt a proper sanctuary. I struggled out of my jacket and one sweater and collapsed gratefully on to his bed.

For quite a long time I simply lay there, waiting for what one might call the life force to flow back. What with illnesses and the inevitable knocks of life on the land, not to mention the crunches involved in jump racing, I was fairly experienced in the way one’s body dealt with misfortunes. I was accustomed to the lassitude that damped it down while it put itself to rights, and to the way that this would eventually lift it into a new feeling of vigour. I knew that the fierce soreness of my fingers would get worse for at least another twelve hours, and would then get better. I’d been concussed enough times to know that the sponginess in my mind would go away slowly, like fog clearing, leaving only an externally tender area of bruised scalp.

All that, in fact, would be the way of it if I gave it rest and time: but rest and time were two commodities I was likely to lack. Better to make the most of what I had. Better, I dared say, to sleep: but one factor I was not used to, and had never had to deal with before, was keeping me thoroughly awake. The sharp threat of death.

There wouldn’t be any more lucky escapes. The fourth close encounter would be the last. For if my attackers had learned one thing conclusively during the past two days, it must have been that it was necessary to kill at once, and fast. No fooling around with horse boxes, kidnappings, or icy rivers. Next time... if there was a next time... I should be dead before I realised what had happened. It was enough, I thought, to send one scurrying to the airport... to leave the battle to be fought by someone else.

After a while I sat up and took the long telex out of my pocket.

Read again the pages about Hans Kramer.

Eight schools. Doctors, hospitals, and clinics. Ill-health, like mine. And, like me, success on ponies, and on horses. Like me, a spot of foreign travel to equestrian events: I to the awesome Pardubice in Czechoslovakia and the Maryland Hunt Cup over fixed timber fences in America, and he to top-rank horse trials around Europe: Italy, France, Holland and England.

Died at Burghley in September of a heart attack, aged thirty-six. Body shipped home, and cremated.

End of story.

I took off my glasses and tiredly rubbed my eyes. If there was anything useful to be gleaned from all the unasked detail it was totally invisible to my current mental sight.

I tried to clear my mind by shaking it, which was about as useful as stirring old port with a teaspoon. Bits of sediment clogged my thoughts and little green spots slid around behind my eyes.

I read the rest of the telex twice and by the end had taken in hardly a word.

Start again.

Yes, I knew all that.

I put the sheets down. Hughes-Beckett, if it was indeed he who had sent the telex, which was unsigned and had no indication of origin, was up to his old tricks of seeming to help while encouraging failure. Flooding me with useless-looking information while warning me away from the one who really might pose a threat to Johnny Farringford.

Hughes-Beckett, I thought a shade irritably, had not the slightest idea of what was actually going on.

To be fair to him, how could he know if I didn’t tell him?

The mechanics of telling him were not that easy. Anything sent from the Embassy via the telex ran the gauntlet of Malcolm Herrick’s inside informer: and since Malcolm had learned of Oliver telling me to send a message directly from Kutuzovsky Prospect, he had probably made his arrangements there as well. The one place I did not want my adventures turning up was on the front page of The Watch.

There was the telephone, to which someone at either end might listen. There was the mail, which was slow, and might be intercepted.

There was Ian, who, if I read it right, probably had his own secure hot-line to the ears back home, but might not have the authority to lend it to any odd private citizen who applied.

In the back of my mind, also, there hovered an undefined question mark about the soundness of Ian as an ally.

Stephen’s friend duly came to collect Stephen’s pass, at shortly after eleven: and Stephen and Gudrun returned, full of bonhomie and onions.

‘Onions!’ Gudrun said. ‘Back in the shops today after four months without them. No eggs, of course. It’s always something.’

‘Want some tea?’ Stephen suggested, and went to make it.

There floated about both of them the glow of an evening well spent, and perversely their warmth depressed my already low spirits to sinking point; like Scrooge at Christmas.

‘What you need,’ Stephen said, coming back and making an accurate diagnosis with a glance, ‘is half a pint of vodka and some good news.’

‘Supply them,’ I said.

‘Have a biscuit.’

He unearthed a packet from the recesses of the bookcase and cleared a space on the table for the mugs. Then, seeming to be struck by a thought, he began rigging up a contraption of drawing-pins and string, and upon the string he threaded his bedside alarm clock, so that it hung there loudly ticking on the wall. It was only towards the end of this seemingly senseless procedure that I remembered that that exact spot was the lair of the bug.

‘Better interference than nothing, if they’re listening,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And they get a right earful when the alarm goes off.’

The tea probably did more good than the unavailable vodka. A certain amount of comfort began to creep along the nerves.

‘All visitors have to be gone by ten-thirty,’ Stephen nonchalantly said.

‘Will they check?’

‘I’ve never known it.’

Halfway down the mug a modicum of order returned to my thoughts. Very welcome: like a friend much missed.

‘Gudrun,’ I said lazily, ‘would you cast your peepers over something for me?’

‘Sorry?’

I put down the mug and picked up the telex, and she noticed the up-to-date state of the hand I hadn’t used.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That must really hurt.’

Stephen looked from my fingers to my face. ‘Are they broken?’ he said.

‘Can’t tell.’

I could scarcely move them, which proved nothing one way or the other. They had swelled like sausages, and gone dark, and it was a fair certainty the nails would go black, if they didn’t actually come off. It was no worse, really, than if one had been galloped on by a horse, and injuries of that order had been all in the day’s work. I smiled lop-sidedly at their horrified faces and handed Gudrun the telex.

‘Would you read all the stuff about Hans Kramer, and see if it means anything to you which it doesn’t to me? He was German, and you are a German, and you might see a significance I’ve missed.’

‘All right.’ She looked doubtful, but compliantly read right to the end.

‘What strikes you?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing very much.’

‘He went to eight different schools,’ I said. ‘Would that be usual?’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Not unless his family moved a lot.’

‘His father was and is a big industrialist in Dusseldorf.’

She read through the schools again, and finally said, ‘I think one of these places specialises in children who are... different. Perhaps they have troubles like epilepsy, or perhaps they are...’ She made tumbling motions with her hands, at a loss for the word.

‘Mixed-up?’

‘That’s right. But they also take people who have a special talent and need special schooling. Like athletes. Perhaps Hans Kramer went there because he was exceptionally good at riding.’

‘Or because seven other schools slung him out?’

‘Perhaps, yes.’

‘What about the doctors and hospitals?’

She read through the list again with her mouth negatively pursed, and finally shook her head.

‘Would they be, for instance,’ I said, ‘anything to do with orthopaedics?’

‘Bones and things?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes went back to the list, but the no’s had it.

‘Anything to do with heart troubles? Are any of those people or places specialists in chest surgery?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

I thought. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘anything to do with psychiatry?’

‘I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t know much about...’ Her eyes widened suddenly and she looked rather wildly down at the list. ‘Oh my goodness...’

‘What is it?’

‘The Heidelberg University clinic.’

‘What about it?’

‘Don’t you know?’ She saw from my face that I didn’t. ‘Hans Kramer attended it, it says here, for about three months in nineteen seventy.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why is that important?’

‘Nineteen seventy... There was a doctor called Wolfgang Huber working there. He was supposed to be great at straightening out... mixed-up... children from rich families. Not little children... teenagers and young adults, our age. People who were violently rebellious against their parents.’

‘He seems to have managed it all right with Hans Kramer, then,’ I said. ‘Because isn’t that clinic the last on the list?’

‘Yes,’ Gudrun said. ‘But you don’t understand.’

‘Tell me.’

She could hardly frame the sentences, so intense were her thoughts.

‘Dr Huber taught them that to cure themselves they had to destroy the system which was making them feel the way they did. He told them they would have to destroy the world of their parents... He called it terrorism therapy.’

‘My God.’

‘And... and...’ Gudrun practically gasped for breath. ‘I don’t know what effect it had on Hans Kramer... but... Dr Huber was deliberately teaching his patients... to follow in the footsteps of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.’

Time, as they say, stood still.

‘You’ve seen a ghost,’ Stephen said.

‘I’ve seen a pattern... and a plan.’

The teachings of Dr Wolfgang Huber, I supposed, had been a sort of extreme extension of the theories behind the communist revolution. Destroy the corrupt capitalist system and you will emerge into a clean healthy society run by the workers. A seductive, idealistic dream which seemed always to appeal most to intellectuals of the middle class, who had both the brains and the means to pursue it.

Even in the hands of visionaries the doctrine had led to widespread killing. People like Dr Huber, however, had preached their gospel not to reasoning adults, but to already disturbed youth, and the result in widening ripples had been the Baader-Meinhof followers, the Palestinian Black September, The Irish Republican Army, the Argentinian ERP and The Japanese Red Army, with endless virulent offshoots among small groups like Croatians, South Moluccans, and Basques.

The place most free from terrorism was the land which still encouraged and nurtured it, the land where the seedling had raised its attractive head.

At the Munich Olympics, the world had awakened in a state of shock to the existence of the growing crop.

Eight years later, at the Moscow Olympics, someone was planning to carry the fruit home.