‘You still haven’t said anything about how you wound up here.’
‘How I actually got to this cave is a long story, ma’am, and probably not worth telling. Why I started on my journey here is another barrel of catfish, as we used to say in Athens.’
‘Why then?’
‘I joined the Army because I wanted to fight Germans. I was already in the Army before I discovered that’s not what they wanted us for. What they really wanted was us to do was haul and lift and fetch just like usual. I didn’t think it was right that we’d have to do the same old shit we’d always done on top of maybe getting killed.’
‘You deserted.’
‘No, ma’am, wrong again. I talked about it. Loudly. Some people didn’t like it. The Klan for instance.’
‘The Klan, as in Ku Klux Klan? You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no Klan in the U.S. Army.’
‘Afraid you’re wrong about that too, ma’am. There most certainly is. Lots of members too, I’m afraid. Anyway, they have this game where they come into your unit, kidnap you and take you twenty or so miles from your home base. In my case it was in Northern Ireland, just after we shipped out. They let you go and tell you the rules. If you can make it back to your unit alive you get to stay that way; if they catch you, they kill you. Simple. What they don’t tell you is that they strip you, beat you senseless and cut you up a little before you start.’
‘You got away?’
‘No, ma’am, I did not, not for too long anyway, but I took three of the sons of bitches with me on the run. I got caught by the military police and thrown in the glasshouse for murder. They were transporting me over here for trial when I managed to get away.’
‘That’s crazy. Didn’t you tell them what happened?’
‘Why bother?’ said the sergeant. ‘They wouldn’t have believed me.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jane.
‘Now maybe he would have believed me.’ The sergeant smiled again and wrapped the blanket a little tighter around his shoulders, old memories chilling him.
‘We’re all the same here; the musician at the fire is Peter Potter, although I doubt that’s his real name. A schoolteacher. Some accused him of being a homosexual and that was the end for him. Lost his job and all. Even the Army wouldn’t take him. The boy there just turned up at the cave a month ago. He’s either deaf or he’s scared out of his wits. Likely both. We’re all the same, one way or the other; we just have a different face on it. Some people even war doesn’t want. We’re flotsam and jetsam you might say, tossed on the tide of events.’
Angus clapped his hands suddenly, rising out of his crouch. ‘Come along now, you’ve sat about in those wet things for too long. We’ll get some dry clothes on you and then we’ll have a wee palaver about what to do about you and yon Okkey.’
Chapter Nineteen
Dundee made his way carefully downward. The stairs were dark and narrow and had probably once been used by the servants who had undoubtedly occupied the attic room he’d just left. He made his way down for a long time in almost complete darkness, when suddenly the flight of steps ended in a heavy, panelled door. Dundee turned the knob and found himself standing in an immense hallway tiled in a sombre grey-green marble. The walls were wainscoted in some heavy wood that was probably oak and above that they were covered in a pale green moiré silk that matched the floors.
To the right was an archway leading to a narrow hall and to the left the main hall widened to include a grand staircase that swept in an elegant curve up to a banistered mezzanine and doorways leading off in all directions. What had to be the front entrance to the house was made up of a pair of massive carved doors set into a vestibule guarded by a marble urn on one side and another white-jacketed guard on the other.
This one was seated, chair tilted back against the wall, snoring. Dundee looked up. The centrepiece of the entrance hall was a gigantic and obviously very old cast-iron chandelier, ratcheted up on a heavy-linked chain under the colossal, churchlike hammer beams of the ceiling at least thirty feet above his head.
At the base of the staircase stood a life-size statue in Carrera marble, the stone white as death and depicting a classically robed maiden on a plinth of withered roses. The maiden was young, barely a woman by her figure, left hand extended above her head like a dancer, long hair flowing as if being blown by the wind, right hand held up in a strange gesture – one finger extended like the holy mother giving her benediction before the advent of her child, eyes blind as justice, unaware of who might be coming in the door. In sinister contrast to the young girl’s innocence, at the foot of the stairs a few feet away there was a tapestry depicting what had to be the Rape of the Sabines. Below the tapestry there was a stone bench, again in white Carrera, its bases depicting seated rams, horns sharp and twisted, mouths and teeth in terrible twin grimaces; the rams in turn supporting leering Pan figures enclosing a hellish back piece depicting a savage, unrepentant bacchanalia of coupling women and men, devils and animals.
The whole thing was more like some mad dream of a baronial hunting lodge than a hospital. The only things missing were the severed heads of a cross section of African wildlife staring down at him from the walls with glazed, dead eyes. Except for the sleeping guard there was no one around but he was aware of a steady drone of murmuring voices from behind one of the closed doors nearest the main entrance.
He could also smell the overwhelming aroma of freshly brewed coffee and it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t had anything to eat since the station restaurant at King’s Cross. He thought of Jane suddenly and felt a tug of anxiety; if she was lucky the Robbie Burns would be coming into Glasgow just about now and she’d be waking up in time for the Scots version of bacon and eggs. Somehow he doubted it. She had lied to him about who or at least what she really was but he’d never forgive himself if he’d drawn her into a trap prepared by Charlie Danby.
He crossed the floor, his sturdy boots booming on the marble, one eye on the guard at the front entrance. Either he was dead to the world or he simply didn’t care. Dundee reached the dining room door, turned the knob and entered.
What now passed for the dining room in the Akergill Sanitorium had once been two rooms, perhaps an adjoining library and sitting room. The first room had a long and heavy side table loaded down with covered sterling silver salvers. What appeared to be a huge pheasant, head still attached and plumage arranged neatly around its dripping, roasted flesh, lay in the centre of a tray devoted to various types of bacon and other fried meats. There was another table off to one side for coffee and tea and a third table for crockery and cutlery.
From the serving table he was apparently supposed to take his food into the next room, which held a long refectory-style table set in front of a row of tall windows, all of them still covered with heavy damask curtains in the same green colour as the silk walls in the hall outside. The walls in both rooms were originally panelled wood, now painted a creamy white. The ceilings were done in French plaster ovals and the light was given by dangling chandeliers in gleaming, delicate crystal.
There were half a dozen men and one woman seated at the table. The men were dressed informally, as though for a weekend in the country. The woman was in her fifties, wore a tweed suit and had her hair drawn up in a bun. She wore glasses and had the pinched look of a schoolteacher who had been doing the job for longer than she intended.
Pausing just inside the door, Dundee listened to their animated conversation. Somehow it sounded brittle and practised, as though he was watching a bad play in a West End theatre in London. The man at the head of the table looked up from his plate and spotted Dundee watching them. He was a little portly, in his early sixties, grey-haired and pleasant-looking, his eyes pale blue and curious. He was wearing a three-piece worsted suit with a heavy gold watch chain arcing from one side to the other of his substantial pot belly.
‘Mr Portal!’ he boomed. ‘How good of you to join us.’ He waved Dundee into the room. ‘Dr McNab said you might partake of bre
akfast. My name is Sir John Gadsby. I’m the director of this fine institution.’
‘Where is the good doctor?’ asked Dundee. He drew himself a cup of coffee from a tall, spigoted urn and stepped into the dining room, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.
‘Attending to another patient, I believe,’ said Gadsby.
Dundee brought his coffee into the room and sat at the far end of the table, as far as possible from everyone else. He took a tentative sip from the delicate cup. It was excellent. He put the cup down carefully in its saucer.
‘Tell me, Sir John, what exactly is the point of all this? Surely it’s not entirely for my benefit. Even Charlie wouldn’t go that far. You know perfectly well who I am and it’s not David Portal, Canadian merchant marine swabbie.’
Gadsby smiled. ‘Who are any of us really, Mr Portal, when you get right down to it?’ He took a tiny, almost feminine sip from his own cup, his small tongue flicking lightly out of his mouth as though to test the liquid before he committed himself. His eyes never left Dundee’s. ‘My specialty is psychiatry, you see. I’m afraid you’re asking a rather fundamental question which haunts us all.’
‘Very nicely put, Sir John, but it doesn’t answer the real question.’ Dundee smiled. ‘And don’t ask me what the real question is.’ Everyone else at the table was watching the two men silently. No one had said anything since Dundee walked into the room, their own little stage play suspended for the moment.
The portly man sighed. ‘This could become irksome with time.’
‘It already is.’
‘Then why don’t we stop it?’ said Gadsby. ‘You know who you are although I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t quite sure how you got here.’ A small smile flashed across the man’s face and the blue eyes were suddenly several shades darker. ‘It is a fundamental of my trade, Mr Portal, that we are the arbiters of who is who and what is what. That is our function actually – to tell people who is sane and who is not. You are not what you say you are but what we say you are.’ The smile became smaller. ‘It’s very democratic actually. It’s a question of majority rule when you get right down to it.’
‘You’re telling me I’m crazy?’
‘Perhaps, although it’s not a word I like to use. Let’s just say I have the ability to do that.’ The smile was now completely gone. ‘And be taken at my word.’
Dundee climbed to his feet, the taste of the coffee suddenly bitter as ashes in his mouth. ‘This is a pretty fancy mental institution. I don’t think I like it here.’
‘Then feel free to go, Mr Portal. This is not a mental institution, no matter what you think. It is a place of healing. The sooner you come to realise that, the better.’
‘So I can just leave?’
‘By all means, if that is what you want. We certainly don’t want to hold anyone here by force.’ The smile was back. ‘After all, this is not Mr Stalin’s Russia.’
‘Or Nazi Germany.’
‘No,’ said Gadsby, ‘not that either.’
Without another word Dundee turned on his heel and left the room. He went back through the serving room, pausing just long enough to cram half a dozen strips of bacon between two thick slices of bread, and then he was back in the front hall. If he was going to get any distance he’d need something to sustain him.
Cramming the roughly made sandwich into the pocket of his newly acquired tweed jacket, he marched across the broad space to the front door. Ignoring the guard completely he threw open the door and stepped outside. Instantly he understood Gadsby’s ease at giving him leave to go anytime he wanted.
Dundee had rarely seen such a desolate spot in his life. From the light it couldn’t be much more than six thirty or seven in the morning but a torn sky of low, scudding clouds, grey as shrouds, made telling the sun’s position impossible. He could be anywhere – north, east, south or west.
All he could tell for sure was that the ancient old building was located at the end of a curving, rocky headland topped by a scattering of twisted, windblown trees. A long gravel lane ran out from the main road, itself no more than a bare track winding through the empty, rolling landscape of some unnamed moor that stretched in every direction without any sign of human habitation.
Beyond Akergill Hall itself was the sea, pounding at the base of low, rotted cliffs, lines of broken waves rolling in monotonously, their tops bearded with spinning foam wrenched from the top of each angry breaker by the gusting wind. Trying to orient himself, Dundee found that it was impossible; he could be staring out at the English Channel as well as he could be looking towards the North Sea or the Scottish Hebrides. Suddenly Dundee was ten years old again, lost in the woods on a camping trip in the Santa Ynez Mountains with his father, realising that he hadn’t told anyone he was going off by himself, realising that right now nobody in the world had any idea where he was and that he’d have to get out of his predicament all by himself.
He turned and looked back the way he’d come. The front of the house was enormous, the main floor stone and half-timbered stucco, the stucco’s original chalky whitewash long since stained and weathered to a sickly yellow, spiderwebs of mould and mildew creeping over the surface like broken veins on the cheeks of an old woman.
It went out in two huge wings from the central hall, each at least four storeys tall, ending in towers and turrets like broken brick teeth against the hurtling sky above, rushing in from the sea. More than anything it looked like an old resort hotel, long since gone to seed, but why anyone would have wanted to build a hotel in this godforsaken place was beyond him.
He turned away from the house finally, following a barely visible path that ran out to the edge of the cliff and a set of wide stone stairs that looked as though they’d been blasted out of the spray-riven stone, smoothed by years of storm and the simple passage of time on this lonely coastline.
He finally found a clue to his location. At the foot of the stairs there was an old concrete fortification, a two-storeyed monstrosity built half into the rock, circular, flat-roofed with a wide slit in the front, a single rectangular eye looking out over the grey-brown expanse of heaving water. Built before the last war, there would have once been a three- or four-inch naval gun poking out of that slit, pointing towards the enemy and her great fleet of battleships and dreadnought-prowed cruisers. Times had changed and no ship would cruise so close to an enemies’ coastline; today it would be a U-boat but the enemy was still Germany, as it had been twenty-five years ago; not so long really as the distances between wars go.
Dundee stared out over the water, able to see in his mind’s eye the sleek black submarines coming out into open water from Bremerhaven and the dangerous, shifting sands of the Frisian Islands; this was the North Sea, which put him somewhere on England’s thinly populated north-east coast. Something flashing caught his eye from the interior of the old gun tower; a flash of light reflecting off the lens of a pair of binoculars or maybe the scrape and glow of a match.
He took the bacon sandwich out of his pocket, eating it hungrily and keeping his eyes on the gun tower. The light didn’t come again. He wiped his fingers on the jacket and headed down the stairway to the stony beach below.
He counted the steps as he went, wondering if there’d be thirty-nine like the book by John Buchan of the same name. There’d been an English boy at Bain with the deadly first name of Evelyn who’d had a collection of the Richard Hannay novels. Dundee had read them all, including The Thirty-nine Steps, wondering as he did how the bland and sickly Buchan could write such thrilling stories.
He reached the bottom of the stairs at a count of twenty-eight and stepped down onto the rocks, slipping and sliding as he moved across the shiny, wet stones that made up what passed for a beach here. Once again he wondered what could have possessed someone to build Akergill Hall in such a spot; it certainly hadn’t been with seaside holidays in mind. Wading in that boiling water would be courting disaster and no spade had ever cut into these stones in hopes of making a sandcastle. There were n
o rock pools to investigate, no sand dunes to climb and no handy spot to sun yourself either, just the odd piece of seaweed-festooned driftwood and the rusting spikes of more ageing fortifications that clearly dated back to the gun tower’s time.
The entrance to the gun tower was towards the rear of the building, a simple metal door, studded with rivets and fitted with a welded pull ring instead of a latch. Dundee tugged on it and the door opened easily on recently oiled hinges. Somebody was using the gun tower on a reasonably regular basis. There was a flight of metal steps leading up to the second level of the tower. Dundee began to climb, his booted feet ringing on each step.
The top level was empty, the roof above Dundee’s head rusted iron. There was a large semi-circular mechanism with a central ratchet hub in the centre, rusty as the roof, that had once let the old naval gun traverse from left to right through the wide observation slit. The gun itself was long gone. A man in a long trench coat belted tightly at the waist was standing at the slit, a pair of binoculars in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Hearing Dundee, the man lowered the glasses and turned. He smiled a greeting.
’‘Hello, Ten Spot,’ the man said. Dundee nodded. He’d known who it was going to be from the moment he entered the tower.
‘Hello, Charlie.’
Chapter Twenty
Charles Danby dropped the binoculars, letting them dangle from the leather strap around his neck. He took a step or two towards Dundee, hand extended, and then stopped, the hand slowly falling to his side. He stepped back. He still had the good looks of a much younger man but there were telltale lines on his face now marking years of hard living.
‘You don’t look too happy to see me, Ten Spot.’ Somehow, years ago at Bain Academy, Danby had found out Dundee’s middle name was Decimus and had never let him forget it, nicknaming him ‘Ten Spot’ and calling him that ever since. Dundee loathed the name.
An American Spy Page 19