The Castle of the Demon

by Reginald Hill

  He paused for effect.

  ‘Go on!’ said Emily obligingly.

  ‘Someone, it seemed, while we were in the base, had opened their top-security safe, extracted a small capsule which contained a piece of micro-tape on which was printed information of greater importance than anyone has seen fit to confide to me, and taken this as a souvenir. We were stripped, searched thoroughly, inside and out, which was rather disgusting, and cross-questioned for the rest of the night.’

  ‘But why? I mean, did it have to be one of you? And surely if the Americans agreed to the raid they’d have taken more precautions than they seemed to?’

  ‘Very true,’ said Carruthers. ‘That was the trouble, you see. They hadn’t agreed. And the orders Colonel Petard had sealed up for me didn’t mention the base. The ones I opened didn’t originate from him. And naturally there wasn’t a rush of volunteers to say where they had come from. Anyway, one of us had taken the tape. It seemed a good theory. When we were spotted on the way out the Commandant there put two and two together very quickly. He’s quite chummy with the Colonel. So he got on the phone, hence the reception party when we got home. The search produced nothing, so they started on the shore between where we had landed and the college. The trouble was, of course, that we made our way back individually. A little knot of six green men is a bit too obvious! No one had taken an excessive amount of time, but it meant there was a lot of possible ground to cover.’

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Yes. The capsule. But no sign of the tape. We were all put under arrest. Close, but not too close. They left us room to manœuvre. You see, the tape hadn’t been passed on yet. At least it seemed unlikely. And out of its capsule, exposed to the elements as it probably was, its magnetic field would begin to break down and within a couple of weeks at the most it would be unusable. So everyone was watching like mad. Mr. Conn arrived the next morning and has been around ever since. The Colonel has been part apologetic, part jubilant at the ease with which we got into the place. But I gather Conn reckons someone over there was in on it and made things easy. It’s nice to know they have their traitors too.’

  The word hung heavily on the air.

  ‘But tell me,’ said Emily. ‘You said you were watched all the time, under arrest. Well, why are you wandering around so freely now? And why’s Conn still here? And why …?’

  All the whys would have come tumbling out of her then if Carruthers hadn’t held up a restraining hand.

  ‘Hold on!’ he said. ‘Let me finish. The loose rein was too loose. Two nights later one of the party, a man called Ball, slipped away. Again it was pure chance that his absence was noted. Scott played hell.’

  ‘Scott? Michael Scott? What is he exactly?’

  ‘He’s our sort of trouble-shooter. He keeps an eye on all the colleges. Acts as liaison man with the locals.’

  ‘Do you like him?’ asked Emily.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Carruthers with a shrug. ‘He was, is, a … dangerous man I think. He went after Ball, got to him too late. I don’t know what happened exactly, but Ball’s body turned up on the sands down near Allonby the next morning.’

  ‘That was one of your men? But I thought it was a foreigner? I thought there was something about his teeth?’

  Carruthers nodded.

  ‘We do a thorough job here. If we’re caught alive that’s tough. But there’s no point in letting a dead body do any talking for you. There’s lots of ways a corpse can advertise its nationality. We rearrange as many of these as possible. A dentist wouldn’t think the National Health ever had anything to do with my mouth!

  ‘Well, with Ball gone, the trail seemed dead. The rest of us were let off the hook. But the heat’s still on till at least the fortnight’s up. We don’t know whether Ball made a contact or not. Certainly he didn’t have the tape when Scott reached him. And there’s been plenty of activity recently.’

  Emily sat on the bed, her head buzzing with the extraordinary story she had just heard.

  ‘Activity?’ she said faintly.

  ‘Yes. Castell was killed.’

  ‘Fenimore? What had he to do with it?’

  Carruthers raised his eyebrows as though at her naivety.

  ‘The Americans wanted to stake out the area for themselves. Naturally. Conn came here. The Castells were his plant at the hotel. They obviously stirred something up, something, after what happened to you, to do with those two phoney archaeologists. And you yourself were a problem.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, when the wife of the overall head of training suddenly appears on the scene under a false name at a time like this, people start worrying. Mr. Follett has been in touch with the situation from the start. Three days ago he appeared in person.’

  ‘I got the impression he was being put on the spot a little before,’ said Emily invitingly.

  ‘In a place like this, at a time like this, everyone’s got to be ready to stand up and explain themselves. Everyone.’

  ‘I see,’ said Emily thoughtfully. ‘What’s happening now?’

  ‘We have launched a search for Scott and for Inwit and Plowman. There was no sign of Michael. They found the rowing boat, but there’s no trace of the other two.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  He shrugged. ‘Almost certainly working for the opposition. Nasty people from the sound of them.’

  ‘And why me? Why was I involved?’

  It was a question she would be expected to ask. But she felt she knew the answer already.

  He looked at her curiously.

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs. Follett. Perhaps you tan tell me?’

  Emily sat in silence for a long while, trying to organise her thoughts into some kind of coherence. Carruthers kept very quiet, watching her carefully. There was an air of expectancy in the room.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ said Emily finally. ‘There is something … Listen, I’d like to talk to my husband if I may. Could you tell him?’

  ‘Certainly, Mrs. Follett. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.’

  ‘By the way, Captain,’ she asked curiously, ‘how does it come that someone of so junior a rank as yourself knows so much about my husband?’

  ‘Rank in an establishment like this is a matter of convenience,’ he said with a smile. ‘Old Petard’s the only one of us who’s ever had Her Majesty’s commission in a straightforward way. Robin Glover’s the real boss here. As for me, I’m just a kind of superior filing clerk!’

  He went swiftly from the room, closing the door gently behind him. There was no sound, but when she went to it a moment later it was, as she half expected, locked.

  She returned to her seat on the bed and to her still turbulent thoughts. She hadn’t yet made up her mind whether the humanity of the green men was a comfort or not.

  But for the first time since she had known him Sterne seemed to have put himself in her power. And she had no idea what to do about it.

  9

  It was more than two hours before anyone came. Curiously she did not mind the wait, though she was not normally a very patient woman. She lay full length on the bed and stared at the ceiling, occasionally nearly drifting into sleep so that the expanse of white plaster turned into the snow slopes in the Harz where Sterne had taken her to learn to ski, or the pale, pale sand which curved like the new moon round the royal blue sea of the Caribbean. Then she would start back to full waking as the memory of Scott, the blood trickling between his fingers, returned to her.

  Thinking of Scott made her wonder what had happened to Miranda. She fervently hoped that Inwit had not reached her with his trenching tool. And the thought of Miranda made her sit up violently on the bed as she remembered Cal. Poor Cal! Told to stay on guard at the cottage. What dreadful fears must be lying there with him now, for she was convinced he would not have moved. All his instincts would be telling him to go out and look for her. But the conditioned reflex was of great strength too. The memory of her command would not soon weaken.
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  She rose now and went to the window and looked out along the shore in the direction of the cottage. But it was out of sight as she knew it would be. She turned her gaze back to the sea, raised it and looked at the American base, so clear in the sunlight it looked like a scale model only a few yards away. Once again she thought of the story Carruthers had told her. She still shivered at the memory of the green men, but she finally decided it was better than ghosts, and ghouls, and green knights. Plowman had sounded curiously expert, but why not? A man does not have to be a moron to be a spy and murderer.

  She looked down at the placid sea and wondered if either of the archaeologists had been able to reach the shore. She doubted it. She would have no qualms of conscience if they had not done so. None at all. Conscience was a strange thing, not absolute as the moralists would have you believe, but relative, susceptible to all the pressures of habit, circumstance, loyalty, which affected all decisions and attitudes. It was not the fact that Inwit and Plowman were enemies of her country that cleansed her of guilt in the likelihood of their deaths, but her personal relationship with them, the terror they had caused her and their murder of big, happy, harmless Fenimore Castell.

  Harmless? What did she know about that? He had been one of these men too. Plowman himself had seemed jolly in an almost Dickensian way. It was the memory of Amanda, collapsed, faded, destroyed almost, which was affecting her judgement.

  So what was she debating about now? Was she trying to persuade herself to action or against it? Was what she thought she knew significant or not? No, that was a stupid evasive question. The answer was obvious.

  I suppose it comes down to love, liking, the loyalties of the heart, returning pleasure for pleasure and pain for pain, she thought, half mockingly as she made up her mind.

  And turned to find Sterne watching her from the open door.

  ‘May I come in?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘You have had a terrible experience, my dear,’ he said, closing the door.

  ‘Do you mean our marriage or last night?’ she gibed, feeling it necessary once more to attack.

  He did not even look pained.

  ‘All this must have come as a complete surprise to you, my dear. I am sorry for the deception that has been necessary all these years. But it was not so much a deception as a non-sharing, wasn’t it? Not the same thing as another woman, for instance.’

  There was no question mark in his voice, but he paused as though for a reply.

  ‘If you say so, Sterne,’ she said.

  He nodded as if satisfied.

  ‘It was, after all, in the service of my, our, country. There was some slight element of risk every time I went behind the Iron Curtain, and I apologise for involving you in this.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Emily. ‘What about involving me in this?’

  She moved her hand to encompass the college, the Grune, the past three days.

  ‘That was an error of judgement,’ he said carefully. ‘The second I have made concerning you, my dear. The first, of course, was marrying you.’

  He smiled sweetly as he uttered the insult. Emily felt a great urge to slap the back of her hand across his mouth, but held herself back. It would keep till later.

  “Why me, Sterne?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Marriage or this?’ he said, mockingly echoing her own early mockery. ‘Not that it isn’t the same thing in the end, of course. Strangely enough, I married you for love. Not perhaps what you in your then near-childish naivety would have called love. I found you not unintelligent, physically extremely attractive and above all malleable. You inspired creativity in me, my dear, and that is what I think of as love. I could have had women as beautiful, and much more gifted, sitting as hostess at my table any time I wished. But they would have been bought. Not that I minded that. The straightforward economic relationship is always the best I have found. So clean, so simple. But you invited me into the messy business of creation and I succumbed.’

  ‘Weak of you,’ said Emily, feeling incredulously that in a way he believed he was paying her compliments.

  ‘An indulgence, yes,’ he corrected. ‘I enjoyed it for a long time. Till I had finished and you were perfect for the job, or should have been. But creation’s a messy business. The suppleness of clay is what makes it the material of the potter. But once moulded and graven and glazed, its suppleness is gone. If you drop it it breaks. And if you’re not careful it can cut you.’

  ‘Hurrah for the analogy,’ said Emily. ‘You talk in metaphors and parables, you and the Bible both. Let’s get up to date, shall we?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘My second error of judgement, not so serious by half I’m glad to say, was to ask you to perform this little task for me. It seemed harmless enough, an inspired extemporisation I felt. It would also have involved you all unknowing in something that could carry with it a considerable prison sentence. I like everyone connected with me to have some little black mark against their name in the law’s book, or rather in my book to be transferred to the law’s if necessary. Take young Burgess, for instance. He has had some interesting and spectacular sexual adventures in his time. I could show you pictures which would surprise you. I was touched by the near normality of his interest in you. He had to be reprimanded quite severely a couple of times.’

  He was talking freely, far too freely, Emily thought uneasily. He was an accomplished persuader when he wished and could easily have put up some fairly substantial smoke-screen. But he didn’t seem to care in the least.

  ‘Why are you telling me all this, Sterne?’ she heard herself asking. She didn’t really want an answer, though what possible answer could bother her she couldn’t see.

  ‘Tell me, my dear,’ he replied. ‘If I had told you that this business at the college had nothing to do with my requesting you to come here, would you have believed me? That it was just coincidence?’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t,’ said Sterne. She didn’t feel her question had been answered, but decided not to press it.

  ‘This tape. Was it going to be in the book?’

  ‘Originally, yes,’ he said. ‘There were all kinds of changes of plan. In theory the Americans wouldn’t have missed a thing till next day and our people at the college wouldn’t have been alerted till the debriefing on return. The book was in the college library, a little cavity ready prepared in the spine for the tape. But things went wrong. Ball had to hide the tape on the Grune—he knew as soon as the Yanks spotted them that they’d all be searched when they got back. He had to be the one to pick it up again. It was so small that only the hider could stand much chance of finding it, especially at night. So off he set to get it. He had the book with him. But Scott spotted he was missing and went in pursuit. Whether he actually got to the tape or not, I do not know. Nor what happened to the book.’

  ‘Which was to have been passed on to me.’

  ‘Eventually. I did not know about these complications when I phoned you. I almost cancelled the arrangement when I heard what had happened but on second thoughts it seemed worth while letting it stand. It’s always a good thing to have as many strings to your bow as possible.’ He smiled. ‘There you are, dear. I am an enemy agent. You protected me downstairs when you did not know for sure, but must have suspected greatly. What are you going to do now the words have been spoken?’

  He might have been asking her to dance, the way he stood quietly and confidently before her.

  ‘Sterne,’ she replied at last. ‘You mean nothing to me. Understand that. In the past I have owed you something, I suppose. Much, by your scale of values, I think. Most of that debt has long since been repayed in a variety of ways. I have suffered, in great comfort I know, but I have suffered none the less. However, I had decided before you came in that if there was any of that debt left in your mind, if I still owed anything at all, now I would finally cancel it out by my silence.’

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p; He nodded approvingly, not so much as her decision, she felt, but at some conclusion of his own.

  She went on. ‘Then, however, I wasn’t absolutely sure. I was merely in possession of information which made you look very suspicious indeed. Things have changed. Now I know for certain. I’m not sure if I can keep quiet now.’

  He nodded again, like an approving tutor.

  ‘Good. Good. I’m glad to see how correct my analysis of your thought processes has been. There was a slight risk involved in letting young Carruthers tell you the story. You might have told him about our chat on the telephone that night. But I made a little wager with myself that you wouldn’t.’

  He allowed himself a slight almost secret smile of self-congratulation.

  But he wanted me to be certain of the truth, Emily thought. He didn’t want me to keep quiet. Or to be willing to keep quiet. Why?

  ‘And I thought your mind would work exactly along the line you’ve described, my dear. Well. It may be some little consolation to you to know that I had decided to kill you no matter what conclusion you came to.’

  The words did not mean anything at first to Emily. Then she began to laugh as convincingly as she could. It was ludicrous. He must know what a fool he was making of himself. He stared at her intently.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I feel a strange desire to make love to you for one last time before we part for ever. You wouldn’t feel able to pander to the whims of an old secret agent, would you?’

  Still laughing, she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ he said as if to himself. ‘I suppose not. A younger man, you’re ready for a younger man now. Scott, perhaps, if he were not drowned by now. Or even Burgess.’

  ‘Scott drowned?’ she said chokingly, all laughter gone. ‘Has he been found?’