Corpus

by Rory Clements

  ‘In line, please. Face the wall.’

  What do you do when a man holds a gun to your head and orders you to do something that will render you helpless, utterly at his mercy? Like the condemned man on the scaffold, you submit, even though you know death is coming. By submitting you might remain alive a few seconds or minutes longer, perhaps make death less painful; you hope, too, for a reprieve, that the killer might have a change of heart, that the police might arrive. But they won’t, and you know it. There are no heroics when a man holds a loaded gun to your head.

  ‘In the name of God,’ Wilde begged again, ‘spare the lives of these boys. They can’t hurt you.’ Except he knew they could. They could hurt Sawyer very badly.

  Maxwell and Felsted were shaking, uncomprehending, but they did what they were told, standing on either side of Wilde. The three of them faced the dark brick of the side wall along the concrete pathway to the overgrown back garden of Wilde’s pleasant house. Wilde smelt the sudden hot whiff of urine from his right. Felsted. Two seconds, then the crack of a gunshot. Maxwell crumpled. Wilde turned to plead again. A second shot, a sharp pain and he felt himself collapse in a heap. A third shot and Felsted crumpled.

  ‘One bullet apiece,’ said Sawyer.

  ‘A bullet costs three pfennigs.’ Dorfen thrust the pistol into his belt. ‘With such economies, an empire might last a thousand years.’

  *

  It took a few moments for Wilde to realise he was alive. The movement of his head as the shot came had saved him. He could smell blood and cordite and burning and piss. His hair was burnt, the side of his head was scoured by the trace of the bullet. He could hear little but a savage ringing in his ear.

  Someone gripped him by his hair. Wilde imagined them peering at the back of his head, before releasing it. Wilde allowed his head to drop, lifeless.

  He waited, still as death, expecting the coup de grâce. Through the metallic thunder in his head, he heard their footsteps recede, then the car roared into life and sped off along the road. When he was sure it was gone, he clambered onto all fours, then to his haunches. He felt his head. Blood poured through his fingers.

  ‘Felsted,’ he said. ‘Maxwell.’ He touched their slumped bodies in turn, but there was no response, no pulse at their throats or wrists or chests. No breath. Two private eyes out for some fun at Christmas. He began to weep.

  Hauling himself upright he stumbled along the passageway, up the steps to his front door, fumbling for the key as he ran. Inside he grabbed the telephone receiver. What in God’s name was the number? It was there in pencil on a pad in front of him. He had written it himself when Lydia had first gone to the police station after finding Nancy’s body. He dialled, his hand surprisingly steady. A desk officer answered. He shouted the address – told him to send an ambulance, doctors, anyone. Then he dropped the telephone; it clattered to the floor.

  His motorbike goggles and gauntlets were on a shelf beside the coat-rack. He kept an electric torch there, the same one he had taken to Brandham Hall. He picked it up. It was dead. He kept matches and candles somewhere in the kitchen. Where?

  He was in a hurry. The police would arrive soon, and he didn’t want to be here. They would only hold him up. Behind him he heard someone trying the front door. It swung open. Too late. Not the police: Philip Eaton.

  ‘You left a message . . .’ Eaton tailed off and his mouth fell open, appalled. ‘What’s happened to you, Wilde? You look as if you’ve been shot.’

  ‘I’m fine, but . . . Outside. Two bodies. Undergraduates. Wrong place. Wrong time. Sawyer and Dorfen shot us.’

  ‘Dr Sawyer?’

  ‘Yes, and Dorfen.’

  ‘Good God, your head . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’ Wilde let out a long, low breath of despair. ‘God in heaven, Eaton, they were on their way to a Christmas party. Those poor boys. Their parents. What will I say to them?’

  ‘Take it easy. We’ll have a look outside. Show me.’ Eaton was surprisingly calm.

  ‘They stuck to me like glue. Jesus, I should have told them to fuck off.’ Wilde put his head in his hands, combing his fingers through the tangle of hair and sticky blood. He recoiled when his finger touched the raw wound. The bullet had carved a furrow in the bone.

  ‘Do you want me to look at that first?’

  ‘No, but you’ll have to speak up. My head’s thundering.’ Wilde began to open the front door, then stopped. ‘My torch batteries are dead. I was looking for candles.’

  ‘You’re in shock. Take deep breaths. I have a torch.’ Eaton took it from his coat pocket and switched it on.

  Wilde ran along the passageway, Eaton behind him, his torch casting erratic light as he moved. The scene that met them was carnage. Blood on the wall; two lifeless bodies, one kneeling forward, his head against the wall, one splayed to the right. Eaton bent to check the pulses. Shook his head.

  ‘This is it,’ Eaton said under his breath.

  ‘Come on,’ Wilde said. ‘My motorbike.’

  ‘It’s happening. Tonight. But where?’

  ‘St Wilfred’s. It must be. They wanted to stop me going to the priory . . .’

  CHAPTER 35

  The Rudge surged and roared beneath his body. Wilde pushed the motorbike to the limit, sliding into the slippery bends and accelerating out; he had never ridden faster or with darker intent. He was riding for Lydia and Nancy and Maxwell and Felsted. Hartmut Dorfen and Duncan Sawyer would pay.

  Eaton sat behind him on the pillion seat, his gloveless hands clasped round Wilde’s waist. Within a hundred yards of St Wilfred’s Priory, out of sight of the front windows, Wilde killed the engine. In his pocket he had a penknife for sharpening pencils. Nothing more.

  Eaton dismounted, removed a pistol from his pocket and held it up to show Wilde.

  Two windows were lit; otherwise the house was in darkness. The two men went to a side door and tried the handle. The door opened. They slipped inside and listened, but there were no sounds. The house seemed empty. They moved through the bootroom, the game room and the kitchens into the main body of the house. In the hall, portraits glared down at Wilde.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ Wilde said. ‘You search the downstairs rooms.’

  Eaton nodded, then moved on almost silent feet along the corridor in the direction Wilde had taken earlier in the day.

  Wilde climbed the grand staircase to the first floor, his head pounding with pain. He didn’t care any more. If Lydia was in the house, he would find her, and if he ran into Dorfen or Sawyer, then he could kill at least one of them. Wilde flung open door after door, switched on lights, wrenched cupboards open, then moved on. Bathrooms, bedrooms, laundry rooms, boxrooms were opened with a crash; he cared nothing about noise or disturbance.

  He was in a bedroom, pulling at the cupboard doors. He turned at a sound. A maid stood in the doorway, mouth open in horror. His hand went to the knife in his pocket.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ She was a stout woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She was shaking with fear. ‘Who are you?’ Her eyes fell on the clotted and seeping blood at the side of his head oozing beneath his cap and goggles. She let out a gasp. ‘Your head . . .’

  He put his hand to the wound. ‘This? I had an accident on the way here. Fell from my motorbike. It’s nothing.’ He forced himself to slow down. ‘Look,’ he said more gently, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Professor Wilde. I think I saw you at the funeral reception earlier today. Weren’t you serving drinks?’

  ‘Yes, I was. But all the guests are long gone.’ Her eyes strayed around the shambles of tossed bedding and open doors.

  ‘I’m looking for a missing woman.’

  ‘There’s no woman here, only me.’ Her voice was still nervous.

  ‘Who else is in the house?’

  ‘No one. All the servants have been sent home for the weekend. We all worked overtime at the funeral reception. I’m not supposed to be here, but I had to finish off.�
� She tensed; she had told him she was alone.

  He held up his palms. ‘I promise, you’re safe with me. Did you see the young woman I was with at the funeral? Did you see her later, after we left?’

  ‘Miss Morris, sir? I remember her. She was a friend of Miss Hereward.’ She had stopped trembling. ‘I haven’t seen her here.’

  He thought she was telling the truth. Lydia was unlikely to be in the house. Not if she was alive. ‘Where has Sir Norman gone?’

  ‘He didn’t say, sir.’ She was gaining in confidence. ‘Now, please, you must go. I don’t want to have to call the police.’

  ‘Was he with Dr Sawyer? And the German?’

  Her eyes were wide. She was afraid. If she didn’t know what was going on, she certainly suspected something. ‘Please, sir . . .’ She was close to tears. ‘I don’t know anything about anything. I’m just the housemaid.’ She put her hands to her eyes, sobbing.

  Wilde ignored her. From somewhere to the east of the house, he heard the distant drone of an aeroplane, but the sound was deeper, bigger, more powerful than the yellow Sopwith that had landed earlier that day. He went across the corridor into Nancy’s childhood bedroom, and looked out across the parkland.

  There was little to see. The sky was dark. All he could make out beneath the clouds was the skeletal line of winter trees. Charcoal lines on black canvas. Then the clouds broke, revealing a waning moon, a little over half full, like a clipped silver coin. Out of the clouds, coming straight in his direction but still two or three miles distant, were the lights of a low-flying aeroplane. It came from the east. His first instinct was that it was too low, that it would crash into the woods. But the aeroplane began to turn in a gentle arc to make its descent to the hidden airstrip.

  *

  Wilde found Eaton in the hall. Together they ran from the house, mounted the Rudge and rode into the woods, along the paths he had taken earlier in the day. Low branches loomed, ghostly, from the darkness into his headlights and they had to duck and swerve.

  A quarter of a mile from the landing strip, Wilde cut the engine and ditched the motorbike and they ran in silence along the pathway. Wilde no longer thought of the injury to his head or the blood caking his face. Nor was he afraid. There was only the need to find Lydia and the desire to avenge two innocent lives.

  Stopping at the edge of the woods, they looked down across the greensward. Two lines of flaming torches lit the runway for the approaching plane. The aircraft was low in the sky, altitude less than a hundred feet, almost suspended in the air. In the light from the cockpit they saw two pilots. Two faces, a world away. Hanging there like a great unwieldy moth searching for a place to drop down between the blazing lines. The flames of the torches dashed and leapt in the wind.

  The plane had three propellers, one on each wing and one on the nose cone, a trimotor passenger plane; no apparent markings.

  ‘Junkers JU-52. German built. I rather think we’re about to meet a band of heavily armed White Russians,’ Eaton said in a low voice.

  ‘White Russians?’

  ‘Ssh. I’ll explain later.’

  In front of them three people stood watching the approaching aircraft: Dorfen, Sawyer and Hereward. Parked alongside the airstrip were two vehicles: a Rolls Royce and a closed truck. A welcoming party.

  The plane landed smoothly, bumped along the grass, made a full turn, and came to a juddering halt dwarfing the tarpaulin-covered biplane parked nearby. At last, Wilde saw markings – a white cross on a red background on the tailplane and sides of the fuselage. Swiss.

  The side door opened and a small flight of metal steps was lowered to the ground. Men in old leather jackets and Lenin caps, working-men’s clothes, began to emerge. They may not have worn uniforms, but this was a fighting force. A dozen men in all, then the two pilots, accompanied by two men armed with sub-machine guns. There were raised-arm salutes, clicked heels, some shaking of hands.

  Sawyer brought a tray of drinks from the back of the Rolls Royce and offered it round. All but the two with sub-machine guns drank quickly, then threw the glasses to the ground. Hereward drank in nervous, quick gulps. Did he have any concept of what he was dealing with here? Wilde wondered.

  ‘Your gun,’ Wilde whispered to Eaton. ‘I don’t think it’s going to help us much against that crew.’

  ‘No. All we can do is watch.’

  Dorfen had taken aside one of the new men, a huge man with a bushy black beard. He had the look of a ragged animal, leader of a pack. Under his orders, the men formed a line from the door of the plane and began to unload a stream of weapons: automatic rifles, sub-machine guns, a heavy machine gun, and some bulky wooden crates. Dorfen, meanwhile, was conferring with the pilots.

  The back of the truck was thrown open to reveal a partially lit cabin with bench seats on either side. It looked nothing like any vehicle Wilde had seen. Low and broad, it had the appearance of a dark metallic war machine, a tank without cannon, the sort of vehicle H. G. Wells might have imagined. Once the weapons were loaded into the back, the men themselves clambered in. Dorfen went over to them and said something quietly, finger to lips – silence.

  Wilde spotted a stash of heavy jerry cans near the Rolls Royce. The two remaining men helped the two pilots haul them across to the aircraft, and lift them to pour into the fuel tank. Without a pump and line, it would be a slow process; perhaps just enough to get them back to wherever they had come from.

  ‘As I said, they’re White Russians.’ Eaton spoke under his breath. ‘A mercenary squadron linked to the SS. Call themselves the Romanov Division, I believe.’

  ‘You knew about this?’

  ‘I didn’t know when they were coming or how or where, but I’ve been trying to discover their plans for quite a while. I need to call in the army.’

  ‘Where are the bastards going?’ Wilde whispered urgently.

  *

  The back doors of the vehicle were slammed shut. Dorfen went to the front and climbed into the driving seat. Sawyer and the bearded man went round the other side and climbed in beside him. The bonnet shuddered and the vehicle began to crawl away from the clearing towards the path through the trees, leaving the two pilots and their armed guards standing next to the plane.

  ‘Hereward will know. I’ll choke the truth out of him. I’ll call for help from the priory.’ Eaton looked at Wilde. ‘I need you to follow them.’

  ‘But what about Lydia?’

  ‘If she’s here, Hereward will know. I’ll throttle it out of him. I’ll find her.’ Eaton fished out a scrap of paper and thrust it at Wilde. ‘If you get a chance, call that number. Ask for Terence Carstairs. Say these words: I’m calling for Eaton. The Russians are here. Those words exactly. Then give him as much detail as you’re able. I’ll keep in touch with him; he’ll know what to do.’ He held out his pistol. ‘Walther PP. Full magazine. Hope you don’t need it.’

  *

  Eaton watched as Tom Wilde rode off into the night and then raced back to the priory. In the study, he grabbed the telephone. They would need roadblocks and alerts on all vulnerable points. He was not hopeful. There could be hundreds of targets in Cambridgeshire and thousands more beyond the immediate vicinity. How far would the White Russians travel on their murderous mission? How many troops could his superiors muster at half-past eight on a Saturday night in December?

  In the distance, he heard the muffled roar of the JU-52’s three motors firing up, then the receding hum as the aeroplane took off and disappeared into the night. The study door opened and Hereward walked in, cigarette in one hand, brandy glass in the other. He stopped, swaying slightly, and looked at Eaton.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Philip Eaton.’

  ‘I’ve heard of you.’ Hereward pointed at the brandy decanter. ‘Help yourself. It’s my best Cognac.’

  Eaton ignored him. Hereward shrugged and sank into one of his leather armchairs.

  ‘This has all got a bit out of hand, hasn’t it, Hereward? Correct me if I’m wr
ong, but it wasn’t supposed to involve the death of your daughter, was it?’

  ‘What exactly are you implying?’

  ‘She found out what you and Sawyer and the others were up to. She had to be silenced, didn’t she?’

  Hereward said nothing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You’re North Sea, aren’t you? You’re certainly on the list. I thought you were with us. I’ve nothing to say to you.’

  ‘You’ve been duped all along – and you’ve paid a price no man should have to pay.’

  ‘Get out.’ Hereward’s words were slurred. ‘You’re too late anyway.’

  ‘You can still go some way towards making things right, you know.’ Eaton approached him and leant over. ‘Tell me now where they’re going, and you may yet find some peace. This is for your King and country, Hereward.’

  ‘King and country?’ The older man gave a bitter laugh and threw the contents of the brandy glass down his throat. ‘We turned our children to dust for King and country. My boys, both of them shot to hell. And we’re still fighting. Didn’t you know, they’re planning to get rid of him? Baldwin and Dawson and Chamberlain and Lang and all the other treacherous, sanctimonious bastards are plotting against the King. All those damnable words: oust, depose, usurp, treachery, treason, cheat. Slippery, slimy, dirty words, all of them, Eaton. And they apply to Baldwin and company. Traitors every one.’

  Eaton ripped the cigarette from Hereward’s hand and threw it to the floor, grinding it into the rich Persian carpet with his heel. ‘If Sawyer and Dorfen are your friends, then who are your enemies?’

  ‘It looks very much as if you are, Eaton.’

  Eaton put his hands out to grasp Hereward’s well-fed neck. The door opened. A shambling, bespectacled figure shuffled in, hat in hand.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Bower?’ Eaton demanded.

  ‘Come to do my job, Mr Eaton. Come to do my job. Now, Sir Norman, is this man bothering you?’

  *

  On the road the truck was even more menacing than it had seemed at the airstrip: squat and windowless. Wilde kept well back, feeling the weight of the pistol in his coat pocket. He was glad to have it, but what use was one gun against a heavily armed squadron?