by Sarah Rayne
There was a sudden silence, and Kate stared at him. ‘Richard,’ she said at last. ‘It’s Richard you want, isn’t it?’
‘I admit I should very much like to have Richard,’ said Vogel, and a spasm of anger twisted his face. ‘Richard was one of the very few who managed to resist the music and do you know, I found that immensely annoying.’
‘I can believe it,’ said Kate sarcastically. ‘He eluded you.’
‘Yes. He was getting too close to understanding the music’s source and something had to be done. I could of course have disposed of him, but I prefer to keep inside the law. And so I marked him out as a—’
‘Neophyte?’ said Kate tartly, and Vogel said,
‘Convert would be nearer. You understand about Serse’s People do you—? Yes, I see you do. The Black Chant has been put to a number of uses over the centuries, but I think this is the first time it has been used to beckon to people’s minds . . . And I have gathered in some extraordinary minds, Kate. Bright, clever, young—There is no power so great as having power over young, malleable minds. I think no one has ever before channelled the music in quite that way—That is what I have been doing,’ said Vogel. ‘But of course, you know that. Richard knew it as well.’ He paused, and a look of sudden greed came into his eyes. ‘Richard,’ he said softly. ‘All that intuitive brilliance and all those teaching gifts—He would have been a valuable recruit; the youngsters would have followed him and he could have been of very great use to me.’
Kate said very deliberately, ‘What about the others you failed with? All those others who fought you like Richard did, and ended up dead or destroyed? If you go on littering your path with suicides, people will soon start getting suspicious. They’ll ask awkward questions.’ Like I did, said her mind suddenly, only nobody listened. I wonder if I’m going to get out of this. The light modern room was beginning to seem oddly blurred. She frowned, forcing her mind to focus.
‘Once I have Ahasuerus the suicides will end,’ said Vogel. ‘The music is powerful and Ahasuerus is powerful as well – or so the legend tells. But combined they must be invincible. With them together, there is nothing I could not do, no one whose mind I could not reach—’
Kate heard for the first time the escalating note in his voice but then Vogel said in a prosaic tone, ‘I am really very grateful to you for bringing Ahasuerus to England, Kate. It saved me a tedious task – that unpleasant Irish crypt – and also an irritating journey.’ Kate looked up sharply, and he smiled. ‘You are very easy to follow, my dear,’ he said. ‘And Serse’s People can make themselves very unobtrusive if they have to. Who looks at a couple of youngsters or a handful of students? I kept tabs on you very nicely, Kate. You have brought Ahasuerus out of Curran Glen, and now I can present to my people the Master I promised them.’
Kate stared at him and thought: of course, he’s mad. I heard it in his voice a minute ago, only he’s quenched it now. Is that really what he’s going to do? Present Ahasuerus to Serse’s People as some kind of – of what? Messianic being? A Christ-figure? He won’t be the first, of course and he certainly won’t be the last. There’ve been charismatic leader-figures all through history, and some of them have wielded very great power indeed. And if he has Ahasuerus and the music . . .
She said, ‘So you’re going to make Ahasuerus your puppet, are you? I hope you aren’t forgetting all those other power-mad men who created a monstrous servant and saw it get away from them?’
Vogel laughed. ‘Frankenstein and the man-monster? We aren’t in the pages of Gothic fiction, Kate.’
‘Of course not. I was thinking,’ said Kate coldly, ‘more of Adolf Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich.’
There was an abrupt silence. That’s hit a nerve, thought Kate. I’ve touched a core of anger, as well. Damn, I’ve over-reached!
Vogel had been standing behind the desk, but now he came around it, and stood over her, the gun resting against her head. It felt cold and very evil. Kate felt her courage draining, and sick waves of terror closed about her head, but she said, ‘You do know, do you, that I left word of where I was coming. The appointment is recorded in my diary. This will be the first place Richard will look—’ She stopped. ‘That’s what you want,’ she said, staring up at him. ‘You want Richard to follow me—Supposing I simply let you kill me?’
‘I shan’t kill you,’ said Vogel. ‘If you resist me, I shall first of all spoil your face, as I did your husband’s.’ He traced the outline of her cheek with the gun’s muzzle, and smiled as she flinched. ‘I should enjoy doing that,’ he said softly. ‘And afterwards I could turn my attention to your precious Richard, because make no mistake, Kate, there are still a good many things I can do that would hurt Richard very much indeed. One of your fingers in the post – perhaps with your wedding ring still on it. The next day your thumbs—He would soon come running into my net.’
‘How dreadfully second-rate,’ said Kate scoffingly. ‘You’re sounding like a bad horror film. Chopped-off bits of bodies sent through the mail—That went out with Jack the Ripper and the half-eaten kidney, Conrad. Is this the part where I recoil in terror and ask where you’re taking me? Not,’ added Kate, pleased that her voice was coming out so steady, ‘that I wouldn’t like to know, you understand.’
Vogel said, ‘We’re going to the place that I have made the centre and the focus of Serse’s People. Hadn’t you tracked that down, Kate? How lax of you.’ He reached across the desk, and picked up a set of keys.
‘Serse’s People,’ said Vogel, ‘have their – I could almost say their headquarters – in a place deep within the old kingdom of Thuringia: today part of modern Germany. That’s where we’re going.’
Kate stared at him, her mind tumbling. She said, with what she thought was a creditable attempt at scorn, ‘You can’t possibly hope to take me out of the country – I haven’t my passport with me for starters. We’ll be stopped at the first checkpoint we reach.’
‘We shan’t be stopped,’ said Vogel. ‘You won’t need a passport, because you won’t be visible, Kate. Stand up – move slowly.’
Kate stood, and at once the room tilted. She grabbed the back of the chair. My God, he’s drugged me!
‘In the basement garage here is my car,’ said Vogel. ‘And in the back of it is a long wooden packing case. You’ll be travelling inside it, Kate – it bears a rather sinister resemblance to a coffin, I’m afraid, but perhaps you won’t mind that. If you are lucky, you won’t even be aware of it.’
He unlocked the door and motioned her through, and Kate glanced up and down the corridor outside, assessing her chances. Could she call for help? Or spring on him when he locked the door behind them? She found that she was forced to lean against the wall to stop her legs from buckling. Damn. I believe he really did drug me, the bastard!
‘Yes, you are drugged,’ said Vogel offhandedly. He pulled the door closed, and the Yale lock clicked of its own accord. Vogel took her arm, pulling her towards the lift. ‘And yes, it was in the coffee,’ he said. ‘Chlorpromazine – very useful and astonishingly easy to obtain. Quite harmless – little more than a strong sedative – but it should render you unconscious for the journey.
‘And if you’re contemplating calling for help or trying to run, don’t bother.’ He pressed the button and the lift slid up, its doors opening smoothly. ‘I’m the only tenant of this building now, unfortunate how many of the yuppies over-reached in the Eighties, wasn’t it? Parts of Docklands are like a ghost town these days. But that serves my purpose very well this afternoon.’ He pushed her into the lift, and Kate sagged against the wall, her senses blurring. There was a thin whine as the lift descended.
The Range Rover was parked almost directly outside the lift and the basement was deserted. It looked as if Vogel had told the truth about the building being empty.
Kate was barely keeping back the overpowering waves of unconsciousness, but she felt Vogel take her hands and loop thin rope or twine about her wrists. As he bent to open the Range Rove
r’s boot, she saw, as if from a great distance, the long wooden box wedged in the back. A coffin. Dear God, he’s going to put me inside it. The ground was tilting sickeningly, and awareness was sliding away down a long echoing tunnel. Even if I could run, I wouldn’t get six feet, she thought bitterly. And anyway, he’d shoot me. Chlorpromazine. I suppose he did tell the truth about that? But she could dimly remember Richard being prescribed doses of it at the beginning, as a sedative.
Vogel was opening the coffin-box, but his free hand about her wrist was hard and strong. Kate thought even without it she would have stayed put, because she could not have run two steps now. When Vogel spoke again, she heard him through a rushing tunnel. He said, ‘I believe I have judged the dosage of the drug accurately, Kate, and I believe you will be unconscious until we reach Eisenach.’
In a blurred voice, Kate managed to say, ‘Eisenach—’
‘Eisenach Castle,’ said Vogel. ‘The place where, over fifty years ago, Jude Weissman played the ancient beckoning that he called the Devil’s Piper. The place that has become the base for Serse’s People. As we speak, they will all be making their way to the Castle – some by foot, some by road, some by air or sea. It’s a pilgrimage, Kate, a mass bringing-together of my people.’ Again, the soaring note of madness. Kate shivered. ‘They are coming to meet the One I promised them,’ said Vogel. ‘They are coming to pay homage to the Devil’s Piper.’ He pushed her forward. ‘This is your travelling compartment,’ he said. ‘And in a little while, you will have a companion.’
He paused, and Kate, her mind being sucked down the whirling tunnel, was dimly aware of Vogel smiling down at her, and of his voice swooping about her head.
‘When I have you stowed away, my dear, I shall be loading up everything for the concert. It will take some little time, I’m afraid, but you will be long beyond knowing about it.
‘And then,’ said Vogel, ‘I am going to drive out to your house for Ahasuerus. There is room for the two of you in here.
‘You will travel to Eisenach Castle in the arms of the Devil’s Piper, Kate.’
The drug was closing in as Vogel lifted her into the car’s interior, but there was still a vestige of dreadful awareness left.
A thick blanket or a rug lined the box: at least he has that much consideration! thought Kate hazily. She felt him bend over her, sliding one hand under her thighs, the other about her shoulders, and then he was lifting her easily. He’s thin but he’s wiry and strong, thought Kate, torn between wanting to hold on to consciousness and praying for oblivion.
But she was still hovering on the borders of awareness. She could smell that Vogel wore the same aftershave as an old boyfriend, someone from her university days . . . The scent touched her nostrils. Didn’t they say that the sense of smell was the last one to go? No, that’s hearing. I can still hear. I can hear that Vogel’s breathing a bit fast because of the exertion. I wish I weighed eighteen stone and was six feet tall, so that he’d have had a heart attack or a hernia when he picked me up . . . He’s laying me down now – it’s like a travesty of being taken to bed – I’m going to bed with Ahasuerus, God, no . . .! I suppose this is the punishment for fooling the monks at Curran Glen. Ciaran . . . I fooled you, Ciaran – or did I – and I stole your immortal creature. But it looks as if there’s a reckoning coming up. The punishment fitting the crime, no, that’s not Christianity, or is it? I can’t think . . . I don’t want to think . . .
Vogel was levering the lid into place; Kate thought there was not a lock or a hinge, but that it wedged into a groove. At any minute the light will shut off and I shall be in the dark. It’s not airless – I can see tiny bored holes for air – but it’ll get stale. And once Ahasuerus is in here as well . . .
And then Vogel pushed the lid into place, and Kate shuddered. There was the sound of a chain going around the outside, and the snapping of a lock. Chained and padlocked in.
Before the final layer of unconsciousness closed in, she heard Vogel slam the boot closed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘Have we got the remotest idea where Kate Kendal might be heading?’ said Isarel, as the hire-car bucketed its way across North Wales through sheeting rain. ‘Or are you simply trusting in heaven to point you in the right direction? Beyond the last blue mountain, across the angry and glimmering sea—There’s a traffic island up ahead.’
‘Even heaven would get confused by traffic islands,’ said Ciaran. ‘These are terrible roads, aren’t they, it’s taking all my concentration to keep—’
‘On the straight and narrow?’
‘In the right lane,’ rejoined Ciaran equably. ‘I always had difficulty with the straight and narrow, and I certainly couldn’t find it in this rain. Is that our turning up ahead?’
Isarel peered through the rain. ‘Yes. Siphoning us off to the left. Get in lane now.’
‘Siphoning’s the right word in this weather,’ said Ciaran, swinging over. ‘But I thought we’d find our way in the end.’
‘O Faith, that meets ten thousand cheats, yet drops no jot of faith—You do know where you’re going, do you?’
‘I do indeed.’
‘Well, could you share the information? Because this certainly isn’t the Golden Road to Samarkand.’
‘I thought that since Kate Kendal is headed for London we’d head there as well,’ said Ciaran. ‘The touch’d needle trembling to the pole and so on. Would you know is that meant pruriently, by the way, because I don’t think Father Abbot would like me to say it if it is—’
Isarel had turned round in the passenger seat to stare at him. ‘How the devil do you know she’s going to London?’
‘Because I paid the ferryman.’
There was a sudden silence, disturbed only by the rhythmic swish of the car’s windscreen wipers. At length Isarel said, ‘Have you any idea how extraordinarily sinister that sounds?’
‘It was the Irish Sea, not the waters of the Styx—’
‘Was it really as easy as that?’ said Isarel curiously.
‘It wasn’t strictly speaking the ferryman. I only said that to provoke you—’
‘Well, you succeeded.’
‘But those dock officials can be surprisingly open to persuasion. I said we were discreetly following the lady, and implied that there was a divorce case involving child custody. If Ms Kendal doesn’t want to be followed she shouldn’t have such a memorable entourage. A caravan in tow and the lady herself—’ Ciaran paused. ‘The lady herself is the most memorable part of it,’ he said softly. Isarel waited, but Ciaran said in an ordinary voice, ‘It sounds as if she’s only twenty-four hours ahead of us and my man heard her say something about reaching the motorway network quickly because of getting to London before dark.’
‘I don’t remember hearing anybody tell you any of that,’ said Isarel suspiciously.
‘No, you were in the bar at the time.’
‘Is that a criticism? Listen, I’m here under protest, Brother Ciaran. I don’t give a damn about your itinerant corpse!’
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Ciaran. ‘By the way, you did pack Jude’s shofar, didn’t you? Yes, I recall seeing you wrap it in that sheepskin rug to protect it on the journey.’ He sent Isarel a mischievous look. ‘I didn’t rely wholly on bribable dock officials, of course. Kate paid the rent of the field by cheque and her cheque had the name of a North London branch of Barclays. From which, my dear Watson—’
‘You deduce she lives – or possibly works – in North London,’ said Isarel. ‘On the subject of cheques and rents, and speaking as a member of the oldest financial fraternity in the world—’
‘How did I get the money out of Father Abbot for the journey?’
‘I ask purely out of professional curiosity, you understand.’
‘Very easily indeed,’ said Ciaran. ‘We’re pledged to guard Ahasuerus and the tomb, and once we found he’d gone we hadn’t much choice but to follow. Actually we’re a reasonably well-off Abbey and the finance wasn’t a problem. Our
money’s almost all invested – in fact we employ a stockbroker in Dublin to watch it for us. When a monk enters the Abbey, in theory he brings a dowry with him, I’m not sure what the present amount is, but it used to be something like four thousand Irish punts. That’s more or less the same as four thousand English pounds, but I think a punt buys a bit less than a pound these days. In practice nobody with a true vocation is turned away of course, which sometimes means it’s all output and no income.’
‘But,’ said Isarel, who was finding this deeply interesting, ‘the Abbey is almost self-supporting, surely?’
‘Almost’s the operative word,’ said Ciaran. ‘We have a few projects going on most of the time – bottled fruit and honey, and dried lavender from a monastery garden – stuff which sells in Galway and Shannon. There’s a book about religious music in the pipeline as well – that’s quite a departure for us and it’s an ambitious project, but we’re very optimistic about it. One of the local girls is helping us, partly because we’re trying to prise her away from her father – he’s a bit unhealthily protective of her and Father Abbot was getting concerned – but largely because she’s a bright, intelligent child and we really did want her help.’
Isarel said very tentatively, ‘If you want any more help—’
‘Oh, with you on the strength as well, we’d have a bestseller overnight,’ said Ciaran at once. ‘Or at least replenish the coffers for a time which would be good because there’s a shortfall between income and expense most years. Inflation, the cost of maintaining a structure that’s nearly a thousand years old . . . we do a lot of that ourselves, of course; between us we’ve got carpenters and stonemasons and electricians. And fortunately there’ve been no really major expenses since the eighteenth century when the Troubles ended. I believe the Father Abbot of the day pushed the boat out so enthusiastically then that it nearly bankrupted the Order.’
‘It’s quite difficult to imagine a monastery going bankrupt,’ said Isarel.