The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  Some of this returned to his memory as he watched her graceful body, inadequately covered in a thin cotton robe, cross the room.

  “That reminds me,” he grunted, head cocked and eyes bright with malevolence. “You need teaching some manners, girl.”

  She favored him with one glance, and then reached for clothes in the cupboard. The overt contempt on her face drove him beyond control.

  She heard the sudden movement, and began to turn. But full weight hit the door as she reached into the wardrobe; her arm was jammed into the opening.

  He grabbed her hair with his free hand and smashed her head once, twice, three times against the thick framework of cupboard. The skin down one side of her face was split and blood ran down, soaking into her robe.

  Half stunned, she felt herself thrown across the room.

  The robe twisted in her passage across the bedroom, tangled around her elbows, pinning her arms to her sides, and Luther’s eyes narrowed with vicious pleasure at the sight of body it revealed.

  He punched her in the stomach and as she doubled up in pain, twisted her onto her face and held her down with a knee in the small of her back.

  For a long moment, then, he stood and held his head while the waves of nausea welled up from his own stomach and the pain in his head threatened to overwhelm him.

  As it ebbed, his eye fell on his trousers, abandoned last night as he fell into bed. There was a wide, leather belt half in and half out of the loops.

  He pulled it out and wound a couple of turns round his hand.

  “Now then, you little bitch, I’ll teach you a lesson you will never forget,” he panted, and swung the belt with all his might.

  *

  Josef Lefeu and his boss, Gehn, stood in front of the big desk and wished with all the fervour in their persons that they had been somewhere else. A sun-bleached rock in the Khyber Pass, for instance. A tiger hide in the Northern foothills. The foredeck of the Titanic. Anywhere.

  Sigmund Dark broke the long silence with a suddenness which made them both jump.

  “Well,” he said in a voice so quiet that they both knew he was in a killing rage, “Go and find him and bring him back here. Immediately.”

  He glanced across the room at the door which led to his own bedroom. From behind it came a low, wailing cry. Both Lefeu and Gehn winced at the sound.

  “Fail to find him, and I promise you that you will both envy her for a very long time,” Sigmund Dark told them, and both men implicitly believed him.

  The discovery that Luther had run amok had come too late to prevent his escape from the castle. By the time the chamber maid had gone to Luther’s room to tidy it up and discovered Yasmin’s unconscious body, Luther had already driven through the gatehouse in the big Citroën and disappeared down the road.

  Gehn and the American Brinkman, who was on duty at the gate, had not yet been told of Luther’s disgrace and house arrest. Brinkman had been mildly surprised to see that his employer’s latest house guest was driving off on his own, particularly considering the state in which he had been brought back last night, but considered it none of his business.

  By the time Lefeu had brought the news when he delivered the guards’ coffee at mid-morning, it was far too late to do anything but report to Sigmund Dark and take the expected tongue lashing.

  Nothing, however, had prepared Gehn for the torrent of corrosive abuse which had been provoked.

  Sigmund Dark had dredged from the pits of his memory the most unforgivable insults he could find, reaching back into a vast knowledge of several cultures to find those which would call for blood.

  Then he had offered an alternative target for the boiling hatred he knew he had evoked.

  Find Luther, he said. Find him and bring him back here and all will be forgiven.

  The two former Legionnaires almost ran from the room, and within minutes, Sigmund Dark heard the Renault start up and sweep out of the courtyard, with its tyres squealing. He permitted himself a murderous smile, and pushed open the door to his bedroom.

  Yasmin was stretched face down on the big bed, naked. Her back and buttocks were a criss-crossed ruin of blue-black welts, some of which had broken the skin so that blood had oozed out and dried in lines of black dots and smears. Her head was turned sideways on the pillow to expose the line of broken skin across the black swelling of her cheek.

  “By the grace of God, nothing is broken,” Kiti told him from the far side of the bed. She had her medical equipment on the table and had been treating Yasmin’s back as best she could.

  “Will she heal?”

  Kiti nodded.

  “And be unmarked?”

  The girl hesitated. “There is a good chance that in time all the marks will go. There are no major deep incisions. It must have hurt her terribly, but almost all the damage is superficial.”

  “Almost?”

  Again the hesitation. Then Kiti’s eyes met his.

  “I cannot be sure about the face. It is too swollen to say what has happened underneath. I am not a plastic surgeon. But as you can see, there is only the one line of skin damage and that is mercifully along the hair line.”

  He stood for a moment, stroking his beard and looking like a Father Christmas working out which toy to give to a particularly well-loved child. Then:

  “We will risk it. She is sleeping now?”

  He did not miss the spark of relief deep in Kiti’s eyes and knew at once that she was lying to him. The damage was too deep to heal itself.

  The discovery did not dismay him. Yasmin was a valuable property and well worth the investment of a little time and money to correct her injuries.

  What did dismay him was the knowledge that Kiti had the courage to tell him a direct untruth. An untruth, moreover, which he was bound to discover within a very short time.

  That meant that either she had lost some of her fear of him, or that she had some reason for supposing that she would be able to evade the consequences of her lie.

  Kiti was one of his most trusted subjects. So trusted that she was allowed to share his room while he was asleep. While he was defenceless. And only two nights ago, he had watched her secret tears in the moonlight.

  None of this communicated itself through so much as a flicker of expression.

  “Look after her,” he repeated, and turned back to his study and to the complex problems of the coming two days.

  There was still, he knew, the problem of Carver. And two of his best gundogs were off wasting their time combing Carcassonne bars for Luther. The chase would simply have to wait for a while. In any case, it was quite likely that Luther had been right. Let Carver come to him, where he was strongest and surrounded by his own retainers.

  *

  The problem, had he but known it, was about to solve itself. It sat in the back of an old auberge near the town gate of Carcassonne, eating a croissant, drinking café au lait, and watching with fascination while Luther carefully dosed his hangover with calvados and tea.

  The man had come in out of the bright sunlight and stood, blind for a moment in the dark of the room. By the time his eyes were used to the subdued light, he was already at the bar, ordering his drink and he had not yet noticed Carver and Amy at their late breakfast.

  Amy half rose when Luther came in, but Carver put her back in her chair gently, and pulled the chair round until Amy, with her back turned, was screening him from Luther’s direct line of sight. Then she explained to him who the newcomer was.

  Carver recognised him from the previous night, of course.

  But he had never previously seen Luther.

  Admittedly, Amy with her back turned was more striking than most women face on, but he relied on Luther’s hangover to take the edge off the man’s natural caution, and he had been right.

  After beating his bed slave into unconsciousness, Luther’s own sense of self preservation had resurfaced. He remembered – too late – Sigmund Dark’s warning against viole
nce and against marking the girl.

  Pushing all the money he could find into his pocket, he had stolen the castle’s big Citroën car, eased it out of the gate and made for Carcassonne and succour.

  His first priority was a drink. His second was escape.

  Once he was feeling human again, he promised himself, he would take the Citroën and the money he had in his pocket and make his way to the airport, where he would get on a plane. Any plane.

  He did not have a passport, admittedly, but it should not be difficult to steal one, and he doubted if the emigration authorities in France would examine his passport too closely. He had never noticed any real concern on the face of Spanish officers when he had visited Majorca or the Costa Brava and he imagined that France, which was also a foreign country, would be run on much the same lackadaisical lines.

  There remained the problem of money. He had taken his credit cards when he fled from the Château, so immediate expenses would not be a problem. He had tested them out when buying petrol for the Citroën, and found they were readily accepted. All he need do was to confine his spending to establishments with the plastic stickers in the window, and he should be fine.

  He had, he knew, nearly £100 in francs in his pockets.

  And the heady fumes of the apple brandy were beginning to ease the pain of his hangover.

  Now that he had time to sit and think and the luke warm porridge in his head was beginning to function like a brain again, there was something else demanding his attention.

  Something about last night was nagging at him.

  He considered the problem of the barman in the modern hotel at the other side of the city, and decided regretfully that he would have to forgo his revenge. The time which would be taken driving to the hotel and finding the barman would give the pursuit a chance to catch up.

  By this time, he knew, his employer would have a search party out looking for him.

  He called for another Calvados, silently damned the barman’s look of faint surprise, and downed it in one.

  “Time to go!” he said. The barman put a tiny saucer containing three bar slips, in front of him, and Luther dropped a hundred franc note into it. A tenner, he thought, should cover two brandies and a cup of tea.

  The barman totted up the three slips and made them come to 110 francs. Working on autopilot, he had mistakenly added in the breakfast slip for the couple at the back of the room.

  Luther looked at the 100 franc note, and raised his eyebrows.

  “More?” he said, surprised. “Blimey, how much are these things?”

  “Two calvados, monsieur,” began the barman, “Twenty two francs each. Tasse de thé...” he faltered as he realised his mistake, and changed the total he had written on the bar slip.

  “I excuse myself,” he said. “I had added on that couple’s breakfast.”

  He pointed towards the back of the room. Luther automatically followed the direction of the pointed finger, and found himself looking Carver straight in the face.

  Recognition was instant. He was in the presence of the man the whole organisation had been seeking. Memory also recalled the previous night. His crotch throbbed in sympathy, and he opened his mouth to shout.

  Then he closed it again. Perhaps, he thought, he would not have to forgo totally the pleasure of revenge. Perhaps, also, he might be able to reinstate himself in Sigmund Dark’s organisation.

  All he had to do was return to the Château with Carver in the back of the car, and explain that his absence had been in order to catch Carver unawares. He could think of some reason to explain away the beating of Yasmin, who was after all a slave.

  He glanced ostentatiously at his wrist watch, and climbed off his bar stool with the businesslike air of a man on his way to an appointment.

  Just let the bastard follow him to the car park under the trees by the church, and Luther could easily take him by surprise. He had parked the Citroën at the back of the lot, away from the road, and the little bay in which it stood was shielded from the rest of the car park by a large, leafy tree.

  He walked down the street to the corner, and waited there until he saw the dark girl and her solidly built companion emerge from the bar, before setting off at a brisk walk to the car park.

  “He’s made us,” Carver told Amy as they walked after him at a more leisurely pace.

  “Made us?”

  “Knows who we are,” said Carver. “I thought he got me last night, so maybe he’s come into town to try and pick us up again. Keep your eye on the corners.”

  “Corners?”

  “In case he’s the bait and we’re the tiger,” said Carver patiently. “Keep your eye open for that skin-head and his guys following us while we follow him!”

  Amy glanced obediently at every corner they came to, and even dropped behind a little to check on places she could not easily see.

  In the car park, Luther opened the back of the Citroën, and chose a jack handle from the holdall of tools at the back of the boot. He watched through the gap between the boot lid and the car’s rear window as Carver approached.

  As Carver ducked to come under the lower branches of the tree, Luther straightened up and swung the jack handle viciously at head level. He felt it hit something yielding, and the branches of the tree were instantly a storm of activity.

  “Gotcha!”

  Luther hurled himself through the screen of agitated greenery, jack handle swinging back for another blow.

  The ground beneath the tree was bare.

  He stopped, nonplussed, and Carver dropped on his back from the branch. It was like being caught in a mine cave-in, and Luther for the second time in less than twelve hours, lost consciousness instantly.

  Amy, following Carver through the car park, found him laying Luther in the rear seat of the car.

  “But what...?” she said, amazed.

  “Your passenger. I just found a way of getting into the Château,” said Carver. He was sweating lightly and his jacket was showing signs of a struggle.

  “How?” said Amy.

  “Do they know you up at Château Bram?”

  “Of course not,” she said with a gesture.

  “Then you’re elected driver. I was going to try and get in on the coat tails of one of the buyers tomorrow. But this guy made me. You saw him. So they know me. You they won’t know. You drive him home, explain how he made a pass at you and fell over, and get one of them to drive you back.”

  “And you?”

  “I shall be in the boot,” said Carver simply.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There were moments during the drive up the Rocher de Bram when Carver almost called the whole thing off. He considered himself a driver with panache. Amy, he thought, was a much simpler kind of driver. One with a death wish.

  For the sake of comfort, he did not spend the whole of the twenty kilometre journey from Carcassonne in the boot, but in the passenger seat. For the sake of sanity, he also spent it with his eyes tightly closed.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he exploded as Amy swung the car round the outside of a lumbering road-train and scared ten years of growth out of the driver of a Citroën ZCV full of chickens coming the other way.

  With the manoeuvre only half finished, Amy took both eyes off the road to argue with him, and he grabbed at the wheel himself and forced them back onto the right side of the road just in time to miss a gas tanker on its way to Perpignan.

  Amy was livid.

  “How dare you?” she shouted. “I drive this car, not you. Are you so much of a chauvinist that you cannot bear to have a woman drive you? You did not mind when you wanted to rest yesterday!”

  “I was asleep, yesterday,” Carver told her. “Watch the goddamn road! Let’s just get to the ... oh, no!”

  Amy stared at the road.

  “But there is nothing coming,” she said, puzzled.

  “It just occurred to me that you’ll be driving me up that goddamn track to the ca
stle, in the boot,” said Carver. “I won’t be able to see.”

  Amy fell silent, staring at the road. Since morning she had been quiet, and she had not eaten more than two croissants and a foot of baguette for her breakfast. It was unlike her.

  Carver watched her thoughtfully for a while, ignoring even the steady procession of near-misses which punctuated the journey.

  “Can you think of a place to stop out of sight, so I can get in the boot?” he asked. Amy nodded absently, and a couple of kilometres further along the road, she swung off into a little loop of dusty side track, and stopped, screened by bushes and trees beside a broad stretch of water.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Canal du Midi,” she said. She was watching him with an intense look, strangely bothered.

  “Do you need to do this?” she said, suddenly.

  Amy, worrying about him?

  “Can you think of a better way to get me into the castle?”

  She shook her head, silent.

  “Then I need to do it. There’s a little girl up there who’ll be expecting me to come for her. If we let your people raid the place, they’ll just kill the slaves and escape. In the old days, they used to drop them overboard in the Middle Passage when the naval patrol came by. These days they’ll have some similar trick to get rid of the evidence.”

  “What will I tell the guard?”

  “Tell him you met Luther last night before he got on the bottle, and he came back this morning to see you. You argued over the price, he went for you and fell down and hurt his head. He was boasting he came from the castle, and you reckon they’ll pay to keep him out of the hands of the police du quartier.”

  “I bring him back and I want my money,” she said, with a face like thunder. “Some people will believe any woman is available if the price is high enough.”

  Carver nodded, satisfied. He examined the inside of the boot lid, assured himself that he could open the lock with a screwdriver from inside, and equipped himself with an appropriate tool from the unexpectedly lavish kit in the back of the recess.