‘Yes, but I still say all this couldn’t possibly have been meant for me and there’s still been a mistake, it must just have happened at an earlier stage, for heaven’s sake. Surely.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry to say that’s not the case either,’ continued Chatterton’s voice for a moment before an abrupt return to the earlier stockbroking inflection. ‘You’ll have to take my word for that, my dear fellow. I was present when this thing was set up and you, Adrian Hugo Hollies of Parkes & Richards, were at the centre of the picture right from the beginning.’
‘Oh. What is this thing you mention?’
‘You know some of the answer to that already. A mechanism for removing you from your daily life and imprisoning you for an indefinite period somewhere you’ll never escape or be rescued from.’
This silenced Adrian, but only for a moment. ‘Is that all?’
‘It’s what you might have inferred unassisted. Some of the rest is that your experience here is an end in itself. Nothing is required of you in the shape of information, your signature to a confession or any other action or reaction. Whatever happens you stay. Yes?’
‘I was going to ask, though why I should hope to get anything helpful out of you I don’t really know, I was going to ask if this is supposed to be a punishment for something I’ve done.’
The man Adrian was always to think of as Chatterton shook his head. It was a rather handsome head, in fact his whole being radiated something like distinction. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll tell you what is true, that indeed you have done something that displeased somebody, but to tell you what it is or was would be to immediately forfeit the anonymity that is of the essence of this enterprise, and … and after all, punishment suffered without knowledge of either the offence or the offended party can hardly be called punishment at all. So, let’s call it revenge. Somebody intends to satisfy himself – or herself – by retaliating upon your person for some wrong you’ve inflicted upon him or her.’ Chatterton appeared less than pleased with this formulation, but after a pause continued fluently enough, ‘And that satisfaction and that wrong correspond to no legal definition, otherwise my principal would no doubt have looked for redress through the courts.’ He finished strongly and with an air of triumph, smiling as he spoke and springily adjusting his position behind the desk.
‘You mean any sensible person would think that whatever it is I’m meant to have done is ridiculously disproportionate to all this elaborate and obviously very expensive bloody fuss.’
Chatterton looked wary. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hollies, I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘Really? Well, just consider. I’m a literary agent and as such I must have inflicted a great many wrongs on people, or what they might see as wrongs. And in my private life I’ve done quite a few things I’m ashamed of, like many of us. But nothing on this scale. Unless your principal is mad. Well, is he? Or is she?’
The question seemed to flummox Chatterton a little. ‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that. Or rather, I can assure you between ourselves that for practical purposes he or she is … is entirely sane.’
‘Have I injured you?’ asked Adrian quickly.
‘Oh no, Mr Hollies, you’ve never done anything to me, anything at all. Why, you’ve never set eyes on me before, have you?’ For a moment there, the shadowy presence of Sergeant Chatterton, and the absence of Chatterton QC or FRCS, was unmistakable. ‘You and I have no quarrel.’
‘So how much does this carry?’
But this time upmarket Chatterton was prepared. ‘The organization will naturally see to it that I don’t lose by this interruption of my more regular activities.’
‘Such as resting, eh?’ When this brought no reply but a huffy toss of the head, Adrian went on, ‘How long do you expect this interruption to last?’
‘That’s easy,’ said Chatterton with a less pleasant smile than before. ‘As long as it takes.’
‘As long as what takes? As long as it takes to what?’
‘We have a modest programme arranged for you, Mr Hollies, but I’m afraid it would be premature at this stage to speculate on its likely duration. It’ll last quite long enough to satisfy you, you’ll find.’ The last part was delivered in a tone that seemed to lack some of the required conviction.
‘I see. I mean I see I’m not going to get anything out of you if you can help it. Why did you have me fetched along here, to this room?’
‘If you really want to know, removing any unhelpful theories you might have formed about the reason for your presence here, impressing you with—’
‘But leaving a big question mark over the disparity between size of punishment and crime.’
‘From our point of view there’s nothing unhelpful about question marks being left in your mind,’ said Chatterton with some complacency. After a pause he added in a different tone, ‘And I wanted to have a look at you.’
‘I hope the sight’s been worth the trouble.’
‘Aren’t you frightened, Mr Hollies?’
‘One of your underlings asked me that. I told him of course I was, but I was trying not to let it interfere with my powers of observation and thought.’
‘Admirable. If true.’ Chatterton paused again before hurrying on, ‘I’ve got news for you, Hollies. You won’t be done any physical harm. Nothing actually painful’s going to happen to you, nothing … messy, you understand?’ Then, with yet another change of mood or idiom, he continued, ‘But before this is over you’re going to wish that all you had to put up with was something along those lines, something painful in that way, something that really … hurts. Right, I’ve said enough already. Ah, here we are.’
A door opened and the man earlier called PC Llewelyn, no doubt summoned a few moments before, came into the room. He entered in a lounging, rolling fashion before a kind of military yelp from Chatterton smartened him up in an instant. Coming to something like a posture of attention he said loudly, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wake up, Llewelyn.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, truly I am.’ This was said in a noticeable Welsh accent. The fellow had taken his jacket off but still wore his uniform trousers. Although there seemed to be no other definable change in his appearance, he looked uncommonly scruffy.
‘Convey Mr Hollies back to his room and secure the door.’
‘Right, sir.’ Llewelyn at any rate spoke sharply.
Adrian looked from one to the other of the two as they went through their performance. His expression evidently offended Chatterton, who gave him a curt nod of dismissal and gestured impatiently to Llewelyn to remove him.
His return trip along the corridor was less smooth than the outward journey. Scruffy or not, Llewelyn was quite strong, and provided unnecessary encouragement to continue to move by means of a hand clamped on his upper arm. The door of the room he had woken up in was ajar and Llewelyn’s hand propelled him across the threshold. Before the door could be shut Adrian said clearly,
‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’
Llewelyn stared back at him with a look of puzzlement, surprise, dismay or of all three, but for a moment he neither spoke nor moved.
‘Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.’
At this, Llewelyn scowled ferociously and gave Adrian a push in the chest forceful enough to send him staggering and almost falling. When he had recovered himself the door was shut and, he soon discovered, fastened. His instinct was for setting about getting it open again, but he had no way of doing so, certainly no quick or non-noisy way. No such decisive move would in any case make sense without knowledge of where he might find an exit from the house. And a means of using it. If any. It looked as if he might as well heed the advice he had received on waking, that he would not escape by his own efforts.
The scrap of paper bearing this message was no longer to be found. The remains of his snack had likewise been cleared away. The bed had been remade. A more thorough
look than he had earlier ventured showed him pyjamas, fresh underclothes, shirts. Their mundane practicality seemed designed to dishearten him. With head bent he moved slowly round the room a couple of times, then halted and for some minutes stared at the wall in an unfocused manner. After that he sat down on the bed and paused a moment before dropping his head into his hands and rocking slowly to and fro. Anyone looking at him would have said that a thoroughly wretched man, if not a despairing one, was sitting there. Presently Adrian drew his legs up on to the bed and lay down on his side with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped. Unexpectedly, he slept.
There passed another immeasurable tract of time. At its end, at the sound of the door being unlocked, Adrian sprang up and stood beside the bed, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. When all four of the men he had previously seen came into the room, they found him facing them in a posture of defiance.
After sending him a look of peculiar distaste, Chatterton moved over to one side, as if to underline his supervisory status. ‘Come along, Hollies,’ he said sharply.
Fotheringay and Llewelyn began to move forward, but Adrian eluded their grasp. ‘Let me come of my own accord, please. I’m quite capable of setting one foot in front of the other.’
‘Oh, good show, sir,’ said Fotheringay, ‘but anybody can see you’re terrified. Why not admit it?’
‘What, terrified of you?’
Fotheringay’s immediate response was to punch Adrian in the stomach. He collapsed on to the bed. ‘That was quite unnecessary,’ said someone: Chatterton.
‘Just a tap, that’s all. Look, he’s getting up already.’
‘Our orders are not to hurt him physically.’
‘There won’t be a mark on him, if that’s what’s bothering you.’
By now Adrian was facing them again, still panting and groaning, half doubled up, but back on his feet, and was allowed to make his own way out of the bedroom, round a couple of corners in the passage and into a room of about the same size but partly subdivided by a grey-painted screen on rollers. Two men were visible: after a first glance one of them went behind the screen and the other led an unresisting Adrian over to a corner where there stood a narrow backless couch of the sort to be met with in doctors’ consulting rooms.
‘Take off your jacket and shirt and then get up on here, please.’
Adrian followed instructions and successively had his blood pressure taken and allowed auscultation of his chest. Both exercises were rapid but thorough.
‘Now sit up and take a series of deep breaths as I tell you, please.’
He felt the small cool circle of the stethoscope applied in turn to various parts of his back.
‘Thank you. Please get dressed and sit on the chair.’
‘Well?’ asked another voice.
‘His heart and circulation appear excellent. His blood pressure is above normal, but then he’s obviously in a condition of extreme tension, if only as shown by his respiratory rate.’
‘So there’s no real risk?’
‘In an undertaking of this kind there’s always a risk, but if you mean am I prepared to take this risk then yes, I am.’
‘Good. Let’s get on with it, then.’
‘Mr Hollies? Mr Hollies, I’m going to put you to sleep for a couple of minutes, nothing more than that. When you wake up you’ll be in one piece and still here. Do you understand? Oh well, here goes.’
When Adrian came to himself after what he suspected to be only a short time, he was in some discomfort. He had been strapped into a chair in a way that prevented him from leaving it and also bound his wrists to its arms. More noticeably, his head was tightly clamped and what felt like pieces of sticky tape had been applied to his eyelids to prevent even their slight closure. A large screen of the TV type, at present blank, filled most of his vision. He must have made some movement because almost at once a voice spoke to him from behind his chair, the voice of the man who had seemed to be some sort of doctor.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Restricted.’
‘No nausea or trouble with breathing?’
‘I’ve never felt better in my life.’
‘Bravely spoken, Mr Hollies. Happy viewing.’
As he spoke, a thrumming click sounded, the screen in front of Adrian lit up and in a moment, with excellent definition and lifelike colour, images began to appear.
The first of these, that of an attractive young woman, Adrian found pleasant enough, and he had no objection when, smiling at the camera, she proceeded to undress, nor did he find what immediately followed any worse than embarrassing. When other persons joined her, however, he very quickly started showing signs of discomfort and not long after of distress. When a cry of pain sounded from the direction of the screen, he struggled to free himself and to turn his head away. Within a couple of minutes he was making anguished sounds and, as far as was possible to him, thrashing about. A female scream of terror and his own scream rose together, at which point the film froze and two or more men seized him and gagged him. But as soon as the coloured shapes were again in motion and appropriate sounds to be heard, he was able to show how much clamour could be created by a gagged man, especially in the forms of shrieks and inarticulate noises of protest and pain. In the end the man who had last spoken hurried forward and, with the screen now darkened, silence fell.
This time Adrian woke up lying on his bed. His eyelids were sore, his eyes ached and his lower lip was swollen and tender; he remembered biting it and feeling blood trickle down his chin. Despite these things he felt comfortable and languid, and guessed he was under some sedative or painkiller. He was alone. Presently, taking his time, he pushed himself upright and round until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had not long to wait.
The door clicked a couple of times and opened to admit the supposed doctor, who was now wearing a suit and tie. He looked closely at Adrian and said, ‘You should be lying down.’
‘I can get all the rest I want. I’m not going anywhere.’
The doctor was not listening. He brought from his jacket two small containers and handed them over. ‘Take two of the round red ones to stop things hurting, not more than six in twenty-four hours. The white ones will calm you down and also help you to sleep. Dose of two, maximum six a day, got it?’
‘Are you off somewhere?’
‘I have things to see to.’
When the doctor had gone, Adrian went into the bathroom and came back holding a glass of water. Before he could have taken a pill there was the unexpected sound of a tap on the outside of his door.
‘Come in,’ he called. At the sight of Chatterton and Fotheringay he got up not very steadily, seized a chair by the back and ran at them with it, calling to them to keep their hands off him.
Fotheringay twisted the chair out of his grasp. ‘Sit down, Mr Hollies,’ he said easily.
As he sat on the bed again, Adrian said, ‘Will you tell me something? Please?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Those, those things you made me see, they weren’t real, were they?’
‘Well …’
‘When those men, when they forced the girl to do what she did, that wasn’t really happening, was it? Please tell me.’
‘We weren’t on that side of it, Chatterton and me.’
‘I mean, when they started … started … that poor girl,’ said Adrian, and burst into tears, racking sobs he seemed at the same time to be trying to restrain. ‘Sorry,’ he gasped after some moments – ‘sorry, I thought I could just ask you in the ordinary way, but when it came to it … I found I couldn’t. Sorry.’
‘Don’t let it get you down, Adrian,’ said Fotheringay. ‘It was all trick photography, what you saw. Bloody amazing what they can do these days, you know. Must have cost somebody a fair packet, mind. But anyway, no call for you to fret like you’re doing now.’
‘No, but when he thought it wa
s for real,’ said Chatterton.
‘Absolutely,’ said Fotheringay. ‘Oh no, I fully appreciate that.’
An awkward pause supervened, during which Adrian seemed to pull himself together and each of the remaining two waited for the other to proceed. In the end it was Fotheringay who nodded resignedly and spoke up.
‘Er, Chatterton here and me, we got talking and we came to the conclusion we don’t want to go on with this any longer. “This” being the kind of play-acting or pretend caper or make-believe we’ve been going in for up to now. Now we’ve got to know you a bit we reckon you’ve had a raw deal, and we’re sorry, right? The thing was, we were both without a job, down on our luck, when this bloke comes along and throws cash around like he’s got three arms and says there’ll be more to come if we just look after somebody for a couple of days and go on according to this kind of script he’s got for us, if you see what I mean. We say okay. But …’
Chatterton now broke in. Throughout what followed he stayed much closer to his police-sergeant persona than to the urbane self Adrian had first seen. ‘The background is that Mr X had set everything up for a whole programme of unpleasant experiences aimed at punishing somebody he’d taken a real dislike to – lucky for you that you only got as far as the first of the series, there was a lot worse to follow. Then right at the last minute the job’s off. The central character’s suddenly not around any more.’
‘Being as he’s dead,’ said Fotheringay.
‘Anybody I know?’ asked Adrian.
‘Let’s hope not, for your sake.’
‘Keith Gordon,’ said Chatterton. ‘Also known as Big Thief. He had the misfortune to be under a couple of hundredweight of stonework when it fell off his office roof. Apparently it was a genuine accident.’
‘I heard about it,’ said Adrian.
‘The word is he’d been warned it was unsafe but was too bloody mean to have it seen to,’ said Fotheringay.
Complete Stories Page 50