by Ellis Peters
He uttered a shriek of grief and rage, incredible from that composed and imperturbable throat of his, and the comely mask before her broke and crumpled horribly into ugliness. Two round, glaring, golden eyes in a grimacing chaos of hate levelled upon their target for once not coldly but in boiling fury. The bomb that had shattered him had shattered his plans with him. The only thing that mattered now was to kill Maggie Tressider. The little black pistol came up fast and accurately. He fired pointblank at her.
She had clamped her arm over the arm Francis had thrown round her, her hand gripping his hand, he could not throw her clear, she would not let go of him. All he could do was hold her fast and turn with her in his arms, putting her between him and the wall.
The bullet took him in the back of the left shoulder, a little high for where Maggie’s heart should have been. The impact drove them both forward against the wall. They slid down it, still linked, still clasping each other, and on the chill, soiled flagstones. Maggie drew herself clear, half-stunned by the fall and his weight upon her, and gathered him jealously into her arms. The heat of his blood jetted into the folds of her sleeve. His head lay in the crook of her elbow, his face half-smiling at her for one astonished instant, before all its precision of line dissolved into faintness, into a dream.
There were no more shots, and yet the vault above them was suddenly alive with discordant noises, none of them understood, none of them relevant. Francis and Maggie were alone in the centre of a whirlwind, in a cone of calm that was half shock and half the peace beyond exhaustion. For a moment she did not even realise that he was hit, she only held him like a trophy, like the palm after a long, hard race.
Then her senses cleared a little, enough to distinguish the hammering at the door, hysterical with alarm, and the clash of the bolts as the man in the raincoat opened. The man who burst in and slammed the door at his back she saw clearly. She saw him clawing at the bolts, turning the key again. Robin had called him Roker, and he spoke English, most likely he was English. Why not? They flourish everywhere. If ever they wanted a description of this one, she could give it, one that would find him wherever he ran. Her vision seemed to be inordinately clear, as in one kind of dream. He was a little, fast-moving, quiet man, who even screamed in a whisper; balding, nondescript, fortyish, tough as nylon rope and almost as synthetic, a product of his age. He was rattling out destructive sentences in a low, venomous monotone; and because of him, she and the man she held in her arms were forgotten.
‘Police… hordes, I tell you! You knew I had the trap open, God damn it, I had to! Any minute I might have had to drop in here fast. It wasn’t the shot so much… somebody screamed like a blasted woman. How could I know they were that close? Don’t ask me what brought them snooping round here… They are here! They homed on that squeal like on a radar fix. Don’t hope for it, they saw me drop, all right, they know where the stone is. Nothing’s going to keep them out of here now. Sure I locked and bolted the door up there. You think two doors will hold them long?’
Robin’s voice, riding high and authoritative above this hail of disaster, said clearly: ‘Out, the back way!’ All his disintegrated atoms had welded again into one efficient being at the first pressure from outside. He dropped his victims without hesitation, without another thought. If he stayed to silence them he would lose precious time, and leave the police two identifiable bodies and two all-too-provable murders, should he ever be taken to answer for them. If the police here were on to him, then the game in these parts was up for good. Take the gains, cut the losses, and get out clean. There were other continents besides Europe, and there was money already carefully distributed there.
‘They must have found the car in the coppice, they came up from that way… No, I tell you there wasn’t a sign… not until that fool yelled like a banshee. Who the hell was it? You knew I should leave the trap open! They came from everywhere, like greyhounds on a hare…’
‘All right, we’ve got the message. Open that door and get going. Scatter and make for Dornbirn.’
A crisp, cool, commanding voice, not at all the scream of a banshee now. And they were obeying him in something more than haste. The other door was open, Maggie felt the chill of outer air like a fine spray over her cheek and shoulder. Of course, a rear exit would be an elementary precaution, and simple here in a labyrinth of castle cellars. They were all slipping away like flickering ghosts, the taciturn man who had cleaned the gun, the two big, raw-boned Austrians, the slender young one in the raincoat, the distraught sentry, all vanishing, all receding into tiny, rapid footfalls swallowed up by the rock.
Give him this at least, Robin was the last to go. He saw all his men away before he extracted the key from the rear door by which they had withdrawn, and passed through it in his turn, closing it briskly after him. His foot, as he crossed the room, stepped in the slowly-gathering rivulet of blood that seeped along between the stones. Maggie heard the key turn in the lock, and then his long, light steps receding rapidly.
It was very quiet in the wine cellar for a few blank moments, during which she drifted towards collapse, and dragged herself back desperately to press her hand against the hole in Francis’s shoulder, where the blood pumped steadily out of him, sending thin, bright-red jets welling between her fingers. She hardly noticed when the new noises began, the shots that broke the lock of the outer door, the rush of feet advancing. Only when the battering at the nearer door began did she realise that the police were through one obstacle, and divided from her now only by that last barrier. She laid Francis down out of her arms gently, and went stumbling across the room to drag back the bolts. There were voices calling out to her from the other side, offering and demanding reassurance. She was almost too tired to understand or answer, but if she did not, Francis would die. She knew nothing about first-aid, but she knew arterial bleeding when she saw it.
‘They’ve gone… another entrance somewhere…’ Every word required an effort like shouldering the world. ‘He took the keys away…’
‘Miss Tressider, are you all right?’ That was an English voice, not just someone local speaking English. It made its way to the centres of energy in her exhausted mind, and she drew reviving breath. ‘Yes, I’m all right, but Francis… he’s badly hurt… shot… Hurry, I’m afraid he’ll bleed to death…’
‘We’re coming. We’ll get through to you as fast as we can. Maggie… is he well away from the door? We may have to shoot a way through.’
‘Yes, near the other end of the room… ten yards… to your left…’
‘Stay there with him, and keep down. Maggie… Maggie, can you hear me? Where is he hit?’ George Felse was on one knee with his mouth as near to the keyhole as he could get it, yelling through to her over the probing and grating and cursing of an experienced professional struggling with the lock.
‘In the left shoulder… an artery, I think… he’s bleeding terribly…’
‘Do you know where the pressure point is in the shoulder?’ He told her in the fewest words possible how to locate and compress the subclavian artery. ‘You’ll have to keep pressing… you’ll tire…’
‘I won’t tire.’ No, not when she knew what to do. Her voice called back to him this time from farther away, she was already on her knees, raising Francis in her arms against the wall to strip away collar and shirt from his neck and feel for the pump that was emptying him of blood before her eyes. ‘But hurry…!’
‘Good girl, we’ll be through soon to help you…’
But the door was the door of a fortress.
From the moment that they found the Mercedes, tucked away in a hollow coppice on the Bregenz side of the castle hill, Oberkofler had taken no chances. He had a cordon of armed men strung round the hill on every side, methodically narrowing their circle as they converged on the unimpressive and unlovely ruins. Those on the Scheidenau side had neither seen nor heard anything of note since the discovery of the car, and were still merely carrying out their orders with proper attention, and no immediate expe
ctation of incident, when their colleagues from the Bregenz side were already below the flagstones of the unkempt courtyard and battering at the first locked door. Their turn, however, came some minutes later.
The snaggle-toothed outline of what had once been a bastion, now reduced to a ragged stone wall no more than six feet high at any point, and overgrown with grass and weeds, reared from the smooth dark side of the hill ahead of them. And out of it, vaulting the wall at a low place, burst suddenly the figure of a man, running head-down for the gully of trees below. After him surged another, and another.
Gladly the police closed in. The first shout of challenge caused the foremost fugitive to swerve away towards the lake, where willing hands gathered him in without resistance, and the later ones to balk, break in various directions, and open fire. The police returned the fire, picked off the enemy singly and undamaged where they could, and shot to bring them down where they must. Five in all, but the fifth was no more than poised on the wall when the volley of shots broke out. He was notably quick and resolute in making up his mind. The bullet he put through the left upperarm of the nearest policeman was meant to do worse than wound, if the marksman’s stance had not been so unstable. The policeman, firing back almost in the same instant, saw his opponent fall backward into the rubble and undergrowth inside the wall. But whether because he was hit or merely because he lost his balance no one was then clear.
By the time they had the other four secured, and came to look for the fifth, he had disappeared, though everyone was sure he had not emerged again anywhere round the perimeter. He had gone back, presumably, by the same way all five had come.
In the rank growth of early autumn it took them some time to find the broken place in the flooring within, and the steps leading down to the new, strong, locked door beneath.
He lay for a moment with the key still in his hand, feeling the waves of faintness approach and recede, and the slow drain of his blood seeping out of him. Here he could scarcely hear the shots from outside, and had no idea how long the skirmish continued; but he knew that they were all lost, every man of them. And he as certainly lost as they, though to another victor. All round the hill, waiting for them, the law. Down here in the rock, waiting for him…
How could it have happened, so unexpectedly and so finally?
Suddenly there were no continents left outside Europe, and Europe was crumbling away under his feet. All that carefully constructed kingdom, so firmly established, so long immune, wiped out in a night.
And all because of her. She had done this to him.
He did not know where the bullet in him had lodged, but he knew it was somewhere high in his chest, probably in the lungs. Bright red blood running out of his mouth, staining his hand, and the world sliding irrevocably away from him, and all at once this budding, proliferating pain where no pain had been, filling and overfilling him to the lips until he overflowed in blood.
He had always lived for his own advantage, pleasure and amusement, and in their cause everyone else had been expendable; and now that all these came down so catastrophically into one last small but sweet indulgence, he might as well continue consistent to the end, and rate himself as expendable, too. In any case he was all but spent. He knew he had not much time left, but he had time at least to kill the woman who had destroyed him.
With the last of his strength he set out along the passage, to crawl the ninety or so yards that separated him from Maggie Tressider.
Maggie, stiff and cold on the flagged floor by the open grave, holding Francis on her breast with his head carefully inclined and her thumb wedged hard down into the hollow of his collar-bone, heard the key grate in the lock of the rear door, clumsily and for some seconds abortively. She turned her head as if in a dream, without belief, and watched the door swing open, and no one come in. Nothing was quite real any more, except Francis, and the necessity to keep her thumb rammed into his gaunt flesh, and the awful, spurting flow stemmed. She did not move, even when she looked down from the place where the arriving face should have been, down below the lock, down to the creature who lay sprawled black and red across the threshold, with nothing live or human about him but the round, greenish-gold eyes in the ruined face, bent inexorably on her, and the right hand that still clutched the gun.
She raised her voice, not out of panic, but to reach the ears stretched to receive it beyond the other door, where the lock-breaker had been working now for many minutes:
‘He’s coming back!’
Someone outside cursed terribly. The door shook. George Felse shouted: ‘For God’s sake try the gun…’
‘He’s come for me,’ she called clearly and calmly. It was there in his face. She watched Robin, and cradled Francis, gently retaining the blood in him, never moving.
Outside the door they were going mad. The solid wood shook and trembled and creaked, but held firm, the first burst of gunfire, from something surely larger than a pistol, splintered the woodwork and scarred the stone wall, but still the lock resisted. Inside the cellar it seemed inordinately still and quiet. They were two separate worlds. Maggie excised from her consciousness the one that was useless to her, and sat still, only following with her eyes the struggles of the creature in the doorway.
The gold eyes never left her. His free left hand reached up laboriously, with the patience, she realised now, that belongs not to angels but to devils, until it got a hold on the latch of the door, and held fast. The right hand that held the gun, so carefully, so tenderly because it was the only treasure he had left, prised him doggedly up to his knees. He shifted the hand then with slow, drunken concentration to the door-frame, where it clung by the side and heel of the palm, frozen to the wood by the icy coldness of his will. Nothing else was now alive in him, except the deep, secret nerve that reacted only to hatred.
With infinite effort he had got one foot flattened to the floor, and with clinging hands and sweating agony he was levering himself upright. It was impossible. But for the burning determination he had to kill her as she had killed him, he would have fallen down long ago and stayed down, and died where he fell. Instead, inch by inch he drove himself upright, and even as she watched him, he took one lurching step away from the wall.
Gently and regretfully she laid down Francis out of her arms, on his face, that the wound might bleed less. Rising, she stepped over his body, and stood between him and their enemy. In this last encounter she had to meet Robin on equal terms. This whole affair had begun with the two of them, and with them it must end.
Neither of them heard the renewed grating of metal at the lock, the shattering gunshot, the impact of massed bodies against the barrier. There was no one left in the world but Maggie, erect and motionless in the centre of the cellar, and Robin Aylwin, propelling himself in dogged agony almost to within touch of her. The levelled gun, as heavy as the world, wavered upwards by inches towards her heart, sank irresistibly twice, and twice was recovered and forced onwards towards her heart, level with her heart.
With abnormal clarity she saw the crooked finger on the trigger struggling to command the strength to contract, and put an end to her. For an age the muzzle quivered, leaned, sagged from her breast, reared again and shook again, straining and ravenous for her.
The flame went out abruptly. The gun and the hand that held it trembled and sank, in spite of all his almost disembodied fury, sank and reached for the flagstones, subsiding into the dark. He pitched forward at her feet, and lay still. The bright blood from his lips stained her white slipper. The hand with the gun was buried under him.
The lock gave, the police flooded into the room. They saw her standing like a statue in ice and blood, her face as white as the ground colour of her own housecoat, blood on her breast and sleeve, blood on her shoe, where her enemy lay prone as if in worship, his curled lips kissing her instep. George Felse put his arm round her, and she crumpled into it with a huge, hapless sigh, and he picked her up bodily and carried her away, out into the air and the clean night emptied of enemies.
Behind him others at least as expert as he converged upon Francis Killian, and took charge of him until the ambulance came to rush him into hospital at Bregenz, where they would pump into him pints of blood, and stop the loss of his own.
But it wasn’t a hospital this one needed. George thought, as he always thought when the world closed in, of Bunty. He made for the nearest car of the several that had somehow gathered, and commandeered it without scruple, police driver and all. On the journey back into Scheidenau he held Maggie in his arms like the daughter he and Bunty had never had, and promised her the world and Francis, too, and never stopped holding her until he gave her to Bunty at the Goldener Hirsch.
So it was not until half-way through the next day that he provisionally closed his own case. They had excavated the sitting tenant of the wine cellar by then, naked, almost a skeleton, young, male, the errand-boy who knew better how to run the business than did the managing director. Maggie would clear up the references later, but up to then Maggie was a limp, wondering convalescent just coming to life in Bunty’s charge, living on bulletins from the hospital in Bregenz, and not yet fit to be questioned. What mattered about the young man from under the flagstones was that his more durable parts, notably the teeth, bore certain unique characteristics which were ultimately to identify him beyond doubt as Peter Bromwich, the art student of Comerbourne.