by Colin Forbes
Smooth rock, a scooter thrown carelessly down on its side. No sign of anyone. Then she saw the manhole cover, what it had uncovered when removed. She parked her scooter on its strut, listened, stretched her aching legs several times to bring back strength, mobility. She had the Browning in her hand as she walked to the edge of the large dome, looked down a sheer drop, saw Airolo far to the north like a toy town. She swung round quickly, raising her automatic. She wasn't going to be shoved off the edge - as she had been in Chiasso.
In the far distance she saw the twin towers bathed in sunlight, looking much smaller. Then she heard something she didn't like. The slow moaning boom of a large bell echoing across the mountain slopes. She walked to the manhole cover, bent down to lift it by the handle. God, it was a weight.
Taking cautious steps, she walked to the large hole it had covered. She risked using her small powerful torch to shine down into the blackness. A wide old iron ladder led down. The treads were rusty and there was only one handrail, on the left. Now she remembered what Tweed had said about long ago mining for ore, a rail system to transport the ore. She listened again. Only a horrific silence.
'Get on with it, girl,' she said to herself.
It was awkward descending backwards. She shoved the torch, the illumination still shining, under her belt. In one hand she gripped the Browning, used the other to grasp the rail. As she descended deeper, away from sunlight, she detected an odour she had smelt before. In Saafeld's morgue in Holland Park back home. In Zeitzler's morgue in Zurich. The odour of formalin. Used to preserve body parts.
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Before starting her nerve-racking descent she had taken the glove off her right hand, so now she had a firm grip on her Browning. The torch was not a lot of help: she had to use a foot to feel down for the next tread on the ladder. Then, casting a brief glimpse down, the torch illuminated the base of what she realized was a tunnel, with ancient rails closer together than with a modern system. Her foot trod on rock unexpectedly. She had reached the bottom.
She slowly moved the beam of her torch round and up. Yes, it was an old railway tunnel, carved out of rock with an arched roof. To her right the rails ended at a concrete wall covered with mould. It had been sealed off. To her left the rails vanished round a bend. She'd go that way.
It was further to the bend than she had thought. She tried to walk without making a sound but loose stones between the rails rattled. She stepped to the side of the rails, near the rock wall. The odour of formalin was becoming stronger. She raised the angle of the torch and nearly dropped it.
By its beam she was saw on the opposite wall a level shelf of rock, about five feet above the floor. She was looking at a large round glass laboratory jar with a lid and a round knob to lift it. The jar was occupied. Inside she gazed at the head of someone she had never seen, covered with transparent liquid to well above the crown. The head was of a man probably in his fifties, the cheeks sunken and gaunt, the open eyes glazed. Hank Foley, caretaker from Pinedale, Maine, she guessed.
She swivelled the beam to the laboratory jar perched next to it and nearly choked. She knew this one - Adam Holgate, blurred eyes half-closed as though asleep. Clenching her teeth, she moved the beam to the next jar, nearly let out a cry of misery. Abraham Scale's owl-like nose so clear, the open eyes staring at her as though trying to convey a message. Like the previous ones his head had been severed just below the pointed chin.
Knowing what she was going to see in the next jar she again clenched her teeth. Her torch shone straight on Elena Brucan's scarf. It had been missing from her decapitated body perched in the boat by the River Sihl. Then she saw something which was a vile obscenity. Elena's embroidered scarf was neatly coiled below where the head would have rested. How inhuman.
She was moving by reflex now. Her whole body was stiff with revulsion that anyone could do all this. The next jar contained Black Jack's head. His lower lip had slipped open. He looked as though he were leering. She found this almost worse than what she had seen before.
After tucking the Browning inside her belt she took off the glove from her right hand. It was damp with perspiration. She wiped it quickly on her trousers, then grabbed hold of the weapon. That was when she sensed movement behind her. Someone had hidden in one of the alcoves she had passed. She dipped her head to the right - Saafeld had said it was the left side Holgate had been struck a hammerblow. Even so, the blunt end of the axe grazed her head, she stumbled, twisted round, fell backwards. Her right hand had hit the rail and she lost her grip on the automatic.
The torch had also left her grip but hadn't broken. By its illumination she saw the tall figure clad in a black coat, the wide-brimmed hat pulled well down so the face was hidden. Dazed, she still realized her neck was raised up, resting on something smooth. She glanced both sides. She saw a white curved surface enclosing her. She had fallen on to an execution block. The tall black-coated figure stood above her, raised the axe in its right hand. By the illumination of the torch she saw the razor-sharp edge of the blade, poised to slice down on her. It began its downward sweep.
She rolled her whole body over to the left, completed a circle as her body thudded into the tunnel's wall. Her right hand fell on something. The Browning. She grabbed it, aimed, fired point-blank as cold-blooded fury seized her. She was going to kill, kill, kill. She kept on pulling the trigger, fired nine times.
Two more shots were fired. Tweed, awkwardly clinging to the ladder, had fired twice. The tall figure in its long black coat stood still as a statue, then collapsed backwards, lay still.
Paula was hauling herself to her feet as Tweed reached the base of the ladder, came to her. He bent over the black-coated figure, checked the carotid pulse, looked up.
'Dead as the dodo.'
'But who is it?'
She could hear the faint sound of a helicopter landing, then feet climbing down the ladder. A man shouted out a command at the top of his voice.
'No one moves or I'll shoot.'
Beck's unmistakable voice. Tweed, still crouched over the prone body, shouted back. Repeated what he said twice.
'You won't be shooting anyone. I'm here with Paula. Shut up.'
Paula picked up the torch, shone it on the corpse Tweed was bent over. He reached out a hand, carefully lifted off the strange hat. The light shone on the face.
Marienetta. Cat's eyes still open. Staring up at Paula with what seemed to be hatred.
Epilogue
STRAUB ANNOUNCES HE WON'T RUN FOR PRESIDENT 'For Health Reasons' COUSIN MARIENETTA MASS MURDERESS
The screaming headlines in the Daily Nation stared up from Tweed's desk. Below was a long story about the headless murders. The by-line was Robert Newman's. In his office at Park Crescent Tweed sat in his swivel chair, looked at all the members of his team. They had flown back from Zurich four days after leaving Airolo.
It was evening and outside in the London streets rain sluiced down. Paula, seated behind her desk, was the first to speak.
'Congratulations, Tweed. You got there in the end, as you always do.'
'That was the most difficult case I've ever tackled,' he admitted. 'But the congratulations are yours - despite truly terrible ordeals you solved the case.'
He waited as everyone cheered, gave her an ovation. She looked embarrassed, stared down at her desk top. She spoke softly, feeling she had to say something.
'It was so close - down in that old mining tunnel. The absurd thing is I knew it was her before you pulled back the hat. I'd remembered - rather late in the day - the words I couldn't recall, or who said them. I like creating museums. We couldn't understand why the heads were missing. Marienetta had the idea of creating a museum of the dead. It was even worse than that, even madder. Remember, Tweed, before we left the mining tunnel I walked further in, found her workshop with a complete set of sculpture materials. She was going to use the heads in the jars as models for sculpting their heads.'
'Beck also explained to me,' Tweed told them, 'the secret of the execut
ion blocks. He visited the plastics plant at Vevey. Marienetta had a duplicate key to Sophie's private room where Sophie invented the new, very flexible, strong and lightweight plastic. Hidden away he found a metal cast, size of the plastic block in the mining tunnel. Sophie had left instructions. Marienetta mixed the plastic, poured it into the cast, heated it. Bingo, she had an execution block, very strong but easy to carry. He had found two more in the mining tunnel at Airolo.'
'How the devil did she transport the heads?' Nield wondered.
'Beck,' Tweed continued, 'found a Bloomingdales carrier in the tunnel, its interior reinforced with leather. Large enough to take a laboratory jar - with a head inside it and the axe. New clothes were also inside to cover the real contents. He found another similar carrier inside the tunnel.'
'Marienetta must have been the villain who shoved me down onto the line at Chiasso,' Paula puzzled. 'Yet she arrived on that express later.'
'She played the old trick,' Tweed explained. 'At the Splendide Royal she said she wasn't coming, went up to her room. Then she caught a much earlier train, was waiting for you. After she tries to kill you she runs back, boards the express when the doors are opened, walks through several coaches, emerges into my arms as though she's just arrived. Days earlier she plays the same trick -leaving Zurich very early on a train stopping at Airolo.
She's carrying the trophy heads, gets off at Airolo and takes them to start her lovely museum. Catches another stopping train to Lugano.'
'And,' Paula suggested, looking at the newspaper, 'Bob must have had evidence establishing she was Straub's cousin.'
'Arriving back in Zurich,' Tweed told her, 'I phoned Roy Buchanan. Armed with a search warrant and a large team, he entered ACTIL's London HQ. Breaking into a steel cabinet, they found Marienetta's birth certificate. Born in America, her father was a brother of Straub's father Vito, her mother English. That made her Russell Straub's first cousin. So that's it. I said power was the motive. So Newman's story makes that point, destroying Straub's ambition for ever. Who would elect to the Oval Office someone with insanity in the family?'
'You think Straub knew what she was doing?'
'I now know he did. Marienetta was the mysterious patient held in the locked room in the Pinedale asylum. The Bryans, who ran the asylum, have surfaced in Ohio, worried when more murders were committed. They've admitted to the FBI that Straub paid the huge bill. While waiting to come home from Zurich I phoned my old friend, Cord Dillon of the CIA. He told me.'
'So that's why Straub was following the Arbogasts round like a lap dog. He was becoming frantic about Marienetta as murder followed murder. He knew his career was on the line. And it was - he's finished politically now. And who was Mannix?'
'Marienetta,' said Tweed. 'Diabolically clever. It was a diversion she hoped would put me on the wrong track. Mannix was nonexistent - created by Marienetta.'
'Why kill Adam Holgate?' asked Butler, who had known him.
'We know Holgate had been caught snooping in the files ACTIL kept. I think Marienetta thought he'd seen her birth certificate which might have blown the case wide open. So she lures him out to Bray and whop! She has another head for her museum.'
'It's quite horrible.' Paula exclaimed. 'And she asked me to join her in playing detective.'
'Because she feared you, had to know how close to the truth you were getting.'
'That leaves Scale, Brucan and Black Jack,' Nield remarked.
'Scale was a criminologist. Probably made the mistake of letting slip he suspected her sanity. Same reason for Brucan, so sensitive to the presence of evil. As for Black Jack, she had chosen him to give Paula the map showing the way to the old house by the lake. When Paula evaded the hole into the rats' cellar Marienetta hurried back to eliminate Black Jack, who could have told Paula what had happened. She must have bribed bankrupt Jack.'
'And Hank Foley, the caretaker back in Maine?'
'Like Holgate he was a snoop. We heard that from Millie, the asylum's cleaner. There would be a record with Marienetta's name and treatment for an outbreak of madness. Marienetta couldn't risk him knowing about her, so when she left the asylum - whop!'
'I do wish you wouldn't keep using that word,' Paula protested. 'It's so descriptive. My last query is: how did she transport all the heads to Airolo?'
'Don't you remember? She caught an early train, a stopper, I'm sure. She gets off, deposits her treasures in the museum, catches a later train to Lugano which gets there after we've arrived. It all fits.'
'What doesn't fit is that Sam Snyder was sending an earlier account to papers all over the place. Yet it hasn't appeared.'
'That was me.' Newman chuckled. 'Snyder had played so many dirty tricks in the past I thought it was my turn. I wired all the papers and magazines warning them they were about to receive a sensationalist report before the case was solved. Which it wasn't. Their lawyers would order editors to hold off. They were later quite happy with my report.'
'Now I know why I kept feeling jittery,' Paula said. 'It was always after spending time with Marienetta. My subconscious was screaming warning signals. I think I'd better get off home.'
'No, you don't,' Tweed rapped out. 'I've booked a large table at Santorini's on their platform projecting out over the Thames. They assured me they have plenty of champagne. So everyone here on your feet. Including you, Monica. You did build up that vital family tree of the Arbogasts.'
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