Pieter trudged and crunched along the frozen gravel of the wide path and driveway that paralleled the moat, eyeing the ice that had formed on the surface of the water and wondering whether it was strong enough to take his weight. He had to get inside the compound somehow and the first step was to get across the barrier that the moat provided. Simply walking over the bridge and up to the front gate was surely not an option? He frowned to himself, even if he could get on to the island that housed the castle, how could he get in? After all, the whole point of such a building was to stop people 'getting in', the defences built so long ago were all concerned with protecting the inhabitants, not to present easy access to any passer-by.
He kept walking, suspiciously noting a young couple skipping along with their dog as they jogged toward him through the public parkland that would have once been devoid of trees, providing a clear field of view of an approaching aggressor. The time for action was fast approaching.
Gertrude sat on the edge of her bed and leaned forward slightly. Yes! She had been right, there was no light shining through the keyhole in the door which meant that the key was still in the lock. When the little man had arrived outside a little earlier, the guard had automatically placed the key to her room in the lock, no doubt presuming that 'Rumpelstiltskin'- as she had come to call the little man - would want to enter. In fact, after a brief conversation to discuss his imminent departure, he had gone away again without visiting Gertrude and the guard must have forgotten to remove the key again.
She calculated that she had less than ten minutes to prepare for her escape. Gertrude knew that the guard had poured himself a coffee around twenty minutes ago. He was a man of meticulous habit and it was a regular pattern of activity that she had come to recognise, occurring unseen on the other side of her door over the period she had been held in captivity. Around half an hour after finishing his coffee, she would always hear his chair scrape back and he would wander off, returning just a few minutes later. Evidently, he was visiting the lavatory and since he had finished his last coffee over twenty minutes ago she knew that he would be taking his toilet break very soon, effectively leaving her alone with the key in the door, albeit inserted into the other side and ostensibly out of reach.
She glanced behind her and over the bed, grabbing the magazine that she had been reading earlier, pulling it closer and readying herself to rip out a single page. She scanned the room, wracking her brain to figure out how she would extract the key from the lock, looking for a long strong implement to needle the key in its position until she could poke it out to fall onto the magazine page that she intended to slip under the door. Her eyes suddenly alighted upon the bathroom and she remembered the dental implements that that had been provided by the little man; the mouthwash, toothpaste, toothbrush and most importantly, the tooth-scraper with the slender handle and the small curved hook of metal at the tip. It would provide the perfect tool to scratch and scrabble at the key but she guessed that she would not need to perform too much manipulation; after all, the guard had only inserted the key into the lock and had never actually turned it.
Gertrude wandered to the bath room, snatched up the tooth-scraper and returned to perch on the edge of the bed, her heart beating faster in anticipation as she pretended to flick through the magazine that she would soon rip a page from, the instigation of a sequence of actions that could lead to her escape and freedom.
An old gentleman wandering between the trees with a pair of binoculars, occasionally pointing them at some unseen bird settling amongst the bare branches, seemed innocent enough but Pieter was acutely aware that the area was probably being watched. He eyed the old man with suspicion just as he had when the joggers with the dog had passed him, but shook his head with self-disdain as he consciously convinced himself that he was just being paranoid. He turned back to stare at the curtain wall of the castle and wandered further, examining the bare limbs of the trees that swayed in the bone chilling breeze gusting intermittently.
Centuries ago, the trees would not have stood anywhere near the walls however, they now provided a romantic summer covering of foliage and as Pieter realised, a possible route onto the walls and into the compound. Across the widest part of the moat he could see a group of three or four firs intermingled and abutted against the wall and fifteen metres further along the skeletal limbs of a large oak tree swayed gently. The firs looked too dense to climb through; however, they provided perfect cover from which to make a dash for the oak, a single limb of which occasionally brushed against the topmost brickwork of the ten metre wall. All he needed to do was to get across the moat and hide until the appropriate time.
A chair scraped and Gertrude immediately tensed, aware that her guard was now leaving. She probably had five or six minutes at most to drop the key from the lock onto the paper, slip it back underneath the door and then exit her room, locking the door up again before heading somewhere - anywhere - in the large building that she knew she had been escorted through during her arrival.
She listened at the door as the footsteps receded and then went to work, slipping the torn page from the magazine under the gap of the door. Her hands were already sweating and she fumbled slightly with the tooth-scraper to insert it into the lock, manoeuvring it about to jiggle the key in its place.
'Hoerenjong!' Gertrude exclaimed to herself, she had accidentally turned the key in its position, actually making it more secure as it sat in the lock. She took a breath and exhaled slowly, inserting the tooth-scraper again and carefully dragging the key teeth around, aligning it with the hole. She pressed the sharp tip of the small scraper blade against the rounded end of the shaft and started to press, feeling elated as it slid back, although catching a couple of times before plopping out and falling to the paper she had placed on the opposite side of the door.
She grasped at the edge of the magazine page and gently pulled the sheet towards her, fearing that the key would strike the bottom of the door and be brushed off on to the floor, out of reach and retrieval. As she slowly pulled the paper under, the rounded oval of the key handle appeared and she hastily jabbed her little finger through the centre hole, plucking it toward her and sighing with relief as it shot into the room to rest on the carpet at her knees.
Grabbing at the key, Gertrude quickly inserted and twisted it in the lock, hearing the clunk as the bolt slid back. She depressed the handle and the door urgently yielded inward as she yanked at it with too much vigour. Taking just a moment to calm herself down, she peeped into the corridor and could see the table and chair of her guard and a monitor screen displaying a quadrant of security camera footage, the images flicking between different angles, one of the four displays dedicated to the rooms she was now leaving. This was it, time to make a break!
She darted outside and quickly locked the door behind her, leaving the key in place before scurrying along the narrow crooked corridor that she recognised as the final leg of her arrival route. Taking the lift she had been brought up in was out of the question, she had to keep away from the main halls and stairways but the corridor led off to a myriad of other different routes, archways opening left and right. One of them must provide her with a safe exit.
Pieter had performed a full circumference of the moat and was sure that the only way across was over the large wooden bridge leading to the main gatehouse. Standing before the frosted entrance ramp, he was also aware that his activity was probably starting to look a little conspicuous. Surely, somebody would be watching and he had to admit to himself that he had not been acting in a particularly relaxed or nonchalant manner. He walked to the bridge and placed a hand on the rail, deciding that a purposeful walk was all that was required, a quick hop over the rail from where he would have to drop into the bushes that grew out of the bank just above the water level of the moat. He could only hope that he would be able to grab onto the evergreen foliage and haul himself over to the small bank at the foot of the wall - he certainly did not fancy crashing through the thin ice that had formed where the da
mp stone of the gatehouse disappeared into the murky water beneath.
The wooden steps of the small spiral stairway creaked as Gertrude crept down, leaning into the small circular wall space as she tried to peep around the centre shaft and down to where she was headed. Meeting somebody on their up was not something that she relished. She arrived at a small landing and a short arched wooden door that seemed to have been built to the proportions of a child rather than a tall adult. She gently tried the latch and found that the door opened with her tentative pressure and peeking through she could she another corridor which she guessed was originally the sleeping quarter.
She was effectively entering the top floor of the main building, possibly containing a series of sleeping chambers that had once provided comfort to the Lord of the castle and his family hundreds of years ago.. She considered that her guard would be back at his post soon and that perhaps she should have waited to hear him settle down again. No matter, there could be other people wandering about the building and anyway, she had to be prepared to encounter anybody, she needed to be ready to run or hide and constantly examined her surroundings for possible escape routes or places to secrete herself.
Where did she want to go? The obvious answer was out through the front door, the same way she had come in. She knew that if she kept heading down, then she would obviously reach the ground floor and hopefully be able to make it into the courtyard where she had been dragged from the van she had arrived in, however, that presented a problem. What if the main gate was locked? She would still be trapped. She had to get a view of the outside to determine what it was like, after all, she had only seen the interior of the room in which she had been confined, nothing else.
Gertrude slipped back though the tiny door into the small shaft of the spiral staircase and decided to head down to what she guessed was in fact the first floor. She wandered out through a similarly shrunken door and edged out into a much larger corridor than the one above. The floor was of polished wood rather than carpeted and the whitewashed walls were hung with shields and swords, pikes and muskets, the weaponry of bygone ages. Gertrude spied an open door through which a shaft of daylight was beaming, there must be a window there and she could look outside. She gently loped over to the door and poked her head around the corner, taking in the contents and décor of a large room that seemed to be configured for some of presentation or ceremony.
A huge fireplace built into the outside wall acted as the focal point of the room with a large raised stone plinth in front of it providing a platform on which a lectern stood. There were rows of chairs along the length of the room, all ready for an audience of which there was thankfully no sign. Massive iron candelabras hung from the heavily beamed ceiling and various life-sized statues of naked but winged men and women stared down from the walls, watching her every move, their faces locked in earnest and somewhat ominous reproach. Although they appeared angelic with attractively carved faces, they all had a demonic countenance.
Gertrude wandered to one of the large windows, squinting at the daylight that streamed in contrast to the dimly lit corridors she had come from. Looking out, she could see over an area of parkland and the aspect of the room obviously faced out from the castle rather than into it. She pressed her face against the modern double-glazed glass and tried to squint down to the base of the wall. All she could make out was a small terraced garden where a waist high wall dropped away to the real ground level and the curtain wall, beyond which was the moat that she assumed surrounded the whole castle. She ran her hands over the frame of the window, it was a sash that could be raised and lowered but it was securely locked and the key was nowhere in sight.
She could not waste time trying to find it and she certainly was not about to break the glass to clamber out. Besides, the drop to the garden terrace was much too far for her to jump safely. With her face flat against the panes, the only thing that had caught her attention as a possible escape route was a rope that had been strung from a room further along the corridor and tied up to a fixture on the curtain wall walkway. It appeared to have been used as part of a pulley system as there was a pile of building materials, cement or plaster, at the base of the wall and the rope had probably been tied up out of reach to stop inquisitive visitors from grabbing it and yanking on it. In spite of the opportunity that it offered, she decided to go down to the next floor to find an exit to the garden, from there, she could at least try to get to the curtain wall and find a way over it. If she had to swim the moat, then so be it.
The brush and twigs of the bush into which Pieter had dropped were still supporting him as he clambered over the brushy cushion. He had just recovered from a moment of urgent scrabbling, a few branches had given way and although he had managed to prevent himself from falling off completely, his left foot was soaked and stung from where it had dipped into the icy waters of the moat. Carefully reaching out, he managed to grab onto a trailing branch from an adjacent woody shrub that gave him the leverage to pull himself closer to the small bank at the foot of the wall. He judged that one more pull would suffice to land him on the bank and from there he would soon be able to creep around to the firs and thence to the oak tree to climb up to the parapet of the wall.
Pieter heaved and he slid over the poking spines of the bush, some of them catching at his clothes and digging into his stomach but he persevered. He was almost at the bank and one more over-hand pull would allow him to scramble from the bush onto the island. He gripped the branch and tensed his biceps, dragging his body until he could reach some long grass stalks that sprouted from the clumpy soil. Grabbing a handful, he pulled himself forward, the frozen blades tearing and shearing as he used them for leverage. Despite pulling away a great sheaf of grass, Pieter managed to get himself over, pistoning his legs to push himself off the bush and away from the danger of falling into the moat. A final stumbled leap and he was standing at the foot of the wall on a narrow bank that widened as it arced away from the gatehouse. He crouched and looked back across to the parkland but could not see anybody. He had not seen any CCTV cameras watching him and he had not yet heard an alarm that would signify that somebody knew what he was doing.
Pieter ran for the firs he had seen earlier and dived into the dense pine cover, taking a moment to catch his breath as he appraised the oak tree a few metres further along and how he had to climb it to get to the top of the wall. He coughed slightly as the cool air made his lungs tighten but kept examining the oak intently, mildly amused that the last time he had climbed a tree with such enthusiasm he had been a fourteen year old boy.
Gertrude was hiding, practically cowering. She had heard voices and decided to take cover, nimbly dodging into a small alcove and crouching into the shadows of the recess as a party of three gruff men wandered past. They were speaking German and she managed to catch some of their conversation as they chatted about the wiring in one of the rooms of the main turret. She was sure that they could not see her but she waited until the clumping footsteps of their heavy boots had reverberated to a dull thudding well away from her position before emerging from her hiding place, gasping slightly from holding her breath.
In her terror, she could not conceive that getting down the ground floor in safety would be possible, it was surely guarded and the close call with the trio of sentries had unnerved her to such an extent that she felt an overriding impulse get out as soon as possible from an exit on the first floor - any exit.
She scanned left and right in the long corridor and saw that it veered off at both ends, probably to the main rooms toward the centre of the building, however, directly ahead of her she was sure that one of the rooms would have a window that could open - one of them must have an exit to world outside. Getrude crept forwards and slid into the next door along.
Pieter was swinging wildly at the end of the branch that he had managed to climb to and which he had slid along to reach the wall. He had slightly misjudged the strength of the branch and although it comfortably held his weight, the whole limb was bou
ncing as he neared the end and he realised that he would need to make a small leap to grab the wall.
He crouched himself as near to the end as he dare and then deliberately bounced up and down. He needed to make the leap as the branch was rising, using some of the energy residing in the tension of the wood to at least prevent him from diving too low and simply smacking straight into the wall. He counted himself down, three, two, one, performing a violent surge up and away from the tree, kicking off from the branch with his shins and toes to dive forwards. His timing was accurate but not necessarily comfortably within margins and he scrabbled as his finger tips caught the top edge of the brickwork and his body swung down to lump heavily against the facing wall. He gasped, slightly winded, but managed to pull himself up, gaining purchase with his toes and driving his elbows into the brickwork to lever himself up. Feeling every scrape as he rolled over the parapet, he landed in a heap on a narrow walkway that ran around the top of the wall.
Pieter rested for a moment, wheezing slightly from the exertion of his activities and squinting as he tried to work out where he should go next. He was now at the top of the curtain wall that surrounded the castle complex but as he surveyed the grounds could see no obvious way into the main buildings. He could not see into the inner courtyard but he suddenly heard the rattle of a diesel engine starting up from cold. He caught the grating sound of machinery and guessed that the main gates just a few metres below and away from him were being opened via some automated entry system and sure enough, within a few moment a Renault van nosed out of the compound belching a black cloud of diesel fumes from the exhaust as the driver revved the engine to accelerate away. Pieter peered intently and recognised it as the van he had been tracking, noting the license plate and relieved that it matched the number he had been looking for.
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