The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  She took the drawing, shook her head over it, and then went to the old man and handed it to him. He looked at it in silence for a while, and then started a long conversation with her. I got the impression that they seemed to be arguing about something. In the end the old boy got up wearily from his seat and started down the garden path. The woman, with a big smile, motioned me to follow him.

  Outside the gate the old boy paused, pointed to the scooter, and said something. I didn’t have to know German to realize that the old man preferred riding to walking.

  I started it up. He climbed on to the tiny pillion seat and motioned me away down the road. He sat behind me for two miles, chuckling to himself, gripping tight to my waist, and now and then breaking out into bursts of German which meant nothing to me.

  Then on a long curve of new road, he tapped me hard on the shoulder. On our left was a run of tall stone wall. We got off and we walked along the wall in the grass for a couple of hundred yards until, to accommodate the new road, the wall turned almost at right angles. Round the corner he stopped and smacked the wall as though it were the flank of a favourite horse. This next section of wall was much newer than the one we had been following. He said something in German and shook his head at my obvious stupidity. Then he made the obvious motions of opening big gates. He then stepped to one side, sank unsteadily on one knee and crossed himself. This done he turned to me and began to count on his fingers aloud, “Ein, Zwei ...” and so on. I could count fairly well in German. He stopped at “Zehn”.

  I got it then. I walked across to the other side of the road and took a look at the wall. From the turn of the angle, to where it ran away into the rise of a wood, the stonework was years newer than the first part we had walked along. From where I stood I was looking at the view I had seen in the background of the slide ... the same mountains, the same grouping of trees. But there were no gates, and no wayside altar. I could have searched for months and never found it. Ten years ago clearly, the road had been widened and straightened and the gates had gone. More than likely the slide had been a colour transparency taken for sentimental reasons before this work was done. Something else became obvious, too. I’d been working on the basis of a ten-minute road drive from the Zafersee – that at a generous estimate gave a radius of five miles from the lake. This place was at the limit of a twenty-mile radius. I couldn’t see Siegfried doing the body-dumping trip, almost certainly at night, at a speed of over a hundred miles an hour – except by using a helicopter!

  I took the old man back to the cottage by way of the nearest inn, bought him a couple of brandies, and finally left him at the cottage gate with a handsome tip.

  It took me until late afternoon to beat the bounds of the place. The stone wall was its frontage only to the two-mile strip of main road. The rest of the estate was bounded by a tall wooden fence which carried three strands of barbed wire, angled outwards to stop anyone climbing in. I guessed there might have been a couple of hundred acres of ground inside, roughly in the shape of a natural bowl, surrounded by wooded mountain slopes that ran up to bare crests. The new entrance was a mile up a side turning, a twisting, tree-hung road; a tall pair of barbed-wire topped wooden gates with heavy iron drop-ring handles that didn’t move an inch when I tried them.

  I climbed the hill on the far side of the gates until I came out in a small clearing where I could get a good view of the bowl. There it was, an enormous Schloss with a centre block and two side wings. From my view point I had the whole of the side of one wing facing me. The roof was cut into small towers of blue slate. To one side there was a small lake surrounded by parkland. A narrow stream ran out of the lake and disappeared down-valley in the direction of the main road. I went over the whole place with my glasses, and the thought of what it must cost to heat it in winter made me shudder. The only sign of life was Herr Hesseltod.

  I held him in the glasses for an hour and the sight of what he was doing cheered me up. He was repairing a patch of bad slatework on the roof of one of the higher towers on the wing facing me. He’d got three ladders; a long one from the ground up to a wide terrace on the fourth floor, another ladder up to a flat roof about twenty feet above this, and then a longer ladder up to the slope of the tower. To one side of the tower I could see part of a rounded dome, that looked like glass. It was clearly a great warren of a place where you could get lost in a maze of rooms. I had to get Katerina and Lottie out of the place as fast as possible, and I had to do it myself. If I went to the German police with my cock-and-bull story, I knew exactly where I would finish – in Sutcliffe’s hands. He would already have taken care of that one.

  I waited until Hesseltod had finished for the day, and then I went back down the road on my scooter and found the stream which ran out of the lake.

  It came out through a culvert in a bank, with the wall two yards above it on a slope. It was a simple brick tunnel, about four feet high, and there was about six inches of water flowing down it. Ten feet up the tunnel was a wooden framework, latticed with barbed wire.

  I drove five miles down the valley, bought myself a pair of pliers at a garage, and then went and had dinner at a Gasthof. Before I left I bought myself half a bottle of brandy, and a great length of sausage which I tucked away into my rucksack.

  It was eleven o’clock when I went into the culvert. The barbed wire gave me no trouble. Beyond the wire the culvert ran for about twenty yards, and then I was out and into a small plantation of young spruce. I kept their cover up towards the Schloss. It was a night bright with stars and I could see the ladders still in position. I had now, too, a better view of the front of the place. There was a big gravelled forecourt held between the two wing arms. One or two lights showed in the far wing, and there was a light over the main door in the face of the centre block.

  I sat in cover for a couple of hours across the lake until there was only one light burning in an upper window of the far wing. Then I made my way cautiously round the top end of the lake. When I was a hundred yards from the foot of the first ladder, I took off my shoes and hung them by the laces round my neck.

  I’m not good at heights and I went up without looking down. Two-thirds of the way up the last ladder I stepped sideways from it on to a parapet top that protected the edge of the leaded roof flats from which the towers rose. I went exploring cautiously around the acres of leaded roof. There were four towers or pinnacles on my wing and one had a small door at roof level. On the inner side of the wing there was a thirty-foot drop to the roof run of the centre block. I found a piece of rusted iron rod lying on the leads and decided to tackle the tower door. I prised open the door and slid inside to pitch darkness. I then sat down with my back to the door and decided to wait until first light.

  I was wakened by the sound of pigeons love-making on the roof outside. It was a quarter-past four. I was not prepared for the comfort which was awaiting me.

  A little run of stone steps went down from the roof door to a narrow corridor. Dust was thick on the floor and bat and mouse droppings crunched under my feet. At the end of the corridor a door led into a small kitchen. It had a stone sink with a cold-water tap, rows of tarnished copper pans, and a small electric grill festooned with cobwebs. Beyond the kitchen was a hallway with a moth-eaten carpet, an antique armchair, a dower chest, and an oil-painting of some white-haired old boy in court dress.

  Off the hall I found a bedroom with a fourposter, stripped of everything except the mattress and uncovered bolster. There was a sitting-room with an alcove at one end which was lined with shelves that held rows of leather-bound books. Around a small marble-fronted fireplace were a couple of settees and a chair. The walls, which were lined with leather and studded with copper-headed nails, were covered with oil-paintings, most of them dark and dirty. At the end of the hall were two doors. One led into a tiny bathroom and lavatory, and the other, which was locked from the outside, led out, I guessed, into the main body of the wing. I tried to look through the keyhole but it was blocked by the key on the other side
. It wasn’t hard to figure what kind of person had lived up here – some embarrassing old relative shoved out of the way and conveniently forgotten. As it stood at the moment, except for the dust, cobwebs and bat and mice deposits, it was all ready for occupation; water ran from the kitchen cold tap, the electric grill and lights worked, and there was water in the bathroom.

  I cut myself a slice of sausage, drew a glass of water, and sat just back from the sitting-room window, looking down on to the front courtyard of the Schloss. At eight o’clock I heard Hesseltod overhead working on the roof and whistling contentedly.

  I sat for four hours at the window, and a very interesting four hours they were.

  The first person to appear in the courtyard was the old man who, I was pretty sure, was Professor Vadarci. He walked over to a wide, stone-rimmed bowl which was full of water. Through the glasses I could see goldfish and water-lilies. He spent some time fiddling with three or four big arc lamps set up around the pool. He was there for about ten minutes and then Madame Vadarci appeared. She was wearing a long white summer dress, one of her big floppy hats, and carrying a lace-bordered parasol.

  She joined the Professor and they strolled over to the lakeside and sat down on a seat under a large weeping willow. The old man smoked and Madame Vadarci read a newspaper; a pair of simple, innocent people, enjoying the morning sun.

  An hour later Siegfried appeared. He was wearing bathing trunks and white sandals and he joined them by the willow and did a few press-ups and back-flips. As he finished I saw Katerina come into the forecourt and walk towards the lakeside group. With her was another girl.

  I put the glasses on them. Katerina was wearing a towelling tabard, and her head was bare, the blonde hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and caught at the nape of the neck with a ribbon. I got her face in profile and saw that she was laughing as she talked to the other girl. Katerina’s blonde hair, the blue eyes, the firm suntanned skin, the way she walked and smiled, all made enchantment for me. I gave her half a minute’s silent worship, didn’t care if I was a damned fool about her, and then slid the glasses to the other girl. She was a shade taller than Katerina, blonde and she carried her bathing wrap instead of wearing it. She went across the gravel in a white bikini. It had to be Lottie Bemans.

  When they joined the group, Siegfried came up to them and put an arm around each one’s shoulders. I didn’t care for that. He looked altogether too matey with both of them.

  He talked to them both and pointed down the lake, explaining something. The girls tossed their wraps aside, kicked off their sandals and lined up on the bank. I saw him drop his hand and both girls went in with long, racing dives and they headed away down the lake like a couple of torpedoes. The edge of the window cut off part of my view of the lake. When they passed out of sight I saw that there was nothing to choose between them. They appeared, heading back, in about thirty seconds and now one of them had about a yard lead. I could not tell which one it was until she came into the lakeside and Siegfried reached down and gave her a hand ashore. It was Lottie, and I had her face full on, panting and laughing.

  Katerina came out of the water unaided, and for a few moments was ignored. I didn’t know how the elimination process was going to be worked – but she already had big competition from Lottie.

  I turned away from the window, trying not to think of the Zafersee not many miles away. I took an angry swipe at a cushion that lay on the carpet. It exploded into a cloud of dust that got into my throat and sent me into the kitchen for water. When I came back the lakeside was deserted.

  I beat some of the dust off the settee and stretched out on it.

  After a while I realized that there was no tapping noise from the roof.

  I went up, opened the door carefully, and slid out. Two or three pigeons went up indignantly from the leads. I walked over to the tower, and I realized at once that I had committed the cardinal sin of any military commander. I had failed to ensure my lines of communication with the rear. I was sitting on top of the Schloss with no way of getting down, except through the house. That snake Hesseltod had finished his job on the tower and the long ladder that had reached up to it was now lying on the lower roof twenty-five feet below me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE KATERINA PHILOSOPHY

  I couldn’t tell how long I was going to be marooned in the suite and on the roof top, but, like a good castaway, the first thing I did was to carry out a much more thorough survey of my little double-decked island.

  On the roof I found a plentiful supply of food. On a Pacific island it would have been seagulls and their eggs. Here, it was pigeons and their eggs. At least, I wouldn’t starve.

  I found drink, too, in the cupboard in the sitting-room. There were a couple of bottles of brandy and two unopened bottles of Rhine wine. Behind a silk screen to one side of some bookshelves in the sitting-room there was a glass door about four feet high with rows of drawers below it. It was a wall case and in it were a couple of hunting rifles and a twelve-bore shotgun. The drawers below held boxes of ammunition. At that moment my eye was caught by the title of one of the books on the shelf at my right hand.

  The title of the book was Les Crimes de l’Amour by the Marquis de Sade. With it were Justine and Philosophic dans le Boudoir. And beyond these the whole row was taken by other authors ... about thirty volumes of erotica.

  I kept watch from the window but there was no more movement outside. As the sun went down I moved up on to the roof.

  I didn’t care a damn about all the political malarky involved around the girls. The people pushing it and the people trying to put a spoke in it wouldn’t move an inch from their plans to accommodate a simple little human need like saving a beautiful girl from being dropped into a lake. That’s how life was with the Sutcliffe, Malacod and Spiegel types. First things first. All I could think of was a helicopter flying low in the dark over the Zafersee and the weighted cargo being jettisoned.

  I had to get in touch with Katerina, and that meant bursting out of the suite and taking my chance in the house. I had to get the girls out, and I might have to do it by force. For myself, I had the Le Chasseur – but it would be handy to have the girls armed. Katerina, I knew, could handle a gun.

  As the darkness gathered over the bowl in the hills that held the place, I went down to the suite. There were thick velvet curtains in the sitting-room. I drew them and turned on the light.

  I opened the gun-case and took out the shotgun. It was a twelve-bore, hammerless ejector gun by Cogswell and Harrison, a nice job, fitted with ornamental strengthening plates, and there was ammunition for it in one of the drawers below the case. The other two were German Walther rifles, one a ·404 that would stop an elephant, and the other a ·22 repeater. This last seemed a handier model to me. A ·22 slug can make a man think twice about coming on and, if that’s all you need, there’s no point in blowing his head off.

  I put the two I had chosen on a table with their ammunition.

  I shut the glass front of the case. It had a round brass knob as a handle. Maybe because it hadn’t been opened for years, the door of the case stuck a little. To get it closed I pushed the handle hard, turning to the left as I did so, in order that the small lock tongue should not catch the lock casing until I had the door shut. The door went home into its frame with a jerk and I nearly fell over. The brass knob in my hand, held to the left, took another half turn and the whole gun-case moved away from me, hinging on its left like a door. I was staring into an aperture about four feet high and three feet wide. From the light behind me, I could see a narrow run of stone steps going steeply down for two or three yards and then the outline of another opening which looked about six feet tall and just wide enough to take a man who didn’t carry too big a girth.

  I stood there in the darkness, listening. A faint draught from the entrance funnelled up into my face. After a few moments I realized that on the draught there was coming to me the smell of frying onions.

  I got my torch, and ke
pt the beam well down to the ground. There was a thick layer of dust and mortar powder on the floor of the passageway. When I moved my arms just brushed the sides. After about twenty yards there was another drop down of six steps. Then the passage turned sharply and some yards ahead I saw a small patch of light striking across the passageway from left to right at about eye level. Switching off my torch I went quietly down to it.

  I found myself looking through a small double-sided ventilator grille into a long, barely furnished room. The smell of onions and bacon was strong in my face.

  It was probably originally the family schoolroom – there was a chalk-whitened blackboard fixed to the wall facing me. There were two iron beds, a deal trestle table, and a couple of whitewood cupboards. Near the door was a sink with a long draining board to one side and on this was a small electric ring. Standing at the ring, a frying-pan in hand, was a young man of about twenty-odd, his back to me, singing quietly to himself as he turned the onions and bacon in the pan. The table was set with a place for one. From a schoolroom it had now been turned into a barrack room. Hung on the wall between the beds was a sub-machine gun and a couple of pin-up photographs.

  The young man turned away from the electric ring, came over to the table, and scooped his fry out on to a plate. He had very close-cropped sandy hair, wore a white singlet and black, tightly fitting breeches. He had his boots off with a right toe sticking through the grey wool of heavy socks. He had a pleasant enough face but was clearly tough, brawny, and a handy companion in a fight. He sat down and began to eat. Once he looked straight up at the ventilator grille, chewing reflectively, a far-away look in his eyes. Maybe he had a girl in some distant village and was wondering why she hadn’t written.