Airs Above the Ground (26 page)

There was no way of guessing. Only one thing was certain, that I wasn’t going to stay down here in this echoing vault. I had to get out somehow to the upper air, to the courtyard. And even if Sandor was there, there also any minute now would be my own safety, Lewis.

Only then did it occur to me that my safety was Lewis’s danger. If by chance, as he entered the courtyard or the castle, he were to meet Sandor, then I no longer had any illusions about what the latter would do, and Lewis was unsuspecting, and for all I knew unarmed.

Foolishly or not, I was not going in the lift again. I turned to my left, and running between the pillars, began to search for a way out.

I was back in the world of fantasy, Red Riding Hood lost in the depths of the grey forest . . . on every side, it seemed, the vast stone trunks stretched away, ribbing the floor with shafts of darkness. Soon the dim electric
light was lost behind the crowding pillars, and I was groping my way from stone to stone, stumbling on the uneven flags, heading apparently for deeper and ever deeper darkness.

At the very moment when I faltered, ready to turn back towards the light – even, perhaps, to use the lift and risk meeting Sandor in the upper corridors – I saw light ahead of me, and soon recognised this for a shaft of moonlight falling through some slit window in the outside wall. I ran towards this.

It was an old spearhead window deep in a stone embrasure, and it was unglazed. The sweet night air poured through it, and outside I got a glimpse of the moonlit, glinting tiers of pines, and heard faintly the sound of falling water. Inside, just beyond the window, and reasonably well lit by the edge of the moonlight, was a flight of stone steps leading upwards. At its top was the usual heavy door, liberally studded with iron. Praying that it wouldn’t be locked, I half ran, half stumbled up the steps, and seizing the big round handle, lifted the massive latch and pushed.

The door opened smoothly and in silence. Cautiously I pushed it open a foot and peered out.

A corridor this time, flagged floor, rush matting, dim lights, probably somewhere near the kitchens. To my left it stretched between closed doors to a right-angled corner; but only twenty yards to my right it ended in another vaulted door. This was locked and bolted on the inside, but the bolts soon yielded, and quietly enough I was through. Outside was darkness and moonlit arches and a confusion of massive shapes. I
shut the door softly and leaned back in the shadows, getting my bearings.

In a moment I had it. I had come out into the coach-house. The shape looming in front of me was the ancient closed carriage, its shaft sticking up like a mast and bisecting the moonlit archway that opened on the courtyard beyond. Beside it was the car, a big old-fashioned limousine. I tiptoed forward between the two vehicles, and, pausing at the edge of one of the arches, peered out into the courtyard.

This was empty. I could hear no sound. In the bright moonlight that edged the scene like silverpoint, nothing stirred, but at almost the same moment I heard the purr of a car’s engine mount the last hill towards the castle, mount and grow and distort into a hollow echo as the car crossed the bridge. Then the lights speared through the archway, and a big car – a strange one – stole into the courtyard, swung round with its headlights probing the shadowed corners, and came to a quiet stop with its bonnet no more than a yard from the open archway of the coach-house.

The lights went off. The engine died, and Lewis got quietly out of the car and reached into the back seat for his bag.

As he straightened, bag in hand, I breathed: ‘Lewis.’

He did not appear to have heard me, but just as I nerved myself, regardless of possible danger, either to call him more loudly, or to go out into the open towards him, he turned, threw his bag into the front of the car, got back into the driver’s seat himself, and re-started the engine. As I still hesitated, tense and
shaking, I heard the hand-brake lift, and the car, without lights, slid forward and into the open arch of the coach-house.

I remembered, then, his trained reaction to the news reel cameras. When a whisper came from the dark, he was not likely to give anything away to a possible watcher. The car came to a stop a yard from me; he got out quietly with the engine still running, and said, very softly: ‘Vanessa?’

Next moment I was in his arms, holding him tightly enough to strangle him, and able to say nothing but ‘Oh love, oh love, oh love,’ over and over again.

He took it patiently enough, holding me close against him with one arm, and with his free hand patting me, comforting me rather as one does a frightened horse. At last he disengaged himself gently.

‘Well, here’s a welcome! What’s the matter?’ Then in a suddenly edged whisper: ‘Your face. How did that happen? What’s been going on? What’s wrong?’

I had forgotten my bruised cheek. Now I realised how sore it was. I put a hand to it. ‘That man . . . it’s that man from the circus . . . Sandor Balog, the Hungarian, you know who I mean. He’s here, somewhere about, and oh, Lewis—’

My whisper cracked shamefully, half aloud, and I gasped and bit my lip and put my head down against him again.

He said: ‘Gently, my dear, it’s all right. Do you mean the high-wire act from the circus? He did that to your face? Look, my dear, look, it’s all right now . . . you’re all right now. I’m here . . . Don’t worry any more. Just
tell me. Can you tell me about it? As quickly as you can?’

He had sounded startled and very angry, but somehow not surprised. I lifted my head. ‘You came back as Lee Elliott because you knew about him?’

‘Not about him, no. But I was expecting the worst – having to get next to the circus again. Now it may not be necessary. If this is it breaking, pray heaven it does so this side of the frontier. Now, quickly, my darling. Tell me.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll try, but he’s somewhere about, Lewis. He’s somewhere here, and he’s got a gun.’

‘So have I,’ said my husband matter-of-factly, ‘and we’ll see him before he sees us. What’s behind that door?’

‘A back passage, somewhere near the kitchens, I think. I came up that way from the dungeon.’

‘My poor sweet. Come on, then, back here, behind the car . . . If he comes out that way now, we’ll get him. And if he comes in through the arch we’ll see him easily. Keep your voice down. Now, please, Van, if you can . . .?’

‘I’m all right now. Everything’s all right now. Well, it started with Annalisa giving us the old piebald horse that belonged to Uncle Franzl, so we arranged to bring him up here tonight and his saddle and bridle along with him . . .’

As briefly and as quickly as I could I told him everything that had happened, even the business of the jewelled brooch and the portrait. ‘And I think he’ll have gone back that way,’ I finished, ‘to my room.
There was still the brooch, and the stones that were spilt on the floor. He said all that about their not being valuable, but I think he was only talking stupidly to put me off. “Dreams for the damned”, he said he was selling, “you can always sell dreams”. He was still determined to get the saddle, and I don’t see why, but it means he’s bound to see if I was telling the truth about putting it in the corn bin, so whichever way he comes down, he’ll be making for the stable, and he may have seen you arrive – and if not, he’ll have heard you – and now he’ll be waiting for you to go in, before he slips out and away. Lewis, if you don’t go in the main door, he’ll wonder why; and if you do, and he sees you, he’ll recognize you, and then —’

But he hardly seemed to be listening. He was still holding me, but half absently, with his head bent, thinking.

‘“Dreams for the damned”,’ he quoted softly. ‘I begin to see . . . And he still wants the saddle, does he?’ He lifted his head, and his whisper sounded jubilant. ‘By God, I think you have broken it, at that, bust it wide open! No, I’ll tell you later. Where are the stables? Next door?’

‘Yes, that way. That’s the connecting door, beside the carriage. And there’s a door off the courtyard.’

‘Right. He won’t have gone back to your room: I think you can take it he was telling the truth, and the “jewels” really are only stage props. Why bother to lie, and throw them down like that, when he’d already had to give himself away to you, and was probably going to get rid of you anyway? No, the only reason he was
interested in the brooch was because it meant you’d been meddling with the saddle . . . And he still wants that saddle, which means he’ll be making for the stable. Do you reckon he’s had time to get down off the roof, pick up the saddle, and get out over the bridge before I arrived?’

I tried to think back. ‘It’s hard to judge, it seemed like years, but I suppose it’s only been a few minutes . . . No. No, I’m sure he hasn’t.’

‘Then either he’s still above the gate waiting to come down, or he’s already in the stable waiting for me to go. In either case he’ll have seen or heard the car arrive. Stay there half a minute, while I think.’

He drifted from my side like a shadow, then from the car came clearly audible movements, the creak of upholstery, a grunt, a sharp revving of the engine before he killed it, the sound of his feet on the cobbled floor, and finally the slam of the car door.

Then he was beside me again, with his case in one hand. His free arm went round me, pulling me close. I could feel the calm, unhurried beat of his heart, and his untroubled breathing stirred my hair. As my own body relaxed into this unruffled calm I reflected that it was something to be able to hand over to a professional. It was something that that sleek animal in black leather should find he had tangled, not with a stray English tourist and her bewildered husband, but with Our Man (Temporary) in Vienna.

‘I’ll have to go in by the front door,’ said Lewis. ‘He’ll be waiting for that. I’ll see he doesn’t recognize me if he’s watching, and he won’t know the car. I’ve
brought a Merc this time. Then I’ll come straight back here, by that door of yours. The lay-out’s simple, I’ll find it in two minutes. Will you let me leave you here for two minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s my girl. Now, just on the off-chance he’s inside, you’d better not go back in there. Stay out here. Not in the car . . . what about that old carriage? Yes, the door’s open. In you go, then, and keep still. I’ll be back.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘As far as you’re concerned, I suspect he’ll cut his losses, and he won’t know how fast to get out of it. But I also think he’ll get in touch with his bosses straight away, and when he does I want to be there. So I think we’ll let him take what he wants.’

‘You mean you’re just going to let him go? Now? Tonight? Not do anything to him?’

His hand touched my bruised cheek very gently. He said: ‘When I do lay hands on him, I promise you he’ll never walk a high wire again, or anything else for that matter. But this is a job.’

‘I know.’

I couldn’t see him smile, but I heard it in his voice. ‘We both know a bruise on your cheek is worth more than a cartload of Top Secret papers, but the fact remains, I’m afraid, that I’m still on the pay-roll.’

‘All right, Lewis. It’s all right.’

‘Get in there, then, and stay still. I won’t be long.’

‘Lewis . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Be – careful, won’t you? He’s dangerous.’

Lewis laughed.

The inside of the old carriage enclosed me like a small safe box, smelling fusty and close, of old mouldering leather and straw. There were curtains at the windows, thick and dampish; they felt like brocade. With fingers fumbling in the dark I found the loop that held them, and loosened it, and the curtains fell across the window, shutting out what little light there was. Then I crouched back on the burst and prickly squabs to wait.

Though I could see nothing, shut safely away in the darkness of my little box, I found that I could hear. The top sections of the carriage doors were of glass, rather like those of a railway compartment, and on the side nearest to the stable either the glass was broken, or the window had been lowered and was standing wide. I could feel a draught of air from it, and almost immediately I heard the sound of stealthy footsteps in the courtyard, and then the quiet click of the stable latch.

Now, the old carriage was parked within two yards of the wall dividing stable and coach-house, beside the connecting door. This was shut, but, peering out avidly between the folds of damp brocade, I saw a wide bar of light at the foot of the door wavering a little, but growing as Sandor, flashlight in hand, approached the end of the stable nearest me, where the corn bin stood.

He was being quiet, but not especially so; he must have watched Lewis, the late-coming guest, go into the house; he would guess it was the delayed husband, but
might count himself safe enough for the time it would take for Lewis to reach his room, find his wife gone, and start to look for her. All he wanted now was to get what he had come for, and escape as quickly as possible.

There was a soft metallic clink as the corn bin lid was lifted. A shuffling sound followed, and a falling rustle as the saddle was lifted clear of the corn, then it was dumped on the floor, and the lid closed.

He didn’t hurry away as I had expected. I strained my ears to hear what he was doing, but couldn’t guess . . . I heard more shuffling sounds, even the noise of his rapid breathing, and presently I could have sworn that I heard the sound of ripping cloth. Since there were no more ‘jewels’ left for him to tear away, he must be opening the thing up. Lewis was right; the ‘jewels’ were worthless after all; there must be something else contained in the saddle, and, sooner than carry away the whole clumsy burden, Sandor was taking the time to remove whatever he had so carefully stitched into the padding. I remembered his offer to stitch the thing, and its much-mended look.

Two minutes, Lewis had said. With no light to see the time, there was no judging it at all. It might have been two minutes, or four, or forty, but it was probably not much more than Lewis’s two, before quite suddenly, near me, the sounds ceased.

In the silence that followed, I heard again the click of the stable latch, and steps approaching, quiet but unconcealed.