Split Code (34 page)

I said, ‘And what about me?’

‘You’re goin’ to have your work cut out, ain’t you?’ said Gramps Eisenkopp. ‘You got a sick kid to look after.’

I said, ‘You’re leaving me here?’

‘Whadda you think?’ said Gramps. ‘I ain’t got anything against you - much. If everythin’ goes according to plan an’ we get what we want, then someone phones your pal Hugo and they can start in an’ break the doors down.’

I said, ‘But what if something goes wrong? They could send all you’ve asked for and something might go wrong at your end.. What happens if you get ill, or can’t make the pick-up? You’re not leaving me here alone with that baby?’

‘You got air,’ said Grandpa Eisenkopp. ‘You got warmth. You got caviar and bubbly right in there, dammit. If I was you, baby, I’d just go and get stoned. There ain’t no other way you’re going to enjoy this party.’

Then Vladimir said, ‘The longer she is in this room . . .’

And Gramps said, ‘O.K. That’s it, Joanna. Get the hell through that door, and take the kid with you.’ And when I didn’t move immediately, he took out a revolver. ‘You hear me?’

I went; and the automatic door slid shut behind me. The door which, like the rest, would only open when approached by Hugo’s master device in Grandpa Eisenkopp’s pocket.

I had got what I wanted. I was alone with Benedict, entombed under the fortress of Kalk, with my life hanging on nothing more substantial than the whim of Elijah Eisenkopp.

Some situations have their own in-built bonus incentives. I lost no time either screaming or starting to draw calendars on the walls. I put Benedict’s carrycot down in the nearest draught-free area likely to have the approval of a Maggie Bee graduate, and then hared round the whole string of warehouses and passages like a demented being, switching on lights.

Then, once I had a picture of the whole area in my head, I returned to Benedict and sat on the floor and considered.

The issuing point, Gramps had said, was under the moat. It connected, pretty certainly, with the office and workshop I had just left. From there, the string of passages and storage caverns ran in more or less a straight line to Hugo’s private apartment, where I had wakened.

But the exit under the moat wasn’t surely the only one. This was Hugo’s creation: the place where he kept his secret prototypes, and his mistresses, and for all I knew ran the most lucrative part of his designing business, coining money unknown to the Communist country of his fathers.

I couldn’t imagine Hugo sneaking out into the dripping bushes every time he wanted a romp on the waterbed with his girl friend. There had to be an exit up into the castle. And it had to be in a passage, or through one of the outer walls of the warehouses.

I had a look to check that Benedict was still peacefully sleeping and then I began methodically to search.

The texture of the walls was the first thing that struck me in the good light. Within the warehouses, fitted racks covered most of the brickwork. The rest of the wall space was exceptionally well finished. Some of it had been tiled; some of it painted in bright cubist designs, oddly dated. Both had the virtue of concealing any cracks where an exit might conceivably exist.

The rest had been washed in uniform biscuit colour, marred here and there by chalky patches, as if the glaze had failed to key into the base. I noted it, because it was out of character with the rest of Hugo’s craftsmanship. Also because it reminded me of something, I couldn’t think what.

After I discovered the second stretch, in a corridor, I remembered. It was like nothing so much as a page from a child’s magic scribbling book. The kind where the sheets appear blank until rubbed over with a soft pencil.

It was a silly idea. Anyway, I didn’t have a soft pencil. On the other hand, there on a shelf under the light was a pack of charcoal sticks, thick and substantial and black.

Feeling a fool, I opened the pack and pulled out a stick. Holding it like a windscreen wiper instead of a pencil, I smeared it up and down Hugo’s immaculate wall. Then I stood back.

Where the charcoal had been, the wall was smudged in two shades: one dark grey, one almost white. And bang in the centre, as clear as an optical chart, stood an elegant capital E.

I wasted time just staring at it, while a haze of charcoal settled all over me. Then leaping forward, I attacked the passage in earnest.

Five seconds later, with hands, face and wall equally loaded, I had it. The treated patch was small, and just below eye level; and consisted of a long pointed arrow with the single word
KEY
.

The arrow pointed up to the ceiling. The ceiling, I noticed for the first time, was made of the same sort of finish. I found a crate and stood on it and scrawled over my head, in a downfall of fine powdered charcoal. Nothing there. I had to shift the crate twice before I found it. The next arrow said
KEY
again, and pointed down, this time, out of a doorway.

Hugo’s particular brand of wit. I didn’t blame him, 1 was too excited. I ran through the door and looked wildly about me.

The next set of arrows set off round one of the warehouses and ended back in a corridor with a blank wall which my charcoal could do nothing with. I spent five fruitless minutes on that, before the texture suggested an alternative.

Magic scribbling books were not the only thing of their kind. There were also magic painting books. Instead of pencil, you had to brush the page over with water.

No brush; no water. But, wait - a sponge, in my bathroom. I ran there and back through the passages, and scrawled on the walls as I went for good measure. If there were any more magic drawings, I didn’t catch them. But I arrived back at base and attacked the blank wall with my bath sponge.

This time the words came up in red, with Enid Blyton fairies drawn all about them.
KEY
, and an arrow, pointing back the way I had come.

I said into the air, slowly and viciously, ‘Hugo, dear. This isn’t a party game for one of your futile mistresses. This is for someone locked in your bloody labyrinth and trying to find her way out.
Will you stop playing games?’

Which was silly of course. For the amusement Hugo had devised had been laid out long before any of us had ever met him; and he couldn’t hear me, although I could hear him. I could hear all their voices coming from the remote set of screens in my bedroom, yapping into the untenanted air. I set my teeth and began to walk backwards, washing the walls as I went.

The arrows went all round the warehouse and out into the next couple of corridors and over another ceiling. Then they stopped, and neither the sponge nor the charcoal would answer. I went back to the last arrow and stared at it. There was something different about it. Inset in the tail was a number. No. 1, it said.

I went back and checked. None of the others had numbers. Even the rooms weren’t numbered. The only places in the underground network where I had seen numbers were on the racks.

I looked at the nearest rack. It said No. 36.

The racks were in no sort of order. I had to go right back to the first room, where Benedict was slumbering still, to find No. 2.

Join the dots. Connect the numbers in the right numerical order, and you get another picture. At least, that’s what happens in kids’ books.

I might be mad, but it was worth trying. Having found rack No. 1, I climbed up and looked at the number, and particularly at the ball-headed pin by which the number was attached to the casing. I pressed it, and nothing happened. I pulled it and it rose under my fingers: no more than an eighth of an inch, with a click I should never have heard unless I was listening for it.

Hugo, you ass. Missy’s Golden American Wonderland in the flesh. But it was going to get me out. If I could only keep upsides with Hugo Panadek’s infantile imagination, it was going to set us free, Benedict and myself.

I didn’t bother dragging the crate to No. 2. I jumped for the number, my fingers tearing the pin, and pulled it out at the second attempt. Then to the third, which was on the other side of the room. For as I said, the numbers weren’t in order. That, after all, would have been too easy.

There must have been about eighty racks altogether but I didn’t have to do them all, which is just as well, as my finger-tips were fringed to the middle joint. Rack No. 36 was the last with a ball- headed pin. All the rest were firmly screwed into place and neither pushed, pulled, nor put their tongues out at me. I looked around, at a loss. Then I looked again.

I had joined all the dots and as in all the best games, I had been allotted my prize.

Where there had been a smooth tiled wall, there was now a large irregular hole in the corridor. And within the hole, ridiculously, a red light appeared to be flashing.

I went forward slowly. The light came from a neon sign wired into the opposite wall of a small doorless chamber about the size of a cage at the zoo. The ceiling, like the walls, was smoothly tiled, and the floor was of solid concrete. Standing in one corner was a large canvas sack, closed with string at the mouth. The sign read, quite simply:
Welcome.

I stepped cautiously into the hole. Nothing happened. I examined the walls and the ceiling. There was no aperture that I could see, apart from the hole I had entered by, which seemed to be pitted like Gruyére cheese along its jagged edges. I touched the canvas bag gingerly, and when nothing darted out and grabbed me by the wrist, I began to open it.

It was full of large flat metal shapes, whose erratic profiles were fitted with cribbage pegs. They were coloured a uniform biscuit colour, and looked like nothing so much as the segments of some enormous jigsaw puzzle.

They were the segments of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. And the pegs on the rims of the pieces were precisely the right size to fit into the sockets in the thickness of the entrance hole.

I was being invited to fill in the hole. But whether to brick myself up on the outside or the inside was the question.

It was the sign, flashing on and off, that decided me. If I was being made welcome, presumably it was as a guest, not an outsider. And I was not afraid of what Hugo might devise. If I hesitated at all, it was because this time I could see no visible outlet from the chamber; no heating, no air inlet. I might, given someone far more malevolently-minded than Hugo, be stepping into that airtight box Benedict’s kidnappers had threatened. But Hugo was not of that kind.

All the same, this time I went and fetched Benedict, and lifting him through the hole, placed his cot on the floor just inside it. Without me, he couldn’t survive alone anywhere. Whatever was going to happen, it might as well happen to both of us.

Then I tipped the contents of the bag on the floor and kneeling, began to sort out the jigsaw.

There wasn’t a picture on the pieces or anywhere, so it wasn’t especially quick. More a case of painstaking effort, backed by years and years of practice with children. I found the bits that fitted into the side of the hole first, and then searched for and began finding their neighbours all round the edges. The hole began to grow smaller, like the stopped-down aperture of a camera. The light from outside grew less as well, and the flow of fresh air. Inside, all we had was the glare, on and off, of the sign; which flushed Benedict scarlet, and also my hands and arms, where they weren’t already sooty with charcoal.

The last piece had no pegs on the outside, but like the keystone of an arch, remained locked in the middle by tension.

So was I. We were immured. It remained to be seen for what purpose.

Benedict slept. I stepped back, kicking the empty bag to one side and waited, my eyes searching the walls and the ceiling. The red light, the only light in the chamber, went out abruptly.

Benedict snuffled. I said, ‘It’s all right, my Ben. Joanna switched off the light.’ I couldn’t see, in the dark, whether his eyes had opened. He gave another snuffle and then a whimper and I felt for his cot and kneeling, touched him and talked. After a bit, when he was used to it, I picked him up in his blanket and held him. I don’t know what I was saying. I was thinking, ‘I give this one minute more, and then I unlock the jigsaw.’

I gave it one minute more, and I stretched out my hand and feeling my way, prised at the centre piece of the jigsaw.

It wouldn’t come out.

I tried the others, with difficulty, because Ben wanted his hands freed and once he got them freed, kept swiping me with either his head or his fists. The dark didn’t seem to frighten him.

It frightened me, now. Somehow, the inserting of the last piece had locked the whole wall into position. So we couldn’t get out that way.
Welcome,
the sign had said. A sick joke. Welcome to a hole in the wall.

But the sign had gone off. Accidentally, or on purpose? Chatting to Benedict I turned and with extreme caution, lifted my hand to where the neon lighting had been.

It was still there, cooling now. I ran my fingers all over it, outlining the cursive lettering. A loose wire somewhere: that was all it needed to deposit us both, fried, on the floor of the cage.

Cage. The word set off another train of thought. Why had I thought of it as a cage in the Zoo? There were other cages. Such as a lift.

A lift wouldn’t need to have another door. A lift only needed a button. And the button could only be there, behind the sign, where blinded by light, I wouldn’t have seen it.

It was. A small round shape, which depressed when I pressed it. There was a whining sound, and the pit of my stomach, already sunk to my knees, bored its way down to my ankles. I held the wall with one hand and Benedict with the other and waited.

The whining stopped. There was a jolt; a rattle; an unholy crash, and then a blinding rush of light, air, colour, movement and sound.

The jigsaw puzzle, collapsing headlong outwards, revealed an immense panelled hall full of animal heads, not unlike a set for
The Prisoner of Zenda.
And standing in the centre of the hall, staring at me, seven well known faces; three female and four blessedly male.