The Shepherd File (14 page)

He heard her indrawn breath.

‘It's nothing to do with you.'

‘It’s going to be,' he said, brutally. ‘If you’ve been such a fool as to get both of you involved in this someone will have to get you out. We don't want another corpse floating down river.'

Her hand caught him on the side of the neck, just below the ear, making his head sing. She was swearing and it sounded vicious. He flung himself back and sideways to avoid her. Instinctively his knee came up but at the last moment checked, so that the jab in the groin which would have stopped her was never delivered and she was on him, tearing with her nails, beating and pulling, spitting and swearing. Something gauzy — her nightdress — was tangling his hands and he was sprawling half across the bed under her. He got his hand round one wrist, twisted two ways to muddle her reaction and then pulled. Her shoulders and breasts slid over his face and as she came over him the nightdress that had been tangling him up in its folds tore with a sharp crisp sound. She writhed and gasped as his fingers, sliding up her wrist, found a lock on her thumb. He increased the pressure slowly until she lay still, unable to move. She had stopped cursing at him and was gasping with pain. The violence and savagery of her attack had been unnerving. He could feel blood on his cheek, warm and trickling, and his muscles ached with the effort of holding her. He eased his position a little, raising himself, still holding her thumb with her arm twisted underneath her so that she could not move. In the semi-darkness, in the faint light of the moon showing through the gaps in the curtains, he could see where her nightdress had been torn. He could see, dimly, the white breasts, rising and falling extravagantly in the exhaustion which followed her struggles. The sound of her breathing was very loud, or seemed so in the darkness of the bed. But through that sound was coming another, an alarming sound, footsteps, brisk, light and determined, coming along the corridor outside.

The
Fish
Tank

Monique released her breath in a long shuddering sob, a sound that seemed to go on and on. She turned over, face down on the pillow, putting her arms up underneath the pillow so that she was holding on to it to stifle her sobs, something to hang on to.

The footsteps went past the door. They receded briskly down the corridor. There was a long silence. A faint line of light came at one side of the door and widened inch by inch, light sweeping into the room. She knew what was happening. She wanted to stop it. She wanted to get up and stop him and make him talk. She did nothing except lie on the bed, hugging the pillow, watching the light widening and spreading.

He moved through the door, slowly and gently, and again she thought how silently he moves and she had a feeling that it was unsafe out there in the light and again wanted to call him back, this time more urgently than before, and yet she went on hugging the pillow and watching and doing nothing. It was the massage, she thought, and losing her temper when he had talked about someone else drowning, and lying awake without sleeping pills or tranquillizers to dull the emotions.

Holmes was closing the door behind him. He had gone out without saying a thing, without a glance. Absurdly, she felt piqued, defrauded of something, of another scene, an argument, a demand for an explanation. Her mood changed. She switched on the bedlight, got up, unscrewed the bottle of sleeping pills and took three. If she had had whisky she would have drunk whisky as well. Three pills would put her out for a long, long time.

Holmes moved quickly but with infinite caution down the corridor in the direction from which the footsteps had come. It was a matter of luck now. If someone else was walking the corridors, or if the other person returned, there was no chance of cover.

He went down the main staircase. A tread creaked badly and he waited but nothing happened. The clinic was probably accustomed to nocturnal movement either by nursing staff or patients. He went on down into the hall. The ashy grey remains of a log fire glinted red in a wide stone fireplace. A thick-filament lamp glowed dully at the foot of the stairs. There was enough light to see three or four doors leading off the hall. One of the doors was open.

It was a sitting-room of sorts, large and lofty, furnished with elaborate and large upholstered chairs and settees. Holmes’ pencil torch gleamed out and the light fell on a side table on which were piled copies of illustrated magazines. There would be nothing here.

He tried several rooms, one after another, equally fruitlessly. One was a consulting-room, another a dining-room, a third was almost completely filled with a large-size billiards table and glass-fronted cases containing a dozen or more fishing rods.

The fishing rods were puzzling until Holmes remembered the lake in the grounds. He examined the rods with some care and a professional interest. One or two were old green-heart rods, probably fifty years old or more, others included one or two six-foot split-cane fly rods which seemed either brand new or barely used. They would not be the kind of rods which a man who knew anything about lake fishing would buy. They were light brook rods.

Holmes went out into the hall again, moving towards the back of the house. The kitchen, a large one, modern, designed for catering for a large number of people, yielded nothing of interest to his enquiring torch. The cupboards, scullery and larder were opened in turn. The last door he came to — the cellar door — was locked.

It was, he noticed, with a sudden interest, a mortice lock of the kind that one would hardly consider putting on a door which led to a cellar unless it was a wine cellar and this was not the kind of house, he felt, where there would be a wine cellar. Perhaps stout or cider? But one would hardly lock a cellar unless there was a bin of Chateau Gonthier or something of that kind to be preserved and he doubted the existence of a Chateau Gonthier. It did not seem to be in character. Why, then, was the door locked?

He searched the likely places for a key but there was no key. Then he had another look at the lock. The snatch-fall mechanism could be forced only with noise and difficulty. It might be worth going outside to see if there was a window low down in the wall which might lead to the cellar. On the other hand whoever had put a double mortice lock on a cellar door would hardly be likely to neglect boarding a window. It would mean exploring in the open. He looked at his watch. It was nearly three o'clock in the morning.

He stood for some time staring at the cellar door. Not a dozen hairpins nor half the skeleton keys in Scotland Yard would have been much good with a lock of that kind. On the other hand, there were always hinges, and this seemed more promising. There were in fact two hinges, bevels outward, and an overall gap between door and frame of about a quarter of an inch on each side.

It was taking a risk. It was staking all his cards on the cellar to the exclusion of perhaps a dozen other rooms where there might be something of interest which he had not yet seen, but the more he thought of the double mortice lock, the more likely and the more attractive the cellar became. He flicked out his knife. The point splintered the surface paint and sank into the wood behind the bevel of the lowest hinge.

Holmes began to sweat. There was a stove in the kitchen and the room was intolerably hot. He was flicking out splinters of wood little bigger than matchsticks. It took a long time until he felt the point of the knife grate on the screw thread. The second screw was exposed more easily but the two of them took nearly half an hour. The top hinge was in harder wood and there was a knot in the way which he had to cut round. By now the sweat was running into his eyes, his clothes were sticking to him and his wrists felt like lead. He was working in the dark, having given up holding the torch in his mouth, working only by touch. Then he felt the door move. The knot, which had been in his way, had also masked a weakness in the wood which had splintered just below the last screw. He found a heavy carving knife in one of the kitchen drawers and worked the point into the gap between the door and the frame, levering outwards. The door swayed and moved, a fraction of an inch at a time, opening on the hinge side of the frame. At the same time the bolt of the lock was being moved gradually out of the socket which contained it. First one side of the door and then the other was levered. There was a slight click and a sudden lack of resistance. Holmes caught the door and moved it gently to one side, resting it against the wall. The opening of the cellar yawned darkly in front of him.

There were twelve steps down, wooden steps which creaked horribly, but they were well built and strong, and after the last step he felt a flat stone or brick floor under his feet. In front of him was a brick wall. The tiny circular beam of light from his torch travelled along the wall and swept round the cellar, which led off to his right. In the light something moved. It was a fish.

The fish, a trout, was perfectly poised, mouth and gills moving slowly, the tip of the pectoral fins languidly waving to keep it steady, poised in what seemed like mid-air. But it was water. Holmes shone the light round. He was looking into a glass fish tank, a very large glass tank, the length of a man, several feet wide and deep. It was half full of water and several dozen rainbow trout. Some of them were big.

Under the tank was a workbench. On it were bottles, test tubes, retorts, tins and containers, lengths of rubber tubing, a mass of splintered wood and electric wiring. There were also three or four round black balls, like ball bearings or marbles, but with matt surfaces which did not reflect the light. He had no idea what they were but he supposed they could be of importance. He picked one up and put it in his pocket.

On the far side of the cellar there was a control panel of some kind whose purpose he could not make out. There was a horizontal panel, slightly tilted, with a number of coloured flick switches, like those on a private telephone exchange. At the back of the panel were a series of dials, needles at zero, and on a vertical panel rising from this there were more switches and dials.

He went over and examined the panels and the controls more closely but there was no indication what they were. It was not a telephone exchange nor was it a broadcasting transmitter, though it seemed in its dials and switches to have affinities with both. Underneath the panel was a jumble of wood shavings, old sacks and broken cardboard cartons, piled together. On the floor was a pair of headphones, a headset of the kind used by radio operators. Holmes picked it up, plugged it in to what seemed an appropriate socket, and began playing with the dials and switches. Nothing happened. The needles remained resolutely at zero.

He took off the headset and placed it on the panel, frowning. Why had the headset been left on the floor — apparently dropped there as if someone had left in a hurry? Why a hurried departure? What were the fish for? There was a strange and possibly significant association of tidiness and disorder — the neatness of the control panel and the rubbish left beneath.

Nothing, at the moment, made sense. The fish swirled monotonously in the tank, making slurping and lapping sounds in the water but somewhere, beyond these sounds, was another, a faint sequence of noise, muffled and stifled.

Holmes listened. The noise was coming from a cupboard on the other side of the cellar. It was a small cupboard, about three or four feet high, square shaped and padlocked. Holmes went across and knelt down beside it. He put his ear to the wood. Something alive was inside. Holmes took a chisel from the workbench and wrenched off the padlock. He tore open the cupboard and stared into the eyes of Rosa Verschoyle.

She had been swathed in sacking, half covered with rubbish, her wrists had been tied to her ankles and she was lying on her side. There was blood on her head, matted in the roots of her hair; smeared over her forehead. She was covered in a film of grey dust. Holmes said something to reassure her — later he tried and could not remember the words he used — and began to cut away the gag from her face. A cloth had been forced into her mouth and a piece of sacking covered her mouth and nose. Her face was livid with the effort to breathe. First he cut the cord which held the sacking and then, piece by piece, tore off the strips of adhesive tape which held the cloth in her mouth. The cloth came away, sodden with saliva, filthy with dust, and she began to gasp for air with a deep shuddering sound. Very gently he lifted her from the cupboard. She had been tied like a parcel, plastic wire encircling her body, legs doubled up behind her, ankles tied to her wrists. It had been impossible for her to move. The noise she had made to attract attention could only have been made by her banging her head against the wooden sides of the cupboard. That, perhaps, explained the blood.

Her breathing was less tortured but she was moaning. Her legs were horribly swollen about the raw weals on her ankles. Her wrists were black, her hands and fingers red and puffy, like a pair of rubber gloves blown up and distended until they were rigid. She probably had no feeling in them. The pain there would come later. Suddenly, without warning, she was violently and uncontrollably sick.

It was probably the sickness which saved their lives. Holmes lifted her into an easier position and having got her into his arms decided that the best thing would be to take her upstairs into the fresh air. He had long passed the stage of worrying whether or not he would be discovered by someone. He was now so angry that he would have welcomed it. He was seething with anger. He grew ruthless with a baffled, unfocused rage. To focus it on somebody would have been a pleasure.

He had got her halfway up the stairs when there was a heavy puffing explosion, soft blazing substances pattered like water on the wall, and the entire cellar became incandescent. Liquid flame, drops and handfuls of it, was running down the walls. Hot air surged past them up the steps and he nearly fell. The heat of air was followed by a suffocating cloud of thick white smoke. The smoke stank. It had a peculiar choking taste. As he lurched and coughed, dragging the inert woman up the stairs with him, he recognized the smell:

Phosphorus.

He could taste it and could hear the peculiar bubbling sound of the first stage of burning phosphorus, followed by other hissing explosions, soft and muffled, one after the other. He stumbled. The yellowy-white smoke was in his lungs. Even as he choked, he was recording the facts. He had got there only just in time. The phosphorus could have been in the wood shavings under the control panel but it was more likely to have been in the cupboard. He was angry that he had been so unobservant that he had not seen it. There was probably a simple fuse and a time-switch. He might have disturbed this when opening the cupboard but whether he had set it off slightly in advance of the time was not important. It would have gone off in any case, either by a time-switch or by the movements of her body. Burning phosphorus would eat into skin and bone. It left nothing after it had finished its work. It would be difficult to trace — there had even been a body.

His lungs felt as though they were bursting. Tears were pouring from his eyes. He was stumbling and dragging himself up the stairs in a most laborious way, both arms round the body of the woman. He fell. They were in the kitchen. The smoke rolled over their heads. There was a sudden draught of fresh air.

They lay for some moments, side by side, the thick acrid smoke rolling over them, fingers of smoke stroking their bodies, but where their faces lay close to the floor they could just breathe. The air would not last long. The kitchen was already filling with smoke. Holmes began to ease himself across the floor in the direction he imagined the door to be. He felt suffocated, there was a pain across his eyes as though his forehead was being squeezed between a crusher. He inched across the floor, dragging the woman with him, putting his arm across her body and heaving her forward with a grip under her armpit. She was moaning and complaining and sobbing but helpless, in a state of collapse, and he had to pull on a deadweight. He was sweating, tears were streaming from his eyes, the fibres of his muscles felt as though they were being torn apart. The poisonous fumes, the lack of oxygen in his lungs, made each movement more and more difficult, more exhausting. He was up now, swaying on his feet, making a run for it, and he came up against the door with a bang that knocked him sideways. One hand touched the handle and it was turning, slowly, very slowly, and then it opened.