I stretched out on the floor again and resumed my rolling to and fro. I was hardly more than ten seconds too soon, for on my third or fourth roll towards the door I saw Goodbody and Jacques thrust their heads into view. I stepped up my performance, rolled about more violently than ever, arched my body and flung myself so convulsively to and fro that I was suffering almost as much as I had been when I was undergoing the real thing. Every time I rolled towards the door I let them see my contorted face, my eyes either staring wide or screwed tightly shut in agony and I think that my sweat-sheened face and the blood welling from my lip and from one or two of the reopened gashes that Marcel had given must have added up to a fairly convincing spectacle. Goodbody and Jacques were both smiling broadly, although Jacques’s expression came nowhere near Goodbody’s benign saintliness.
I gave one particularly impressive leap that carried my entire body clear of the ground and as I near as a toucher dislocated my shoulder as I landed I decided that enough was enough — I doubt if even Goodbody really knew the par for the course — and allowed my stragglings and writhings to become feebler and feebler until eventually, after one last convulsive jerk, I lay still.
Goodbody and Jacques entered. Goodbody strode across to switch off the amplifier, smiled beautifully and switched it on again: he had forgotten that his intention was not only to render me unconscious but insane. Jacques, however, said something to him, and Goodbody nodded reluctantly and switched off the amplifier again — perhaps Jacques, activated not by compassion but the thought that it might make it difficult for them if I were to die before they injected the drugs, had pointed this out — while Jacques went around stopping the pendulums of the biggest clocks. Then both came across to examine me. Jacques kicked me experimentally in the ribs but I’d been through too much to react to that.
‘Now, now, my dear fellow — ‘ I could faintly hear Goodbody’s reproachful voice — ‘I approve your sentiments but no marks, no marks. The police wouldn’t like it.’
‘But look at his face,’ Jacques protested.
‘That’s so,’ Goodbody agreed amicably. ‘Anyway, cut his wrists free — wouldn’t do to have gouge marks showing on them when the fire brigade fish him out of the canal: and remove those earphones and hide them.’ Jacques did both in the space of ten seconds: when he removed the earphones it felt as if my face was coming with it: Jacques had a very cavalier attitude towards Scotch tape.
‘As for him — ‘ Goodbody nodded at George Lemay — ‘dispose of him. You know how. I’ll send Marcel out to help you bring Sherman in.’ There was silence for a few moments. I knew he was looking down at me, then Goodbody sighed. ‘Ah, me. Ah, me. Life is but a walking shadow.’
With that, Goodbody took himself off. He was humming as he went, and as far as one can hum soulfully, Goodbody was giving as soulful a rendition of ‘Abide with me’ as ever I had heard. He had a sense of occasion, had the Reverend Goodbody.
Jacques went to a box in the corner of the room, produced half a dozen large pendulum weights and proceeded to thread a piece of rubber cable through their eyelids and attach the cable to George’s waist: Jacques was leaving little doubt as to what he had in mind. He dragged George from the room out into the corridor and I could hear the sound of the dead man’s feels rubbing along the floor as Jacques dragged him to the front of the castle. I rose, flexed my hands experimentally, and followed.
As I neared the doorway I could hear the sound of the Mercedes starting up and getting under way. I looked round the corner. Jacques, with George lying on the floor beside him, had the window open and was giving a sketchy salute: it could only have been to the departing Goodbody.
Jacques turned from the window to attend to George’s last rites. Instead he stood there motionless, his face frozen in total shock. I was only five feet from him and I could tell even from his stunned lack of expression that he could tell from mine that he had reached the end of his murderous road. Frantically, he scrabbled for the gun under his arm, but for what may well have been the first and was certainly the last time in his life Jacques was too slow, for that moment of paralysed incredulity had been his undoing. I hit him just beneath the ribs as his gun came clear and when he doubled forward wrested the gun from his almost unresisting hand and struck him savagely with it across the temple. Jacques, unconscious on his feet, took one involuntary step back, the window-sill caught him behind the legs and he began to topple outwards and backwards in oddly slow motion. I just stood there and watched him go, and when I heard the splash and only then, I went to the window and looked out. The roiled waters of the moat were rippling against the bank and the castle walls and from the middle of the moat a stream of bubbles ascended. I looked to the left and could see Goodbody’s Mercedes rounding the entrance arch to the castle. By this time, I thought, he should have been well into the fourth verse of ‘Abide with me’.
I withdrew from the window and walked downstairs. I went out, leaving the door open behind me. I paused briefly on the steps over the moat and looked down, and as I did the bubbles from the bottom of the moat gradually became fewer and smaller and finally ceased altogether.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I sat in the Opel, looked at my gun which I’d recovered from Jacques, and pondered. If there was one thing that I had discovered about that gun it was that people seemed to be able to take it from me whenever they felt so inclined. It was a chastening thought but one that carried with it the inescapable conclusion that what I needed was another gun, a second gun, so I brought up Astrid’s handbag from under the seat and took out the little Lilliput I had given her. I lifted my left trouser-leg a few inches, thrust the little gun barrel downwards, inside my sock and the inside top of my shoe, pulled the sock up and the trouser-leg down. I was about to close the bag when I caught sight of the two pairs of handcuffs. I hesitated, for on the form to date the likelihood was that, if I took them with me, they’d end up on my own wrists, but as it seemed too late in the day now to stop taking the chances that I’d been taking all along ever since I’d arrived in Amsterdam, I put both pairs in my left-hand jacket pocket and the duplicate keys in my right.
When I arrived back in the old quarter of Amsterdam, having left my usual quota of fist-shaking and police-telephoning motorists behind me, the first shades of early darkness were beginning to fall. The rain had eased, but the wind was steadily gaining in strength, ruffling and eddying the waters of the canals.
I turned into the street where the warehouse was. It was deserted, neither cars nor pedestrians in sight. That is to say, at street level it was deserted: on the third floor of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s premises a burly shirt-sleeved character was leaning with his elbows on the sill of an open window, and from the way in which his head moved constantly from side to side it was apparent that the savouring of Amsterdam’s chilly evening air was not his primary purpose for being there. I drove past the warehouse and made my way up to the vicinity of the Dam where I called de Graaf from the public phone-box.
‘Where have you been?’ de Graaf demanded. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Nothing that would interest you.’ It must have been the most unlikely statement I’d ever made. ‘I’m ready to talk now?’
‘Talk.’
‘Not here. Not now. Not over the telephone. Can you and van Gelder come to Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s place now.’
‘You’ll talk there?’
‘I promise you.’
‘We are on our way,’ de Graaf said grimly.
‘One moment. Come in a plain van and park further along the street. They have a guard posted at one of the windows.’
‘They?’
‘That’s what I’m going to talk to you about.’
‘And the guard?’
‘I’ll distract him. I’ll think up a diversion of some kind.’
‘I see.’ De Graaf paused and went on heavily: ‘On your form to date I shudder to think what form the diversion will take.’ He hung up.