House of Green Turf

hit?’ George Felse was on one knee with his mouth as near to the keyhole as he could get it, yelling through to her over the probing and grating and cursing of an experienced professional struggling with the lock.

‘In the left shoulder… an artery, I think… he’s bleeding terribly…’

‘Do you know where the pressure point is in the shoulder?’ He told her in the fewest words possible how to locate and compress the subclavian artery. ‘You’ll have to keep pressing… you’ll tire…’

‘I won’t tire.’ No, not when she knew what to do. Her voice called back to him this time from farther away, she was already on her knees, raising Francis in her arms against the wall to strip away collar and shirt from his neck and feel for the pump that was emptying him of blood before her eyes. ‘But hurry…!’

‘Good girl, we’ll be through soon to help you…’

But the door was the door of a fortress.

From the moment that they found the Mercedes, tucked away in a hollow coppice on the Bregenz side of the castle hill, Oberkofler had taken no chances. He had a cordon of armed men strung round the hill on every side, methodically narrowing their circle as they converged on the unimpressive and unlovely ruins. Those on the Scheidenau side had neither seen nor heard anything of note since the discovery of the car, and were still merely carrying out their orders with proper attention, and no immediate expectation of incident, when their colleagues from the Bregenz side were already below the flagstones of the unkempt courtyard and battering at the first locked door. Their turn, however, came some minutes later.

The snaggle-toothed outline of what had once been a bastion, now reduced to a ragged stone wall no more than six feet high at any point, and overgrown with grass and weeds, reared from the smooth dark side of the hill ahead of them. And out of it, vaulting the wall at a low place, burst suddenly the figure of a man, running head- down for the gully of trees below. After him surged another, and another.

Gladly the police closed in. The first shout of challenge caused the foremost fugitive to swerve away towards the lake, where willing hands gathered him in without resistance, and the later ones to balk, break in various directions, and open fire. The police returned the fire, picked off the enemy singly and undamaged where they could, and shot to bring them down where they must. Five in all, but the fifth was no more than poised on the wall when the volley of shots broke out. He was notably quick and resolute in making up his mind. The bullet he put through the left upperarm of the nearest policeman was meant to do worse than wound, if the marksman’s stance had not been so unstable. The policeman, firing back almost in the same instant, saw his opponent fall backward into the rubble and undergrowth inside the wall. But whether because he was hit or merely because he lost his balance no one was then clear.

By the time they had the other four secured, and came to look for the fifth, he had disappeared, though everyone was sure he had not emerged again anywhere round the perimeter. He had gone back, presumably, by the same way all five had come.

In the rank growth of early autumn it took them some time to find the broken place in the flooring within, and the steps leading down to the new, strong, locked door beneath.

He lay for a moment with the key still in his hand, feeling the waves of faintness approach and recede, and the slow drain of his blood seeping out of him. Here he could scarcely hear the shots from outside, and had no idea how long the skirmish continued; but he knew that they were all lost, every man of them. And he as certainly lost as they, though to another victor. All round the hill, waiting for them, the law. Down here in the rock, waiting for him…

How could it have happened, so unexpectedly and so finally?

Suddenly there were no continents left outside Europe, and Europe was crumbling away under his feet. All that carefully constructed kingdom, so firmly established, so long immune, wiped out in a night.

And all because of her. She had done this to him.

He did not know where the bullet in him had lodged, but he knew it was somewhere high in his chest, probably in the lungs. Bright red blood running out of his mouth, staining his hand, and the world sliding irrevocably away from him, and all at once this budding, proliferating pain where no pain had been, filling and overfilling him to the lips until he overflowed in blood.

He had always lived for his own advantage, pleasure and amusement, and in their cause everyone else had been expendable; and now that all these came down so catastrophically into one last small but sweet indulgence, he might as well continue consistent to the end, and rate himself as expendable, too. In any case he was all but spent. He knew he had not much time left, but he had time at least to kill the woman who had destroyed him.

With the last of his strength he set out along the passage, to crawl the ninety or so yards that separated him from Maggie Tressider.

Maggie, stiff and cold on the flagged floor by the open grave, holding Francis on her breast with his head carefully inclined and her thumb wedged hard down into the hollow of his collar-bone, heard the key grate in the lock of the rear door, clumsily and for some seconds abortively. She turned her head as if in a dream, without belief, and watched the door swing open, and no one come in. Nothing was quite real any more, except Francis, and the necessity to keep her thumb rammed into his gaunt flesh, and the awful, spurting flow stemmed. She did not move, even when she looked down from the place where the arriving face should have been, down below the lock, down to the creature who lay sprawled black and red across the threshold, with nothing live or human about him but the round, greenish-gold eyes in the ruined face, bent inexorably on her, and the right hand that still clutched the gun.

She raised her voice, not out of panic, but to reach the ears stretched to receive it beyond the other door, where the lock-breaker had been working now for many minutes:

‘He’s coming back!’

Someone outside cursed terribly. The door shook. George Felse shouted: ‘For God’s sake try the gun…’

‘He’s come for me,’ she called clearly and calmly. It was there in his face. She watched Robin, and cradled Francis, gently retaining the blood in him, never moving.

Outside the door they were going mad. The solid wood shook and trembled and creaked, but held firm, the first burst of gunfire, from something surely larger than a pistol, splintered the woodwork and scarred the stone wall, but still the lock resisted. Inside the cellar it seemed inordinately still and quiet. They were two separate worlds. Maggie excised from her consciousness the one that was useless to her, and sat still, only following with her eyes the struggles of the creature in the doorway.