In spite of everything I tried to lead a normal life. Five days of the week I went into the office, but mostly in the evenings I stayed indoors. I motored over to see my girl in the next town no more than twice a week, even then taking devious routes in order to throw off my pursuers. Once Carson found out about her it might present him with the opportunity he sought to bargain for the missing manuscript. Jeanette was pretty sore about these infrequent visits, but I couldn't tell her the real reason, and somehow I felt it might be for the best if she left me, distressing as it would be at first.
On Sundays I always went to church, something which I have done throughout my life. I noticed that Carson’s henchmen had also joined the congregation, occupying a pew at the back. It amused me to think that I had brought his lurkers into a place of worship.
After the services I made a point of tending to the family grave beneath the tall elm trees, in the furthermost corner of the overgrown courtyard. It was practically the only grave which was regularly looked after amidst this jungle of tall weeds, and I prided myself in its appearance. I washed the headstone with detergent in order to remove the bird-droppings, and cleared an area around it which I planted with lobelia and alyssum. Truly it was a colourful island in a sea of drab desolation. Below this patch of ground lay my grandparents and great-grandparents. My parents, myself, and any children which I might father will all join them in time, united in death as we have been in life.
And so life went on, day after day, week after week, month after month, and still they watched me. Once they broke into my office, but nothing was taken. They did not find what they were looking for. Once they got their hands on that manuscript I was doomed. But someday it will be found. The death of either myself or my parents will bring it to light. Carson’s empire will be shattered. The opening of our family tomb will sweep a tidal wave of destruction over them, for there, resting in the coffin of my grandmother, will be found the wreath which I threw in that grey afternoon, only minutes before the discreetly waiting grave-diggers began filling in that gaping hole. The bunch of lilies will have long rotted away, but packed neatly inside the polythene wrappings at the base of the plastic covering which originally were flowers, will be discovered that manuscript which has been sought by Carson for so long. The fate of those men who have commanded public respect for so long lies below ground level in this neglected and peaceful churchyard. Carson and his men lurk in the shadows of my life, and I just wait.
The Executioner
(from Graveyard Rendezvous 6)
Vengeance smouldered within him as he hunted them down to pay the supreme penalty for their war crimes.
Wolskel had spent over a year preparing his file on Bremmer from the moment he first located the whereabouts of the Nazi Beast. He had followed a meticulous process in just the same way that he had plotted the execution of his former three victims. But this was the big one, the culmination of a hunt to which he had devoted the last twenty years of his life. He could not risk any slip-ups with the coup-de-grace in sight.
Vogel, Stalhein and Duvar had been academic by comparison, ‘practice runs’ for when he found Bremmer. Certainly all three were Nazi war criminals who had deserved to die for their part in the atrocities during the occupation of Poland. But throughout, Lech Wolskel had pursued Bremmer with a smouldering obsession for revenge, for he had proved beyond a doubt that it was the commandant who had been instrumental in betraying 14,000 Polish servicemen to the Russians and instigating the massacre in Katyn Forest in 1940. The Nazis had been blamed for the outrage but recently the USSR had owned up to the slaughter. But the guilt lay with Bremmer.
Any day in the metropolis you would pass a dozen Wolskels, barely give them a second glance. Executives, civil servants, greying hair, bespectacled and carrying briefcases that denoted a respectability in their daily routine of paperwork and meetings. You saw them on the tubes and on the buses, ignored them because they were part of the accepted background to the bustle of city life. Which was how Wolskel had intended it to be from the first day he had commenced work at Whitehall. His position of trust had allowed him access to secret files. Three down and one to go. After that he might apply for early retirement and return to his beloved homeland, satisfied that his life had been well spent, that his father, who had been one of the Katyn victims, had been avenged. He fought to maintain a calmness. Only when it was all over would he allow himself to gloat.
He returned to his large suburban house, smelled again that lingering odour of death as he entered the long hallway. Its sickly sweetness was like nectar and made him heady. A door at the end of the dimly lit corridor led down to the cellar below, his footsteps echoing in the dank bowels of this place of death.
The light from a single bulb showed him the gallows which he had constructed over innumerable weekends, the rough sawn timbers, the trapdoor which operated with precision; the hempen noose greased so that it slid smoothly and tightened. His eyes travelled over to the far corner where a stone slab covered the ‘pit’, a deep grave
