The Whip Hand

into the rise of a wood, the stonework was years newer than the first part we had walked along. From where I stood I was looking at the view I had seen in the background of the slide ... the same mountains, the same grouping of trees. But there were no gates, and no wayside altar. I could have searched for months and never found it. Ten years ago clearly, the road had been widened and straightened and the gates had gone. More than likely the slide had been a colour transparency taken for sentimental reasons before this work was done. Something else became obvious, too. I’d been working on the basis of a ten-minute road drive from the Zafersee – that at a generous estimate gave a radius of five miles from the lake. This place was at the limit of a twenty-mile radius. I couldn’t see Siegfried doing the body-dumping trip, almost certainly at night, at a speed of over a hundred miles an hour – except by using a helicopter!

I took the old man back to the cottage by way of the nearest inn, bought him a couple of brandies, and finally left him at the cottage gate with a handsome tip.

It took me until late afternoon to beat the bounds of the place. The stone wall was its frontage only to the two-mile strip of main road. The rest of the estate was bounded by a tall wooden fence which carried three strands of barbed wire, angled outwards to stop anyone climbing in. I guessed there might have been a couple of hundred acres of ground inside, roughly in the shape of a natural bowl, surrounded by wooded mountain slopes that ran up to bare crests. The new entrance was a mile up a side turning, a twisting, tree-hung road; a tall pair of barbed-wire topped wooden gates with heavy iron drop-ring handles that didn’t move an inch when I tried them.

I climbed the hill on the far side of the gates until I came out in a small clearing where I could get a good view of the bowl. There it was, an enormous Schloss with a centre block and two side wings. From my view point I had the whole of the side of one wing facing me. The roof was cut into small towers of blue slate. To one side there was a small lake surrounded by parkland. A narrow stream ran out of the lake and disappeared down-valley in the direction of the main road. I went over the whole place with my glasses, and the thought of what it must cost to heat it in winter made me shudder. The only sign of life was Herr Hesseltod.

I held him in the glasses for an hour and the sight of what he was doing cheered me up. He was repairing a patch of bad slatework on the roof of one of the higher towers on the wing facing me. He’d got three ladders; a long one from the ground up to a wide terrace on the fourth floor, another ladder up to a flat roof about twenty feet above this, and then a longer ladder up to the slope of the tower. To one side of the tower I could see part of a rounded dome, that looked like glass. It was clearly a great warren of a place where you could get lost in a maze of rooms. I had to get Katerina and Lottie out of the place as fast as possible, and I had to do it myself. If I went to the German police with my cock-and-bull story, I knew exactly where I would finish – in Sutcliffe’s hands. He would already have taken care of that one.

I waited until Hesseltod had finished for the day, and then I went back down the road on my scooter and found the stream which ran out of the lake.

It came out through a culvert in a bank, with the wall two yards above it on a slope. It was a simple brick tunnel, about four feet high, and there was about six inches of water flowing down it. Ten feet up the tunnel was a wooden framework, latticed with barbed wire.

I drove five miles down the valley, bought myself a pair of pliers at a garage, and then went and had dinner at a Gasthof. Before I left I bought myself half a bottle of brandy, and a great length of sausage which I tucked away into my rucksack.

It was eleven o’clock when I went into the culvert. The barbed wire gave me no trouble. Beyond the wire the culvert ran for about twenty yards, and then I was out and into a small plantation of young spruce. I kept their cover up towards the Schloss. It was a night bright with stars and I could see the ladders still in position. I had now, too, a better view of the front of the place. There was a big gravelled forecourt held between the two wing arms. One or two lights showed in the far wing, and there was a light over the main door in the face of the centre block.

I sat in cover for a couple of hours across the lake until there was only one light burning in an upper window of the far wing. Then I made my way cautiously round the top end of the lake. When I was a hundred yards from the foot of the first ladder, I took off my shoes and hung them by the laces round my neck.

I’m not good at heights and I went up without looking down. Two-thirds of the way up the last ladder I stepped sideways from it on to a parapet top that protected the edge of the leaded roof flats from which the towers rose. I went exploring cautiously around the acres of leaded roof. There were four towers or pinnacles on my wing