“J
ust keep him away from me!” Angela sobbed as Gill helped her out of the Volvo. “He followed me to Killin. I saw him, tried to hide my car among the cars here. But then he came, prowling the parking lanes in that Beetle. I saw the barrier going up and made a run for it. Oh God! Oh, my
God
!” She was half in shock, incoherent (to Gill), and obviously hurt. She kept touching her right shoulder and working it in a circular motion, but gingerly.
Gill looked at her and thought:
She’s very lovely
. She looked a little like Marie-Anne, Gill’s “girl next door.” That had been two years ago and they’d made serious plans. But then he’d discovered that his time was running out and he’d let Marie-Anne off the hook. There’d been no one since.
“That lunatic was shooting at you?” Gill looked from her towards the man on his face in the road, where Turnbull sat astride him on the other side of the barrier. At first Gill had thought that this must somehow be connected with last night, but now that idea was slipping away.
“My husband.” She nodded, sobbing as he led her stumbling to Anderson’s car. “Was, anyway. No, still is—but it’s finished now. He’s the jealous sort—insanely! He’s been tracking me down for three weeks. I suppose he thinks if he can’t have me no one else will. That’s how his mind works. But I didn’t think he’d try anything like this.” She winced and held her shoulder again. “Ow! I think something’s out of joint in here.”
“Get in the car,” Gill told her. “In the back.”
Anderson leaned out of his window and patiently asked, “Spencer, what are you doing?”
“There’s a first-aid post up at the Castle,” Gill answered. “They’re fully equipped. Someone should have a look at her shoulder.”
Turnbull had disarmed Denholm and handed him over to the barrier policemen. Denholm was conscious and on his feet but bleary-eyed, slope-shouldered, and staggering. Now Turnbull came running, stuck his head inside the car. “He’s okay, I only creased him,” he said breathlessly. “The police witnessed the whole thing. They want statements from me and from the girl.”
“Tell them later, when we come out,” Gill told him. “We’re taking Mrs. er … ?”
“Denholm, Angela Denholm.” She sat propped in the corner of the backseat.
“Taking her for treatment at the Castle. The bloke who was shooting is her husband.”
One of the policemen, approaching the car, had heard all of this. Anderson forestalled any protests by introducing himself and stating their intentions. “We should be out again in about two hours,” he finished off. “Maybe less.”
“Very well, sir.” The officer was amenable. “But don’t forget to stop and let us have a word with Mr. Turnbull and Mrs. Denholm, now will you?” He waved them on.
Gill and Turnbull got into the car. As Anderson started the car moving again, he turned and glanced at the girl. “I take it that what just happened here has nothing to do with the Castle? That it was an entirely, er, private and personal affair?” His instinct, too, had been to connect this latest incident with last night’s business at Gill’s place.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean no—it has nothing to do with anything.” Taking her weight off her right shoulder, she leaned a little against Gill where he sat in the middle. He was very much aware of her there. Her parka’s fur collar held her perfume. “I’ve broken up with my husband,” she continued, “and now it seems that he … well, that he wants to break
me
up!”
“Hmm,” said Anderson. “Well, I should hardly think he’ll be in any position to do that for a while.”
Through all that had happened, Jean-Pierre Varre had sat in the front passenger seat very stiff and silent and a little pale. Now he coughed, cleared his throat and quietly ventured: “What on earth are things coming to?”
In a voice so dry it might easily have been Anderson’s own, Turnbull said to him, “What? Don’t people try to kill each other in France, then? It would have been a crime of passion, surely? I always thought Frenchmen were supposed to understand that sort of thing.”
Varre said nothing but merely turned and stared at him for a second or two. Looking into his eyes, Turnbull made a mental note that perhaps, in this Frenchmen, anyway, there wasn’t a deal of passion to spare … .
At the second barrier Anderson asked the men on duty to phone ahead to the first-aid post and have someone waiting. And a minute later, driving round a bend in the loch road between the water and the mountain—
“Is that it?” Angela asked in a small, hurting voice.
Up on the slopes of Ben Lawers, the Castle had come into view. At its foot, about fifty feet to the fore, a high fence had been erected like the perimeter of some fort out of a Hollywood western. It had wooden towers, a catwalk and observation points, searchlights, and a wicket gate guarded by uniformed policemen. Behind the Castle the steep mountainside had been enclosed in barbed wire, and even up there were wooden towers with roofed-over observation platforms. The entire place was staffed by policemen, members of the security services, and men in plain workaday clothes who looked like nothing so much as soldiers—which in fact was what they were. Little of these people could be seen from the outside, however, for in the main they were within the enclosure, in various fortified workplaces both above and below the ground. Slender metal masts stuck up here and there from the fortress walls: the aerials Gill had spoken of to Turnbull. Between the lakeside road and the massive fence, a cable lift had been constructed with two open cars each capable of carrying four people.
“That’s it,” Gill finally answered the girl, hearing his own voice as faintly as if it came from some distance away. And even though he’d spent so much time here, still he found himself staring as in some fatal fascination up the slope as the mountain’s contours unwound and the Mercedes swept them closer to the great enigma which was their destination. For impressive as the perimeter structure and its entirely man-made facilities were, the alien Castle itself drowned them in solemn stone, in a sort of cold, implacable patience. That was how Gill thought of it, anyway: as something old as the mountains and impersonal as … as what? As the hangman’s rope? As the terminals on an electric chair?
Now where did that thought spring from?
he wondered as Anderson pulled off the road and brought his car to a halt in the car park midway between the spurs.
“I should very much like to go with you,” said Varre as they all got out of the car. “This is my first time here.”
“By all means,” the Minister told him. “But as you’ll discover, there’s not a lot to see.”
Gill said, “We’ll go up in the first car, if that’s okay? The sooner she gets this shoulder seen to the better.”
“Fine,” Anderson told him, holding back a sigh of annoyance. He gave Turnbull a nod. “Jack, you go with them.”
The three narrowed their eyes against a cold wind, followed the threads of cable receding dizzily away up the steep slope and looping between the lift’s pylons. The whole setup was. distinctly utilitarian; the Castle wasn’t yet a tourist attraction, and not likely to be for a long, long time. They got into the stationary car and fastened their belts, and up above chains started rattling as the car gave a lurch and a sway and commenced its ascent.
Midway, the number-two car passed them on its way down. It contained four Americans, conversing in less than boisterous tones, all round-eyed and obviously still in awe of what they’d been looking at. They wore lapel badges which proclaimed them members of SCOPE.
“SCOPE?” Turnbull looked at Gill quizzically. “Sounds somehow military?”
Gill shook his head. “Society for the Correlation of Paranormal Experiences,” he said. “But I agree, it gives the wrong impression. So does ESP, for that matter.”
“Paranormal experiences?” Turnbull didn’t attempt to conceal his bewilderment. “Ghostbusters, up here?”
Gill shrugged. “Apparently the American vice-president’s cousin is a member—or something. Someone pulled some strings, and that’s a fact. Anyway, they’re listed amongst this week’s VIPs. A dozen of them.”
Getting out at the landing stage, Gill escorted the girl through the wicket gate in the high perimeter fence. Turnbull entered with them but remained at the gate while Gill took the girl to the first-aid post—a marquee which reminded Turnbull of nothing so much as a field hospital.
Inside the marquee a muscular, short-cropped paramedic type was waiting for them. He introduced himself and got right on with it. “I’m a physiotherapist”—he smiled at Angela—“when I get the chance, anyway. But I’ve been up here for three months now and you’re my first case. I’ve been hoping one of the cable cars would crash!”
While he spoke he sat her down in a chair, took her right arm and extended it horizontally. “Can I see the shoulder?” he said. “Please don’t say no or I’ll get the sack! Sir, will you open her parka?” He must take Gill for her husband or something. Gill thought:
What’s a joker like you doing in a nice place like this
? But he did it anyway. “And the blouse—just the top button.” Again Gill obeyed. Angela said nothing, just sat there white and hurting.
The medic’s hard fingers slid gently under the collar of her blouse onto her shoulder and worked there, exploring the bones. He shook his head, frowned, said, “Nothing broken, anyway. One or two things are a bit out of line, that’s all. Ma’am, can you lean forward just a little?”
Her arm was still extended, held there where he grasped her wrist. As she tentatively leaned her weight forward he turned her wrist sharply and her shoulder made an audible
click
! She cried out, slumped down in the chair, and the medic stopped smiling and clowning, gently folded her arm and laid her hand in her lap. “Done,” he said. “I hope!”
“Ah—
oh!”
she said. But there was more surprise than pain in her tone. She slowly rotated her shoulder, then glanced at Gill and smiled. He saw small tears in the corners of her eyes and felt an unreasoning urge to hit the medic on the nose. If he had, he knew the man would probably break him in half—but he wanted to anyway. It was a peculiar feeling, an emotion he’d never experienced before … .
Turnbull, Anderson, and Varre were waiting for them at the foot of rough concrete steps leading up to the base of the Castle. As Gill and Angela made towards them, he said to her, “Will you wait down here for me, at the gate?”
“Can’t I come up?” Only a little over five foot tall, she was obliged to look up at him. “It’s only a dozen steps away … .” As their eyes met something passed between them. They both felt it; and Gill thought:
She’s like a beautiful doll! How could anyone want to hurt her
?
He smiled to hide his bewilderment, shook his head half in annoyance—at himself—and said, “You shouldn’t even be here!”
“I’m not here’ because I wanted to be,” she reminded him. “But … I’m glad anyway.”
He nodded and took her left arm. “You can come up if you want to.”
Climbing the wide steps, the group of five made way for a party of Americans coming down. All were wearing SCOPE badges. One member of their group remained at the top, at the foot of the Castle’s blank, frowning wall. He stood there unmoving except for his head and eyes; the latter scanned slowly up and down the wall, absorbing the featureless lower face no less than the high, apparently pointless upper battlements.
“No windows, no doors,” he was drawling to himself as they came up behind him. “Weird as all get out!”
Weird is right
! Gill thought. He came to an abrupt standstill and Anderson, immediately to his rear, bumped into him. “What?” Gill mouthed, out loud. The Castle—this great machine—had suddenly woken up. Gill knew it if no one else did.
But in fact there were others—other human beings—who did know. Down in a sandbagged dugout under the perimeter fence, someone was yelling incoherently, and from the foot of the steps a man with a walkie-talkie was shouting up at them, “Sir? Mr. Anderson, sir—Mr. Gill? The activity has gone right off the register. Off
all
the registers!”
There was no time to do anything. Someone Gill didn’t know, a tall, sturdy man, was climbing the steps directly behind them, walking right into it. Gill—the only one of them who knew that something was about to happen—might have made a run for it, but this stranger was in his way. Also, all the strength had gone out of him. He was afraid—because he knew that the Castle was suddenly
intent
upon something.
“Oh, God!” he said, his voice very small.
The others just looked at him: a sea of round, uncomprehending eyes. No, for one of them at least seemed aware of something. The American from SCOPE, shouting: “Shit, shit, oh
shit
!” and trying to run.
But Turnbull grabbing him and holding on, asking, “What the bloody … ?”
Gill wanted to shout, “Let go of him! Let him go!” But all that came out was, “Oh, God! Oh my good God!”