Robin’s voice, riding high and authoritative above this hail of disaster, said clearly: ‘Out, the back way!’ All his disintegrated atoms had welded again into one efficient being at the first pressure from outside. He dropped his victims without hesitation, without another thought. If he stayed to silence them he would lose precious time, and leave the police two identifiable bodies and two all-too-provable murders, should he ever be taken to answer for them. If the police here were on to him, then the game in these parts was up for good. Take the gains, cut the losses, and get out clean. There were other continents besides Europe, and there was money already carefully distributed there.
‘They must have found the car in the coppice, they came up from that way… No, I tell you there wasn’t a sign… not until that fool yelled like a banshee. Who the hell was it? You knew I should leave the trap open! They came from everywhere, like greyhounds on a hare…’
‘All right, we’ve got the message. Open that door and get going. Scatter and make for Dornbirn.’
A crisp, cool, commanding voice, not at all the scream of a banshee now. And they were obeying him in something more than haste. The other door was open, Maggie felt the chill of outer air like a fine spray over her cheek and shoulder. Of course, a rear exit would be an elementary precaution, and simple here in a labyrinth of castle cellars. They were all slipping away like flickering ghosts, the taciturn man who had cleaned the gun, the two big, raw-boned Austrians, the slender young one in the raincoat, the distraught sentry, all vanishing, all receding into tiny, rapid footfalls swallowed up by the rock.
Give him this at least, Robin was the last to go. He saw all his men away before he extracted the key from the rear door by which they had withdrawn, and passed through it in his turn, closing it briskly after him. His foot, as he crossed the room, stepped in the slowly-gathering rivulet of blood that seeped along between the stones. Maggie heard the key turn in the lock, and then his long, light steps receding rapidly.
It was very quiet in the wine cellar for a few blank moments, during which she drifted towards collapse, and dragged herself back desperately to press her hand against the hole in Francis’s shoulder, where the blood pumped steadily out of him, sending thin, bright-red jets welling between her fingers. She hardly noticed when the new noises began, the shots that broke the lock of the outer door, the rush of feet advancing. Only when the battering at the nearer door began did she realise that the police were through one obstacle, and divided from her now only by that last barrier. She laid Francis down out of her arms gently, and went stumbling across the room to drag back the bolts. There were voices calling out to her from the other side, offering and demanding reassurance. She was almost too tired to understand or answer, but if she did not, Francis would die. She knew nothing about first-aid, but she knew arterial bleeding when she saw it.
‘They’ve gone… another entrance somewhere…’ Every word required an effort like shouldering the world. ‘He took the keys away…’
‘Miss Tressider, are you all right?’ That was an English voice, not just someone local speaking English. It made its way to the centres of energy in her exhausted mind, and she drew reviving breath. ‘Yes, I’m all right, but Francis… he’s badly hurt… shot… Hurry, I’m afraid he’ll bleed to death…’
‘We’re coming. We’ll get through to you as fast as we can. Maggie… is he well away from the door? We may have to shoot a way through.’
‘Yes, near the other end of the room… ten yards… to your left…’
‘Stay there with him, and keep down. Maggie… Maggie, can you hear me? Where is he 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?