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.
The gold eyes never left her. His free left hand reached up laboriously, with the patience, she realised now, that belongs not to angels but to devils, until it got a hold on the latch of the door, and held fast. The right hand that held the gun, so carefully, so tenderly because it was the only treasure he had left, prised him doggedly up to his knees. He shifted the hand then with slow, drunken concentration to the door-frame, where it clung by the side and heel of the palm, frozen to the wood by the icy coldness of his will. Nothing else was now alive in him, except the deep, secret nerve that reacted only to hatred.
With infinite effort he had got one foot flattened to the floor, and with clinging hands and sweating agony he was levering himself upright. It was impossible. But for the burning determination he had to kill her as she had killed him, he would have fallen down long ago and stayed down, and died where he fell. Instead, inch by inch he drove himself upright, and even as she watched him, he took one lurching step away from the wall.
Gently and regretfully she laid down Francis out of her arms, on his face, that the wound might bleed less. Rising, she stepped over his body, and stood between him and their enemy. In this last encounter she had to meet Robin on equal terms. This whole affair had begun with the two of them, and with them it must end.
Neither of them heard the renewed grating of metal at the lock, the shattering gunshot, the impact of massed bodies against the barrier. There was no one left in the world but Maggie, erect and motionless in the centre of the cellar, and Robin Aylwin, propelling himself in dogged agony almost to within touch of her. The levelled gun, as heavy as the world, wavered upwards by inches towards her heart, sank irresistibly twice, and twice was recovered and forced onwards towards her heart, level with her heart.
With abnormal clarity she saw the crooked finger on the trigger struggling to command the strength to contract, and put an end to her. For an age the muzzle quivered, leaned, sagged from her breast, reared again and shook again, straining and ravenous for her.
The flame went out abruptly. The gun and the hand that held it trembled and sank, in spite of all his almost disembodied fury, sank and reached for the flagstones, subsiding into the dark. He pitched forward at her feet, and lay still. The bright blood from his lips stained her white slipper. The hand with the gun was buried under him.
The lock gave, the police flooded into the room. They saw her standing like a statue in ice and blood, her face as white as the ground colour of her own housecoat, blood on her breast and sleeve, blood on her shoe, where her enemy lay prone as if in worship, his curled lips kissing her instep. George Felse put his arm round her, and she crumpled into it with a huge, hapless sigh, and he picked her up bodily and carried her away, out into the air and the clean night emptied of enemies.
Behind him others at least as expert as he converged upon Francis Killian, and took charge of him until the ambulance came to rush him into hospital at Bregenz, where they would pump into him pints of blood, and stop the loss of his own.
But it wasn’t a hospital this one needed. George thought, as he always thought when the world closed in, of Bunty. He made for the nearest car of the several that had somehow gathered, and commandeered it without scruple, police driver and all. On the journey back into Scheidenau he held Maggie in his arms like the daughter he and Bunty had never had, and promised her the world and Francis, too, and never stopped holding her until he gave her to Bunty at the Goldener Hirsch.
So it was not until half-way through the next day that he provisionally closed his own case. They had excavated the sitting tenant of the wine cellar by then, naked, almost a skeleton, young, male, the errand-boy who knew better how to run the business than did the managing director. Maggie would clear up the references later, but up to then Maggie was a limp, wondering convalescent just coming to life in Bunty’s charge, living on bulletins from the hospital in Bregenz, and not yet fit to be questioned. What mattered about the young man from under the flagstones was that his more durable parts, notably the teeth, bore certain unique characteristics which were ultimately to identify him beyond doubt as Peter Bromwich, the art student of Comerbourne.
And that, combined with the capture of four of the international gang which had been plaguing this corner of Europe for so long, made the nocturnal siege of Scheidenau Castle a highly profitable operation. All the more so as three of the four showed signs of being willing to talk for their own sakes, and possibly to bring in, indirectly, at least half a dozen others from the shattered brotherhood.
Not to mention, of course, their lord and master, Robin Aylwin, sometime ’cellist of Freddy’s Circus, listed by the hospital at Bregenz as ‘Dead on arrival.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN