Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 19

They wandered about in the general area of Clarens until they struck the little road set back from the lake and lined with large nineteenth-century villas, one of which they knew immediately from a hundred slides and photographs Father Lynch had shown them over the years. Then, too, there was the familiar flag flying from a first-floor balcony. It was growing dark, the sun was setting behind the further mountains lighting the clouds from below so they seemed not so much clouds as daubs of black and gold on the deepening blue of the sky. Even though there were lights in the upper storey of the house, the shutters on the lower floors were closed. The last of the tourists had departed. They would not gain entry until the following morning.

As it happened there were a number of garden chairs and a small, circular steel table at the bottom of a short flight of stairs which led from the front of the house into the garden. Here, though cold, they slept until some time after midnight when they were roughly awoken.

They knew him even though he wasn’t wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts with the golden beaches, the coconut palms and the brilliant sunsets, even though he carried a revolver which he waved at them ordering them into the house.

Once inside, Blanchaille marvelled at his outfit. A raw silk suit extremely crumpled as if it had been slept in, no tie, shirt collar twisted, his laces undone as if he’d just shoved his feet into his shoes before coming outside and wafting off him good and strong were waves of liquor. He’d been drinking, drinking most of the night, Blanchaille guessed. He was aware of a hallway, the smell of polish, photographs on the walls, Kruger everywhere, and to his right a staircase which carried the large warning: No Admittance to the Public. At the top of the stairs stood a woman in a blue dressing-gown.

‘What have you got there, Gus?’ she asked grumpily.

They recognised her immediately, of course, that slightly imperious, dark, faintly hawk-like profile – those handsome rather beaky good looks, the eagle priestess, Secretary of the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel.

‘Oh Ernie Nokkles where are you now?’ Kipsel whispered.

‘Spies are what I’ve got here,’ said the big wild man.

‘Tourists,’ Blanchaille countered.

‘Normal times for that. Normal opening times. It’s rare that pilgrims, whatever their fervour, camp in the grounds. Isn’t that so, Trudy – isn’t that so?’ he appealed to the haughty figure in blue above them.

‘I’d say, from the look of them, you’ve picked up a couple of bums, that’s what I’d say. Who are you boys?’

They told her.

‘Not the Kipsel?’

Kipsel sighed and admitted it.

‘And I know you,’ said Kuiker to Blanchaille. ‘You used to be Father Theo of the Camps.’

‘And you used to be Gus Kuiker, Minister of Parallel Equilibriums and Ethnic Autonomy.’

Above their heads Trudy Yssel laughed harshly. ‘You really picked a couple of wise-guys this time. As if we don’t have problems! When will you learn to leave well alone?’ She spun on her heel.

‘Come on, Trudy,’ the Minister implored. ‘Give a man a break. I caught ’em.’

But she was gone.

Another woman bustled along the corridor. Frizzy grey hair and a cross red face. She carried a broom and a pan. She looked at Kipsel and Blanchaille with horror. ‘Now whom have you invited? I told the Minister that he can’t have any more people here. This house isn’t designed for guests, it’s a museum. I’m sorry but they must go away, they can find a hotel, or a guest-house. The Minister must understand, we can’t have no more people here.’ She began sweeping the floor vigorously.

‘I’m sorry, Mevrou Fritz, but you see, these aren’t guests,’ said Kuiker, ‘These are prisoners.’

‘Prisoners, guests, it’s all the same to me. Where will the Minister put them? I keep trying to explain to the Minister. This house is not made for staying in. It’s made for looking at. Every day at ten I open the doors and let the people in to look. They look, sign the visitors’ book and leave.’

‘I’ll lock them in the cellar,’ said Kuiker.

Kuiker took his prisoners down into the cellar, which turned out to be a warm and well-lit place built along the best Swiss lines to accommodate a family at the time of a nuclear blast and was equipped with all conveniences, central heating, wash-lines, food and toilets. Kuiker producing a length of rope, ordered Blanchaille to tie Kipsel to the hot-water pipes and then did the same for Blanchaille, despite the complaints of Mevrou Fritz who pointed out, not unreasonably, that she would be extremely put off when she did her ironing by the sight of these two men trussed up like chickens, staring at her. Kuiker’s response was to turn on her and bellow. His face turned purple, the veins stood out in his neck. Mevrou Fritz flung aside her broom and fled with a shriek.

Kuiker whispered rustily in Blanchaille’s ear. ‘Soon the house will be open to tourists. You will hear them passing overhead. Examining the relics, paying their respects to the memory of Uncle Paul. Make any attempt to get attention and you’ll be dealt with. That’s a promise.’ And to prove it he struck Blanchaille across the face with his pistol.

They sat trussed like chickens all day. At one stage Mevrou Fritz came in and used the ironing table, complaining increasingly about their presence and of the trouble which the arrival of Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel had caused her. ‘This is Government property. I’m here as a housekeeper, I see to it that the tourists don’t break things or take things. I sell them postcards. I polish the floors. I dust the Kruger deathbed and I straighten the pictures. It is dull and lonely work, far from home and the last thing I expect is to have to share my extremely cramped quarters with a jumped-up little hussy who’s too big for her boots and a Government minister on the run who spends most of the day drinking. And now I have prisoners in the cellar.’

Blanchaille and Kipsel were not fed. They were released from their chairs only to go to the lavatory and then only under Gus Kuiker’s gun.

Later that night Trudy Yssel lay in bed. Down the corridor from the small spare bedroom they could hear the continual low grumblings of Mevrou Fritz now relegated to this little corner of the house, as if, she said, she were a bloody servant, or a skivvy.

Minister Gus Kuiker poured whisky into a tooth glass. Trudy Yssel looked at him. It was hard to believe that this unshaven drunk was the Minister confidently tipped to succeed President Bubé. But then she considered her own position. Despite the attempt to maintain appearances, the carefully groomed nails, the chiffon négligé, the impeccable hair, it was hard to believe that she was the Secretary of the Department of Communications.

‘What do you recommend, Trudy?’

Trudy looked at him pityingly. ‘Why ask me? You brought them in here. Now you deal with them. Why couldn’t you have left them in the garden? Then they would have come in at the official time, with all the other tourists, looked around and left. None the wiser.’

‘Maybe they’re spies,’ said Kuiker. ‘Maybe the Regime sent them to find us.’

‘Well, that doesn’t matter now – does it? You’ve found them. They know who we are. Worse still, they know where we are. What’s to be done?’

‘Get rid of them, I suppose,’ said Kuiker.

The blood had dried on Blanchaille’s face and on the ropes that strapped him in. He blamed himself for not anticipating something like this. Kipsel was hard put to find anything to say that would cheer him up. When Kuiker arrived the general mood of gloom darkened still further. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite them, he swung his pistol around the finger guard in a manner so casual Kipsel would not have expected it in a police trainee. He was very drunk. His midnight blue dressing gown was monogrammed with a great G gulping down a smaller K. The stubble on his chin was longer and tinged with grey. His feet were bare and the pyjama trousers which protruded beyond his dressing-gown creased and rather grubby around the unhealthy whiteness of his ankles.

‘Why are you here? Who sent you?’ Kuiker demanded.

Blanchaille ignored him.

‘If we’d known you were holed up here we’d never have come,’ said Kipsel. ‘Come to that – what are you doing here? The papers said you were in Philadelphia.’

‘We were betrayed in Philadelphia. That black shit Looksmart dropped us in it. He and that oily priest bastard brother of his got together and destroyed us in America. Years of work wiped out in a few minutes. Our plans broadcast all over the bloody country. Now, at home, they’ve turned on us. We heard today that there are warrants out for our arrest, it seems that the Regime, desperate to find somebody to blame has settled on us. It is we, it seems, who have been rifling the treasury, absconding with public funds, hiring executive jets and wining and dining our way around the world, all for our own selfish ends. They are saying that we went abroad once too often and were seduced by foreign ways and luxuries. But they, they stayed at home, they are the only ones who remained pure. They will preserve racial amity, only they can withstand the Total Onslaught, they have never been corrupted. They are no longer pretending that we are in Philadelphia, they have officially announced that we are on the run and what’s more the bastards have taken credit for making the announcement, for setting up an enquiry into the misuse of public funds, for the dismantling of the Department of Communications, they have resurrected the dead official, Ferreira, they have announced that this good and faithful official discovered the beginnings of this rotten business, as if small peculiarities in the movements of Government funds which we handled are worth twopence compared to the much larger, one could say total, distortion and perversion of reality the Regime has organised against us.’

‘Do you know who killed Ferreira?’

‘Who? You mean what! What killed Ferreira? I’ll tell you what killed Ferreira. Curiosity killed Ferreira, and ignorance and the refusal to operate within the parameters of the practical. The mind of an accountant. The insistence on perfection, his own perfection. The stubborn desire to go by the book. His book. His books! The refusal to recognise that we were just proper people doing what we could to change things for the better, to win our country a place again in the world. To fight. And we had to fight because we were at war, see. And you can’t behave like you’re in a monastery garden when you’re at war with the rest of the world. But ignorance and pig-headed fucking stubborness chiefly – that’s what killed Ferreira. He wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t learn, he wouldn’t adapt. So he died.’

The Minister lurched forward waving his revolver and perhaps in his rage might have killed the prisoners had not Mevrou Fritz bustled in at that moment with a fresh pile of ironing and complained that the prisoners were beginning to smell.

‘They’ll stink a lot more when they’re dead,’ said Kuiker.

Kipsel kept perfectly calm. ‘This place as such is of no importance to us, it’s a shell, a ghost house. We only came here because it’s the start of our mission. We’re not fighting the war against you. We’re looking for the other Kruger House, we’re retiring.’

Kuiker made a sound, somewhere between a belch and a laugh. ‘There is no safe house, no garden of refuge, no asylum, no home for the likes of you – or me. And shall I tell you how I know? For one very good reason. If there were such a place you can be damn sure I would have found it by now.’ He swayed and almost fell, ran a hand through his hair, pounded himself several times on the chest and hawking phlegm turned abruptly on his heel they heard him clumping upstairs.

That night when Kuiker got into bed he said, ‘There’s no persuading them. They’re mad. I tried to explain this is the end of the road. This is where we turn and fight. But they seriously believe in some promised land. We’ll have to finish with them.’

‘Let me try,’ said Trudy Yssel.

Early next morning she fetched the prisoners from the cellar. Blanchaille and Kipsel were unshaven and smelt badly and after days without food they were weak on their feet. But Trudy smiled at them as if she were taking them on a picnic. Before the first visitors arrived at Uncle Paul’s House she wanted to take them on a little tour, she said. She wore a spotted blue dress with pearl ear-rings and was unnaturally cheerful, relaxed and chatted to them as if she might have been any houseproud wife showing off her establishment and not the mistress of a hunted Government minister with a price on his head and she the disgraced and vilified civil servant accused of spiriting away thousands upon thousands of public money.

‘Don’t you think, Father Blanchaille, that the tour is nowadays the chief way we now have of communicating information to busy people? We have a tour of the game reserve to learn about animals. We tour the townships to show our black people living in peace. We tour the operational areas of our border wars to discover how well we are doing. Talking of war, do you know I have toured forward areas where it felt as if the war had been turned off for the day, like a tap, or a radio broadcast, or a light. You expected when you got back to your tent at night to find a small note on your pillow saying —“The conflict has been suspended during your visit by the kind agreement of the forces concerned”, but of course you knew that wasn’t so when you heard of American senators caught in the bombing raid, or a group of nuns from one of the aid organisations like “Catholics Against Cuba”, had been ripped to pieces by shrapnel. Follow me, gentlemen. Don’t hang back.’

The place was kept spotless, a gleaming polished purity, it seemed to them that Mevrou Fritz must have caught the Swiss passion for cleanliness. It smelt of elbow grease, it smelt of floor wax. It was heavy, dark, depressing and virtually empty. Their footsteps echoed on the smooth boards. ‘Of course none of the furniture remained when the old man died. It was sold off. The house now comes under the Department of Works and they’ve replaced what they can with copies, or pieces of the period. But it’s still pretty bad. A bit of a tomb really. When the old man died his body was taken back to South Africa, again on a Dutch warship, and given a hero’s burial. That was the end of his association with Switzerland. There was no money left here, the furniture was sold off, the house given up and any talk of the missing millions was simply a myth. And it remained, as General Smuts said, merely something “to spook the minds of great British statesmen”. The time has come to stop talking of these dreams. We must wake up. We’ve been woken up, the Minister and I. We’re considering our position. When we’re ready we will move.’

‘I think you’re on the run,’ said Blanchaille.

‘You’re in hiding,’ said Kipsel. ‘We read the papers.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Trudy pleasantly. ‘This house is Government property. As Government people we’re entitled to stay here.’

‘You said you were getting ready. For what?’ Blanchaille asked.

‘Our President is expected shortly. Once he arrives we’ll be in a position to put certain thoughts to our Government at home. We plan to hold talks with our Government.’

‘What makes you think they’ll talk to you?’

She smiled again. ‘We would rather talk to them than to the world press.’

‘Blackmail,’ said Blanchaille.

‘We won’t be blamed for having done our duty. When we’ve cleared our name we shall return in triumph.’

‘And until then?’ Kipsel asked.

‘We will wait here. In the Kruger House. You believe in the sad story of a rest home for the refugees the Old President set up. You should be the first to understand the use we put this place to. Uncle Paul would have understood.’

‘You don’t understand what has happened back home,’ Kipsel said. ‘They’ve dispensed with you. When Ferreira found the figures, publicised them and died, he blew the matter wide open. The Regime stepped away from its anointed Minister and his favourite. First they covered for you. But now they’re joining the crowds calling for your blood. You should be going where we’re going.’

‘There is no place where you’re going,’ said Trudy. She led them into a small bedroom. ‘This is Uncle Paul’s death room. Here is the actual death bed. Well no, not the actual death bed, but a replica.’

They saw the dark wood of the bedstead. The sturdy head board, the starkly simple bulk of the bed with its white linen counterpane. On a small bedside table stood a vase of pink carnations. Thick green drapes in the window and fuzzy white net curtains strained the sunlight to a weak, pallid wash. A huge old-fashioned radiator stood in the corner and a large carved chair stood very prominently by the bedside. The seat and back of the chair were decorated in bold floral patterns and surmounted by crossed muzzle-loaders. This was a recurring emblem throughout the house, the Boerish equivalent of the fleur-de-lis. Other popular symbols about the house were powder horns, ox wagons and lions. Lions had always been associated with Uncle Paul. Hadn’t he wrestled one to death before his thirteenth birthday? Or outrun one? And had he not been known as the Lion of the North? Or was it of the South? Blanchaille couldn’t remember. All presidents had been identified with larger powerful beasts, or weapons. President Bubé had been known as Buffalo, or more colloquially as ‘Buffels Bubé’, while the young and thrusting Wim Vollenhoven, ‘Bomber’ Jan Vollenhoven as they called him, the Vice-President, continued the old tradition.

Trudy sat on the bed. Blanchaille was struck by the ease with which she committed this sacrilege. Here indeed was one of the new people. He pushed open the french windows and stepped on to the veranda where the flag gave its leathery rattle.

‘Our belief, our brief, our mission was straightforward. In this matter of putting across our country’s position we should attack. Fuck sitting on our arses any longer. Get out there and sell the bastards our bag of goodies. Don’t try and win through to the big men overseas, spot the young ones in advance, pick them when they begin to come up the tree, and gamble. Don’t expect the foreign newspapers to print nice stories about you, the only reason they like producing stories about you is because you’re so horrible. So don’t wait for them to tell your story, buy a space and tell it yourself. If possible buy the fucking newspaper, radio station, investors’ bulletin, whatever. If that won’t do then buy the owners lunch, dinner, drinks as often as possible, have them around to your place for confidential chats. If governments are against you, fly their MPs over, show them the game reserves, the war zones, the beer halls, peace in the townships. Play golf with them. Did you know we were the ones who got Bubé to play golf with the newspaper owners? We made him take lessons, even though he moaned like hell at the time. Well, today, they’re saying back home that we stole the money for the golf clubs. They say it was Government money. Well of course it was bloody Government money! Where else would it come from? And what’s more the Government knew it was Government money, because that was the deal. I said to them, I spoke to half the damn cabinet, that half of it which matters: Kuiker, the President himself, Vollenhoven and of course General Greaterman, the Defence Minister. I said to them, look, I want permission to go ahead on a propaganda offensive. O.K. they said. Wait, I said, till I finish. It’s going to cost a bomb. If I need to send an editor away with his mistress to Madeira, then I’ll do it. If I have to bribe a newspaper editor, then I need the funds immediately. No questions asked. If I need to hire an executive jet to fly a party of journalists into the country via Caracas or Palm Springs or anywhere else on the globe, then I want the wherewithal to do it – without anybody raising an eyebrow. Bubé was there and he wanted to know how much this campaign would cost. I gave it to him straight. Millions, I said. He took it on the chin. I should start as soon as possible and the funds would be forthcoming. So I went ahead, and I stress this, with full official backing. And I’ve done so from that day to this. They all knew. President Bubé knew. Vollenhoven knew. Greaterman knew. And approved. The money was raised from various departments so as not to cause too great a dent in individual budgets. So much from Defence, so much from Security, so much from Tourism, everybody had to cough up their share and the money was then transferred to Switzerland and passed through various Swiss banks. And let me here say a word for the Swiss banks which have been bloody unfairly slandered. We have a great debt of gratitude to the Swiss banks. They have raised loans for us when nobody else would and we were damned hard up for foreign capital. They’ve safeguarded difficult deposits, overseen delicate payments and observed the strictest confidentiality in sensitive matters such as the volume of gold sales. To suggest that we bribe certain Swiss banks to hold secret funds is a gross lie. And a nonsense. They did it for nothing. Well, for a small holding percentage. And even there we get a discount from them. No, I won’t hear a word said against the Swiss banks. Where would South Africa be today without them?’

‘Why were you denounced then? Why have you made a run for it? Why are you hiding out here?’ Kipsel demanded, scratching blearily at the thick stubble on his jaw, and shivering slightly in the early morning damp rising from the lake.

‘We were fingered by the Regime! They were frightened to own up to a mission they had sanctioned. They wanted scapegoats.’

‘And the story about the missing money, the Swiss accounts, the house in Capri, the apartment on the Italian Riviera?’

‘The houses were part of the job, safe houses for our people, reception centres for new recruits, entertainment bases for important visiting VIPs who didn’t want the world to know that they were spending the weekend with South Africans. The houses were used in the course of operations, they weren’t holiday cottages, you know. As for the money we’re supposed to hold – what money?’

Blanchaille looked out across the big green lawn to the lake. It was on this balcony the old man had sat, the Bible open on his knees, peering blearily across the water at the big blue mountains on the other side. The locals had paused, he knew, as they passed by and pointed up at the famous old exile, Uncle Paul on his balcony. The lake lapped at the bottom of the garden. The gulls made their skidding contact with the water, claws angled for the landing as if not knowing for certain where they were putting down until they had actually landed, distrustful of the medium. The old man had sat on his chair, solid as the mountains, deep as the lake. Perhaps he had seen and admired this tireless energy of the gulls, this compulsion to take off and land, but that energy always tempered by caution, their wildness calmed into life-preserving habit. Away to the right was the town of Montreux, it crowded down to the water’s edge along a gentle crammed curve of densely packed buildings on the shore, pretending to be a small Mediterranean port. But here was no sea, this was still water, a great placid lake lying in the bowl of the mountains. Those mountains in the distance, the big blue ones across the water that he knew were in France, if one screwed up one’s eyes and gazed blindly until they began to water, they were vaguely reminiscent of mountains in the Cape Peninsula. But of course the old refugee and his rented accommodation wouldn’t have known the Cape mountains either, he’d seldom been out of the Transvaal veld until, that is, he began his great last journey into exile.

The flag-pole on the balcony was slanted at an angle of forty-five degrees and from it hung the familiar blue and white and orange colours. Very carefully Blanchaille lowered the flag to half-mast.

‘Any more questions?’ Trudy asked jumping up and smoothing the white coverlet on the death bed. ‘Oh yes, I know – you’re dying to ask me if I’m Gus Kuiker’s mistress. So, then – do I sleep with Gus Kuiker?’

‘No,’ Kipsel protested weakly, ‘we were not going to ask you that.’

‘But I insist. Sleeping with Gus Kuiker means that once or twice a week he gets into bed beside me. I lie on my back and spread my legs. He puts a cushion under my backside because, he says, he doesn’t get proper penetration otherwise, and then he pushes himself into me with some difficulty and moves up and down very fast because he gets penis wilt, you see. He can get it up but he can’t keep it up. You can rub him, suck him, oil him. It doesn’t help. While he’s going he’s O.K. The moment he stops, it drops. So about two minutes later, that’s it. Overs cadovers. So much for sleeping with Gus Kuiker. He’s also heavier now, sadder, he drinks almost all the time and he seldom shaves. But, as you say, we do indeed sleep together. Though I hope next time you use the phrase you will think hard about its implications.’

Back in the cellar Blanchaille was gloomier than ever. ‘What if I’m wrong and the Kruger story ends with this house?’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘But say it did.’

‘No, dammit. I won’t say it did! You know the story as well as I. This is just another stage on the journey which began in Pretoria, went on to Delagoa Bay, touched Europe and Marseilles, and then moved on to Tarascon, Avignon, Valence, Lyons, Mâcon and Dijon to Paris, as Uncle Paul travelled Europe to win support for the Boer cause. He pressed on to Charleroi, Namur and Liège, he called at Aachen and Cologne and Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Emmerich, and then he went on to Holland, stopping at over half a dozen cities before pitching up at the Hague. December 1901 saw him in Utrecht, nearly blind, 1902 he was in Menton for the warmth. He was in Hilversum in the following year and then back to Menton for the sun. Only in 1904 did he come here to Clarens, to this house which he did not buy, but rented from a M. Pierre Pirrot – some doubt has been cast on the existence of this man – notice the similarity between his name and the French pantomime character with the white face, Pierrot. The picture we have of the solidity of this house, of his living here in exile, of the near-blind old man in his last days looking out across Lake Geneva to the mountains, it all sounds like a drama, doesn’t it? Or a tragedy? And it suits the people to give the legend weight and durability, to make it solid and believable. The bourgeois respectability of this house aids that delusion. But it’s not a drama, or a tragedy. It’s a pantomime! Everybody’s dressed up, everyone’s pretending. For instance, he wasn’t here alone, Uncle Paul. His family was with him, his valet, his doctor, countless visitors called. And he was by no means finished either. He had his plans. The last act of the pantomime was not yet played out. And he had to hurry. He came here in mid-May of 1904 and by the end of July he was dead. But in those short months he was busy, sick as he was, planning a place for those whom he knew would come after. He knew that many of his people would collaborate with the enemy. But he also knew that some would hold out, escape, and would have to be accommodated. He wanted a place, an ark that should be made ready to receive the pure remnants of the volk.’

But a black passion had seized the ex-priest and he said stubbornly. ‘Yes, but what if there is no such place?’

‘Then,’ said Kipsel, ‘all I can do is to quote to you again the mad old Irish priest who knew a thing or two – if a last colony, home, hospice, refuge for white South Africans does not exist, then it will be necessary to start one.’

That night Trudy lay beneath Kuiker who was hissing and bubbling like a percolator and had his tongue clenched beneath his teeth in a frenzy of concentration as he entered her, trying to ensure that his erection lasted through the entry phase.

‘I think,’ said Trudy, ‘that you are going to have to get rid of our guests.’

Kuiker did not reply. He had begun moving well and did not want to break his intense effort to remain upright and operational. Instead he shook his head, not to indicate his refusal, but to show her it was not the time to talk of these things.

‘Now,’ said Trudy, cruelly tightening her exceptional vaginal muscles.

Kuiker shrank, he fell out of her, he sat back on his haunches and said, ‘Damn! That’s lost it.’

‘We can’t hold them much longer, Augustus. Something is going to have to be done. They claim they don’t care about us. They say they’re above all this. But they might just give us away.’

But he was not interested. He considered his failed member. The brandy he had drunk had befuddled him and was making him very sleepy. He reckoned he had at least one chance to make it inside Trudy that night and he was going for it. Such determination, such single-mindedness had been the mark of his political success in the days when he was tipped as the next prime minister. Desperately he seized his penis and began rubbing it firmly. It stiffened perceptibly. There was no time to lose. With a grunt he pushed her back on the pillows, thrust his hands under her buttocks and rammed himself home.

‘First thing in the morning,’ he promised. ‘Crack of dawn, I’ll finish them.’

Downstairs in the cellar Kipsel was in a bad way. Trudy’s knots cut so deeply into his wrists that the circulation had gone and try as he might to loosen the cord he only succeeded in cutting more deeply into the flesh and making his wrists bleed. He’d not been able to contain his bladder either and a pool of urine spread beneath the chair.

It was then that Blanchaille had a brainwave.

‘Ronnie,’ he said suddenly, jerking upright in his chair, ‘Jesus what an idiot I am! I’ve been sitting here for days putting up with this crap and all the time I had a way out of here.’