Death's Jest-Book (26 page)

Pascoe didn't share their
amusement. This might be a cock-up for the crooks, but he knew that
it was going to register as a cock-up for the cops also. When the
story was told in the canteen and the papers, the joke was going to
be on him. And in the annual list of crime statistics, this day's
work would show as a security van hijacked despite a tip-off and an
expensive escort operation.

Suddenly Franny Roote was
relegated to the very bottom of his piled-up troubles and when at
last he returned to his office, he swept the piece of paper bearing
Sophie Frobisher's name into his waste bin without even reading it.

Monday
Dec 17th (Midnight!)

Dear
Mr Pascoe,

My
mind's in a turmoil so here I am writing to you once more. Let me
skip over my nightmare journey here. Suffice it to say that my
efforts at economy were rewarded by
two
train breakdowns and I
ended up reaching Manchester Airport only five minutes before my
departure time, and I still had to collect my ticket! No way could I
do that and run the gauntlet of baggage and security checks in less
than half an hour, I thought. Oh dear. Linda, who likes her
arrangements to stay arranged, would not be pleased.

But I needn't have worried. Even
Linda's organization is like a dry reed beneath the brutal tread of
the airlines.

My flight was delayed . . . And
delayed ... And delayed...

Finally we took to the air.
Clearly they hadn't let the delay interfere with their catering
schedule. What arrived on my plate made the Chapel Syke cuisine look
attractive. And I was seated next to a fat talkative estate agent
with a bad cold.

Nor did my problems end when we
landed in Zurich.

My case was the very last to
appear on the carousel, a neanderthal customs officer could not be
persuaded that I wasn't a Colombian drugs baron, and when I finally
emerged into the public concourse, nowhere amongst all the attendant
banners bearing sjiange devices did I see one with my name on it.

Some time later, I almost
literally stumbled across my taxi driver snoozing in the coffee bar.
Only the fact that he'd placed the sheet of paper bearing an
approximation of my name (Herr Rutt) over his eyes to keep the light
out gave me the necessary clue. He seemed to resent being woken and
set off into what looked to me like an incipient blizzard without
more than a guttural grunt in my direction, but after the estate
agent's mucous maunderings, I was not too sorry about this.

(I seem to recollect saying I was
going to skip over all this, but it's too deeply impressed on my
psyche to dismiss so easily! Sorry.)

Linda had assured me that
Fichtenburg was within easy driving distance of Zurich but not, I
felt, in this weather or with this driver. It seemed to take forever.
In the end my fatigue overcame my fear and I dozed off. When I was
awoken by the car coming to a halt with a suddenness which threw me
forward quite violently, my first thought was we'd had an accident.
Instead, as I recovered my senses, I realized the driver had placed
my luggage outside the taxi and was standing holding the passenger
door open, not, I hasten to add, in any spirit of flunkeydom but
merely to expedite my exit.

Still half
asleep, I staggered out, he slammed the door, climbed into the
driver's seat, slammed that door also and roared off into the night
without so much as a
Leb 'wohl!

It was snowing gently. I strained
my eyes to pierce the curtain of flakes. All I could make out in
vague outline was rank upon rank of tall fir trees.

The bastard had dropped me off in
the middle of a forest!

Alarmed, I span round. And with
infinite relief my eyes, now adjusting to the darkness, this time
made out the solid-faced and sharp angles of a building. I let my
gaze run to the left and couldn't find its limit. To the right the
same. I leaned backwards to look up and through the floating veils of
snowflakes I glimpsed turrets and battlements.

Fichtenburg!

'Oh my God!' I said out loud.

My school
German has almost vanished, but I seemed to recollect that
Fichten
meant pine trees and I was certain
Burg
meant castle.

I had assumed this was just some
fancy name Linda's chums had given to their holiday chalet. I should
have known better.

Fichtenburg
was exactly what its name stated - a castle among the pines!

And, what was worse, apparently a
deserted castle.

Feeling like
Childe Roland when he finally made it to the Dark Tower and started
to wonder if it had been such
a
great idea after all, I
advanced towards what looked like the building's main door.
Constructed of heavy oak planks bound together with massy plates of
iron, it had clearly been designed by a man who didn't care to have
his relatives dropping by unexpectedly.

A bolus of metal attached to a
chain hung from one of the granite doorposts. I seized it and pulled.
After a while, somewhere so distant it might have been in another
world, a bell rang.

In a Gothic
novel, or a
Goon Show
script, the next sound effect would have
been a slow shuffle of dreadful feet growing louder as they
approached.

I was almost glad when my
straining ears detected nothing.

Almost, for now the possibility
that there'd been some misunderstanding and I wasn't expected and
there was no one here to greet me began to loom frighteningly large.
My knowledge of Switzerland derives largely from early
nineteenth-century literature in which it figures as a confusion of
towering mountains, huge glaciers and snowy wastes. Since the
airport, I had seen little to correct that impression. Even when I
turned my back on imagination and applied to common sense, the answer
I got was scarcely more reassuring. People who built castles rarely
did so within striking distance of neighbours to whom they could
apply for the loan of a barrel of boiling oil if ever they ran short.

The alternative to trudging off
into the snow in search of help was to break in.

Now with your average suburban
house, this (my acquaintance at the Syke assured me) normally
involves little more than putting your elbow through a pane of glass
and unlatching a downstairs window.

Your average castle, however, is
a horse of a different colour. For a start, and indeed for a finish,
the only windows I could see through the drifting snow were well out
of my elbow's reach and protected by bars.

It would be easier to break into
Chapel Syke!

My one remaining hope was that in
a building of this size, there might be a servants' quarter round the
back, full of life and warmth, with a TV set playing so loud that the
doorbell went unnoticed. Such hopeful fantasies crowd thick upon a
desperate man. In any case, any movement seemed preferable to
standing here and freezing to death.

I set off along the front and
then down the side of the castle, following the twists and turns of
its coigns and embrasures, till I had no idea whether I was still at
the front or the side or the back! The snow had stopped falling and
slowly the cloud was beginning to break up, allowing occasional
glimpses of a nearly full moon. But its beams brought little comfort,
showing the solid unwelcoming stonework broken only by barred and
darkened windows.

In despair, I turned my back on
the castle and strained my eyes outwards into the crowding forest.

Was it rescue?
Was it an evil delusion? For a second, I was sure I saw a distant
light! Then it was gone. But welcome or will-o'-the-wisp, it was all
I had and I rushed in the direction I'd seen it, even though it meant
leaving the guiding wall of the castle behind me and heading into the
forest, all the while slipping and floundering in deep folds of snow,
and shouting, 'Help! Help!' then, recalling where I was,
'Zur
Hilfe! Zur Hilfe!'

Finally and inevitably, I fell
flat on my face in a drift. When I pushed myself upright and looked
around me (the breaking of the clouds giving me the full benefit of
the moon at that moment), I saw that I was in a clearing in which
stood a building. For a second I had hope that this might be the
source of the light I had seen, but as I moved nearer, I saw that it
was a ruined chapel. Strange how powerful the human imagination can
be, isn't it? You'd think that sheer physical fright at the prospect
of dying from exposure in this cold and inhospitable terrain would
have left little room for any more metaphysical fear. But as I
examined that place, all my awareness of mere bodily discomfort and
peril was subsumed in superstitious terror! It wasn't just the
post-Romantic knee-jerk reaction to a Gothic ruin in a wild and
remote setting. No, what really broke me out in a sweat despite the
temperature was what I saw painted on the chapel's internal walls.
The plaster had fallen completely in many areas and where it remained
it was cracked and flaking, but I had no doubt what it was the artist
had depicted there.

It was the Dance of Death.

A grisly enough subject, you are
probably thinking, and not one a chap in young Fran's situation would
wish to dwell upon, but why should it affect him so strongly?

The answer is
this. In Beddoes'
Jest-Book,
that most terrifying scene in
which the Duke, hoping to raise his wife from the dead instead
resurrects the murdered Wolfram, is set before a ruined Gothic church
on whose cloister wall is depicted the Dance of Death. My quest for
Beddoes had brought me to this place, and now he seemed to be saying
in that typically sardonic way of his, ‘‘
you want to
see me plain, this way lies your route!

I know it sounds silly. After
all, unlike the Duke, I have no murdered rival whose resurrection I
need fear, have I?

And in any
case my God-given reason tells me, as it told Beddoes,
there are
no ghosts to raise, Out of death lead no ways.
Oh, that there
were! How I would labour to raise dear Sam. But what horror if
instead of Sam I found myself confronted by ... some less welcome
revenu!

What nonsense this seems in broad
daylight.

But there in the dark forest
close by the ruined chapel, I have to admit, Mr Pascoe, that both
innocence and rationality failed me and I closed my eyes and said a
prayer.

When I opened
them, I saw that some god had heard me, but whether in the Christian
heaven or some darker colder Nordic place, I wasn't yet ready to say.
The light I had seen before showed itself again, much nearer this
time, and approaching! I could see it intermittently among the trees,
moving with a serpentine motion, now visible, now masked by the long
straight trunks of the pines, a circle of brightness growing larger
as it neared, putting me in mind of that shining sphere which marks
the arrival of Glenda in
The Wizard of Oz.

It was a happy
comparison, for as - guided I presume by my almost hysterical
shouting - it emerged from the forest into the clearing, I saw that
it was the headlight on one of those snow buggies, and though the
goggled and furred creature that bestrode it was sexless to the eye,
I knew she was my Good Fairy when she spoke and said,
'Herr Roote?
Willkommen in Fichtenburg.'

This, God bless her, was Frau
Buff, the housekeeper, a woman it emerged of few words, and all of
those German, but one whose good sense and ratiocinative powers make
you understand why the Swiss lead the world in the manufacture of
timepieces.

Mind you, it did occur to me as
she indicated I should climb up behind her (she'd already found my
luggage at the castle entrance) and we set off along a winding track
through the dark pine trees, to wonder if she might not be a good
fairy after all but the Snow Queen, and I, like little Kay, was being
abducted to her ice palace at the North Pole.