The Gabriel Hounds (28 page)

I looked up quickly. ‘Did you say a rider with two salukis?
Here
?’

It must be pure coincidence, of course. We must be miles on the wrong side of Beirut, and Dar Ibrahim was a long way away. It couldn’t be John Lethman and the salukis. But it was enough of a strange coincidence to make me sit up straighter and say: ‘Where? Can I see?’

I had to lean right across him to see down the hill. He sat back to let me do so, indicating a point well below us and some way off.

The car was sliding smoothly round the outside of a bend. The road was bounded by neither wall nor fence, its verge only a yard of dried clay where thistles grew between the poplars, and beyond this the steep mountainside. I peered down.

‘I can’t see anything. What’s the colour of the horse?’

‘Bright chestnut.’ He pointed again. ‘There, look, just going into the trees. Quick. The man’s in white. See?’

I strained to see where his right hand pointed. As I leaned close across him his left arm came quietly round me and held me fast.

For a moment I thought he was supporting me against the swing of the car on the bend. Then – incredulously, as his arm tightened – that this was a heavy pass; and I stiffened against it and tried to pull away. He held me, the arm like iron, his hand now gripping my left arm and holding it helpless. With my body pressed to his my right arm was imprisoned against him.

‘If you keep still you won’t be hurt.’

The voice, whispering now, was recognisable. The eyes, too, uncovered and staring into mine. The long nose, the olive face that would look pale in lamplight …

But it was mad. If it was mad to suppose John Lethman was riding out here forty miles from Dar Ibrahim it was still madder to suppose that my Great-Aunt Harriet, disguised as a man of forty-odd was holding me with this ferocious strength with one hand, while the other came up holding something that gleamed …

I screamed. The Arab driver drove smoothly on without even turning his head. He took a hand off the wheel to tap ash into the tray under the fascia-board.

‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ Gasping and twisting in his grip, I fought as hard as I could, and the car rocked, swinging wide on the next bend. But there was nothing coming. There was nothing on the road.

The dizzy swoop of the car round the bends, cliff on one side, open sky on the other, like the flight of a fulmar through an empty bright afternoon; the flicking
pulse of shadow as the poplars whipped by; the unheeding silence of the Arab driver … all these combined in some curiously merciful way to insulate me from the nightmare of what could not – could not possibly – be happening.

He was grinning. From a few inches away, his teeth looked obscene, like something in a horror film. Great-Aunt Harriet’s eyes blinked and glittered as he fought to hold me.

‘
Who are you
?’ It was a last gasp on the edge of hysteria, and I saw him recognise the fact. His voice was smooth. He had me still now, boneless, dumb.

‘You remember now, of course. I told you we’d met before, but we weren’t introduced properly. Henry Lovell Grafton, if you want it in full … Mean anything to you? Yes, I thought it might. And now hold still, or I’ll hurt you.’

On the phrase his right hand flashed down at my bare arm. Something pricked, clung stinging, was withdrawn. He dropped the hypodermic into his pocket and smiled again, holding me tightly.

‘Pentothal,’ he said. ‘Being a doctor has its uses. You have ten seconds, Miss Mansel.’

… Nor do I know how long it is

(For I have lain entranced I wis).

S. T. Coleridge:
Christabel

I was to find that Dr Henry Grafton had a habit of overestimating. It took about seven seconds to put me under, and when I awoke it was to near-darkness, the thick closeness of a shut and windowless room lit only by the faint light from a small barred opening high in the wall above the door.

At first, of course, the waking seemed normal. I opened blurred eyes on a dark wall where shadows moved slightly like rags in a draught. It was warm and very quiet, a heavy airless quiet that slowly conveyed to me the sense of being shut in. A small fluttering, like that of a moth against a pane, pattered into my consciousness through the layers of drugged sleep. It worried me. I must move and let the poor creature out. I must open the window and let in the air …

But not yet; I wouldn’t move just yet. My body felt slack and heavy, my head was aching, and I was cold. This last had its own compensations, for when I put a hand to my throbbing forehead the hand was damply
cool, and comforting. I was, I found, lying on blankets. I scruffled a couple of these over myself, and turned on my face, cold hands against cheeks and forehead. The heavy lassitude of the drug still possessed me, and in a vague way – nothing was other than vague – I was thankful for it. I had an idea that something large, dark and terrifying loomed and gibbered just out of reach; but something in me refused to face it yet. I checked my groping mind, shut my eyes against the blankets, and thought of sleep …

I have no idea how long it was before I came back to consciousness the second time: I imagined it was no great while. This time the return was final, sharp, and altogether frightening. I was suddenly wide awake, and fully aware of all that had happened. I even knew where I was. I was back at Dar Ibrahim. The smell told me, seconds before my brain caught up with my senses – dead air and dust and lamp-oil, and the indefinable sharp smell of Great-Aunt Harriet’s tobacco. I was in one of the storerooms under the Seraglio lake, behind one of those massively locked doors in the underground passage where Charles and I had gone exploring to find the Prince’s Divan …

That was it. That was the gibbering thought that had lain in wait for my return from the dead; the thought I had been refusing to face.

The interview in the Prince’s Divan. Great-Aunt Harriet. Henry Grafton … I could only think of one reason for Henry Grafton’s grotesque masquerade to fob off my persistence, for the dusty abandonment of the Chinese treasures and the beloved books, even for
the glimpse I had had of the ruby ring on Halide’s hand. Something had happened to my Great-Aunt Harriet which this gang had been at pains to hide. Not just ill, or even crazy – they must have known they needn’t fear her family when it came to Will-making, and wherever Lethman and Halide might stand, I didn’t think this was Henry Grafton’s concern. And surely the risks were too great for the rewards? Nor could she be a prisoner, like me; there had been no attempt to stop me wandering where I wished through the palace by daylight.

Well, then, she was dead. And for some reason the death had had to be concealed. At the moment, my skin crawling with cold in that warm airless dungeon, I could only think of one reason for that. But whatever it was that had necessitated the masquerade and the midnight prowling, and now the elaborate operation that had hauled me back into the net, I was soon going to find out – the hard way.

And Charles who had apparently, heaven knows how, suspected the truth – Charles was miles away, heading for Damascus with Hamid after him. Even if Hamid caught him up and persuaded him to come back for me, it would be some time before they would find my trail. No one would miss me at the Phoenicia; and Ben had said ‘Come when you can …’

Christy Mansel, sunk without trace.

Like Great-Aunt Harriet and her little dog Samson. Or like the Gabriel Hounds, locked away in the dust of the rotting palace for ever …

This was sheer crying stupidity, the drug reducing
me when I could afford it least to a useless contraption of slack nerves and jellied bone. I slapped the nerves down hard, sat up, and tried to look about me.

Gradually, the place took shape. A few feet of dusty floor near the bed where the dim light fell, a low ceiling hung with webs, a stretch of rough stone wall where a tumble of leather and metal – harness, perhaps? – hung from a rusty hook. The tiny flickering sound came again from outside, the fluttering of a wick in an oil lamp. The weak light wavered through the tiny grating to drown within a yard or two in thick darkness where, faintly, could be seen stacked shapes of crates, boxes, tins like small petrol-cans …

I had certainly been right about where I was. The ventilator must look out on lamplight in the underground corridor, and the door below it could be one of those massively barred affairs with the uncompromising locks that Charles and I had seen. There would be no questioning that door. And there was, of course, no window.

The silence was intense, thick and suffocating like the stillness one finds in caves, the silence of underground. I held myself still, listening. My body felt stiff and sore here and there, as if there were bruises, but the headache was gone, to be followed by an awareness which at that moment was worse and more painful, a feeling of quickness, a light aliveness and nerve-end vulnerability, like a snail that has been torn from its shell and wants nothing better than to creep back inside.

The silence was complete. There was no way of
telling if anyone else was still about in the palace. You would think I had been buried alive.

The cliché slipped through my mind without thought, then struck home like a poisoned dart, as with it came the quick vision of the rock above me, the tons of rock and earth with the heavy sheet of water lying over it. Man-made; fallible; rotten, probably, as the rest of the place was rotten. The weight must be terrific. If there was the slightest flaw in the rock above me, the slightest movement of earth—

Then with the rush of cold prickling over my skin, I heard it through the dead silence, the tick of settling earth.

I was on my feet, rigid and sweating, before commonsense broke over me like a breath of sweet air. The ticking was merely my watch. I stretched up on tiptoe near the door, holding my wrist high towards the ventilator. I could just see it. The little familiar face was like a friend, the familiar tick brought sanity and the knowledge that it was a few minutes short of six o’clock. It had been just on four in the afternoon when I had accepted the lift from Henry Grafton. I had been unconscious for more than twelve hours.

I put a hand down to the door and, for what it was worth, tried it. The latch lifted silk-smooth, but the door never budged a millimetre. This was so much a foregone conclusion that I hardly registered it with any emotion at all. I was conscious all the time of the positive effort involved in keeping at bay the image of the tons of rock and water pressing down over my head.

The sound which a little while ago I had been dreading came now like the lifting of a nightmare. A key in the lock.

When the door opened smoothly, in that accustomed, well-oiled silence, I was sitting, I hoped composedly, on the bed, trying to conceal with a straight back and poker face that I couldn’t have trusted my legs to let me stand. My lips were dry and my heart thumping. What I expected I have no idea. But I was afraid.

It was John Lethman, carrying a lamp, and behind him Halide, as ever with a tray. I smelled soup and coffee as soon as the door opened. If I had thought about it, I’d have expected to be ravenously hungry, but I wasn’t. He put the lamp up in a wall-niche, and the girl came past him to set the tray down on a packing-case. She let her big kohl-rimmed eyes slide side sideways to look at me, I saw pleasure there. The smile reached the corners of her mouth in a malicious little curl. The silk of her dress shimmered, bordered with gold, and I was sharply reminded of what my own state must be, crumpled from the blankets and with my hair all anyhow. I ignored her stonily, and said abruptly to Lethman:

‘What’s happened to her?’

‘To whom?’

‘To Great-Aunt Harriet, of course. Don’t try to keep the charade up, I know your beastly pal was masquerading. Where’s my aunt?’

‘She died.’

‘Died?’ I said sharply. ‘Was murdered, do you mean?’

From the corner of my eye I saw Halide’s silks shimmer as she started, and Lethman turned quickly to look down at me. His back was to the lamp, and I couldn’t see him clearly, but his voice was edged with nerves. ‘Don’t be melodramatic. Naturally I meant no such thing. She died of natural causes.’

‘Melodramatic! Look who’s talking, what with your underground prisons and your sloe-eyed charmer there and your dear little pantomime dame upstairs with his White Slaver techniques. Natural causes my foot,’ I said angrily, ‘be precise. What did she die of and when?’

He said stiffly: ‘I’m not going to answer questions. Dr Grafton was her doctor, he’ll explain.’

‘By God he will,’ I said.

He had been moving towards the door, but my tone brought him round again to face me. The light was on him now. I saw in his face a sort of startled reappraisement, even a kind of alarm, and he opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again without speaking. I thought he looked as edgy as his voice, a down-drawn look, with pouched flesh under the eyes that betrayed lack of sleep, and lines which I had not noticed before and which had no business to be there. What had certainly not been there before was the swollen bruise at the corner of his mouth and a nasty-looking mark like a weal from the cheek-bone to the ear. I was just taking this in when Halide said, quickly and venomously:

‘Don’t let her talk to you like that. You are the master here.’

I laughed. ‘It looks like it, doesn’t it? For a start, who’s been knocking you about? And you think I’m the one who’s in trouble? Well, you’ll learn. And I do assure you it’ll pay you to listen to me and get me out of here. I should like to go now. At once, please.’

He drew a sharp little breath, either of anger or effort. His voice was deliberately braced. ‘I’m sure you would. But you’ll stay here just the same. Dr Grafton will see you later.’

‘He’ll see me now. After I’ve had a wash. And what’s more, I should like my handbag back.’

‘It’s there by the bed. Now stop being stupid, you must see you’ve got to do as you’re told. There’s some food. We’ll leave you now, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll take it quietly. If you behave yourself you’ll come to no harm. All right, Halide.’

‘I don’t want the blasted food!’ I said angrily. ‘Will you stop behaving like Oddjob and take me to the bathroom?’