Faust Among Equals (17 page)

 

Lundqvist froze in the doorway.

That statement is rather ambiguous. Since it was something like ninety in the shade, and there was enough moisture gathering in the armpits of his shirt to hold a tall ships race on, Lundqvist was by no means frozen. He was, rather, still.

Inside the big shed thing (Lundqvist was a bit vague about the proper names of agricultural buildings) a girl was counting sheep.

‘Seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-
nine
- come on, Hilda, up you get - eighty...'

The shear-your-own idea, Helen admitted to herself, hadn't been the tearaway spectacular success she'd hoped for. In the back of her mind, she had the notion that you needed just a bit more passing trade for a venture of that kind, and perhaps she should have realised that earlier. Still, no use crying over spilt milk (Danny Bennett would have disputed that remark, and it's as well he wasn't on hand to do so); what she did have on the credit side of the ledger was many, many sheep, and it surely wasn't beyond the wit of man to find some way of exploiting the resource.

She paused, hands on hips, and frowned. Then she cracked the small whip she held and shouted.

‘Come
on
, Doris, you aren't even trying.'

Doris gave her a blank stare, said, ‘Baaa,' and trotted grimly round the jump. The rest of the flock, however, did as they were told, and jumped. The face that launched a thousand sheeps, and all that jazz.

Not a bad wheeze, though she said it herself. What do you give the insomniac who's got everything? Trained performing sheep, of course.

Meanwhile, in the doorway, Lundqvist was motionless, listening. Where Helen was, it stood to reason, George couldn't be far away. All he needed to do was wait, like a cat at a mouse-hole, and the idiot would walk straight into his arms.

Well yes. Quite.

On the one hand, Lundqvist said to himself, quite apart from his virtually infinite resources of supernatural special effects, Lucky George has the reputation of being a crack shot, naturally gifted all-in wrestler and ex-Wittenberg fencing blue. On the other hand, I have a toothbrush.

Had
a toothbrush.

A few seconds of frantic pocket-searching followed, at the end of which Lundqvist moaned softly and bumped his head three or four times against the door post. He'd come all this way - stolen a helicopter, hijacked an airliner, taken a series of cars and lorries without permission and finally mugged a sail-plane pilot - only to leave his toothbrush somewhere between here and the entrance of the driveway. And Lucky George liable to turn up at any minute . . .

‘Excuse me,' called the girl from the interior of the shed. ‘Can I help you or something?'

Lundqvist stood upright. A stray pellet of inspiration had lodged in the back of his brain.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I think you can.'

 

By the time Danny Bennett had climbed up on to the rail of the silage clamp to get a better view and got the camera on his shoulder and found the thing you pressed to make it go and the other thing you twiddled to get it in focus, he'd missed some of the best bits. He'd missed Lundqvist running like a hare out of the shed, with a flock of ravening sheep snapping at his heels and the current Miss World bringing up the rear cracking a whip and shouting, ‘Go on, Doris, kill!' He'd missed Lundqvist's quite spectacular leap up into the hayloft, and the lead ewe's frantic efforts to jump up and bite his throat out. He'd missed the really good bit, where the girl had brought up a ladder and the sheep had gone swarming up it like firemen on piecework, followed by Lundqvist jumping out the other side and landing in the water butt.

What he had got, though, was Lundqvist grabbing the girl, bundling her under his arm and running like fun back up the drive, while seventeen livid sheep stood on the hay platform realising that learning to come
down
the ladder had been pencilled on the timetable for the week after next.

He hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on, of course, but that was so close to normality that it was comforting rather than otherwise. What he did recognise was bloody good television.

Familiarity is, indeed, the most powerful anaesthetic of all. To Helen of Troy, bumping about under Lundqvist's arm and trying to write
Been kidnapped. Dinner in fridge. Love, Helen xxx
on the back of a feed bill with an eyebrow pencil, being abducted was just like old times. It was, after all, what she was best at.

‘You,' screamed Lundqvist, ‘start the goddamn car!'

Danny, recognising that the remark was addressed to himself, started to climb down from his eyrie and then checked himself. Yes, sure, a good journalist's first duty is to cover the story, but did that involve assisting in the abduction of beauty queens by known hit-men?

‘Start the fucking car,' Lundqvist reiterated, as if somehow conscious of Danny's internal debate, ‘or I'll rip your nuts off with a plastic fork!'

Yes, Danny decided, it probably did. Without releasing his hold on the camera, he fumbled in his trouser pocket for the car keys.

You know how it is with keys. Shy, elusive creatures, the trouser pocket is their natural habitat and they are masters of the arts of camouflage and concealment. Their favourite ploy is to snuggle down into the folds of a crumpled pocket handkerchief and stop up the mouth of the burrow with any loose change that might be lying about. Failing that, they find a loose thread in the seam to snag themselves on, and cling like limpets. Danny's keys did both.

‘Just a minute,' he called out, jiggling furiously. ‘I won't keep you, I've just got to . . .'

He jiggled too hard and dropped the camera.

Five minutes of the best action sequence he'd ever been privileged to witness, spinning and twirling through the air on its way to obliteration on the rock-hard ground, twenty feet below. In that split second when he realised what had happened, Danny felt the most devastatingly acute feeling of loss that any human being could conceivably register without the top of his head coming unscrewed. It had had everything - sex, violence, action, comedy and white fluffy animals - and in one and a half seconds' time it was going to hit the deck and go splat. He launched himself into the air, stretched out a frantic arm like Michelangelo's Adam, and just managed to get the tips of his fingers round the carrying handle.

His last thought, before he hit the deck and went
splat!
, was
Phew, that was close.

 

When he opened his eyes, it was dark. Then someone slowly turned up the lights.

It was just like being at the cinema.

The faint glow was coming from directly in front of him. As he stared, it seemed to resolve itself into shapes. Patterns. Letters.

Danny started violently; or rather, he didn't. It was like trying to rub your eyes with a hand that's just been amputated; the brain ordered a spasm of movement, and the space where the nerves had once been sent back the message that spasms are off.

Gosh, Danny couldn't help thinking, it's nice of them to say that. Perhaps it wasn't a hundred per cent sincere, no more than
We apologise for any delay
notices at the head of a twelve-mile tailback, but the fact that they bothered at all was reassuring, in a way. It implied that there was someone, or perhaps Someone, you could write to and complain.

The letters flickered and faded, and it was dark again; but there was no immediate impulse towards terror, because they were playing piped music. Airport music. Supermarket music. Please-hold-the-line music. Now everybody knows that when this sort of music plays, the only possible emotion is passive boredom; and it's impossible to be passively bored and shit-scared at the same time. Danny sighed and allowed his mind to wander.

Well, I'm dead. What a bloody nuisance, here I am dead and no camera. My first really
big
scoop and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Then it occurred to him that death is hardly a scoop for any journalist. It's the one story that everyone covers and nobody gets to phone in. Danny opened where his mouth had been and screamed.

Noiselessly.

And then the lights flickered again, this time resolving themselves into a ten-foot-high neon questionnaire.

Put like that, it would be churlish to refuse.

Full name: Daniel Woodward Bernstein Bennett

Date of birth: December 14th, 1959

Nationality: British

Smoking or non-smoking: non-smoking

Evening meal?

And so on. The form scrolled forward - breakfast is served in the dining area between 7.00 and 9.00, the fire escapes are situated at the end of the corridor, if you have managed to take it with you, please deposit it in the safety deposit box in the front office - and as it did so, Danny realised something.

A common factor. A link. New South Wales, a sheep station, Kurt Lundqvist.

Danny's spiritual remains sat bolt upright, and where his eyes had once been shone with ecstatic joy. For, in a moment of transcendent knowledge such as one tends to associate with the Great Transition, Danny had suddenly realised that all his life, everything he'd fought and worked and sweated and been humiliated for, must have been worthwhile.

‘Hey!' he yelled, ‘this is great! I've been silenced! I must have known too much!'

And then the reaction, deadening and crushing as a piledriver. Absolute Sunday-morning-and-no-milk-left despair.

Yes, obviously he'd known too much. Obviously he'd been put out of the way, by Them, by the unseen conspirators . . .

(All rooms must be vacated by 12 noon on Judgement Day. Please do not place objects down the toilet bowl. If you would like your past life to flash before you, please dial your credit card number down to the front desk and select channel 12 on your remote control handset
. . .
)

Unfortunately, he hadn't the faintest idea what it was he'd known too much about.

G
eorge frowned. This, he couldn't help feeling, was a trifle disturbing.

Your dinner, the kidnap note had said, is in the fridge. Upon inspection, however, the fridge turned out to contain nothing but vegetables. One of the things that he'd always liked about Helen was that, unlike ninety-five per cent of the rest of her sex, she didn't confuse food with scenery. Had she chosen this moment of all moments to go to the bad? Or had she simply written ‘fridge' when she meant ‘freezer'?

The latter hypothesis proved to be correct, since the freezer turned out to contain two frozen pizzas and a microwave lasagne. He decided on the lasagne, turned it out of its foil container on to a plate, and smiled at it.

Then he frowned at it, to give the melted cheese on the top that distinctive browned-under-the-grill look.

Callous? Insensitive? Just like a man? These are hard thoughts, and not really applicable. It's true that there have been heroes and men of action who've gone haring off to rescue damsels on an empty stomach, but what the epics don't tell you is that their subsequent performance was considerably hampered by indigestion and heartburn. Your class hero knows this. Hercules, for example, had a double cheeseburger with fries, coleslaw and an ambrosia shake before snatching Alcestis out of the arms of the King of Death, and Sir Lancelot always insisted on a round of cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off before so much as looking at a dragon.

Logic, said George to himself. A spot of logic is called for here.

Who'd want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Well, yes, that's a pretty dumb question, so let's rephrase it. Apart from every red-blooded male in the world, who'd want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Easy. Lundqvist.

By way of confirmation of this working hypothesis, there was the tape in the video camera which some untidy person had left lying about by the silage clamp, right next to the corpse. George wound back the tape and sat for a few minutes, his mind turning over like Mozart in his grave during a Jonathan Miller production of
Cosi fan Tutti
. Then he suddenly scowled and snapped his fingers.

Two seagulls hopped down and perched on the top of the telly, trying to eat the aluminium trim.

‘Hey,' George said, ‘this isn't on, you know.'

‘Quark?'

‘Kidnapping people,' George explained. ‘My compliments to Mr Lundqvist, and ask him if there's any particular order he wants his bones broken in.'