THE GAUDY SHADOWS Page 14

  Laird nodded. Even with the help of Tileman’s drug, he could see that creating a totally convincing illusion must take enormous skill. He said, “Is that the only reason why Medea wanted to get me involved—because she’d like a Mexican trip?”

  “Oh no! She says you have a lot of money from a treasure that you found.”

  Laird rounded his lips in an inaudible whistle.

  “But you said she had an argument with Dr Tileman, didn’t you? Was he objecting to the Mexican deal?”

  “No. He said…” Words came in a sudden rush. “He said you were a friend of Mr Logan and you might work out what the police could not!”

  “What?”

  Dagmar stood before him absolutely stiff, like a delinquent child waiting to hear a teacher prescribe punishment, hands by her sides, eyes closed.

  She said, “I must tell someone or I shall go mad. It was because of me that your friend Sammy died.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The words were passably good English, and adequately grammatical, and they made no sense. Laird listened to them in his memory and still failed to dig a clear meaning out of them. At length he reached for Dagmar’s limp hand and drew her down beside him on the edge of the bed. She was shivering so violently he could feel the bed-frame shaking.

  “Did you know Sammy?” he demanded.

  “I—I met him.” The words were barely audible.

  “Here? Was he one of Tileman’s guests?”

  “Guests? He says ‘guests’, but he makes them pay fifty pounds!”

  So this evening’s little caper was bringing in something like four thousand. Operating on that scale, it was a wonder Tileman confined himself to a Chelsea penthouse and a Bentley—he could have run to a stately home and a private aircraft.

  “Was Sammy one of them?” he asked again.

  Dagmar shook her head.

  “Then how did you meet him?”

  She began to repeat the headshake. Without warning, her self-control snapped. She turned blindly to him and buried her face in his shoulder, her whole body racked by terrible sobs. Laird murmured comforting noises and stroked her sleek fair hair until she recovered. She did so in a few minutes, drawing back and snuffling apologies. He gave her his handkerchief to mop at the tears trickling down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry!” she whispered. “It is so hard to talk about. I am so ashamed!”

  “Save it for later, then. Tell me something else. How did you manage to fetch me from down there without the drug affecting you?”

  Pathetically eager to change the subject, she said, “Why, I’m immune to it. That’s why the doctor brought me with him from—from home. I’m the only person he has ever found who’s not affected.”

  “What does he do himself, then—use a respirator?”

  “No, there is the antidote. Always he carries a flask of the antidote when he must go down to the hall during a party.”

  “How does the stuff work? You breathe it in and it circulates in the bloodstream?”

  “Yes, but it is much quicker than if it only worked that way. It goes directly to the brain from up here”—Dagmar indicated the bridge of her nose—“and a strong dose starts to work at once.”

  “So it’s absorbed through the mucous membranes.” Laird frowned. “And then how does it affect the mind?”

  “I don’t properly understand. All I know is there are three compounds. There is a—”

  And the door jerked open to reveal Tileman.

  His fury would have been grotesquely funny if Laird had not just learned enough to regard him as a very dangerous man. His jowls shook, his gross body encased in dark clothing pumped like one colossal heart with the violence of his rage. He screamed at Dagmar in German. Laird caught only part of that—something about a traitorous bitch—because his accent was regional and unfamiliar. The girl cowered away from him. He took two thunderous strides across the uncarpeted floor and made as though to slap her face.

  Laird drew himself to his full height. “I shouldn’t!” he said in a warning tone.

  “Shut up!” Tileman rasped. “I rely on this stupid cow to keep everything running smoothly—she is not paid to receive her boyfriends while she is supposed to be at work!”

  “And what does she get out of the fifty pounds a head you charge?” Laird snapped.

  “Who told you that? Did you?” Tileman rounded on Dagmar.

  Damn it, why shouldn’t Medea have told me?

  But before Laird could speak again, Dagmar had shrilled at her employer.

  “Of course I did! And that’s not all I told him! I’m afraid of you, but now I’ve seen that you’re afraid of him!”

  “Bitch! Whore! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”

  “Yes, the same way you killed Sammy Logan!”

  The scream chilled the air of the room. Dagmar looked terrified, as though she would have given anything to call back what she had just said.

  “So that’s going to be the story, is it?” Tileman said after a short eternity. “You will disregard that insane accusation, Mr Walker—Dagmar had a disturbed childhood, her parents are dead and life was not easy in our country. Sometimes this happens and there must be medical attention.”

  But he was glistening with sweat over every inch of his exposed skin.

  “Come here, Dagmar,” Laird said as though to a child, and held out his hand. She advanced to link fingers with him. “Take these—the keys to my car. It’s the silver one, the one that used to belong to Sammy. If you knew Sammy you’ve probably seen the car.” He kept his eyes fixed on Tileman. “I’ll join you in a moment.”

  At the words “you knew Sammy”, Tileman had become absolutely rigid. His face turned to a mask of terror. He was incapable of movement until Dagmar started for the door; then he made a wild plunge at her.

  Laird checked him, bracing himself at an angle for the impact. The sheer mass of the man made it almost impossible to knock him down. There was no strength in the wild flailing blows he aimed at Laird, but there was so much weight behind them it hardly mattered.

  “Hurry!” Laird panted at Dagmar. She dragged open the door and vanished along the gallery while Tileman clawed and cursed in his struggle to break free. Inch by inch Laird forced him towards the corner of the bed; with a sudden violent effort he thrust him backwards against the footboard, and it cracked. The pain made Tileman cry out and loose his grip, and Laird dashed for the door.

  Dagmar was already at the bottom of the stairs, among the party guests enjoying their adult make-believe. He hastened after her, catching his foot in a wandering electric cable and almost falling but recovering in time. At the head of the staircase he glanced back and saw Tileman coming after him. But the fat man was making no attempt to run. It was not until he had gone down half the stairs that Laird realised why.

  He was descending into water…

  He had thought instinctively that if he knew what was affecting his perceptions, he could allow for it. That was a wrong guess. Already he was being engulfed in the illusion that had swamped him earlier. He was scrambling across the slanted decks of the wrecked ship, with gaily-coloured fishes darting away on all sides, lungs pumping water instead of air. Great fronded plants tangled around his feet. A stab of pain in the ankle suggested to his remote conscious mind that he must have missed a stair and twisted a muscle, but his eyes reported that he had cut his foot on a sharp piece of coral, as he had once done off Pirate’s Key.

  He looked back again and was suddenly sick with horror.

  Behind him, huge, slavering and hideous, there was following a man-high toad.

  Convulsively he struck out across the sea-bed towards the entrance and renewed sanity. On all sides the party guests looked at him in bewilderment. What they made of this intrusion he could not guess. All he knew was that at this minute, gripped by mortal terror, he could not see them as human beings. They appeared to him like sea-monsters, nameless, malevolent. One of them cried out, uttering his name, but that only added to his
fear. He strove frantically to will away the nightmare drag of water against his limbs, and failed.

  A grip clamped on his neck. He twisted and his perceptions reported that the toad’s tongue had lashed out as though to seize a fly. The touch was nauseatingly sticky to his skin. Then the illusion did break for a moment, and he could see that it was Tileman’s arm. In the palm of the outstretched hand the end of a rubber tube was taped, leading back into his sleeve. Dagmar had said something about him always carrying a flask of the antidote. A waft of it must temporarily have penetrated the illusion.

  Desperately he tore free and started across the hall again. But within seconds the hallucinations returned. He stumbled away from the bulk of the wreck, past a strange golden-yellow castle of accreted sand from which a creature like a hermit-crab peered out—and once more the toad’s tongue unrolled and this time it held him fast.

  He struggled insanely, feeling the pudgy grasp tighten on his throat. His head swam with effort; he was forced back, back, by sheer overpowering mass and was borne to the sea-bed. The toad-thing swarmed over him, crushing his ribs, stifling him, burying him in the sand. Patiently, implacably, it immobilised in succession his legs, his hands, his head.

  Now, Laird ordered himself. Or never!

  He summoned strength he had never known he possessed, and lifted his legs from the floor, toad-thing and all, in a giant heave. The strain wrenched his belly-muscles—but the toad was pitched forward over his head, its wide loose mouth slavering, and struck an outcropping rock on the ocean floor.

  It lay still.

  Laird rolled over, aching in every limb, and fumbled through his automatic repulsion towards one of the toad’s flabby forelegs. He bowed his head, seeking the tube that emitted the antidote to the hallucinogen. Time crept away. The hall began to be the hall again. The webbed foot became a hand. He saw clearly that Tileman’s forehead was bruised and a little blood was leaking from a cut.

  He also saw that puzzled people were assembling around him, their movements stilted and exaggerated, heard them demanding to know what he was doing. He brushed off their attempts to delay him and ran six long paces to the exit. So strong was the drug in the air that even without drawing another breath he felt his command of reality slipping. But at last he was safe, in the vestibule air-lock, and the outer door was ajar—Dagmar must have left it open—and beyond gleamed the silver shape of Sammy’s Jensen, engine purring, Dagmar leaning across from the wheel to open the passenger door and give him grateful refuge.

  The men who had stood guard earlier at the gates had gone away. Dagmar handed him a key, which he somehow managed to fit in the lock, and then they were racing down the road towards central London. It was like being released from hell.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Accustomed to the mannerly restraint of Tileman’s Bentley, Dagmar did not drive the Jensen well, but Laird was content to sit beside her and let the fresh night air scour away the last traces of the drug from his system. It was lucky he had had a chance to inhale some of the antidote; earlier, Dagmar had warned him that mere fresh air would not suffice if he went under a second time.

  What would my mind have made of this innocent street, this line of cars ahead—dragons?

  “Where shall we go?” she said after a mile or two.

  “Paymaster Mews, where Sammy used to live. Do you know the way?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course she must—he’d seen her there with Tileman. He relaxed a little more, his head still spinning with the incredible experience. By the time they arrived at their destination he was feeling much better, but he had only recovered from the physical effects, not the mental ones.

  He took Dagmar upstairs, put on the heating against the unseasonable coolness, and poured each of them a stiff glass of brandy.

  “Now,” he said grimly, “I want you to tell me the whole story.”

  Piece by piece, with much back-tracking because she lost a word or used a misleading phrase in this language which was still a trifle unfamiliar to her, Dagmar explained.

  Four years previously, carrying with him the formulae for three recently-discovered complex organic compounds, Emmerich Schultzhaber Teilmann had defected from East Germany to Britain. He was an able chemist, though not so outstanding that his departure made headlines, and among the privileges he had been accorded in the DDR was a limited number of tests per year on human subjects.

  “You were one of them?” Laird demanded. Dagmar nodded. He thought about that for a while, and told her to go on.

  All three of the compounds which he had stumbled on were closely related to substances occurring naturally in the human nervous system. Dagmar listed them. First there was a euphoric.

  “Ah!” Laird snapped his fingers. “Did he release that at the start of the evening? Because I remember suddenly feeling that it was ridiculous to be afraid of what was going to happen—and then when you came to get me, I saw you as a shark for a moment, because of that black dress and your face showing pale above it. But then I decided there couldn’t possibly be any sharks in that ocean.”

  “That is right. It is necessary to make sure first that everyone is in a correct mood. And then one releases the second drug, the hallucinogen.”

  She explained, with many interruptions, until Laird had a fairly clear impression of the function of this second drug. What it did was, basically, to reinforce the “pictures in the fire” process in the subjects’ minds—in other words, to alter the priority the brain accorded to incoming sense-data, and cause them to be interpreted not in terms of what the person perceived, but what the person was reminded of.

  “The things which are placed around the hall,” Dagmar said. “Dr Tileman calls them ‘sensory nuclei’. It is like abstract painting, do you see? They are designed to suggest a thing which you will then register as real, but not to represent it, because that would mean you saw it as something other.”

  “Christ, what a tool to unlock the mind with!” Laird muttered, thinking what a man like Shannon at the Brankside could do with Tileman’s drugs. “What’s the third compound, then?”

  “A depressant,” said Dagmar. “And that is the one which killed your friend, here in this very room.”

  “How?” Laird demanded. His every nerve sang with the urge to go in search of Tileman and wring the fat devil’s neck, but he had to know the full story before he took action.

  “I know how,” Dagmar said. “The doctor brought me with him from East Germany because I am immune to the hallucinogen, but I am not immune to that one.” She licked pale lips. “One day, back at home, he called me into the laboratory and he made me breathe a little of it. It was like—like the world falling on my head! You know I did not have a happy childhood? There was much death, and the police are not like yours. I was afraid the police would come and take me away, and… I cannot explain. But afterwards, when I had finished crying and screaming, the doctor said to me this. He said if I did not come with him to the West, and if I said anything to anybody that I was not allowed to after we had come here, he would give me enough of the depressant to make me cut my throat.”

  “And I thought he did nothing worse than maybe beat you,” Laird grunted. “How old are you, Dagmar?”

  “I am twenty-two.”

  “So you were only eighteen when he did this to you. Jesus God. Go on.”

  Still in scraps and hints, the rest of it followed. On his arrival in Britain, Tileman had bided his time. Instead of offering the formulae he had with him to a chemical company for adaptation as pharmaceuticals, he had gone to work inconspicuously in a routine job, letting it be understood if anyone grew inquisitive that Dagmar was his illegitimate daughter brought with him for reasons of affection. Gradually accumulating knowledge of how the western world operated, he settled on the best way of exploiting his secret. He decided to take it where the money lay thickest, to the very wealthiest people he could hope to interest.

  A little bribery, a little blackmail, a little pimping with Dagm
ar as the victim, and he was almost ready to finalise his plans—he was respectably naturalised, he had a circle of acquaintances who might be turned into clients, and contacts that would develop many more. But he still lacked one all-important resource: he hadn’t enough liquid capital to make the drugs on the necessary scale.

  “Tonight he would have used perhaps seven hundred pounds’ worth of drugs,” Dagmar said. “And then there is the antidote, though it does not cost much… You do not seem to be afraid that he will come after us.”

  “I’d like him to,” Laird snapped. “But—now that’s a point! You don’t seem to be, either.”

  “He cannot.” For the first time there was a tinge of confidence in Dagmar’s tone. “Without the antidote those people would be like madmen after so long inhaling the drug. Even if he began to cure them directly we left, it would not be until midnight at soonest it was safe to let them go. Then they would be angry to have so little of their fun.”

  “How long do these parties usually last?”

  “All through the night, to breakfast time.”

  “I see.” Laird rubbed his chin. “Now I think I can fill in some of the story for myself. Tileman secured a loan from this company run by Sammy and Barnaby Skelton, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, exactly. It was his partner Alistair Bodiam—do you know him?”

  “I heard the name.”

  Bodiam, it appeared, was a friend of Skelton’s. At his suggestion, Tileman quit his former job and went into partnership with him as Dramagic Ltd—a perfectly genuine firm which afforded the ideal cover for the production of Tileman’s “sensory nuclei”. It was very successful. But even if it hadn’t been it wouldn’t have mattered.

  “I see that,” Laird agreed. “At fifty pounds a head, and almost a hundred people there tonight—”