Games Of The Hangman
Games Of The Hangman
Prologue
Fitzduane's Island off the West of Ireland - 1981
When he was told he was to hang, Rudi had turned pale and swayed on his feet.
Later, he was more composed and it was clear to the others that he had accepted the inevitability of what was to come. He was given no choice. Either he would accept the verdict and do what was necessary or he would be killed painfully - and so would Vreni and other members of his family. It was one life or several, and either way he would die. There was only one decision he could take. He was told that his hanging would be quick and painless.
He had reached a time where he couldn't take it any more, where what they were doing and what they planned to do - however valid the reasons - was suddenly abhorrent. He could no longer continue. Physically, his body rebelled and he felt ill and nauseous. His mind was a morass of terrible images and memories, and hope and belief were dead. He had been warned when he had joined that he could never leave alive.
He thought of fleeing or going to the authorities or fighting back in some way but he knew - knew with absolute certainty - that they meant what they said and would do what they had threatened. It must be his life or Vreni and Marta and Andreas would die.
In many ways he welcomed the prospect of death. Guilt engulfed him and he could see no way out. He knew he would not be forgiven for what he had done already; he could not forgive himself.
The arrangements were made by the others. He had been told where to go and what to do.
The rope was already in place when he reached the old oak tree. It was thin and blue and of a type they used daily around Draker for a myriad of tasks. It was hard to believe this mundane object would end his life. He had been told that precise calculations had been made to ensure that his death would be instantaneous.
Four of the others stood around the tree watching and waiting but making no motion to help. He must do this alone.
He climbed the tree with some difficulty because the bark was wet from recent rain and slippery.
He stepped out onto the branch and slipped the noose around his neck. He nearly slipped and he used the hanging rope to steady himself. His hands were shaking and his skin was wet and clammy.
He could see two of the watchers below him and a wave of despair and loneliness swept over him and he longed to see some friendly face. In seconds he would be dead and forgotten. Nobody would truly care. Nobody would ever know the real reasons why. The man in Bern was hanging him as surely as if he had been physically present instead of fifteen hundred kilometres away from this miserable dripping forest.
Rudi suddenly thought of his father and the time when they had all been happy together. He could see him and he was smiling. It was the way it used to be. He stepped off the branch towards him.
It wasn't over in seconds. The man in Bern had been explicit: it wasn't meant to be.
It took Rudi some considerable time to die.
The watchers - appalled and excited and stimulated - waited until the spasming and jerking and sounds of choking had ceased and then left.
Chapter 1
Fitzduane slept uneasily that night, but awoke with no conscious premonition that anything was wrong. It was raining when he climbed out onto the fighting platform of the castle keep and looked across the battlements to the dawn. He reflected that rain was something anyone brought up in Ireland had plenty of time to get used to.
More than seven hundred years earlier, the first Fitzduane had stood in much the same spot for much the same reason. Inclement weather or not, the view from the castle keep brought satisfaction, even in the grim dull month of February. The land they saw was theirs, and the Fitzduanes, whatever their personal idiosyncrasies, shared a "what I have I hold" mentality.
The rain stopped and the sky lightened.
The castle stood on a rocky bluff, and from his vantage point Fitzduane could see much of the island. It just qualified as an island, a windswept finger of bog, heather, low hills, and rough pasture jutting out into the Atlantic and separated from the mainland by a mere twenty meters. A bridge set well into the overhanging cliff tops spanned the divide.
Further inland was a freshwater lake and by whose edge stood a small white thatched cottage. A trickle of smoke emerged from its chimney. Inside, Murrough and his wife Oona, the couple who looked after the castle and its lands, would be having breakfast. Murrough had been Fitzduane's sergeant in the Congo nearly twenty years earlier.
The Atlantic crashed and spumed against the rocks that formed the seaward base of the castle. Fitzduane savored the familiar sound. He huddled deeper into his heavy waterproof as the gusting wind, even at this height, blew salt spray into his face.
He glanced at his watch. Half past eight. Time to go. He closed the roof door behind him and descended the circular staircase with some care. The stone steps were worn by centuries of use and it was five flights to the storeroom and the armory below. The old names for the rooms were still used, although sides of salt cured bacon no longer hung from the blackened hooks of the storeroom ceiling, but no self-respecting Norman knight would have been overly impressed by the reserves of weaponry that were on display in the armory. If the same knight had been familiar with firearms and the materiel of modern warfare, he might have been reassured by the collection of rifles, pistols, and automatic weapons concealed in the deeper recesses of the castle. Illegal though it was under current Irish law, Fitzduane maintained the family tradition of collecting weapons of war.
He glanced at his watch. Half past eight. Time to go. He closed the roof door behind him and descended the circular staircase with some care. The stone steps were worn by centuries of use and it was five flights to the storeroom and the armory below. The old names for the rooms were still used, although sides of salt cured bacon no longer hung from the blackened hooks of the storeroom ceiling, but no self-respecting Norman knight would have been overly impressed by the reserves of weaponry that were on display in the armory. If the same knight had been familiar with firearms and the materiel of modern warfare, he might have been reassured by the collection of rifles, pistols, and automatic weapons concealed in the deeper recesses of the castle. Illegal though it was under current Irish law, Fitzduane maintained the family tradition of collecting weapons of war.
* * *
In its original form, the castle had been a rectangular tower of five floors topped by the fighting platform, with the entrance, accessible only by ladder, on the second story. Over the centuries, the castle had been adapted, strengthened and modernized. A three-story slate-roofed extension now nestled up to the original rectangular keep. Stone steps replaced the ladder. A curtain wall surrounded the bawn, as castle courtyards are known in Ireland, and stables and outhouses had been built inside the enclosed perimeter. A network of concealed tunnels and storerooms had been added in the sixteenth century.
The entrance, always the weakest part of a castle, was through a small, two-story tower, known as the gatehouse or barbican, set into the curtain wall. The floor of the protruding upper story was pierced with openings - murder holes - from which missiles and boiling water could be dropped upon attackers.
The original iron portcullis, the heavy spiked gridiron gate that could be dropped into place at a second's notice like a guillotine, had long since rusted away, but it had been replaced during the Napoleonic wars. It now hung, its windlass oiled and in working order, awaiting an attack that would never come. Externally, the castle was guarded by the sea and the cliffs on two sides, and a deep ditch secured the rest.
Duncleeve, the ancestral home of the Fitzduanes for over seven hundred years, had never been taken by direct assault. That was reassuring, Fitzduane sometimes thought, but of limited practical advantage in the late twentieth century.
* * *
Hoofs clattered on the wooden bridge over the defensive ditch. Fitzduane applied a slight pressure with his knees and Pooka turned to canter up the slope to the cliff top. The sea crashed against the rocks far below, and though the ground was wet and slippery, Fitzduane rode with confidence. Pooka was surefooted and knew her way.
The island was just over ten kilometers long and about four kilometers across at its widest point. In addition to Fitzduane, and to Murrough and his wife, the only other inhabitants lived in the isolated school on the headland.
The school was officially called the Draker World Institute. Originally the site of a monastery destroyed by Cromwell's troops in the seventeenth century, the site had been bought by an eccentric German armaments manufacturer towards the end of the nineteenth century. With his profits from the Franco-Prussian War, he proceeded to design and build his conception of an Irish castle.
The construction lacked certain desirable features. Von Draker forgot to install either bathrooms or toilets. Not realizing his error, Von Draker came to stay in his apparently completed castle. Tragedy struck. While relieving himself behind a rhododendron bush, he was drenched by a sudden squall of rain - the weather in Connemara being nothing if not fickle - and pneumonia resulted. After a short struggle for the sake of form, Von Draker died. He left behind a large fortune, no children, a wife he had loathed, and the request that his Irish estate be turned into a college for students from all over the world "who will mix together, learn each other's ways, become friends and thus preserve world peace."
Those who knew Von Draker well had been somewhat taken aback at such sentiments from such an unlikely source. His actual words to his lawyer were: "Find a way to keep that hag's filthy paws off my money."
The fortune of the Von Draker Peace Foundation, derived in the main from armaments and explosives, increased and multiplied. In the fullness of time, the Draker World Institute opened its doors for business. It took a select group of pupils from the ages of sixteen to twenty from various corners of the globe and subjected them to a moderately difficult academic curriculum heavily leavened with boating, climbing, hill walking, and other physically demanding activities.
Draker was a success primarily because it was so isolated. It was a perfect out-of-sight out-of-mind location for rich but troublesome youths. It was also co-educational. The children could be dumped there during that difficult phase. All it took to gain entrance to Draker was money and the appropriate connections. Draker parents had both in commendable quantities.
* **
Fitzduane slowed Pooka to a walk. He could feel the wind off the Atlantic in his face and a hint of salt on his lips. He was beginning to unwind. It was good to be home despite the unfortunate weather.
He was getting tired of wars, and of what was arguably more unpleasant--the grinding hassle of modern travel. The older he got the more he thought there was much to be said for peace and quiet, maybe even for settling down.
Fitzduane spent two thirds or more of each year away from Ireland. This was something he regretted but the action tended to be in alien climes. For nearly twenty years, he had been either a soldier or a war photographer, a hunter of men with either a gun or a camera. The Congo, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli wars, Vietnam again, Cyprus, Angola, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Lebanon, Chad, Namibia, endless South American countries. His Irish island was his haven, his place to recover, to rest his soul. It might offer little more excitement than watching the grass grow, but it was the one place he knew that was free of death and violence.
Down below, he could see the small beach, boat house, and jetty of Draker College. The sheer cliffs had made access almost impossible until Draker had brought over some of his company's explosive experts and had blasted and hacked a diagonal tunnel from the castle gardens down to the beach.
Fitzduane rode between the walled gardens of Draker College and the cliff edge. The grey stone of the Victorian castle loomed in the background. Gargoyles competed with crenellations, flying buttresses crash-landed against half timbering. A structure loosely modeled on the Parthenon topped the clock tower. Irish history had been complex, but even it was not up to Von Draker's creativity.
Ahead lay a small wood, and beyond that was the headland itself. If the weather permitted, Fitzduane liked to turn Pooka loose to nibble at the salty windswept grass, and then he would lie down near the cliff edge, look up at the sky and the wheeling seagulls, and think of absolutely nothing.
War and death could be forgotten for a time. Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to hang up his cameras and find a more adult occupation.
* * *
Von Draker had had a passion for trees. There had originally been only one oak tree on the spot, and nearby, a peculiarly shaped mound. The locals gave the vicinity a wide berth. They said that the oak tree was a bilJ and special, and that no man could remember when it was planted. They said that in the days before St. Patrick and Ireland's conversion to Christianity, terrible things had been done under the shadow of its twisted branches. They said that even after the Church was established throughout the rest of the land, bloody sacrifice continued on the island.
Von Draker had regarded such tales as nonsense. Since none of the Connemara men would help him level the mound and plant the wood, he had brought in a crew from his estate in Germany. He left the old oak tree, not for reasons of superstition but because he just liked trees, even gnarled and twisted specimens like this one. The mound was levelled with his explosives. His workers found pieces of bone in the debris and fragments of what appeared to be human skulls. A small wood was planted. Trees from many parts of the world were brought to the spot, and despite the keen wind off the Atlantic and the heavy rain, an adequate number prospered.
Von Draker did not live to see the success of his project. His death came one year to the day after the demolition of the peculiarly shaped mound. The wind that day around his wood sounded like laughter - or so they said.
Such tales were absurd, Fitzduane thought, and yet there was no denying that the overgrown wood was a dismal, depressing place. Raindrops dripping from the trees made the only noise in an otherwise eerie silence. Obscured by the interlocking branches, the light was dim and gloomy.
The forest reeked of decay and corruption. Pooka had to be urged on, as always in the wood, despite the many times she had walked that path before. The sound of her iron shod hooves was muffled by the damp mulch of rotting leaves. The place seemed deserted, and Fitzduane realized that he had seen no living soul since leaving his castle nearly an hour before. Halfway through the wood the undergrowth became particularly dense and the path inclined upwards and twisted more than usual. He could see the thick trunk of the bilJ up ahead.
Horse and rider came level with the tree. He glanced up into its labyrinth of interlocking branches. It was a fine tree, he thought, impressive in its ancient strength.
He saw the rope first, a thin, pale blue rope. It hung from a protruding branch of the tree. The end of the rope had been formed into a hangman's noose and it contained the elongated and distorted neck of a hanged man.
The long still body formed a silhouette in the gloom. Fitzduane raised his eyebrows and stared for perhaps ten interminable seconds. He thought he'd close his eyes and then open them again because a hanging body on his own doorstep just couldn't be true.
