Ash

  The last two members of this dubious company were two very elderly men who sat and whispered to each other in German. Both were in their nineties and both had used stolen wealth to flee their beloved Reich before the inglorious end to the Second World War, one said to have escaped to Egypt, the other to Chile. In fact, they had already made arrangements to journey to England well before the war was over.

  Alois Brunner had been right-hand man to Adolf Eichmann, inventing mobile gas vans which were used to kill tens of thousands of Jews. Now he was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. His hand was shaking as he lifted the spoon with its gooey contents up to his thin-lipped mouth. A globule of dew hung from the end of his nose, and the trembling of his aged head threatened to shake the dewdrop into the food in the bowl of his spoon.

  His companion was Aribert Heim, just a couple of years younger than Brunner, and he, too had played his part in the horror of the last war. A former doctor in the gruesome Mauthausen prison camp in Austria, he’d been aptly named Dr Death. He’d arrived at Comraich many years after Brunner, for after the war he had fled to Egypt, taking the false name of Tarek and raising a family there. He’d eventually fled to Comraich when he’d been tipped off that Israeli Nazi-hunters were on to him. His son Rudiger Heim, left behind in Cairo, had announced his father’s death of rectal cancer in 1992 with medical records to prove it. But the Nazi-hunters hadn’t been taken in by such evidence and continued their searches.

  At Comraich, he and Brunner had become constant companions, though he was worried about Alois Brunner, who had come to Scotland over six decades ago. Together they relished stories of atrocities they had indulged in during the war, murmuring and slapping each other on the back. They had chosen to share a suite, with a single bed each, and most nights they reminisced in whispers, just in case their bedroom was bugged (which it was) and chortled with the bedsheets held up to their mouths to stifle the sound.

  Although the number of years between them was small, Heim was much fitter than the older man and his mind more alert. As a practising doctor all those years ago, he’d studied the work of fellow-German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer. He knew, therefore, that short-term memory impairment might sometimes leave particular long-term memories intact. He, himself, had heard Brunner muttering stories of the Reich to whoever would listen, stories that could incriminate them both.

  Uncomfortably for these two ancient Germans, there were several Jewish guests at Comraich. He’d personally been told by Sir Victor Haelstrom himself, no less. Brunner’s half-whispered, wheezy words might be understood by a Jewish guest one day, and who was to say those same words wouldn’t be repeated outside this refuge, and then what? Heim had ruminated on this vexatious problem for some time now, watching anxiously as his Nazi friend’s mental health worsened each day. He’d come to realize, and not reluctantly, that something would have to be done before it was too late. Perhaps a soft pillow put over Brunner’s face one night when he was deep in sleep. It was time for the old man to go anyway; Heim would be doing him a favour by making his death painless. Just uncomfortable for a minute or two.

  He regarded his ex-Nazi colleague thoughtfully and was thoroughly sickened by the sight of the dewdrop on the end of Brunner’s nose. So much for the Master Race!

  Sandra Belling and her dining companions represented a fair cross-section of the type of guests to whom Comraich played host, nearly all runaways from different horrendous pasts, not missed and in some cases thought to be dead by the outside world. It was a conspiracy theorist’s paradise.

  The universal regimen of sedation meant that the dining room was hardly a hive of animation at the best of times, but as the scream emanated from Sandra Belling every other sound and movement in the room came to a fearful stop.

  37

  The pain caused by his back slamming into the wall behind him was nothing compared to the shock and disgust Ash felt when he stared at the writhing mass of maggots falling from what remained of the chicken sandwich Delphine had supplied him with for his night vigil.

  The soft-bodied larvae spilled over onto the floor and Ash kicked out at the nauseating mess irrationally afraid that, once finished with their meal, the squirming maggots would find their way up his leg and eventually into his groin.

  He yelled, giving vent to his stomach-churning anger as he pushed himself to his feet, back sliding roughly up the wall. Was this Delphine’s idea of a joke? No, he rejected that assumption out of hand – it was something he was sure she would never do. The kitchen staff, then? But then again, maybe not: none of them would have dared give someone of Dr Wyatt’s seniority a silver-foil wrap of rotting meat and maggots.

  Without further thought, he scooped up the living heap and strode hurriedly towards the open window, pulpy little grubs falling onto his wrist and onto the carpet as he went. Fighting his distaste, he threw the wriggling package out of the window without considering that somebody might be walking below. He shuddered, then examined the carpet and stamped on every maggot he could see.

  He hadn’t noticed in his barely suppressed panic – it wasn’t the sight of the maggots that had horrified him so much as the thought that he could have absent-mindedly bitten into the sandwich – that the light from the lamp on the small table had dimmed. Ash headed for the bathroom and ran the tap before he shrugged off his jacket and scrubbed his hands in the tiny sink.

  Suddenly there came a nightmare scream which escalated to another that was pitched even higher. Ash froze, cold water still running through his fingers. The sound had come from some distance away, but he knew its source.

  The great dining hall ran beneath his room and he lingered a moment, trying to make sense of it: the sounds, the screams – for there were many more now – intermingled with others and so the noise was getting louder. Not bothering to wipe his hands or pick up his jacket, Ash dashed through the bedroom and into the corridor. Looking left and right, he saw he was alone, and without further hesitation he made for the oval staircase which would take him to the dining hall.

  In his haste, he failed to notice the heavy door to the old-fashioned lift was open. But as he passed it, a big pair of coarse hands reached out for him from the lift’s dim interior, the guard gate open wide, a foot planted in front to keep it that way.

  Beefy fingers curled round Ash’s neck, dragging him into the box-shaped lift.

  He barely had a chance to see who was attacking him before a heavy fist smashed into his upturned face.

  38

  In the dining hall, there was complete chaos.

  Sandra Belling had been shocked into a clearness of mind, shocked enough to be horrified in a way she’d never been before. Even the horror of finding her little dead baby, tiny lips bluish, cheeks hued purple, was nothing compared to this. Sandra was jolted out of her sedated haze and memory repression and she screamed and screamed, not only because of the wriggling maggots on her plate and the curling specks of larvae that dropped from the stocky man’s mouth on her right as he chomped away on his beef, seemingly oblivious to the disgusting taste and the wriggling things tumbling from his lips and sticking to his lower jaw.

  But when Oleg Rinsinski finally understood what he was eating, his scream, although of a lower pitch than Sandra’s, was much louder. It bellowed through the room, but then only to join with all the other screams and shouts and sounds of retching. Men and women were fainting as they choked on their putrefied food and tried to heave it from their throats. Others were luckier, for they noticed their corrupted meals crawling with innumerable maggots before biting into them.

  Sir Victor Haelstrom watched stupefied as the pupae developed, for the maggots were swiftly evolving. He was a lusty eater and had already consumed much of his beef, and the flies’ eggs had turned to maggots extraordinarily fast – unthinkably fast – inside him, going on as quickly to metamorphose into young flies.

  Haelstrom sneezed violently and a black stream of flies spewed from his nostrils, taking to the air in a united stream to
soar around the room. Their instinct seemed to be to attack any human they found, buzzing around their victims’ heads, landing on their faces and hands, deliberately invading eyes and ears, and even mouths. Where they found women in evening gowns, bare shoulders and arms, necks and faces, their attention was even greater.

  On the dinner table where the two astonished ex-Nazis, Brunner and Heim, sat and where the disorder had begun, the older and more doddery of the companions, Brunner, staggered to his feet, his chair falling over behind him. The dew-drop that only moments before had clung relentlessly to the end of his nose at last fell, not onto the mixture on his spoon but into the mush-filled plate now covered in maggots and blossoming flies. The old German’s eyes widened and he uttered a mewling sound and sprang to his feet, his spine straighter than it had been for twenty years or more.

  His associate in secrecy, Aribert Heim, the erstwhile Dr Death, had his own problems with maggots and flies sprouting from his thin-lipped mouth. He too leapt up, swatting at the flies that swarmed around him. It was the same for everyone in the room as they ran chaotically about, crashing into each other, rolling on the carpet, fighting to get to their feet. Some collapsed with fear.

  Those batting away the swarming insects, or swiping at them with table-napkins, were bent over, vomiting a mixture of maggots, flies and undigested food. It came like bile, but thick and moving, and the stink it gave off was cause for more nausea.

  Kit Weston had crawled under the table, fortunate that he rarely ate much, although some maggots still spilled from his mouth. Through the gap between the edge of the tablecloth and the deep red carpet he saw the lower part of two legs wearing slacks over two-inch heels and he knew they belonged to Sandra Belling.

  Sandra, still in her chair, was drumming her feet on the floor in fear and disgust, so Weston lifted the tablecloth with one tendon-tightened claw and reached for her waist with the other. There was still some strength in his arms, for not only did he take GW1516 but he exercised in his own limited way, trying to stretch those parts of his body which, like his hands, had shrivelled, withered and scarred over so restrictively.

  Initially, Sandra pushed herself back into the chair, but then seemed to comprehend the scarred man’s intention – which, for her, was the kind of breakthrough Dr Wyatt had been trying to achieve for years. After a brief hesitation, she allowed herself to be dragged under the table and Weston quickly pushed the tablecloth back into place to screen them from the worst of the mayhem beyond.

  Luckily, Sandra hadn’t touched her meal, but Kit Weston retched and retched as she thumped his back in sympathy. The sounds of screams, shouts and pounding feet went on all around them as they cowered close together in their gloomy shelter. Enough flies found their way beneath the cloth to require Sandra and Weston to bat them away with their hands. In the end, they both realized the best thing to do was to cuddle up close to the soft-carpeted floor like lovers.

  Waiters and waitresses made for the kitchens, which astonishingly were free of flies or their pupae save for the few that found their way in when doors opened and shut. Chloe, the waitress who had served lunch to Dr Pritchard, Delphine and Ash earlier that day, sank to her knees on the hard tiled floor, sobbing pitifully, confused and frightened by the mayhem inside the dining hall. When a junior chef went to open the swing door to see what was happening for himself, she shrieked, ‘Don’t!’

  He didn’t.

  Osril Ubutu looked around him in wonder, his huge eyes wide with astonishment. He was used to flies, many, many flies. But never like this, not even around the carcass of a lion-killed antelope were there such flies as this. The upper section of the dining room had become a black, buzzing fog, swirling around the room like a flock of miniature starlings. The castle’s restaurant was filled with an unwholesome stench, driving those fleeing into fresh panic. Some were fighting to get to the wide door, arms flailing, legs kicking, fists punching. Ubutu was no exception, though one man immediately objected to being pushed in the back despite the general commotion and he turned on Ubutu in a reflex response.

  The blow that landed on the huge African’s chest came from probably the most feeble man in the room: Alois Brunner. At any other time Ubutu would have found the situation funny, but this was not the time for laughter. For the briefest moment he peered down at this pygmy who’d had the temerity to strike the king, then, with his huge hand, he swiped the fool away from him. The frail old man went down without a cry and the side of his face smashed against the edge of the table, the one under which Sandra Belling and Kit Weston were entwined.

  Brunner had grown weak with age and soft with all the luxury and easy living at Comraich. Some years earlier he might have struggled to his feet again, perhaps a little dazed but ready to retaliate. As it was, the blow knocked him practically unconscious and he tipped up the table, exposing the two guests hiding underneath for a second. Fortunately, the table tipped back, just with fewer plates, cutlery, condiments, glasses and minus a central flower arrangement. Once more they were in shadow and they remained there.

  Beneath the table, it briefly crossed Sandra’s terrified mind that the old Nazi was playing hide-and-seek, peeking under the tablecloth skirt to find them, but she soon realized his eyes were semi-closed and his mouth wide open.

  In fact, the prone German’s dentures had become dislodged inside his mouth as, in his barely conscious state, he’d sucked in air, which in turn sucked in the false teeth so that they became stuck sideways at the top of his throat. He rolled onto his back and suddenly his eyes popped fully open. He stared at the hall’s high ceiling, blinked, and continued to gaze upwards. Sandra couldn’t help but watch as the German’s chest rapidly rose and fell, his lungs desperate for more air than they were getting. Then she saw something that was an even more nightmarish scene. She couldn’t turn away from this sight, no matter how much it frightened her. She was held spellbound by the influx of hundreds, thousands, millions, of small black flies that poured into the German’s open jaw, a mini-tornado that soon became a fierce whirlpool sinking into the man’s mouth, choking him, sucked in further as he struggled to breathe, so that his chest heaved and his body thrashed, until his whole face was covered in a glittering mask of tiny moving insects that funnelled their way via the gaping hole of his mouth to fill his lungs.

  Aribert Heim left his old comrade lying prone on the floor, the newly formed flies feeding off Brunner’s wide, staring, dead eyes, and already laying soft larvae on the exposed flesh. The gestation period was ridiculously short, and very quickly the German’s corpse was populated by a fresh generation of crawling maggots.

  39

  Ash huddled in the corner of the dimly lit lift, blood sluicing from his lower lip, his head spinning from the vicious blow he’d taken. He felt rough hands drag his shoulder round so that his attacker could see his face. Those same hands gripped his shirt beneath the gilet to haul him to his feet, and a coarse wide grin peered into his.

  ‘You think I am stupid?’ Ash’s assailant demanded in a low, heavily accented voice. ‘You think Lukovic doesn’t know?’ He slammed Ash back into the corner again, but this time left the investigator standing.

  Dazedly, Ash looked into his attacker’s brutish face. Who the hell was he?

  Then he recognized the heavy-set man who had glared at him in the reception hall earlier. Karadzic’s general: Zdravko Lukovic. The Serb shook Ash violently, his beefy hands gripping the front of the investigator’s shirt.

  ‘Who send you? British? Americans? Muslims?’

  His spit dampened Ash’s face. The investigator shook his head and tried to speak. ‘Look, I—’

  ‘No lies! I know your face. You come for me, yes? You are here to murder Lukovic.’

  Zdravko Lukovic had been waiting for the day to come – despite the promises that he would be protected for his betrayal of his leader Radovan Karadzic. They would hide him somewhere safe, they’d said, and he would live the rest of his life in comfort, they’d promised him. Just tell
them where ‘The Butcher’ was hiding. He’d told them.

  But Zdravko Lukovic trusted nobody and kept a wary eye out for everything. And because he refused to take any of the pills they handed him each morning in a tiny paper cup (the staff weren’t to know that he stuck the tablets to the side of his mouth with his tongue, spitting them out later when he was alone and flushing them down the lavatory) he was never truly sedated, although he pretended to be. The shots they gave him – and no, they wouldn’t tell him what they were for, nor what the syringe contained – he couldn’t avoid, but they seemed quite innocuous to him, with a mild effect unless sometimes he stood up too quickly and so suffered a short bout of dizziness. Maybe they were meant to stabilize his high blood pressure.

  Unfortunately, because he refused the calming tablets, his paranoia grew greater by the week, although he hid it well. However, by now it had become more serious, a mental malady that was not so easy to hide. And of late – and this might have something to do with this strange new atmosphere in the castle (although he’d never made the connection himself) – he was becoming even more suspicious, sure that his enemies had tracked him down.

  This was why Lukovic eyed any newcomer with suspicion. This was why he’d attacked today’s newcomer to Comraich. Lukovic was not only paranoid, but psychotic too. He would kill anyone he suspected sent there to kill him, before they got him.

  Now he had hold of the first would-be assassin and the man’s death would send out a message to anyone else who wanted Lukovic dead. One by one as they came for him he would deal with them in the same way until those who wanted Zdravko Lukovic dead would eventually abandon the idea. And he, Lukovic, guest of Comraich Castle, would demand financial reparation from Sir Victor Haelstrom himself for breaking the promise of total protection, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.