Chapter 10
There was a way out, perhaps, but in order for it to work, I needed some patience, and some luck. I also needed to keep taking the blood they brought me every day, and I began to justify to myself that that was why I allowed myself to drink it, but the truth is this: I cared more about myself than about Giovanna.
I told myself she was already dead. Not literally, but that nothing could have been done for her anyway, even before he caught her and took her. And now that he had, she was already dead, for he would never let her go. So if I could survive long enough on her blood to make my escape, then it would justify my actions. Maybe I could even find her and save her. That’s what I told myself, but it was all lies. I just wanted to save myself.
I stared at the candlestick. Every day, when the sun went down, the driver would bring the enamel mug and put the candlestick on the floor. I stared at it closely. It was the traditional sort, made of tin, with a wide, flat base.
I only needed the driver to make one small mistake, and that was for him to leave it close enough for me to reach.
During the day, I had stretched out from the wall as far as I could. I had marked a small point in the dirt with my toe; the furthest I could reach. Then I sank back against the wall, making myself look as small and pathetic and immobile as I could.
Every time he brought the mug and the candle into the room, I watched, fixated on one thing only: where he would place the candlestick. I noticed that it varied, and finally, one day, he placed it just inside the limit of my reach.
That night I drank the blood, knowing it would be for the last time. If my attempt to escape failed, they would simply kill me, I was sure.
I waited a long time, counting away seconds and minutes to be certain I was not just imagining that time was passing, counting until I was sure the night was at its deepest, and then I stretched myself out, reaching with my bare toe to hook through the finger grip on the candlestick. I had misjudged it. It was not as close as I thought, and I pulled so hard that my hand started to be cut by the manacle again, stretching till I thought something would snap, and eventually I caught the candlestick with my toe, and eagerly hauled it back.
I sat up against the wall, and prepared for the operation. I knew I needed to do it fast. I was not a surgeon, but I had been a doctor, and I wanted to make the best of it.
I held my left hand with my right, and pulled it tight against the manacle. For what I was about to do, I needed to be sure. I needed to be sure what I was doing, and why, and so, although I had many times tried to squeeze the bones of my hand together and pull my hand out, I plainly saw what was stopping it: my thumb.
I stared at my left hand, at the thumb, and I tried to see it as not part of me, I tried to detach it mentally, because it was the only thing stopping me from getting away.
I tried not to think further after that.
I pulled the candle from the candlestick, and pushed it deep into the soil floor, then adjusted the chain so that a couple of the links were sitting directly in its small but steady flame.
Then I wedged my left hand, the bound one, up against the loop on the wall. It didn’t take very long before it started to go numb, but I waited a long time, for the links of the chain to get hot, for my arm to go numb, and while I did, I took the metal base of the candlestick, and tested it against the brick wall.
It seemed strong, and yet thin enough to do the job. I wished it was sharper, but there was little I could about that. I tried to hone one side of the base against the brickwork, and I managed to put a little more edge on it, but then there came a moment where I knew I was just wasting time, putting off what I did not want to do.
Finally, I pulled off my vest with my right hand, and using my teeth I tore a big section from it, to protect myself as I worked.
I laid my left arm down, so numb and yet it screamed with pins and needles, and felt strange and alien, which was what I wanted. Then with my right hand I took the candlestick base in the strip of cloth, and lined it up across the joint at the base of my thumb.
With all my weight, and as much force as I could muster, I leaned down on my right hand, pushing the tin blade into my left hand, hard, then harder, and then, with horror, I realised I had severed the joint. Blood was flowing into the dirt but I had to work quickly to finish the cut through a tendon that would not break at first, and the flesh of my thumb, and then the skin.
When I was done I tried the manacle again. With horror I saw it was still tight, very tight, and my hand would still not pass through it. Appalled at what I’d done, I grew desperate and pulled my bleeding hand, harder now, until finally, with my own blood lubricating the metal, I yanked it free.
The pain was unbelievable. My head swam and I felt the urge to be sick. My heart was beating fiercely in my chest, pumping blood round my body in fear, which meant I was bleeding fast, and yet which helped me in a way, as that same blood would be carrying adrenalin through my body, the only reason I could survive this critical act. I had a small vision; of the adrenalin that the shock and pain had forced into my bloodstream. I saw the chemicals running around my veins, doing their work, and I knew that it was only that chemistry that got me through what I had to do.
Despite that, I started to feel I would pass out, and quickly, before I lost too much blood, I pushed the wound against the hot metal of the chain, trying to cauterise the main blood vessels. The chain lost its heat very quickly, but it just about did the work required of it. The smell was terrible but by then the pain was too much for me, and I blacked out, though not for long.
When I came round, I saw with relief that the candle was still burning, and I also saw that I had done the best job I could of stopping the bleeding, though the wound was a mess. I wrapped it in the strip of vest I’d used to protect my hand, tying a knot with the help of my teeth.
Then I took the rest of my ruined vest, and made a sling with it, a simple band to hold my left hand up and out of the way. It was useless to me now anyway.
I waited for a burst of pain to subside, and then, breathing as deeply as I could, I stood.
Standing up was hard in itself. I had not stood for days, and I was still very weak, but slowly I found my feet and staggered to the door. It would all end here if I had guessed wrong.
I had guessed that they wouldn’t have left anyone to guard me. I had been making myself look as weak and as ill as possible, and I was chained to the wall. I had also judged that the door was actually quite flimsy, and though they were locking it, when I put my shoulder against it, I knew I was right.
It would make a noise, of course, but I couldn’t help that, and if they found me and shot me, it might be a blessing after all. So I leaned back and then threw my shoulder at the thin panel of the cellar door, and a quarter of the door popped out of its frame, with a minimum of noise.
I waited, listening for sounds of an alarm being raised, but none came.
My hand screamed with pain as I climbed through, but I was scared and desperate and the adrenalin in my blood forced me on.
I was in a corridor, a dead end in one direction, the steps to the outside at the other. Halfway along the corridor was a flight of steps that I guessed ran up into the house itself. On either side of the corridor was a series of rooms, each like the one I’d been in. Mostly the doors were open, and as I stole along, I peered in.
One was full of junk; another had coal in it, looking like it was still in use. There were wooden boxes in a third, and wine in a fourth, and it was then that I had a further thought. I didn’t want just to run away. I wanted to destroy him. I was weak, and there were at least three of them, and given the size of the house probably many more, but I was free, and I had one small weapon: the flame of the candle.
I began to hunt through the cellar rooms, looking for petrol or other highly inflammable spirits. I tried a fifth door, and then a sixth, and then there was the seventh room.
The door was shut, where all the others had been open.
I
tested the handle, and the door opened, and there she was. Giovanna, dumped on top of a crate. I knew it had to be her. I had never seen her photograph, but I knew. She had obviously been dead for a long time. Days maybe. Perhaps she had been too fragile. Perhaps he had got sick of her crying. Perhaps a million things had happened to that poor girl, but the fact was simple. She was dead, she had been for some time, and so the very first thing I thought was that it hadn’t been her blood I had been drinking.
Somehow this was enough to send me into a terrible rage, somehow it made me realise the full horror of what I’d done, what he’d made me do, how he’d tricked me into believing I was drinking the girl’s blood. Did it matter? Did it matter what I had been doing, whose blood I had been drinking?
It mattered very much to me, and it was all I could do not to give myself away there and then with screaming, or by charging upstairs and blundering against the first person I ran into.
My anger gave me more strength. It rose up and hurtled around inside me like a hurricane, stopping me from thinking, forcing me into action, and so I went back to the wine cellar and found what I was hoping for: bottles of old cognac.
These I snatched at greedily, and then I headed for the steps to the house.
Chapter 11
It hadn’t taken much.
I sat in the woods, up behind the house, and then moved round in a wide circle, till I was looking at the facade from across the lake. It was dark, and though I could see everything that happened I felt safe enough.
They did not care about me. They did not, perhaps, even know I had escaped.
I had found the door to the cellars unlocked, and came up into the kitchens. All was quiet, not a single sound save the tick of a clock on the wall that showed it to be around three in the morning.
Outside the kitchen I came into a small hall, and then a dining room, the windows of which were covered in two layers of curtains, thin lace and then heavy velvet. I soaked the bottoms of them in the brandy and set them alight.
I could see the house was grand. Wherever it was, it was big, and though a little faded, it was a sumptuous place. The ceilings were carved plaster, the architraves ornate and old. There was plenty more wood besides; shutters to the windows, panels, floors, tables, chairs.
I knew if it was to work I needed to get several parts of the house alight before the fire was discovered, and I moved through room after room on the ground floor. There were two drawing rooms. A study. A library. And when I had something burning well in every one, I decided to let myself be free. I wanted to be free, whatever that freedom was. I would never lead a normal life now, I knew that. This thing had changed me for ever. Maybe there was only one freedom left for me, the kind that a desperate man inflicts upon himself in a darkened room when all other options are gone.
I headed back for the kitchen. As I did so, I passed the staircase to the upper floors, and knew I had to put them out of reach, so I emptied the last bottle over the carpet that lined them, and was almost scared by how quickly it began to burn.
By the time I crossed the dining room again it was already dangerous to do so, with flames licking across the ceiling. I knew it was already too late for them, even if they discovered the fire right then.
I found the back door from the kitchen, and I unlocked it with the key hanging on a hook on the door frame.
Behind the house there was an expanse of lawn, and then the trees soon started as a wooded hillside rose beyond. I worked my way around through the trees, watching the fire starting to really take hold.
The ground floor glowed, and I wondered how long it would be before anyone woke, before the flames roused them. I knew there was a chance they would be overcome by smoke before they even realised what was going on, but as I heard shouts come across the water, I knew that someone had woken in time.
I crept back a little farther into the trees, watching the flames. My hand gave me almost no pain at all. It was a warm night and though I was nearly naked, I felt no cold. I wondered where I was. The house was magnificent. The style could put it almost anywhere in Europe from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, maybe a little later if pastiche. It was the house of a very wealthy man; a house that would have had servants, and hunting parties at the weekend, and where perhaps French or English would have been spoken as freely as the native tongue of wherever I was.
I saw the flames reaching higher into the house; the second floor was alight, and I could see that the third would follow soon.
There were desperate shouts from the upper reaches of the house. I heard a scream.
I felt nothing of what I’d done, save for one thing; I hoped the fire would engulf the whole house, even stretch down into the cellars, and that it would cremate poor Giovanna and give her soul rest where her body had known little. I sat clutching my left hand in my right, rocking slightly to try and somehow hypnotise myself out of the pain, and I thought of Marian, and of Hunter, and even of Arianna. I wished that they were all at peace, somehow, and I hoped they knew that I had done something for them at last.
Then there were people outside. I saw two men and a woman running around madly, and I heard dogs barking. I could do nothing more. I was unable to defend myself.
It was time to go.
SIX
Sextantio, Italy
1968
Blood didst thou thirst for, and with blood I glut thee!
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, canto XII
Chapter 1
I’m waiting.
The dogs are barking, as they have been barking throughout the long, hot night.
Opposite me, on the little isolated hilltop that sits like a ship sailing down the dry and barren valley, is the ruined village of Sextantio.
He’s there, I know he is, though I have not seen him.
I have watched for three days and nights now. I have a small pair of binoculars in my hand, though they are useless now in the dark. I have scoured every visible spot, every narrow street and every window of the village from my latest hiding place, behind a stone hunting hut.
At dusk each day I have moved on, circumnavigating the hills, revolving around Sextantio like a planet around the sun, to gain a new vantage point on the village. Watching, waiting for him to come out, to show himself, just once, before I move.
It has taken me years to find him again.
When I left the burning house that night, near naked, wounded, starving, and near dead, I had no idea where I was.
I walked for a day through forest till I found a small path, my left hand throbbing unbearably at times, though I left it in the sling as much as I could.
At dusk I found a poor, pathetic, backward village, where I stole peasant clothes from a washing line. I drank water from a stream, and moved on, unseen, still with no idea of where I was.
It took me another day to discover I was much further east than I believed, but when I saw a sign reading Kranjska Gora, I guessed we had crossed into Yugoslavia, which only gave birth to yet more questions about the man I’d been pursuing. What right had he to be in Yugoslavia, behind the Iron Curtain? A softer place than other communist countries maybe, but still, I failed to see how he was able to come and go.
How had he managed to cross the border with me in the boot of his car? Was he known to the authorities? Was he someone powerful, above suspicion? Certainly, the palatial house I’d burned down suggested that he was someone from the elite; I had long ago learned how his money lifted him above the normal concerns of law.
I didn’t know the details, but then all I was concerned about was getting away, and starting my life again, in whatever way I could that meant anything.
I tried.
It took me weeks to put myself back together, months. I travelled rough, I walked across the border into Austria, where I slept rough, stole food and begged on the streets of Klagenfurt, acting mute if anyone tried to bother me.
I stole enough money to buy some proper clothes from a cheap shop in a b
ad neighbourhood one day, and then went to the Turkish baths. I had my hair cut and my beard shaved.
I paid a local doctor to look at my wounded hand, and saw with some miserable satisfaction that I had done a decent job. There was no infection, the healing had started. I explained to the doctor in pidgin English that I had had an accident cutting wood. He didn’t seem to care either way.
I needed access to my money, though, and it took me months to scrabble my way across central Europe, skipping across remote borders under cover of night, begging and thieving my way, until finally I reacquainted myself with my fortune in Geneva.
I knew I couldn’t go on the way I had been.
I made one last illegal trip to Marseille, where I had heard I could get a fake passport. I called myself Jack Hunter, taking my father’s name as my Christian name and my dead friend’s name as my surname. Hunter, it now said on my passport, and I liked the private joke.
Because although I had told myself I was going to head home and quietly destroy my fortune for the rest of my days, and forget about pursuing the man who’d ruined my life, when I left Marseille I knew I was not done yet.
I still wanted him.
I had destroyed his big house in the woods, but I doubted very much that he had been killed in the fire. I’d seen people outside before I left; he would certainly have escaped too. I knew that house must have represented some of his fortune. Maybe it was insured, maybe not. But I knew he would still have money, somewhere, just as I had. And with that money, he could afford to start again, start taking people’s lives again.