Free Puppet on a Chain by Alistair MacLean

ground quite quickly -- nodded a curt acknowledgment to me and, without saying a word, laid a kindly but firm hand on Trudi's shoulder. Trudi looked up at once, her tears gone as quickly as they had come, smiled, nodded docilely, disengaged her arms from my neck and rose. She crossed to van Gelder's chair, recovered her puppet, kissed him, crossed to where I was sitting, kissed me as unaffectedly as a child saying good night, and almost skipped from the room, the waddling Herta close behind. I exhaled a long sigh and just managed to refrain from mopping my brow.
    'You might have warned me,' I complained. 'About Trudi and Herta. Who is she anyway -- Herta, I mean? A nurse?'
    'An ancient retainer, you'd say in English.' Van Gelder took a large gulp of his whisky as if he needed it and I did the same for I needed it even more: after all he was used to this sort of thing. 'My parents' old housekeeper -- from the island of Huyler in the Zuider Zee. As you may have noticed, they are a little -- what do you say -- conservative in their dress. She's been with us for only a few months -- but, well, you can see how she is with Trudi.'
    'And Trudi?'
    'Trudi is eight years old. She has been eight years old for the past fifteen years, she always will be eight years old. Not my daughter, as you may have guessed -- but I could never love a daughter more. My brother's adopted daughter. He and I worked in Curacao until last year -- I was in narcotics, he was the security officer for a Dutch oil company. His wife died some years ago -- and then he and my wife were killed in a car crash last year. Someone had to take Trudi. I did. I didn't want her -- and now I couldn't live without her. She will never grow up, Mr Sherman.'
    And all the time his subordinates probably thought that he was just their lucky superior with no other thought or concern in his mind than to put as many malefactors behind bars as possible. Sympathetic comment and commiseration were never my forte, so I said: 'This addiction -- when did it start?'
    'God knows. Years ago. Years before my brother found out.'
    'Some of those hypo punctures are recent.'
    'She's on withdrawal treatment. Too many injections, you would say?'
    'I would say.'
    'Herta watches her like a hawk. Every morning she takes her to the Vondel Park -- she loves to feed the birds. In the afternoon Trudi sleeps. But sometimes in the evening Herta gets tired -- and I am often from home in the evening.'
    'You've had her watched?'
    'A score of times. I don't know how it's done.'
    'They get at her to get at you?'
    'To bring pressure to bear on me. What else? She has no money to pay for fixes. They are fools and do not realize that I must see her die slowly before my eyes before I can compromise myself. So they keep trying.'
    'You could have a twenty-four-hour guard placed on her.'
    'And then that would make it official. Such an official request is brought to the automatic notice of the health authorities. And then?'
    'An institution,' I nodded. 'For the mentally retarded. And she'd never come out again.'
    'She'd never come out again.'
    I didn't know what to say except goodbye, so I did that and left.

CHAPTER FOUR
    I spent the afternoon in my hotel room going over the carefully documented and cross-indexed files and case histories which Colonel de Graaf's office had given me. They covered every known case of drug-taking and drug prosecutions, successful or not, in Amsterdam in the past two years. They made very interesting reading if, that is, your interest lay in death and degradation and suicide and broken homes and ruined careers. But there was nothing in it for me. I spent a useless hour trying to rearrange and reassemble the various cross-indexes but no significant pattern even began to emerge. I gave up. Highly trained minds like de Graaf's and van Gelder's would have spent many, many hours in the same fruitless pastime, and if they had failed to establish any form of pattern there was no hope for me.
    In the