Hidden Faces

I

The first grey light of dawn was in the sky. In the waiting room the electric light was white and hard, and the slatted benches cold and uncomfortable. The sounds of the station drifted in the open door with the cold mist that smothered the city. An elderly couple sat close and quiet, staring bleakly through the windows at the porters passing with trolleys of luggage and mail. Occasionally they passed a few words in whispers. There was no reason why people should whisper, but a voice raised in normal speech would have seemed somehow out of place.

A fat businessman, prosperous in his navy coat, camel scarf and dark Homburg hat, stood puffing impatiently on a big cigar. He kept wiping the window where it was misting and staring down the line for signs of the train. It was not due for another five minutes. His premature impatience was annoying Bannerman.

The reporter’s eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. His mood was brittle. He was tense without knowing quite why. The weather had changed overnight, the snow turning to rain, and a fine drizzle was drifting down the tracks towards the platforms that stretched away on either side. The dampness was in everything, chill and raw.

Bannerman had risen early, the sound of the alarm drilling into a confused dream that had dispersed, with the coming of consciousness, like smoke in the wind. The windows of the bedroom were milky white with condensation, and outside it had still been dark. In the living room was the smell of stale smoke and the bottle of malt stood empty on the table like a reproach. The first cup of coffee had been good. A few things were pushed into a holdall to do him if he had to stay overnight. When he was in the hall the phone had started ringing. He had frowned and checked the time. Just after seven. Then he had hesitated a moment before deciding to leave it. It had still been ringing as his footsteps echoed down the stairwell. He could not have known what news the call would have borne had he answered it.

More than a dozen people stood now on the platform below the strands of mist that swirled in the lamplight. It was still dark, despite the lightening of the sky. A tall man with short, sandy hair stooped to peer into the waiting room. His eyes lighted on Bannerman for a second and he turned away quickly as the reporter became aware of him. The lights of the train came out of the blackness of the tunnel beyond the platform end, and with a great deal of clattering and grinding of metal on metal, came to a stop. Doors were flung open and people who had come through the night from Germany stepped down pulling suitcases behind them.

Bannerman left the waiting room, pushing past several people on the platform, and climbed up into the train. At the far end of the corridor he caught sight of the man with the sandy hair. He was carrying a polished wooden case. Bannerman slid open the door of an empty compartment and slipped into its welcome warmth. He threw his holdall into the rack overhead and took a seat by the window with his back to the engine. He watched the figures pass in the corridor, the elderly couple who had been in the waiting room, a thin dark man in a dark suit with a Gauloise between his lips and a briefcase under his arm. They all passed. There was no sign of the man with the sandy hair. Bannerman wondered why he had expected to see him, almost expected he would step into the same compartment. Something about the eyes, perhaps, or the way he had looked at him through the window in the waiting room.

The raised voice of the platform guard reached him, and then the slamming of doors. A whistle sounded and with a slight groan, the train began moving slowly out of the station, gathering speed, wheels clattering across rails at the junction.

II

The early afternoon air was clear and bright and the sunlight reflected strongly in patches on the snow that stretched away across the flatness of West Flanders, broken only by the occasional wall or hedge or row of poplars. The mist had lifted and the heavy grey of the sky was clearing to reveal a pale blue behind it. The road was wet and black, a dirty slush piled along the verges where it had been thrown up by the wheels of cars. The snow was still wet, but if the sky continued to clear then it would freeze again tonight.

There was a deep silence across the land. Only the birds could be heard, greeting the return of the sun. The road was deserted, stretching emptily away into the distance towards a belt of trees beyond which the spire of a church rose to a point. Bannerman had walked nearly two kilometres from where the bus from Bruges to Kortrijk had dropped him on the main road. In that time he had not seen a single vehicle or a single human being. The small town of Torhout lay somewhere to the east of him, but whatever town or village it was that lay beyond the belt of trees, it was not big enough to appear on the Michelin map.

The house was set on its own, surrounded by a few gnarled trees, leafless and black, their branches crusted with white. The track that led off the road across half a kilometre of open field to the house was obliterated by the snow. Only two crooked wooden gateposts gave any clues to its existence. A black crow sat one-legged on the further post, ruffling the black feathers on its wings. It watched suspiciously as Bannerman approached. It had seen him coming for some time, waiting until he was within a few metres before taking clumsily to the air with a loud caw-cawing. Somewhere across the fields another crow answered its call, and then silence descended again.

Bannerman paused for a moment before turning into the track and ploughing through snow that had drifted two to three feet deep along the ridge. It took him nearly ten minutes to reach the house. It was a tall, narrow building with a steeply sloped red-tiled roof. A greying whitewash was flaking on the walls and the green of the shutters had faded and cracked. A rusted rone pipe had stained the wall a blood-red down one side where it ran from the guttering. It was an old house, a survivor of the last war, and it bore the scars of neglect.

Against the north wall the snow had drifted several feet deep, and on the protected south side weeds poked up through the patchy skin of snow that covered the gravel path. In summer it would be a fine place to live. Bannerman stood staring up at it, listening to the quiet. The sunlight fell at an oblique angle through the trees, dappling the south wall. All the shutters were closed tight and the storm doors locked.

He walked around the house trying each of the shutters in turn. At the back there was a yard and a crop of crumbling outbuildings. A slab of snow slid from the glistening tiles on the roof and fell with a thud behind him. The stab of fright that shot through him made him conscious for the first time of the uneasiness that had begun to grow in him. He cast his eyes over the surrounding countryside, looking — for what? He didn’t know. There was nothing to be seen. Not a movement, not a sound. And yet there was the strangest sensation he had of eyes watching him. It was foolish, he knew. It was probably just tiredness.

He went around to the south side and as he reached up for the first shutter he saw that it was not properly closed. Where the two met the wood was splintered and broken. He reached up, for the windows were set just above head height, and pulled them open. The steel-framed windows behind them were opened inwards, the glass on one side broken and jagged. Bannerman felt a rush of both excitement and disappointment. Someone had been here before him, though not within the last twelve hours. For there were no tracks in the snow, and it had stopped snowing the night before.

He stepped back and on the wall below the window he saw the marks left by the intruder’s boots where they had sought a hold to push him up and into the house. Again he turned and looked out across the fields. Still nothing stirred. He threw his holdall into the house and took another two or three steps back and then ran at the window, jumping to get his hands up over the sill. His feet scraped on the wall below as he pulled himself up, first straddling the window ledge and then dropping down into the semi-darkness. He crouched for a while, waiting for his eyes to get accustomed to the change of light.

The room took shape before him. It was a small bedroom, sparsely furnished. A bed, a dresser and a short bedside table with a lamp. The sheets had been torn from the bed and were strewn across the floor. The pillows and mattresses had been cut open and searched. Horsehair and down lay in clumps all around the bed. The drawers had been pulled out of the dresser and piled untidily on top. Bannerman, still squatting on the floor below the window, accepted even then that his trip to Flanders had been a waste of time. Gryffe’s country house had been professionally searched. He would find nothing. He could not even tell when the search had taken place. It might have been the day before. It might have been a week before Gryffe was shot. But no! The broken wood on the shutters was very fresh. Within the last couple of days perhaps.

He stood up, heavy with disappointment, and the glass from the broken pane crunched on the floor beneath his feet. He picked his way across the room and pulled the door open. It led into the blackness of a short hallway. His fingers fumbled along the wall until they found a light switch. Nothing. Of course, the electricity would be turned off at the mains. He stumbled across the hall and opened another door.

Tiny chinks of sunlight showed around the windows where the shutters fitted badly. They gave enough light for him to see that this was a big room. A sofa, a working desk, two or three wall cabinets, bookcasing, a coffee table. Two large armchairs and an old wooden rocker were arranged around a huge open fireplace. The debris of the search was here too. Papers and books, whole drawers and their contents thrown any-old-where across the floor. Bannerman opened one of the front windows, unhooked the shutters and pushed them out.

Sunshine streamed in and the rush of fresh air invaded the smell of dust and dampness. A few papers stirred in the breeze. Bannerman lit a cigar and stared thoughtfully out across the fields towards the road. What had they been after? Had they found it? Who were they? He turned and walked across the room to sit in the rocker. It creaked as he pushed it gently back and forth, and he let his head fall back on the wooden rest. It was a dead-end. He could see no way beyond it. He would go and see Jansen and Lapointe. But what would they tell him? They would lock him out with tight-lipped smiles and know he knew nothing. He had given Tait the ammunition the man needed to get rid of him, and without a story he had no bargaining power. His future lay ahead of him like a desert. The words of Palin, the drunk, came back to him like a bitter reproach, ‘...someday even bastards like you get put out to grass’.

Bannerman sighed and leaned forward, tipping his ash into the hearth. The contents of a wicker wastebin were strewn across the stone slabs. Even it had been searched. Bannerman bent further forward and picked up a crumpled envelope. He smoothed it out and and looked inside. Empty. The stamp was Swiss and postmarked December. He was about to throw it away when he noticed the address, P.O. BOX 139, BUREAU DE POSTE, PLACE DE LA MONNAIE, BRUXELLES. Bannerman frowned. It had almost slipped his notice and its significance did not dawn on him immediately.

He stared at it for some time before bending over to search for more envelopes. He found several, and all but two were addressed to Gryffe at his London home. The others were addressed to the same box number in Brussels. He got up and started looking around the room for more. Within a few minutes he had found seven. They were all empty. He clutched them in his hand and cursed softly. So Gryffe had been receiving correspondence which he picked up from a box number in Brussels. It was the first real indication of anything secretive about the man’s activities.

Bannerman dropped the envelope on the floor and thought whoever had gone through the dead man’s papers had been careful to remove all his letters. But he had overlooked the tell-tale address on the envelopes. If Gryffe had kept a private box number then he would also have had a poste restante card. It was just possible that the intruder might have overlooked it also, if it was here. But it had to be. For surely if it had been among his personal possessions in Brussels, du Maurier would have told him.

It did not occur to him until after nearly an hour of fruitless searching among the chaos in the house that it might be among Gryffe’s things in London. The thought stopped him as suddenly and effectively as if he had walked into a stone wall. He righted the upturned desk chair and slumped into it, hot and frustrated. Through the open window he saw that the sun had become a big red globe hanging over the distant horizon, and he realised that the room had sunk into a deep pink gloom. He felt drained and disappointed. The card would have given him access to the box. It was just possible that there would still be mail there for Gryffe that had never been collected.

The drawers down either side of the desk had been pulled out and then not replaced. They lay about the floor where they had been dropped or thrown. Instinctively Bannerman felt under the leaf of the table and found the small round knob of the tray drawer that slides in above the top drawer of most work desks. He pulled it out. The card lay in the tray section among a scattering of paper clips and pins. Carefully, Bannerman lifted it out and examined it before slipping it into his jacket pocket and allowing a little smile to crease his face. ‘Got you,’ he said, softly, and the whisper seemed thunderous in the stillness of the room.

He unwrapped a cigar and lit it slowly, deliberately, taking long, slow pulls and watching the thick blue smoke drift lazily upwards into the quickly fading last light of the day. Everything slowed. His thinking, his breathing, the burning of the cigar, even time itself. It would have been impossible to say how long he sat thus, allowing the passing time to wash over him.

He saw a face peering through a misted waiting-room window. A little girl was shouting, but there were no words. She ran towards him, arms outstretched, but she seemed to go through him and was gone. A hand wiped away the mist from the other side of the window and another face appeared. Bannerman tried to see it. There were features; eyes, a nose, a mouth. They were there, and yet he had no conception of them. He could not see them. But they were there.

He awoke with a start and blinked in the darkness, momentarily confused and a little frightened, until he remembered where he was. He was cold. The room was like ice. A little moonlight filtered through the window he had opened. His cigar, still between his fingers, had gone out and the smell of its smoke had turned stale.

The match he struck to re-light it brought a brief, flickering life to the room. Then he stood up and found his legs and arms stiff with the cold. He picked up his holdall and stumbled across the room in the darkness to find the door. He crossed the hall and went into the bedroom where he had come in the window. The moon, rising in the south, flooded the room with a light that reflected no colour and threw deep black shadows across the floor. The sky was a chaos of stars, and already the frost was glistening on the snow.

Bannerman threw his bag out of the window and then pulled himself up onto the sill. A small red spot of light fluttered momentarily on the wood of the architrave beside his head. As he saw it, the architrave split and threw jagged splinters into his face. The crack of a rifle shot echoed away into the night. An owl in a tree just outside the window screeched and flapped off into the dark. For just a moment Bannerman was confused. He drew his hand from his face and saw his fingers running with blood. He had no time to take in the fact that someone had shot at him before he heard again the crack of the rifle and felt the bullet whistle past, no more than two inches from his left cheek, and smash into the plaster of the wall at the far side of the room. The gap between the two shots may only have been seconds, but it seemed like hours. It was the full realisation that came with the second shot that brought the fear. He recoiled instinctively and fell backwards from the sill.

He landed clumsily in the darkness and felt the broken glass from the window slicing through his trousers and into his right knee. He rolled clear of it and lay on his back on the floor, listening to his breath coming hard and fast. And there, on the wall, was the same spot of red light, no bigger than a half-penny. It moved slowly along the broken plaster then vanished. It had to be some kind of sighting device, but its remoteness, deadliness, was quite chilling.

A jumble of thoughts went tumbling through his mind. Those that stuck brought no comfort. Somewhere out in the snow a man with a rifle was trying to kill him. They were miles from the nearest village. There was no-one to hear the shots. He was on his own.

He turned over and scrambled to his feet, keeping in the shaded part of the room. His hands were shaking, but he felt no pain from his injured face and leg. He searched about the room for something he could hold up at the window. A pillow lay at his feet. It had been cut open and some of its down scattered across the floor. If the sniper had not moved... He would have chosen a position from which he had maximum coverage, the south, west and east sides of the house. The north side had to be blind.

Bannerman thought it out carefully, but he could not bring himself to move. He remained crouched for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes until his teeth began chattering with cold and fear. The perspiration formed like ice on his face. Maybe he could sweat it out until daylight. What was the bastard waiting for? In the silence a twig snapped. It didn’t seem far off. Bannerman’s nerve broke. The yell ripped out from his throat as he threw the pillow up at the window. Almost immediately the rifle cracked in the moonlight beyond and the pillow was flung back in a cloud of feathers. The room seemed filled with them. Bannerman’s indecision was stultifying. Surely he would be safer to hold out. His chances of success in trying to escape across the snow seemed less than remote. And yet he was drawn by the second alternative.

But then the luxury of choice was sharply removed. The first thing he heard was movement in the snow outside, and then a small, dark cylindrical object hurtled through the window and into the room. It clattered across the floor and immediately began to issue a thick vapour that spread quickly in the stillness. Bannerman coughed, tears springing to his eyes as the stink of the acrid vapour stung his nostrils and burned his throat. He made a lunge for the door, pulled it open, and stumbled blindly across the hall and into the room opposite.

There was still a little light here from the window he had left open and the air was fresh and cold. He tripped as he made for the other side and struck his head on the edge of the desk. The pain filled his head, but the instinct to get out was stronger. He pulled himself up and made the opposite wall. His fingers fumbled infuriatingly with the window catch. It seemed to him that it was taking him hours and he felt a dizziness overtaking him. He took long deep breaths and it cleared a little.

Finally the window pulled open and he unhooked the shutters and pushed them out. As he pulled himself up so that he filled the frame it struck him, with a kind of gripping horror that for a second almost paralysed him, that there might be more than one of them. That any moment a man lying in wait to cover the north side would gently squeeze on a trigger and snuff him out with a single, simple shot. He almost felt it. But it did not come, and he jumped down into the cold and was almost buried in the snow that had drifted up against the wall.

For several seconds he foundered in it before he was clear of its burning cold and staggering towards the fence that bounded the house. He felt the friction of icy air on his skin and was aware of pieces of snow dropping from his coat as he ran, like sparks flying into the night. Most of all he felt the crushing vulnerability of being in the open.

The dizziness he had shaken off a few moments earlier was returning. He was over the fence now and running across the field as fast as the foot-and-a-half of snow would allow. All the time he was waiting for the bullet in his back. Surely he would come into the sights of his assailant at any time. He glanced back. He had made several hundred metres and there was no sign of movement anywhere around the house. Ahead, maybe a kilometre or more distant, lay the dark belt of trees he had seen earlier in the day. At least they would provide some kind of cover. And beyond the trees, he knew, there was a village. He had seen the spire.

But already his strength was giving out. The dizziness was intensifying. Maybe it was the gas he had inhaled. Was the snow getting deeper, or was it just that he found it harder to drag his feet through it? It was no longer cold, but suffocatingly hot. His face was wet and glistening with sweat and still he pushed as hard as he could. He might have been running forever. His lungs and throat were burning and tears sprang from his eyes with the rush of cold air.

A dry stone wall, three or four feet high, divided the fields ahead of him. Beyond that there was maybe a three hundred metres stretch before he would reach the comparative safety of the trees. The thought was fatal. He slowed to a stagger. About a metre in front of him, fractionally to his right, the small red spot appeared as if by magic and began searching the ground. It was strangely elongated. A small plume of snow lifted up from the rest. The sound of the gun followed a fraction of a second after. The red spot zig-zagged ahead of him and the second bullet struck the stone of the wall throwing off splinters in the moonlight. Again the now-familiar crack of the rifle.

He almost fell into the wall, scraping knuckles and tearing fingernails in his eagerness to be over it. A crippling numbness overtook him as he sprawled in the snow on the shadowed side. His heart hammered painfully against his ribs, each breath tearing at the next as his body fought to recoup the oxygen it had burned from his blood.

He had no idea how long he lay this way, and he was not sure he cared any longer. He was not hot any more. The cold had crept back. It was wrapping itself around him in a welcome mist of growing unconsciousness. Somewhere in his head a voice was screaming in warning. Don’t let it take you! Keep going, keep going! Don’t succumb to it, it’ll kill you! It took a supreme effort of will for him to roll over and get up onto all fours. He blinked furiously to stop his eyes from closing on him. The lids felt so heavy, as though they were weighted with lead. His fingers found the wall and he pulled himself up onto it so that he was looking back the way he had come. He could see his tracks in the snow as clear as day. He followed their line back several hundred metres until his eyes fell on the dark shape of a man walking towards him. His silhouette stood out vividly against a strange orange glow in the sky.

For some seconds Bannerman was confused by this. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. The whole house was ablaze. Flames licked fifty feet into the sky. Through the glow he could see the black, crumbling frame of the building. Bannerman re-focused on the man. He was tall and thin and wore a heavy jacket of some sort. His rifle was held across his chest and he was moving relentlessly nearer. But he was still just a shadow, a shape in the night. He had no face that Bannerman could see. Bannerman felt hope and life slipping away from him.

He slid back down behind the wall and he knew that he could not last much longer in the open. He had expended all his reserves and now, if this man with the gun did not finish him off, the cold and the open would. ‘God damn you!’ he shouted defiantly at the night. But his voice sounded feeble. Keep going, keep going, the voice in his head was screaming. He heard himself sobbing, but he was on his feet again, though he was not sure how, and he was staggering towards the trees.

Afterwards, there was no recollection of how he covered the ground between the wall and the trees. He was certain there had been no further shots. All he knew was that overhead the protective boughs of many trees spread and intertwined between him and the stars. He threw his arms around a trunk, the bark scraping against his cheek. His legs were liquid. Looking back he could see the man with the rifle no more than twenty metres away, coming through the line of the trees. Bannerman pushed himself off and felt the ground falling away beneath him. He fell for what seemed like an eternity. Down and down until suddenly all his senses became sharply focused by the ice-cold water that soaked his clothes and burned his flesh. He heard the sound of running water and felt it wash over him. Chunks of snow and stone were rattling down the bank after him. Oh, how easy it would be just to slip off into the blessed unconsciousness that beckoned so enticingly. But the shock of the water had brought back some of his awareness and his will to keep going.

His fingers scrabbled in the dirt until he found a hold, and he pulled himself clear of the water and clung to the bank. He had never realised how the coldness could be such a bitter and deadly enemy.

Suddenly his ears were filled with a roaring and just for a second the night seemed alive with fire. Then almost as quickly it was over and a softness of earth was showering down from the sky on top of him. The silence that followed then was quite extraordinary. It was the last thing Bannerman could later recall with any great clarity. He had no memory at all of how he clawed his way to the top of the bank, and only a broken recollection of seeing the crater in the ground, the tree half torn up by its roots, the scorch marks on the surrounding trunks, the remains of the man with the rifle, a white, wide-eyed face, sandy hair matted with blood — the rest barely recognisable as human. And all he could recollect of the next minutes was the urge to keep going. He did not even try to understand. The voice in his head, the trees behind him, the flames of the burned-out house dying in the distance, the sound of his feet dragging through the snow, the fence and the roadway. And then the lights that came out of the darkness that descended on him like a shroud, stealing him finally into a black unconsciousness.

III

Light came slowly into his world of darkness. But before the light came he was aware of sounds around him, jumbled at first, unrecognisable. Then they grew clearer. Feet moving across wooden floorboards, the rustle of material, a woman’s voice. Words he could not understand. As awareness increased he could pick up smells, odours evocative of many distant memories. The musk of a woman’s perfume, the smell of hot food, cigarette smoke.

He opened his eyes and the light flooded into his head in a startling, swimming brightness. He screwed them tight shut and then opened them again slowly so that he could control the light. Where was he? He felt warm and stiff and all around a softness rubbed his skin. Above him he saw a white plaster ceiling supported by black painted beams. A woman’s face peered down at him and smiled. It was a round, pleasant face. She spoke to him, but he could not understand. Her head turned away and she spoke to someone else that he could not see. His consciousness was fully returned now, and with it came a pounding pain in his head. His body ached and he found it almost impossible to move.

With a great effort he pulled himself up on his elbows so that his horizon dropped. Beyond the end of the bed du Maurier sat on a hard-backed wooden chair, watching him. He still wore his hat and coat, and a weariness was deeply etched in the lines of his face. His dark eyes stared sadly back at Bannerman. The woman bent over him, blocking the policeman from his sight, and she plumped the pillow behind his back so that he had support to sit half up in the bed. Then she had a bowl of hot soup at his lips. He accepted it gratefully and took rapid gulps of the hot, thick liquid, allowing a little of it to spill out at the corners of his mouth in his haste. It tasted good in a way that nothing had ever tasted before. It filled him with a core of warmth that seemed to penetrate outwards to reach every part of him. He finished it and let the bowl drop away from his mouth, suddenly self-conscious of the eyes watching him. With the self-consciousness returned the memory of the events of a few hours ago. The red spot, the choking gas in the moonlit bedroom, that agonising chase across the snowy wastes, the remains of the man in the crater. The rest was hazy. The dragging stagger through the snow, the lights on the road. He held out a bowl and the woman took it. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

She was a plain plump woman in her middle forties, her long, thick hair pulled back and held with an elastic band. She smiled.

‘Are you strong enough to talk?’ the policeman asked. Bannerman glanced at du Maurier and nodded. The Inspector spoke briefly to the woman whose face suddenly clouded. She snapped back at him. But du Maurier interrupted her with an authority Bannerman had not seen him exert before and she stopped in mid-sentence, the colour rising in her cheeks. Without another word she bustled to the door and through it, pulling it sharply behind her. A quiet descended on the room.

It was not a big room; bare floorboards with a small, square rug in the centre. The rough plaster walls were painted white. The old brass bedstead was pushed into one corner against the wall opposite the window. There was a big wardrobe, a dresser and two chairs. There was no shade on the light-bulb that hung from the ceiling throwing its harsh, unrelenting light into every corner. Du Maurier took off his hat and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, running the rim of the hat round and round through his fingers. ‘I don’t suppose you would have a cigar?’ Bannerman said.

The policeman shook his head. ‘A cigarette?’

‘All right.’

Du Maurier got up and walked round the bed. He handed Bannerman a cigarette and lit it for him, and then walked back to his chair. His own cigarette was almost spent. He lit another from the end of it and stood on the butt. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’ve driven all the way from Brussels and I’ve sat up most of the night.’

‘I didn’t know you cared.’

Du Maurier sighed and glared at him. ‘If I had not come you might have been in a great deal of trouble.’

Bannerman drew on his cigarette and tasted burning paper. ‘You were sent?’

‘I was sent.’

‘To smooth it over, cover it up?’

‘I want to know what happened.’

‘And if I don’t want to tell you...?’

‘You could still be in a great deal of trouble.’

Bannerman considered this. His head still hurt, his body still ached. He had not the strength to fight it. So he told it, as it had happened, as he remembered it. But he said nothing about the poste restante card. Somehow in the telling of the story it seemed such an obvious hole. Du Maurier gave no sign of missing anything. He sat without expression, just listening. ‘I have no idea what happened to him,’ Bannerman was saying. ‘There was an explosion. I don’t remember everything, but there was not very much left of him.’

The Inspector nodded. ‘I know, I’ve seen it. You were very lucky, Monsieur. He died in a way he could never have imagined. A German land mine from the last war. The woods are riddled with them and there are warning signs every hundred metres or so. It is quite common in this part of the country. You are very fortunate that you did not go the same way.’ Bannerman shuddered suddenly as though someone had walked over his grave. Du Maurier looked to the floor and then back at Bannerman. ‘And you have no idea what the spot of red light might have been?’

The reporter shrugged and felt weary. ‘I don’t know. Some kind of sighting device maybe.’

Du Maurier nodded. ‘A laser beam. It can pinpoint a target at over one thousand metres. It’s a new American gun, the B120. A high-powered sight enables the marksman to line up the laser on any target. You can’t miss. Even I could handle it.’

Bannerman frowned. ‘But he did miss.’

‘Yes, he did.’ Pause. ‘Let me tell you something. The B120 is a highly specialised weapon. There are very few of them around. You’ve got to be somebody pretty special to have one. A top professional. And there is no way a top professional would miss.’

Bannerman flicked ash at the floor. ‘You mean he wasn’t trying to kill me?’

‘It seems possible.’

‘Well it sure as hell didn’t seem that way at the time. How about the gas?’

Du Maurier waved one hand in a vague semi-circle. ‘Tear gas, maybe. Or something a little more toxic. But you were never in danger. He left you a way out and you took it. He could not have planned for the fact that you very nearly did come to grief, as he obviously did not plan his own end. How long was it since you had eaten?’

‘I don’t know. Early morning probably.’

‘So you had not eaten all day you had spent several hours in a cold house. You had cuts on your head and leg. You inhaled toxic or semi-toxic gas, then you went out into a bitter night hardly dressed for sub-zero temperatures, and ran nearly two kilometres through the snow before falling into a half-frozen stream. Fatigue, shock, exposure. You must have the constitution of an ox. When the police communal found you in the road you were very nearly dead. They got some food and drink into you last night and a doctor came from Torhout and dressed your wounds. He recommends that you remain in bed for two or three days.’

Bannerman looked across at the window. The shutters were closed. ‘What time is it?’

Du Maurier looked at his watch. ‘Just after eight. It should be getting light outside.’

‘Where are we?’ It had not occurred to him until now to ask. It hadn’t seemed important before.

‘A small inn at the village of Smoelaert. Only a few kilometres from Monsieur Gryffe’s house, or what’s left of it.’

‘Are you going back to Brussels?’

‘In an hour or so. I have one or two things to attend to first with the local police.’

‘Will you give me a lift back?’

‘If you insist.’

Then they fell silent and there was not a sound in the place. Bannerman rubbed the stubble on his chin and looked down for the first time to see that he was wearing an old woollen dressing gown with a faded checked pattern. He looked up again at du Maurier. ‘Who was he?’

The policeman shook his head. ‘I have no idea. But I shall find out. He had been staying here at the inn for two days, under the name of Michael Ritchie, an Englishman. Presumably it was he who searched the house before you. The night before last he checked out in a hurry after getting a telephone call.’ A new doubt was suddenly planted in Bannerman’s mind as an ugly little thought wormed its way into his consciousness. He pushed it aside. Du Maurier went on, ‘What he did that night or the following day, we have no idea. But the local police found his car last night. It was parked off the road about half a kilometre from the house.’ Pause. ‘You’d never seen him before?’

Bannerman nodded. ‘Yes, I’d seen him. Yesterday morning at the Gare du Midi. He was on the platform.’ He remembered the face peering into the waiting room. And he remembered that same face with its dead eyes staring out of the mud and snow. ‘Why should someone go to all that trouble not to kill me?’ he asked.

Du Maurier stood. ‘Perhaps simply to frighten you.’

‘They did that all right.’

‘They?’

Bannerman smiled wanly. ‘Men like that act under instruction, or for money. Someone else pays the wages, calls the tune.’

‘Yes.’ The policeman put his hand into an inside pocket and pulled out a small, square poste restante card. He walked slowly round the bed and held it so that Bannerman could see it. ‘You forgot to tell me about this.’

‘So I did.’

‘And do you want to?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then you’d better take it.’ He held it out.

Bannerman took it and looked at him with genuine surprise. ‘Why?’

‘Because it is of no use to me, and my superiors would only destroy it.’

‘But I thought you had decided to play it their way. That you wouldn’t fight them any more, that you would stop feeding me information.’

Du Maurier’s head dropped a little and an odd expression of melancholy came over his face. ‘Things have changed since then.’

‘What’s changed?’

The policeman sighed. ‘The night before last, only a few hours after you visited her, the child, Tania, went missing from the clinic. She... someone broke in.’