The Stone leopard

CHAPTER TWO

Ignoring the downpour, Vanek drove at high speed along the deserted road from Strasbourg to Saverne. Beside him Lansky sat in silence as he chewed at the sandwiches they had bought at Strasbourg airport and drank from a bottle of red wine. Once he pointed out to Vanek that he was exceeding the speed limit. 'Get on with your lunch,' the Czech told him. `We have only one final visit to make before we start back for home. And there is a limit to how long time is on our side. With a bit of luck it will turn out that the Devaud woman died years ago,' he added.

Imperceptibly-because he decided that Lansky was right, Vanek reduced speed, but Lansky, who was watching the speedometer needle, observed what was happening and smiled to himself as he finished the sandwich. To some extent Brunner had acted as a buffer between the two egotists, and Lansky, who was intelligent, decided not to make any more provocative comments. They still had a job to do. have to check on the address of Devaud as soon as we can,' Vanek remarked, overtaking a vegetable truck in a shower of spray. `So keep a lookout for a hotel or a bar. If she's still alive and living in the same place the locals are bound to know. In provincial France you can't pee behind a wall without the whole village watching…'

`This time,' Lansky suggested, 'we needn't be too fussy about arranging accidents. Just do the job and run, I say, now we haven't got that old woman, Brunner, round our necks any more…

`I'll decide that when the moment comes,' Vanek snapped.

Across the plain there had been no sign of habitation for miles. They were coming close to Saverne when Vanek, peering through the rain-soaked windscreen, saw the sign. Auberge des Vosges and petrol five hundred metres ahead. He reduced speed. `This place should have a phone book,' he said, 'and we're in the right area now.' Turning off the highway, he pulled in close to a battery of petrol pumps. 'Top her up,' he told the attendant, 'while we go inside and have a drink… Vanek believed that you never could tell what emergency might lie ahead of you, that it always paid to keep a full tank. As they got out of the Renault a mechanic inside the garage was wiping the windscreen of a Mercedes 350 he had been working on.

Lennox checked his watch and walked out of the bar of the Auberge des Vosges on his way to the wash-room. Two hours exactly. The mechanic had just informed him his car was ready and Lennox had paid the bill. Earlier he had checked Annette Devaud in Bottin and there had been no entry, but the barman had been more helpful.

`Funny old girl. Must be over seventy now if she's a day. She still lives at Woodcutter's Farm, all on her own. The locals don't see her from one year to another-except the chap who delivers her supplies. Remarkable woman, Annette Devaud. You know she was blind for getting on thirty years?'

`I haven't met her yet,' Lennox said carefully.

`Remarkable woman,' the barman repeated. 'Happened just at the end of the war-she went blind, just like that. Some disease or other, I don't know what. Then a few months ago a specialist takes a look at her and says he can do something.' The barman gave a glass an extra polish. 'A miracle happens. He operates and she can see again. Think of that-blind for over thirty years and then you see the world all over again like new. Tragedy that-about her grand-daughter, Lucie. You know who she was?'

`No.'

`Girl who tried to bump off Florian the other week. Must have been a nut-like that chap who shot Kennedy in Dallas.' The barman leaned forward confidentially. 'I live only two kilometres from the old girl and the few of us who knew who Lucie was kept our mouths shut. Even the police didn't catch on-the girl only came here a few times. I'm only telling you seeing as you're going to visit her-might give her a shock if you said the wrong thing…'

Lennox was thinking about it as he went into the wash-room and took his time about freshening up-the previous night in Freiburg he had enjoyed only two hours' sleep. It could only happen in a provincial French hamlet-a conspiracy of silence to protect a local and much-respected Frenchwoman. Over the basin a large mirror faced the door and he was drying himself off when the door opened. Lowering his towel he stared into the mirror and the man standing in the doorway stared back at him.

For a matter of seconds their eyes met, then the man in the mirror glanced round the wash-room as though looking for someone and went out again.

Drying himself quickly, Lennox put on his jacket and coat, then opened the door slowly. For a few seconds in the rue de l'Epine at the entrance to Leon Jouvel's building in Strasbourg he'd had a good look at the face of the man with the umbrella he had cannoned against, knocking his pebble glasses down on to the cobbles. He was still not absolutely sure-the man in Strasbourg had seemed older-but not with the light from the street lamp full on his face he reminded himself. The passage outside the wash-room was empty. He walked down it and glanced inside the bar.

The man who had come into the wash-room had his back turned, but his face was visible in the bar mirror. He was talking to another man, tall, dark-haired and clean-shaven, a man of about thirty. The tall man, who was idly turning an empty glass in his hand, looked over his companion's shoulder and stared straight at Lennox and then away. Lennox was even more sure now. There had been three men in the Soviet Commando's car at Freiburg. The man called Bonnard was dead, which left two of them. And at the back of the war diary they had taken off Dieter Wohl had been the address of Annette Devaud.

At this moment Lennox cursed himself for accepting Peter Lanz's theory that by now the remnants of the Commando would, be fleeing back to Russia. It had been a reasonable theory at the time-because the third witness on Lasalle's list had just been killed, so why should the Commando linger? Lennox walked back into the hotel out of sight of the bar as though leaving by the front entrance, then he ran up a wide staircase which turned twice before reaching the upper landing. He waited at the top where he could see through a window to the road beyond.

The barman had disappeared behind a curtain when Lansky returned to the bar where Vanek was leaning against the counter. Picking up his drink, Lansky swallowed it as Vanek played with the glass in his hand. 'That Frenchman I saw coming out of No. 49-Jouvel's place-the chap I bumped into, is in the wash-room here,' he said in a quiet voice. 'That's no coincidence…'

`Are you sure? Describe him,' Vanek said casually.

Lansky described Lennox in a few words. 'I'm quite sure,' he said. `I'm trained to remember things like that-in case you've forgotten. We looked at each other in the mirror for a few seconds and we both knew each other. I could have dealt with him-the place was empty-but that would have sparked off the police and we don't want that at the moment, do we?'

`No, we don't. Incidentally, he's looking in at the bar now, so don't turn round…' The situation didn't surprise Vanek; sooner or later something was bound to go wrong-it had in Freiburg-up to a point. It was just a question of deciding how to handle it. 'He's gone now,' Vanek said. 'I think we'll get away from here, too.'

As they walked out of the front door a Peugeot 504 with a single man behind the wheel was moving off to Saverne after filling up with petrol. The rain obscured the silhouette of the driver. 'That's probably him,' Vanek said. From the first-floor window Lennox watched them drive off in the direction of Saverne. Going downstairs he went back into the bar where the barman was polishing more glasses. Ordering another cognac, Lennox made the remark as casually as he could.

`Those two men who came in here after me-I thought I recognized one of them. Or are they locals?'

`Never seen them before-and don't want to see them a second time. I gathered from the tall one they're something to do with market research. They pick names of people and go ask them damned silly questions. I think they're on their way to see Annette Devaud…'

`Really?'

`Something to do with a campaign to increase pensions,' the barman explained. 'Was her husband alive they wanted to know. How could they find Woodcutter's Farm? I just told them-I didn't draw them a map like I did for you.' The barman grinned sourly. 'And I didn't tell them Annette will chase them off her property with a shotgun as good as spit…'

Lennox finished his drink quickly and went out to where the Mercedes was waiting for him. If anything, it was raining even more heavily, and as he drove away from the hotel he saw in the distance thick rain-mist enveloping the Vosges mountains. There had been mist at Freiburg when the Commando killed Dieter Wohl and now there was mist over the Vosges. The association of ideas worried him as he pressed his foot down and drove well beyond the limit in his attempt to overtake the Renault.

Carel Vanek was a fast driver but Alan Lennox was a more ruthless driver. Risking patrol-cars-and the appalling weather -moving at over a hundred and ten kilometres an hour, the Englishman came up behind the Czech just beyond Saverne where the highway climbs into the mountains. For a moment there was a brief spell of shafted sunlight breaking through the clouds, illuminating the peaks of the Vosges, the shiny road ahead, and less than three hundred metres away Lennox saw the Renault arcing round a bend, sending up spurts of water from under its fast-moving wheels. Then it began to rain again, slanting rain which slashed down like a water curtain.

In the brief glimpse of sunlight Lennox saw the ground sloping away to the right beyond the road edge in a severe drop. He reduced speed a little, maintaining his distance behind the car in front. His opportunity came less than half a minute later as they still circled up the side of the mountain with the slope continuing down to the right. In the distance- where the road reappeared as it descended again-coming towards him, towards the speeding Renault, he saw the blur of a large truck. Lennox pressed his foot down, closing the gap until he was almost on the tail of the car ahead. Still climbing, the road straightened out as the oncoming vehicle, which he now realized was a huge timber wagon, came closer. He timed it carefully, gauging the width of the road, the combined width of the three vehicles, then he pulled out without warning and accelerated.

`Bloody maniac…'

Behind the wheel of the Renault, Vanek, still keeping a lookout for the Peugeot 504, was startled as the car coming up behind him began to overtake seconds before the timber wagon passed them. Instinctively he steered nearer to the right-hand edge where rain-mist blurred the view, trying to give maximum possible passage to the crazy idiot who was overtaking at this dangerous moment. Behind the windscreen of the timber wagon's cab the driver blinked as he saw what was happening, but there was no room to give leeway.

`Watch it,' said Lansky, suddenly alerted. 'There was a Mercedes at that hotel…

Lennox was alongside the Renault, squeezed into a gap where there was no margin for the slightest error as the timber wagon started moving past. Then it was gone. Lennox turned the wheel slightly. The side of the Mercedes cannoned against the side of the Renault. The wet road did the rest. The Renault skidded and went over the edge.

The slope was less steep at this point on the mountain. Vanek wrestled desperately as he felt the car go over and down, losing speed as he released pressure on the accelerator, allowing the car to follow its own momentum. The wheels were slipping on a muddy slope, churning up great gouts of mud which splashed over the windscreen, blotting out vision, so Vanek was driving blind as he lost more speed, as the car went down and down, skidding and sliding, twisting and turning while the Czech fought to keep the vehicle on some kind of straight course. Then, not knowing what lay ahead, he braked. The car hit something. Then stopped.

`We're alive,' Vanek gasped hoarsely.

`That's something,' Lansky agreed.

When they got out into the rain they were half-way down a long slope with the road obscured by mist where they had come over. A grassy rampart had stopped them sliding even further. A few metres beyond where the Renault had stopped a muddy farm-track continued on down the slope and went back up the hill towards the highway. 'It was that Frenchman I saw in the wash-room,' Lansky said. 'I caught a glimpse of him behind the wheel just before he hit us. He can't be the police or he wouldn't have bounced us over the edge.'

`We meet him again, we finish him,' Vanek replied. 'Now we've got to heave this car round and then I'll try and make it up the track. It's going to take time,' he added.

High on the mountain Lennox stopped the Mercedes close to the edge and looked down. He had to wait a minute until the mist cleared and then he saw the car and two small figures moving round it far below. One of them got inside the Renault and the faint sound of the motor starting drifted up to him. After a minute it stopped, the driver got out and both men started manhandling the vehicle.

Disappointed, Lennox drove off. Hoping to kill them, he had gained only a respite.

The weather higher up was foul and he was forced to cut his speed. Clouds blotted out the mountain summits, a grey mist smothered the lower slopes and the world outside the car was a shimmer of dark fir forest in the gliding fog. The address Dieter Wohl had provided-Woodcutter's Farm, Saverne-was misleading, as are so many addresses in rural France. Annette Devaud lived some distance from Saverne. Using the map drawn on the back of a menu card by the barman at the Auberge des Vosges, Lennox drove on through the mist. At one point he passed close to a canal far below him in a cut where oil-skinned figures moved about on a huge barge. Turning a corner, he saw a crude wooden sign rearing above a hedge. Woodcutter's Farm.

The track, climbing above the highway and sunk between steep banks, was greasy mud and squelching ruts running with water. Several times he was stopped, his wheels churning uselessly, and now it was so overcast he had his headlights on. As he topped the crest of a hill the lights swept across the front of a long, steep-roofed farmhouse. The building, huddled under a looming quarry dripping with creeper, was the end of the road. Leaving the motor running, he got out into the wet. Lennox estimated he might have no more than fifteen minutes to get Annette Devaud away from the farmhouse before the Commando arrived.

The woman who opened the door held a double-barrelled shotgun which she pointed at Lennox's stomach. She told him she had seen him from an upper window and didn't admit strangers. Lennox started talking rapidly, getting a note of hysteria into his voice. 'Can I use your phone? There's been an accident down on the highway and a woman's badly hurt…'

`I don't have a phone…'

`Then get some bandages, for God's sake…' Lennox was waving his hands about, gesturing. Knocking the barrel aside, he jerked the gun out of her hands. 'Sorry about this, but shotguns worry me-they're liable to be feather-triggered. And there's no accident down on the highway, although there's liable to be one up here in about ten minutes-and you'll be involved in it.' He took a deep breath. 'Two men are on their way here to kill you…'

In one way Lennox was relieved. He had expected an infirm old lady, but the woman who had faced him with a shotgun was hardly infirm. Of medium height, her back erect, she had moved agilely when he took the gun away from her. Now she stood glaring at him, still a good-looking woman with a Roman nose and a firm jaw. 'You don't look crazy,' she said. `Why should anyone want to kill me?'

`Because you may be able to identify the Leopard…'

It took him well over fifteen minutes-much too long he realized when he checked his watch-to convince Annette Devaud that he might know what he was talking about. And during that time, standing in her old-fashioned living-room, he understood something he had puzzled over ever since the barman had told him she was still alive. If she was able to identify the Leopard-which he doubted-and if by some wild chance Leon Jouvel had been right, how was it that she had not seen Guy Florian's picture during the few months since her sight had been restored? In the newspapers, in the magazines, on television? She supplied the answers after she had told him about how she had once nursed the Leopard when he had been shot in the leg.

`Since I regained my sight, Mr Bouvier, I read books…' She waved her hand towards the walls which were lined with books from floor to ceiling. 'All these years I have had to make do with Braille-now I can read proper books! I was always a great reader from girlhood. Now it is my ambition to read all these before I die…'

`But the newspapers…'

`I don't believe in them. Never did. They're boring. Magazines? Why read them when you have books?'

`And television?'

`Don't believe in it. And I don't have a radio.' Madame Devaud stood very erect. 'I live here on my own and I love it. I have twenty-five hectares of woodland where I wander for hours. The world I saw during the war I can do without for ever. All my supplies are delivered by a man in the village, so I'm self-contained. I actually like it that way, Mr Bouvier…'

`But if the Leopard were still alive you would know him?'

`The Leopard is dead…'

`But if he weren't?' Lennox persisted.

`I think I would know him, yes. He had good bone structure. Bones don't change…'

He managed to persuade her to get into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes for one reason only. 'If you drove the Renault with those two men inside it off the road,' she pointed out, 'then your own car should show traces of the collision.' After she had slipped on a heavy fur coat he took her outside and she briefly inspected the dented Mercedes, then she got inside the car quickly. 'We'd better hurry,' she informed him curtly, 'otherwise we'll meet them coming up the track. I thought you were telling the truth before I saw the damage- I'm a good judge of character, but you must admit I had a right to be suspicious…'

`I'm going to drop you off close to the nearest police station,' Lennox said as he began descending the track.

`I know somewhere we can hide and still see the entrance to the farm…'

She had wanted to bring her shotgun with her but he had put it away in a cupboard before they left the house. The Luger loaned to him by Peter Lanz was inside his coat pocket as they came closer to the highway, and he had turned off his headlights now, fearing that they might reveal the obscure entrance to the track if the Renault was coming up the highway. On his way to the farmhouse he would have missed the entrance himself without the map and the signboard. Close to the bottom of the track the way ahead was masked by a wall of rolling mist. The mist was suddenly lit up, became a luminous gloss as headlight beams from the highway swept across it. The Renault had arrived only seconds before they were clear.

Lennox began depressing the brake prior to trying the impossible-to back up the track the way they had just come. In the luminous glow, blobs of moisture caught the lights and sparkled. The glow faded. Sweat was glistening on Lennox's forehead as he released the brake; on the highway a car's headlights had swept round the bend, flashing briefly over the entrance before the vehicle continued on up the highway. Risking the mud, he accelerated. 'Stop at the bottom,' Annette Devaud commanded. 'If those men find the farm after we've gone they may damage it. So get rid of the signboard, please…' To humour her, Lennox stopped briefly, jumped out and gave the post one hard shove. There was a wrench of rotting wood breaking and the signboard collapsed backwards out of sight. It wasn't entirely to humour her: if the Commando couldn't find the farm, they might linger, looking for it, and while they were searching, Annette Devaud might be able to contact the police. Jumping back behind the wheel, he followed her instructions, turning to the left out of the track-which took them away from the Saverne direction-and then he turned left off the highway, thinking that it was a fork in the road. Instead he found himself driving up a similar mud-track which spiralled up and up round a steep rock-face.

`Where does this lead?' he asked.

`Back on to my land-to a high bluff where we can look down on the entrance to the farm…

It had all happened so quickly. Not knowing the area it had seemed wiser to Lennox to follow her directions, and now she had led them up to some peak which was still not far enough away from the farm for his liking. 'They'll never find us up here,' Madame Devaud said confidently. 'And we'll be able to see what's happening-I don't like to leave my home unattended…' At the top of the spiralling track which was hemmed in by dense fir forest they came out into the open where an old barn was perched on the craggy bluff. The building was derelict, its roof timbers rotting, its two huge doors lying abandoned on a carpet of dead bracken. Thick tangles of undergrowth circled the rim of the bluff. Lennox switched off the motor and the headlights and the clammy silence of the forest closed round them. She had led them into a dead end.

It was 3 pm when Andre the Squirrel alighted from the Alouette helicopter which had flown him to Saverne and was driven to police headquarters by a waiting car. At headquarters he collected three policemen and the car then proceeded up into the Vosges. During his flight from Paris, Boisseau decided that he should perhaps have taken Grelle's advice about providing a police guard on Annette Devaud, so now he was taking men with him to leave at the farm when he had interviewed the only known survivor who had once worked with the Leopard. At headquarters he had made the suggestion that someone should phone ahead to Woodcutter's Farm, only to be told that Madame Devaud had never had a phone installed. As they drove up into the mist-bound mountains Boisseau became restless.

`Hurry it up,' he told the driver, 'I want to arrive at the earliest possible moment…'

`Hurry? In this fog, Mr Director-General?'

Use the damned siren. Hurry…'

From the top of the craggy bluff behind the barn there was, as Madame Devaud had said, an excellent view down a sheer one-hundred-foot drop to the highway below and to the entrance to the farm beyond. To the right of where Lennox stood, a thread of a path curled down a more gently-sloping section and ended at a tiny summerhouse perched on a rocky platform seventy feet or so above the highway. Immediately below him the rock-face dropped away dizzily. Beyond the derelict barn behind him the Mercedes was parked with its nose pointing towards the track they had come up; Lennox, disturbed to find there was no way out from this eminence except down the track, was on the verge of telling Madame Devaud they were leaving. But first he was checking the highway.

Through the mist he could see a car approaching from the direction of Saverne, its silhouette still too blurred for him to recognize the make of vehicle. He glanced at his watch.

3.15 pm.

Behind him Annette Devaud stood inside the barn, leaning on a window ledge as she tried to see what was happening. The car crawled closer, coming very slowly as though lost, and then he felt sure it was a Renault. Crawling past the concealed entrance to Woodcutter's Farm-now completely invisible because the signboard had been removed-it continued up the highway until it was below where Lennox stood and he was looking down directly on its roof. Pausing for a few seconds, it turned off the highway, vanishing from view as it headed up the mud-track which led to the bluff.

'They're coming up here,' Lennox called out to Madame Devaud. 'Get round here as fast as you can…

She hurried out of the barn and round the back of it and Lennox sent her down the thread of a path to the summerhouse. He waited for a second, watching her move down the path sure-footed as a goat before running round to the front of the barn, then he hid himself inside a clump of undergrowth close to the sheer drop and waited. In his right hand he held the Luger.

Vanek drove slowly up the track and beside him Lansky put on a pair of thin and expensive kid gloves. It seemed likely that he would have to throttle the old woman the barman at the Auberge des Vosges had told them lived alone. One kilometre back down the highway they had again asked for directions at the office of a sawmill. 'One kilometre up the highway from here,' they had been told. 'Up an old mud-track…' Driving past the concealed entrance which led to Woodcutter's Farm they had turned up the next track. Turning a corner, they arrived on top of the bluff.

'Something's wrong-look…' Vanek nodded towards the Mercedes parked on the bluff. cover you…' They exchanged no more words as Lansky opened the car door very quietly and slipped out. Trained to operate as a team there was no need to say any more as both men grasped the situation; somewhere concealed on the bluff was the man Lansky had bumped into in the rue de 1'Epine, the man who less than an hour ago had tried to kill them by driving them off the road. Inside the car Vanek waited, his own Luger in his hand, waited for any sign of movement while outside the car Lansky studied the lie of the land and noted that the open-ended barn was empty. Crouched inside the undergrowth Lennox couldn't see the man behind the wheel because the Renault had stopped on a rise and the car's bulk hid the second man. Lansky's sudden manoeuvre caught him off-balance.

The Czech sprinted the short distance across the open and disappeared inside the barn. Then, for a minute or two nothing happened, or so it seemed to Lennox. Inside the barn Lansky sought elevation, somewhere high up where he could look down on the whole bluff. Very quietly he began climbing up the inner wall of the barn, using the cross-beams along the wall as steps until he reached a hole where he could peer down into the Mercedes. The car was empty. He scanned the bluff carefully until he found the silhouette of a man crouching in the undergrowth. Then he climbed down again.

With the body of the parked Mercedes between himself and Lennox he crept forward, pausing only once to make a gesture to Vanek. The Czech nodded. Lansky had located the target. Reaching the side of the Mercedes, Lansky opened the door- handle a centimetre at a time, then opened the door itself. He slid behind the wheel and reached for the ignition key he had seen dangling from his barn wall perch. To shoot him the Frenchman would have to stand up-and if he exposed himself to view, Vanek would shoot him first.

Crouched a dozen or so metres behind the rear of the Mercedes, Lennox resisted the almost overwhelming impulse to lift his head, to see what the hell was going on. So far he had heard no sound since the second man had vanished inside the barn. Lansky, who carried in his head the precise location of the crouching man, paused as he touched the ignition key. This was going to have to be very fast indeed. And he was going to have to pull up in time or else the Mercedes would go over the sheer drop with the Frenchman. Either way the unknown man was dead: if he stayed where he was the car would topple him over the brink; if he exposed himself Vanek would kill him with a single shot. Then all four people on the bluff heard it- Madame Devaud waiting in the tiny summerhouse with her heart beating like a drum and the three men above her- heard the distant wail of an approaching police car siren. Lansky didn't hesitate. Turning on the ignition, flipping the gear into reverse, he began moving backwards at speed.

Lennox grasped what was happening instantly. Someone had got into his car. They were going to knock him over the edge. He timed it to a split second, standing up and exposing his silhouette at the moment when it was masked from the Renault by the speeding Mercedes heading straight for him. He had a camera-shutter image of the Mercedes's rear window framing the twisted-round head-and-shoulders of the driver. He fired twice through the centre of the frame, angling his gun downwards, then dived sideways, sprawling on the ground. Both bullets hit Lansky in the back and neither was instantaneously fatal. The spasm of reaction drove his right foot hard down on the accelerator. The Mercedes tore over the shrubberies and went on beyond, arcing into nothingness and then plunging down and down until it hit the highway one hundred feet below.

The police patrol-car, with Boisseau inside and a local driver behind the wheel, was turning into the entrance to Woodcutter's Farm when the Mercedes landed. As the patrol-car changed direction the Mercedes burst into flames.

Vanek had heard the police siren and he reacted as he saw the Mercedes with Lansky inside disappear over the edge; he drove the Renault round in a tight circle so it faced back down the track. A few metres away he saw Lennox sprawl on the ground, then start to get back to his feet. Braking, Vanek grabbed the Luger out of his lap, took instinctive aim and fired. The Englishman was aiming his own pistol when the bullet hit him and he went down again.

Vanek drove down the twisting track at reckless speed but he managed to keep the vehicle under control. When he emerged at the bottom the blazing Mercedes blocked the road to his right, blocking off the patrol-car. He turned left and started driving west along the deserted highway, his mind racing as he worked out what he had to do next. The answer could be summed up in one word: vanish. It was the death of his partner he had just witnessed which gave him the idea. Climbing a steep stretch of highway he came to a point where the road curved sharply with a fence to his right and a warning notice. Dangerous corner. Stopping the Renault just beyond the bend he got out and walked back to the recently-erected fence.

Beyond it the ground dropped away a good two hundred feet to a rock-pile with a canal crossing the field beyond. Vanek ran back to the Renault, switched on the ignition again from outside the car, released the hand-brake, slammed the door shut as the car started moving backwards slowly, and then guided it with his hand on the steering-wheel through the open window.

He had stopped the car on a reasonably level patch of tarmac before the highway went into a further steep ascent so it moved back quite gently for a few seconds as he walked alongside; then the road began to slope down and the car picked up momentum. Vanek had withdrawn his hand from the wheel and the Renault was moving faster when it hit the white- painted fence-erected only to define the edge-broke through and dropped out of sight. He heard it hit the rock-pile with a crunch of disintegrating metal but unlike the Mercedes it did not burst into flames. Satisfied that he had given himself a temporary breathing-space, the Czech left the highway, climbing up into the forest above and began moving back at a trot towards the craggy bluff where Lansky had died.