The Mercedes gathered speed with a roar. The man was cursing behind me as he clung to the rear door. We plunged out of the tunnel of trees, and went up a hill with the sickening swoop of a swing. Ahead of us, once more, our great flood-lights made a funnel into the dark, and we hurtled down their narrowing glare.
In control now, my hands on the wheel, I felt suddenly, beautifully, icily cold. The needle began to creep over to the right of the dial. We slashed through a tiny village. The name Euzès swam up for a second into the light, and vanished, while I knitted my brows and tried to remember the map.
The Mercedes roared on, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Paul Véry, clinging like a remora, give a heave of his muscles and lift a leg to climb inboard. I waited till the leg was just about to slide over the door, then I gave the wheel a jerk that sent the car across the road in a sickening, screeching swerve.
I heard him scream, saw him lurch outwards, but somehow he managed to retain his grip. He clung there, huddled together, yelling God knew what blasphemies at me.
I gave him a moment or so, and then I did it again. The tyres tore at the road, and I listened indifferently enough. If I had a burst, it would be just too bad, but unless I could get rid of Paul Véry and his gun, then I might just as well die this way as any other. I drove my foot down and dragged at the wheel again. The rear wheels skidded savagely, and the car bucked like a mad stallion. The lights careened dizzily across the night, and the darkness swung in a great are round us. For a moment I thought I had done it too violently, and had lost control. Paul Véry was yelling again, and I heard the frightened dog give a sharp howl as he was flung down. The car, rocking madly, lunged forward again at the same wicked pace. The beam swung ahead, swung and steadied like a searchlight. Two fir-trees flickered by like ghosts, and then the lights met – nothing.
The road ahead had switched sharp left. I saw the verge of it leap towards our wheels, and beyond it a yard of dusty ground where thin grass waved spectral antennae against an immensity of darkness. Stars and wind, and a strange shifting luminous abyss of darkness. The edge of the sea.
This time I skidded the Mercedes in earnest. The wheel kicked like a live thing, and the dust mushroomed up behind us in an atomic cloud. We only missed hitting a rock with our off-front wheel because both off-side wheels were a foot from the ground.
Then we were round. There was blood on my bottom lip, but I was feeling good.
Then I realized that the left-handed swerve had helped Paul Véry to heave himself inboard at last. Cursing, half sobbing, he flung himself into the car, and, almost before I knew what had happened, he had scrambled into the front seat and was crouched beside me, thrusting a shaking hand into the pocket of his coat.
25
In this heedless fury
He may show violence to cross himself.
I’ll follow the event …
(Tourneur)
‘Come on, you—,’ he said, in an ugly voice. ‘Pull her up, or you’ll get it! I warned you I carried a gun!’
I didn’t even glance at him. The second turning past Aiguebelle, I was thinking … by the big parasol pines …
‘In the belly,’ said Paul Véry, and added a filthy word.
I laughed. I was as cool as lake-water, and, for the moment, no more ruffled. The feel of that lovely car under my hands, in all her power and splendour, was to me like the feel of a sword in the hand of a man who has been fighting unarmed. The Mercedes was my weapon now, and by God! I would use her. I knew just how frightened Paul Véry was: I had watched it all, the gradual stretching of his nerves … the savage excitement of his murderous assignment, the acute pleasure of baiting me, the speed, the anticipation of the final thrill … and then, this. The man’s nerves were rasped naked. I had realized, watching him driving, that he was more than half afraid of his own speed. The delicious excitement of frightening himself, of terrifying me, had been half the thrill. No first-rate driver – I could hear Johnny telling me yet again – no first-rate driver is ever excited at speed. Driving, he would add, is just a job, and you can’t afford to let your brain revv up along with your engine. Then he would give that little smile of his, and the hedges would accelerate past us into a long grey blur. When you let excitement in, Johnny would add, in a lecture-room sort of voice, fear will follow.
And fear was in the car with us now. I could hear it raw in his voice. I could smell the sweat of it.
And I had in my hands the weapon to break him with. If I could smash his nerve completely before we reached the parasol pines … if I could get that gun away from him …
So I laughed, and drove my lovely shining sword slashing through the night.
‘Put the thing away,’ I said contemptuously. ‘If you shoot me, what d’you suppose would happen to the car – and you?’
I heard his breath hiss, and thought for a moment that he was far enough gone to shoot without thinking. But he didn’t. He merely cursed again, and moved up to me until I could feel something hard pressing against my body through my coat. It was shaking a little.
‘I mean it,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’ll do you, you –! Pull in, I tell you, or I’ll blow a hole in your guts and take the chance of stopping the car myself!’
We were on a long straight stretch of road. I drove my right foot hard down, and the Mercedes tore up the straight with a rising scream. The needle swung hard to the right and held there.
‘Some chance,’ I said derisively, ‘but go ahead. It’s Kramer’s car, after all; and he’s a fool to lend it you when he must know you’re a lousy driver.’
The gun wavered. I heard him let out a quivering breath. ‘If you tickle me with that thing at this speed,’ I added, ‘I can’t answer for the consequences.’
The gun withdrew. Ahead, the road curved, and I let my foot up a bit. Above the roar of the overdrive I heard him begin to curse again … ‘If I’d guessed you knew, you –, if I’d guessed—’ he said between his teeth, and told me what he would have liked to do to me. He was speaking in French, and gutter-French at that, so I missed a good deal of it, but I had to stop it somehow, before it took my mind off the road.
I cut across the stream of filth. ‘But it was obvious that I knew, monsieur.’
That shook him. ‘How?’
My voice dripped contempt like an icicle. ‘Do you really imagine that I’d have let you maul me about like that because I liked it? My dear Monsieur Véry, as a lover you’d hardly even pass the first test—’
Then he lurched at me. In lashing his precious vanity, I had gone too far. I thought he was going to shoot me and damn the consequences, but instead he lunged savagely at the wheel. I thought he had it, and that we would all go over the cliff; but he missed his grab, and fell against me, clawing at my legs.
I jerked the wheel, stamped on the brake, and sent the rear of the car round again in a left-handed skid. He was flung away from me against the side of the car.
‘Keep your hands off me, please,’ I told him, rather breathlessly, and straightened the Mercedes up.
He did not answer. He stayed slumped against the righthand door of the car, breathing noisily through his throat. Poor Rommel, behind us, was whining with fear. I began to wonder just how much more assault and battery the tyres would stand.
And at that moment we roared by a fork in the road.
The first fork to the right. Not far to go. For the first time I glanced briefly at Paul Véry, and experienced a sense of shock at what I saw.
He, at least, had had as much assault and battery as his nerves could take. Gone was the immaculate Frenchman of the Tistet-Védène, gone the velvet-voiced Don Juan of the Mediterranean night; in their place huddled a man with twitching hands and a face shining with sweat. Nothing, not even fear, could strip Paul Véry of his extraordinary good looks, but, somehow, they had cheapened in front of my eyes: the man who sat there, staring in fascinated horror at the hurtling road, might have been brought up in any Paris gutter.
Formidable no
longer. The power and competence that had seemed the very essence of the man had vanished: defeat – defeat by a woman – had knocked the props from under him. But he was still dangerous. The menace had not disappeared, it had only changed in quality. I was facing, instead of a powerful and relentless executioner, a mean and unpredictable thug.
What was more, I thought, a stupid thug. Only a stupid man, knowing how much I knew, would have talked to me as he had, taken the risks that he had taken, all for a moment’s self-gratification. The significance of his final exchange with Kramer suddenly struck me: only a conceited fool would have forgotten, or pretended to forget, such information at such a moment. Paul Véry was a tool, and, up to a point, a good tool. But shake him out of his master’s grip, and he was lost.
These speculations, flashing through my mind in the brief moment before I turned back to watch the road, effectively silenced any further attempts on my part to bait Paul Véry. In deliberately trying to crack his nerve, I had been running a far graver risk than I had known. He was, actually, quite stupid enough, in a moment of blind rage, to have shot me as I drove. The last incident had proved it, when, maddened by my mockery, he had flung himself at the wheel. If, at that moment, he had had his gun in his hand …
My heart gave a jerk in my breast, then seemed to tip over, sickeningly, and spill chilled blood down all my veins, so that even my fingers tingled.
If he had had his gun.
Clearly, in imagination, I heard his voice again, as I had heard it in Kramer’s office. ‘Throw me my coat.’ Would he have spoken so carelessly if there had been a gun in the pocket? I remembered him standing, dark and handsome in his well-fitting suit, by the petrol pumps in Marseilles. No bulging pocket had spoiled the fit of that coat …
I flashed a look at him as I lifted my foot a little. His eyes were fixed on the road.
I drew my left hand softly off the wheel, and, with a breath that was a prayer, felt down beside me. There was a pocket on the car door. I slipped my hand into it.
Cold, deadly, and infinitely comforting, the gun slid into my grasp.
And at that moment, like great grey clouds billowing in the furthermost tip of our beam of light, I saw the parasol pines.
26
We will die, all three
(Shakespeare)
Like a flash, I cut out the headlights, but Paul Véry had seen them. I saw him stiffen, and shoot his neck out like a bird of prey.
There was only one thing to do. I must drive straight on past the turning, ditch my companion some way beyond, and then return to deal with André alone. It seems odd that it never occurred to me to shoot Paul Véry – though perhaps not; I had never handled a gun in my life.
‘Listen to me,’ I said rapidly. We were nearly there. The pines stood back from the road, making a great grove like a tent. ‘I’ve got—’
But I was too late. Even as I spoke the first of the great trees loomed over the car, shutting out the stars, and our dimmed lights had picked out the shape of a van, parked on the beaten dust a little way ahead, and, beside the van, the figure of a man. André, who was a bit of a fool, had not parked out of sight.
Paul Véry let out a yell: ‘André! Ici Jean! Au secours!’
I switched the headlamps full on, and trod on the accelerator. The beam of light shot out, catching the man who ran forward under the cover of the pines.
It was Marsden. He had a gun in his hand.
‘A moi! André!’ yelled Paul Véry. He was standing, leaning forward, half out of the car.
Marsden had reached the edge of the road. Was in the road. I put a fist down on the klaxon, and my foot hard down on the boards, and, with a little sob of pure terror, I drove that ton or so of murderous, screaming metal straight at him.
I saw him jump; at least, I think I did, but the next few seconds were just a terrifying blur. I remember Marsden’s face, white in the roaring light; his mouth was a gaping hole; he was yelling. There was a scarlet stab of flame: another. Then the car hit something, and the whole world heeled over in a rocketing, exploding skid. The Mercedes seemed to rear straight up in the air, and her headlights raked a dizzy arc of sky. Then they went out, and darkness stamped down on us as a man stamps on a beetle. Clinging to that crazily kicking wheel, blinded, half-stunned, wholly automatic, I fought the car. For a moment I thought I had her, then she swept into a bucketing turn. The night split, wheeled, hung suspended for a million years, then shattered into splinters of flame. Then silence, broken only by the tiny tinkle of falling glass.
There was a shout, a thud of feet running. The door of the Mercedes was wrenched open, and hands seized me out of the darkness.
There was a roaring in my ears. The night, the stars, were spiralling down an enormous, narrowing funnel. Somewhere, far down the gyroscope, I heard a rough exclamation, then another shout – voices, urgent, sharp with something that might have been fear. Hands moved over me, patting, searching. Someone had hold of my head, and was forcing liquid between my teeth.
I choked, gasped, stirred, and the gyrating universe whirred slowly to a standstill, re-focusing itself around me. The stars steadied themselves, and hung, only faintly tremulous, in a still pall of sky. There were two men beside the car. One was holding me; the other bent over me in the darkness, peering down. His face blurred palely in front of me; it was Marsden. I was conscious, first of all, of a tremendous wave of pure relief; I hadn’t killed him after all. Then I began to struggle feebly against the arms that held me.
‘I’ve got a gun,’ I said firmly.
Amazingly, somebody laughed, and the arms tightened.
‘Lie still, you little fire-eater. Haven’t you done enough for one night?’
I turned my head and blinked stupidly.
‘Richard! But – but you’re tied up in the van. I was going to rescue you.’
He laughed again, a little shakenly. ‘Yes, I know, my darling. But there’s no need to run over the police in the process.’
‘Police?’
Marsden was grinning down at me. ‘Strictly unofficial, madam. But Scotland Yard in person!’
‘I – I’m awfully sorry,’ I said feebly. ‘I thought you were André. One of them, anyway. And you shot at me, didn’t you?’
‘We both did,’ said Marsden ruefully. ‘I knew it was Kramer’s car, and I thought he’d seen me and was getting away.’
‘But he was yelling for help.’
‘My French isn’t all that good,’ said Marsden simply, ‘and I couldn’t really hear him anyway. There wasn’t a great deal of time to think, you know.’
Richard spoke. ‘Can you move all right, Charity? You’d better get out of the car. It’s in a rather uncertain position, to say the least.’
I sat up out of his arms and felt my limbs gingerly.
‘I think I’m all right.’ With their assistance I climbed out of the Mercedes. Now that my eyes were accustomed to the darkness I could see quite clearly in the starlight. The car had skidded clean off the main road, and had ended up some yards down the track on the right, facing the way I had come. She was standing, decorously enough, on the seaward verge of the track, and for a moment I could not see what Richard meant. Then I saw. The night swayed perilously, and I was glad of the support of Richard’s arm. The edge of the little road was the edge of the cliffs. A yard beyond the near-wheels of the car, the ground dropped sheer to the sea, three hundred feet below.
‘I – I had some luck, didn’t I?’ I said shakily. ‘What did we hit?’
‘Nothing. Marsden got one of your front tyres. You turned round twice and skated backwards down here. The car’s not even dented – except for a headlamp. I did that.’
I pushed my hair back from my forehead, and took a deep breath of the sweet night air. Things had steadied round me, and I felt a good deal more normal. Richard and Marsden were gently urging me across the road and under cover of the trees.
‘It sounds like some very pretty shooting,’ I said, then memory flooded back. ??
?David!’ I cried. ‘Where’s David?’
‘He’s all right; he’s still asleep. He’s safe in a ditch a hundred yards or so away; we moved him from the danger zone.’
‘And – and Paul Véry?’
‘Alive,’ said Marsden grimly. ‘He’s unconscious, and of course I don’t know how badly he may be hurt. I haven’t looked yet. He didn’t look too good. Byron got him out of the car; he’s lying behind it. I’ll go back and have a look at him in a minute.’
‘Right,’ said Richard, ‘but we’d better let Charity put us in the picture quickly, in case things start to move again. What were you doing in Kramer’s car with that man? And where’s Kramer? Marsden said Kramer was going to follow the van out.’
‘Kramer’s coming,’ I said. ‘He and Loraine are following in your car. It was to be sent over the cliff with you and David in it, Richard.’
‘My car, eh?’ His voice was hard. ‘We might have thought of that, Marsden. And I suppose that thug I laid out just now is Loraine’s real husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘The man who murdered Tony and hit David. …’ His expression was ugly, but it changed as we reached the shelter of the trees and he spoke to me again: ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ He made me sit down behind an enormous double-trunked tree, with the van between me and the road.
‘Yes, perfectly. Don’t worry about me. Go and – oh!’ My hand flew to my mouth. ‘Rommel!’ I said, aghast.
‘What?’ Richard’s voice was blank.
‘Rommel, the dog. He was in the back of the car. I’ll never forgive myself if he’s hurt.’
‘There wasn’t any dog in the back of the car.’
‘But there must have been—’
‘I assure you there wasn’t.’
I was on my feet, steadying myself by the trunk of one of the trees.
‘He must have been thrown out. He’ll be lying around somewhere. Perhaps he’s hurt—’