The Stone Leopard

by Colin Forbes

  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.