by Mary Stewart
We shot out of the deep shadow of the woods into the open valley. Under the racing wheels the road seemed to smooth itself and straighten, and the Mercedes went forward like a horse suddenly given the spur.
‘And there he is,’ added Lewis.
And there indeed he was, a tiny, racing shadow, barely a quarter of a mile ahead. To our right the river, smooth here, gleamed like silver, and the road lay in a sort of blurred brightness in the light of the dying moon. Along the water-meadows the faint white haze of early morning was rising from the grass. The cattle stood knee-deep in it. The air pouring through my half open window was pure and cold and sharp with the scent of pines.
‘Won’t he see us?’ Tim’s voice was quick with apprehension.
‘I doubt it,’ said Lewis. ‘We’re not in his mirror yet, and he’d have to turn right round and take a good look to see us at all, and he’s not going to do that, not at that speed. If he’s expecting to be chased at all, he’s expecting the police, and they’d be after him with all lights blazing, I have no doubt.’
‘He must have had a fright when we came after him through the village.’
‘I’m sure he did, but if we’d been police we’d have stopped then and there. We couldn’t help seeing the jeep, and he knew it. He wasn’t expecting them to be after him as quickly as that. No, I don’t think he has any reason to be apprehensive. I’ll try to close up a little, when we get near the turning. We don’t want to overshoot him.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Heaven knows,’ said Lewis cheerfully, ‘play it as it comes, and keep our powder dry.’
‘With a Beretta—’ began Timothy.
‘There’s the village,’ I said quickly, ‘just beyond that curve. I can see the church spire over the trees.’
Next moment the fleeing jeep had vanished round the curve.
‘Then hold on to your hats,’ said Lewis. ‘This is where we close up.’
18
What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?
Shakespeare: Macbeth
Lewis had been right. It seemed that Sandor was not worried about the possibility of being followed. As the jeep reached the outskirts of the cluster of houses on the edge of the lake, we were barely two hundred yards behind him. But he gave no sign that he was aware of the following car. He slowed down for the village street, and when he reached the turn-off by the big hotel, he swung left without a pause.
A matter of seconds later we took the turn after him.
The road was narrow and very steep, almost immediately beginning its twisting course up the hillside. As we turned into it our quarry was already invisible, but even above the sound of our own engine the roar of the jeep’s engine echoed back as it tore its way up the narrow canyon between the houses.
Lewis made a sound of satisfaction. ‘This is a pushover. We’ve only to keep a couple of bends behind him and he hasn’t a chance of knowing he’s followed . . . though heaven knows it may be a different matter when we get up above the tree line.’
‘Can you see?’ I asked. To me the road was barely visible, its gravel surface pitted, and streaked with the shadows of the houses, and here and there lost deep in blackness under looming trees.
‘Well enough.’ And indeed the Mercedes was climbing at a fair speed. He added: ‘I suppose, Tim, that the biter isn’t being bit. Anything behind us?’
‘Good lord.’ Timothy sounded thoroughly started. There was a pause. ‘No. No, I’m sure there isn’t. Should there be?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Lewis tranquilly, ‘but it’s as well to know. He made a telephone call, after all, and it needn’t necessarily have been to warn the people ahead of him. My God, what a road! Van, I suppose it’s not the slightest use asking you to look at the map under these conditions?’
‘Not the slightest, I’m sorry, I can’t see a thing.’
‘Well, at least there’s no need to look for turnings,’ said Lewis. ‘There’ll be nothing going off this but a chamois track. All we have to avoid is running slap into his rear bumper.’
We were clear of the few houses now, and the road, though not quite so steep, was aiming along the flank of the mountain, and had deteriorated into something little more than a track with a gravel surface here and there badly broken. Below us lay the little cluster of houses and the church and the gleaming waters of the small lake. Above us, to the left of the road, the mountain pines were already crowding. The road ran under a dense and overhanging wall of them, like a river under a break-water. Then at the next upward bend it twisted back and was into them, burrowing immediately through deep forest, only here and there shaking itself clear of trees so that for a few yards the fading moonlight, coupled with the growing light of dawn, could show us the way. Lewis drove with no noticeable hesitation and certainly with no diminution of speed. But I thought it was not a road I would have cared to drive myself even in broad daylight.
As we raced and lurched upwards, bend after bend, I could hear above us the intermittent splutter of the jeep’s engine, the sound coming in sharp echoing gusts as trees and rocks flashed between to cut it off. Above the sound of our own motor it came as little more than a recurrent echo for which one had to listen, and to Sandor in the jeep it was to be hoped that the noise of our climb, less audible by far than his, came merely like a periodic echo of his own.
The trees were thinning. The road twisted again under us, and the Mercedes lurched across ruts and swung round another hairpin, running momentarily clear of forest, so that down to our right we got a sudden dawnlit view of the valley bottom tucked between its dark hills. The lake was polished pewter wisping with silver mist. The stars had gone, and the moon hung in the morning air, rubbed and faded like a thin old coin.
The Mercedes came to a rocking halt, and the engine died. Lewis wound down his window and in with the cold damp air came the mountain silence, broken only by the stuttering roar of the jeep’s engine somewhere above us.
‘The map, please.’
I handed it over, folded open at the place. He studied it for a moment, peering close in the light of the probing torch.
‘As I remembered. This doesn’t go the whole way up. There’s some building marked . . . I don’t know what, it doesn’t look much, but there’s a halt for the rack railway, and the road doesn’t go any farther. That’s about two-thirds of the way up. The remaining third is only traversed by the railway. The rocks up there look pretty sheer; there are crags marked. The railway goes right to the restaurant on the summit; I suppose it tunnels some of the way. Thanks.’ He dropped the map and torch back on to my knee and started the car again. ‘I reckon we’re almost there now. Wherever he’s making for, he’ll have to leave the jeep at the end of the road, and that can’t be more than about three bends above us. We’ll stop while we’re still under cover of his engine. Here’s a good place.’
A matter of seconds later the Mercedes was berthed deep in the shadow of the trees with her nose to the road, and Lewis was giving us our orders in an urgent undertone.
‘You’d better both come with me, only for God’s sake keep quiet and keep under cover. Stay about twenty yards back and don’t break cover until I give you the sign. I may need you, even if it’s only as messengers. Here’s the spare car key. I’m leaving it here.’
At the foot of a tree a clump of toadstools showed sharply in the misty dusk. They had long pallid stems and scarlet caps spotted with white – the traditional toadstools of fairy-tale. A small flat stone lay beside them. As Lewis stooped to lift this and thrust the spare key underneath, Timothy said sharply:
‘He’s stopped.’
‘Then come on,’ said Lewis, and swinging himself up the bank, vanished at a run up through the trees towards the next branch of the road.
We followed him. The going was very steep; smooth enough, clay and rock covered with pine needles, but here and there the rock was loose and there were brambles, so we went carefully, glad of the now steadily growi
ng light.
The next arm of the track was some seventy feet above where the Mercedes was parked. Lewis, above us, was edging his way cautiously out among the thinning trees, to stand there motionless for a moment, hardly visible even to us. The light was in that curious shifting phase between the clear brilliance of moonlight and the brightening day; where it fell most strongly it was a pearled and misty grey, but everything lacked definition; the trees, the track, the grey rock, the hanging woods still above us, looked as insubstantial and vague as those in a badly focused and fading film.
It was even difficult to be sure when Lewis gestured us to follow him, but suddenly the place where he had been standing was empty. Panting a little, I laid hold of a sapling and pulled myself, in my turn, up to the edge of the road. This was empty. But a faint movement in the trees to the other side of it showed where he was heading up towards the last curve before the building. As we followed, I was thankful to realise that our progress was covered by the splash and fall of a small rivulet tumbling down from some spring and losing itself in a stone-faced gully by the roadside.
Lewis was pausing above us once more, but this time after he had beckoned us up he stayed where he was, and as we scrambled to his level he reached an arm down, pulled me up and held me.
The first thing I saw was the building. This was not a house, but simply a small square chimneyless block with a pitched roof of corrugated iron, set at a passing place of the railway – one of those short stretches of double track where trains can pass – and acting perhaps as a shelter for railwaymen or a place for storing materials. Whatever it was, it marked the end of the road. Outside it the track petered out in a cleared space of beaten earth and gravel which looked like a disused quarry, overhung with bushes and ragged saplings. Just at present the place was a tangle of misty shadows, but backed well into it under some hanging creeper that dangled from the rock above, I could dimly see what I took to be the jeep.
There was no light or movement anywhere.
Lewis said softly: ‘There’s the jeep, do you see? But he’s not there. I’ve just seen him a little farther up the hill. He’s still alone, and it’s pretty clear he has no idea there’s anybody after him. I’d bet my last penny he’s going up to the restaurant – there’s nowhere else to go – and he’s going up by the railway. I’m going straight after him. Tim, I want you to take a look at that jeep. Do you think you could immobilise it? Good man. Do so, and have a quick look at the building – I don’t suppose for a moment that the stuff’s there, he hasn’t had time, but you know what to look for. Then come on up after us. You can’t get lost if you stick to the railway. Vanessa, you’ll stay with me.’
We ran across the open piece of road, dodged past the quarry in the shelter of the overhang, and were soon picking our way round the side of the building. Behind us came the faint metallic noises of Timothy tackling the jeep. As we slid past the door of the shed, Lewis tried it quickly. It was locked.
‘Well, that saves a bit of trouble,’ he said. ‘Not that it’d be there, but no stone unturned is the motto of the PEC Sales Department.’
‘You’ve got yourself quite a job, then, considering the terrain,’ I said dryly.
‘You’re telling me. I’m praying to all the gods at once that he’ll double straight up to the restaurant and dump it there. Here’s the railway, and it looks as if there’s a path of a sort running beside it . . . Just as well, railways are hellish to walk along. Can you manage it?’
He was already leading the way at a good pace. The question, I gathered, had been no more than one of those charming concessions which make a woman’s life so much more interesting (I’ve always thought) than a man’s. In actual fact, Lewis invariably took it serenely for granted that I could and would do exactly what he expected of me, but it helps occasionally to be made to feel that it is little short of marvellous for anything so rare, so precious, and so fragile to compete with the tough world of men.
‘Wither thou goest, I will go. Excelsior.’ I said heroically, going after him up the perfectly easy path beside the track of the railway.
This was a narrow-gauge affair, cutting its way up through rocks and trees in what was, for a railway, a series of frightening slopes. Some of its climbs would, indeed, have been steep even for a motor road. I had not before seen how a rack railway worked. Between the rails, which gleamed like steel ribbons with the constant daily use, was the rack, like nothing more or less than a heavy cog-wheel unrolled and laid flat, a fierce-looking toothed rail standing well above the other two. I supposed that some answering pinion wheel on the engine engaged with the teeth of the rack line and held the train, whether climbing or descending the steepest gradient, at the same controlled and regular speed.
We were still making our way through trees, but these were now more sparsely scattered, and soon gave way to the barer slopes of the higher reaches of the mountain. Visibility was still poor. The only movement I could see was that of the mist which shifted and clung between the scattered pines, and once a big black bird – a jackdaw – which flew clumsily down past us with a startled ‘Tchack!’
‘Where did you see him?’ I asked.
Lewis pointed above and ahead to where the line swooped in a lifting curve round a shoulder of white rock. ‘Just a glimpse of him there. He was going at a hell of a speed.’
He himself was setting no mean pace. By the time he had reached the same corner I was beginning to feel a little more genuinely precious and fragile myself, but I was able to get my breath while he left me to reconnoitre the stretch ahead of us. Apparently the line was clear, for he beckoned me up beside him again, and on we toiled. At least, I toiled. Lewis seemed as fresh as a daisy. In fairness to myself I thought that anyone would have been feeling fragile after what I had already been through that night. All Lewis had had to do was to drive two hundred kilometres or so since he had left Vienna . . .
We got along at a fair speed, prospecting carefully at the bends, and making very little sound. Fortunately my shoes were rubber-soled, and Lewis, though not wearing what I had dubbed to myself his spy kit, seemed able to move as quietly as he had done in my bedroom at Oberhausen. And presently there was no need of cover at all, because the mist came down.
I suppose this would in normal circumstances have made the going much more difficult, but it lifted just then the worst of our responsibilities, that of being seen by our quarry; and there was certainly no danger of our losing the way with visibility varying from ten to twenty-five yards. The railway led us as surely as a pillar of fire into the dim heights of the mountain.
But by no means as straight. If we had to keep to its track we had to go the long way round. It was to be assumed that the permanent way would double back on itself to take the easiest course up the mountain, as a road zigzags its way up the steepest slopes. If we had been able to see, we could have short-circuited the curves; as it was, not knowing the terrain, and afraid of where a false step or a false trail might lead us, we were forced to stay beside the rails. There was only one comfort in this, that, unless he knew the mountainside very well indeed, Sandor Balog would have to do the same thing. With any luck we should be following closely on his exact trail, and in his turn, Timothy would be able to trace us.
Lewis said: ‘It’d be interesting to know what time the first train comes up.’
‘I do know. The first one’s at seven. The porter told us, and there was a sort of time-table in the hall at the hotel, and we checked with that, because we thought that if we were here a few days, we might take the trip.’ I added, grimly: ‘It seems funny, doesn’t it, to think of coming up here for pleasure?’
He grinned. ‘You never know your luck.’
Then he put his arm out quickly, barring my path, and we stood still. Ahead of us the mist had thinned, smoking momentarily aside to show us a long empty stretch of the mountain ahead. I saw long reaches of pale rock, strewn with dwarfed bushes and drifts of thick tough grass, and here and there a solitary tree, warped and br
oken by frost, and reaching long fingers down the wind. What bushes there were were low growing, thin-leaved mountain varieties, that seemed to cling against grey rock where nothing should have been able to survive.
But I hardly took this in, except as a quick impression. I was looking at Lewis. That last response of his had been casual, even ironic, but – it came to me like a blinding light out of the thin mist – he had meant it. I knew every tone of his voice, and he had meant it. For me the night had held terror, relief, joy, and then a sort of keyed-up excitement; and drugged with this and sleeplessness, and buoyed up by the intense relief and pleasure of Lewis’s company, I had been floating along in a kind of dream – apprehensive, yes, but no longer scared; nothing could happen to me when he was there. But with him, I now realised, it was more than this; more positive than this. It was not simply that as a man he wasn’t prey to my kind of physical weakness and fear, nor just that he had the end of an exacting job in sight. He was, quite positively, enjoying himself.
‘Lewis,’ I said accusingly, ‘can you possibly be wanting some rough stuff?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ He said it very lightly, and it was a lie – a lie he didn’t even trouble to follow up, but gave it away with the next sentence. ‘Is your face still sore?’
‘My face? I – yes, I suppose it is.’ I put a hand to the swollen cheek, realising how stiff my bruised mouth was. ‘I was too busy to think about it, but it must look awful, does it?’
‘Not from this side, beautiful. Praise be, this blessed mist’s clearing just in time. There’s a tunnel ahead.’
‘A tunnel?’
‘Yes. See? It looks like a cave mouth. Heaven knows how long it is. I wish to God we could see a little farther, and take a short cut straight up. Too bad if we had to – ah!’
Even as he spoke there came another of those queer freak currents of air, lifting the mist away. He pointed straight up the mountainside away from the rail track. ‘There, you can see where the track goes, cutting along above this again. Come on, we’ll take a chance on this. Let’s by-pass this tunnel.’
