by John Brunner
“Christ, you must be psychic. Where?”
“His Bentley is waiting in Line D at Dover for the first available vacancy on a cross-channel ferry.”
“But he can’t drive,” Laird said stupidly.
“He has someone with him who can.”
“Oh my God. You must mean Medea Logan!”
THIRTY-THREE
There was a pause. Eventually Bitchy said, “Which one of us is psychic?”
“We just called the Rapallo. They said she’d checked out… But are you sure she’s with Tileman?”
“The description fits.”
“How did you find out?”
“Trade secret!” Bitchy snapped, then relented. “Sorry. Just take my word my contact is reliable. Isn’t he a bastard, though? I did so hope he’d stick around and hit me with that suit for slander! At least we’ve panicked him, though.”
“But have we?” Laird countered grimly. “Hang on. Dagmar!”
“Yes?”
“Is Tileman the kind of man who can be scared easily?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, it’s very hard. I saw him when he was the most frightened in his life, coming from East Germany, and always he was calm, like a machine.”
“So why should he decide to cut and run? He’s at Dover with Medea, waiting for a boat to France.”
The girls gasped in unison. Dagmar said after a pause for thought, “Courcy, you said about this place where Mrs Logan lives—are there many rich people, very bored?”
“Christ, are they ever bored at Fastosa? Half of them are so bored they can’t even be bothered to go bed-hopping any longer!”
Laird snapped at the phone. “Bitchy, he may just be shifting his centre of operations, not panicking at all. Do you know anything about Fastosa?”
“Of course. It’s a— Lord, that’s where Medea lives, isn’t it? I know it; they practically use banknotes for beermats! If Tileman can get his raw materials shipped in, he’ll simply coin it down there!”
Laird hesitated. “I’m going after him,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“I’m going after him! I have a hundred-and-thirty-mile-an-hour car downstairs. And there are air routes across the Channel, aren’t there?”
“Yes, of course. But what can you do?”
“Make like Nemesis, if nothing else.”
“Try and catch them on the road? There are five or six routes they could take—”
“I know, I know! But how would Tileman like it if he got to Fastosa and found me sitting waiting for him?”
“Laird, they’re using a Bentley, and that’s no slouch of a car. If they’re at Dover already, they have three hours’ start and possibly more. It’s August, and in August you don’t just ask for a Channel flight—though wait a second; it is Monday, so you might be lucky because most people start their holidays over a weekend… Even so, you’d be at least four or five hours behind them.”
“I’ll drive around the clock if I have to,” Laird said, and threw down the phone.
Flushed with excitement, Courcy said, “No, you wouldn’t have to drive around the clock! I could spell you!”
“I too!” Dagmar exclaimed. “I drove your car before, on Saturday night!”
“Shut up and get out of my way—”
“Laird!” Courcy leapt to her feet and confronted him, hands on hips. “Don’t argue with me, is that clear?” Her voice was suddenly fierce. “Don’t you realise what that devil Tileman did? I’m not kidding myself that Sammy would have married me and we’d have lived happily ever after amen, but…” She was almost crying with the intensity of her feeling. “Damn you, don’t you understand?”
Laird drew a deep breath. “Sure I do! But I can just throw some things in a bag, grab my passport, and—”
“The hell you can! You have to book a passage, you have to sort out all sorts of documents for the car, and heaven knows what else!”
Laird’s heart sank like an iron bar through water. He said faintly, “I’d clean forgotten about all that. The guy at Carriage Trade said something, but… The hell with the car, then! I can simply fly out to Málaga, and—”
“I?” said Courcy.
The word floated in the air for a short eternity.
“Oh, blast you! All right!”
“I’ll dash home and get my passport, then!” Courcy exclaimed, and headed for the door.
“I have my passport,” Dagmar said softly. “I carry it always.”
For an instant Laird thought Courcy was going to throw herself bodily at the German girl.
Christ, what a way to start a trip like this, as though the idea wasn’t crazy enough in itself!
“Oh, for—! Go ahead, Courcy, and hurry!”
In a panic of legs she vanished through the door, and he rounded on Dagmar.
“Get on the phone,” he commanded. “Call every airline you can find which serves Southern Spain. Find out the earliest bookings they can offer us.”
“For two or three people?” Dagmar said.
“Anything!”
He stormed into the bedroom to find a bag and fill it with essentials.
When he came back, he found Dagmar still at the phone, pale and worried.
“Laird, there is nothing before Wednesday with any airline I can find!”
This bloody world! They can fly you anywhere in next to no time, but you have to wait two days before you go!
“Then try the Channel air-ferries,” he rapped. “No, wait a second. Ring Carriage Trade and ask for Halliard and say it’s urgent. He asked if I might want to take the car to the Continent and I said yes and he promised to fix the necessary papers. He might have them ready by now, I guess.”
As Dagmar obediently dialled, Polly said from the corner where she had been sitting aloof, “Laird, can I do anything to help?”
“Not right now, thanks,” Laird said gruffly, and fumbled out a cigarette. He stared out across the mews, remembering it was from the other side of those panes that a window-cleaner had spotted Sammy lying dead.
Behind him Dagmar said, “Laird, the papers for the car are ready!”
“That’s a miracle! All right, start checking the Channel air-ferries. Now there is something you can do, Polly. Dash along to Carriage Trade and pick up the documents for me! And see if Harry Pentecost is in the workshops and tell him to bring along anything he thinks the Jensen may need if it’s going to do a thousand miles today.”
Polly ran for the door.
Waiting for a reply from the first air-ferry she had dialled, Dagmar said, “And if there is nothing available today…?”
“Maybe I can charter a plane. Christ, I don’t know!” Laird sucked on his cigarette furiously and discovered after two vain drags that he had clean forgotten to light it.
It was forty minutes after Bitchy called that Dagmar turned in triumph and reported that a firm named Anglofrance Airlift could offer them a cancellation provided they could reach Landfall Airport in Kent before two-thirty.
Laird checked his watch. “I guess we might make that! Grab it!”
Outside there was a roar as Courcy’s little Spitfire slammed to a halt.
Thank heaven for that! Courcy would have clawed my eyes out if I’d had to leave before she got back!
Abruptly exuberant, he grinned at Polly who had dutifully fetched the documents from Carriage Trade. Behind him, Dagmar said to the phone, “Yes, driver and two passengers.”
“Three,” Polly said unexpectedly.
“What?”
“Three passengers!” Polly opened her bag and produced her own passport, fixing Laird with her eyes.
“He was my brother,” she said. And, as Courcy’s feet clattered on the stairs, she added, “Whatever he may have been to anyone else!”
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, do we have to wrangle over this now?
“Will they take all of us?” Laird rapped at Dagmar. She nodded.
“Then come on, all of you! Bring your aunts and uncles too,
if you like—just so long as you don’t make me miss that plane!”
THIRTY-FOUR
Harry Pentecost was in the garage, stowing a pack of spares in the Jensen. He greeted Laird with a grin.
“I’ve put in a spare set of points and eight spare plugs, sir, and enough oil for a change if you need one. I’d have put in a set of gaskets if I could, but you can pick those up at any Chrysler agency!”
“Expect me to need them?” Laird demanded, slinging his own back in the back.
“No! Mr Logan used to drive to the South of France in this car; two or three times last summer he did that. Never a lick of trouble.”
Across the mews, Courcy shouted for help. She was hauling out bags and cases from the back of the Spitfire.
“Dagmar hasn’t anything!” she explained at the top of her voice. “I brought everything I could manage!”
Polly and Dagmar ran to help her. Pentecost coughed behind his hand.
“Mind if I ask where you’re going, sir?”
“To try and catch the guy who killed Sammy Logan,” Laird said.
Pentecost was silent for a moment. He said finally, “I saw the Echo this morning, sir. I remember Mr Logan used to go to the Lizzie Borden club a lot. Is…?”
“Yes, there’s a connection.”
“Then I hope you get him, sir. I really do. Whoever the bastard is.”
“So do I,” Laird said, and grinned like a hungry wolf.
Courcy rushed up, followed by the other girls, and piled what she had brought into the car. Dumping her load, she turned to Pentecost and thrust a ring of keys at him.
“Be a love and put my car in the garage here, will you? Just in case it rains!”
“Certainly, miss,” Pentecost said. “By the way, if you don’t mind my saying so… it’s the first time I’ve seen you looking so well since Mr Logan died.”
Courcy stared at him in astonishment for a second. Then, disregarding his grease-stained overalls, she flung her arms around him.
“Harry, you’re a darling!” she exclaimed and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek before jumping into the Jensen alongside Laird.
“You have a smut on your nose,” Laird said, waiting for a chance to accelerate from the end of the mews into the main street.
“Wouldn’t be surprised! But isn’t Harry a dear, really? You know, I think he’s almost the only person, apart from us, who really cared when Sammy died.”
And I thought I discovered that.
Laird put his foot down and the car leapt forward like a spurred horse.
Threading his way through the South London traffic was one of the most frustrating experiences of Laird’s life; even when he reached the metropolitan boundary and was able to blast ahead down the eastbound road he had to keep remembering about the national speed limit and creep along at barely half the car’s ultimate performance. But it would have been disastrous to risk being flagged down by the police at this stage.
Cars, grumbling trucks, tourist buses—everything seemed to be conspiring to prevent them making the plane. And yet somehow, by dint of some hair’s-breadth overtaking, they found the sign for Landfall Airport at twenty-five past two.
“Cross your fingers,” Laird said, and slammed down the sideroad indicated by the sign. “By the way,” he added, “is there a speed limit in France?”
“There wasn’t the last time I went over there,” Courcy said.
“Praise be! Courcy, see if there are any maps in the door-pocket, will you? If I know Sammy there are bound to be. I only have half an idea where we’re going, and it’d be damned silly if we went a hundred miles out of our way, wouldn’t it? To start with, you could find out where in France this plane is going to put us down!”
THIRTY-FIVE
The Jensen was the last car on the plane—a big Bristol Freighter—but that was fine; it meant it would also be the first to disembark. Having spent his entire cash reserve on the fares for them all, Laird gathered up the maps Courcy had found and spent the duration of the short flight studying them. Their landing-point was between Dieppe and Rouen. If Tileman had had to settle for a Calais boat rather than a Boulogne boat, that might reduce their lead.
“Fastosa is pretty close to Málaga, right?” Laird said, leafing through the Spanish maps.
“Right,” Courcy confirmed.
“Damnation. That means going through Madrid, and I’d hoped to avoid big cities.”
“You can’t—not unless they’ve built a hell of a lot of new roads since I last went to Spain,” Courcy shrugged.
“All right, then. We go Rouen, Chartres, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Bayonne—and south in the nearest we can manage to a straight line aimed at Málaga.” Laird folded the maps and handed them back to Courcy. “It looks like quite a trip!”
“I wish we could just be doing it,” Courcy said sadly. “For fun, I mean!”
“Me too,” Laird said. “Me too.”
The plane set them down on a sunlit country airport where they fretted over the official procedure that prevented them from getting straight into the car and heading south. But they eventually escaped the net of bureaucracy and—stopping only to buy some francs with one of Laird’s travellers’ cheques—they headed for the road again.
“Just as well you’re carrying dollars,” Courcy said as they waited for a Peugeot to get out of their way. “If we’d had to bring pounds with us we’d never have made it. I used up my fifty-quid allowance in May when Sammy brought me over to Juan-les-Pins.”
“I don’t imagine Sammy had many problems in that area,” Laird grunted.
“No. There’s always a way around everything. Like Bitchy said, even murder…”
Laird rolled the car past a signpost showing routes for Dieppe, Rouen and Paris. He said, “For once, Bitchy is going to be proved wrong.”
The Rouen road was a winding but fairly level two-laner, bordered by disheartened Napoleonic poplars that made the sun flicker on the windows. Shortly it debouched on to a Route Nationale, and Laird glanced at his watch.
“This is where we have to start hurrying,” he said.
There was a Citroën racing down the road in the direction he wanted to follow. He let it go by, then put his foot down as he hauled over the wheel. They were doing ninety-five when they overtook the Citroën and he had to keep on overtaking because there was a string of cars beyond. Polly uttered an exclamation, half-rising from her seat on seeing that another line of cars was approaching from the opposite direction.
“Relax and put your belt on!” Laird snapped at her, pushing the accelerator all the way to the floor. They cleared the right-hand line of cars at about a hundred and twenty and missed the first oncoming vehicle by a good thirty feet.
“It’s going to be like this all the way,” he added. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to get used to it. Courcy, can you light me a cigarette?”
The signposts continued to say Rouen.
After half an hour it began to feel as though the car was an extension of himself, instantly responsive but immune to fatigue. The flat rolling country became as detached as a map of itself, a mere series of intersecting lines designed to facilitate passage, having no reality between stopping places. Rouen to Tours: 168 miles…
Rouen went by, shimmering in the afternoon heat. At one point Laird almost missed a signpost but recovered in time, to the hooted complaints of other traffic.
“Funny!” Courcy said. “Sammy told me Rouen was the town where he always took wrong turnings. He could never work out why.”
Laird felt an eerie sensation, as though the car carried an extra passenger, watching and approving what he was doing. The signs said N154 Chartres.
Evreux—Nonancourt—Dreux. At Dreux a right turn and southwards. The road was fast and straight but carried a lot of traffic, from lumbering trucks with monstrous trailers to little chuggy 2 CV’s. Where there were trees lining the road, their shadows blink-blinked like an old movie.
“Laird!” Diffidentl
y from behind him, Polly—blushing! “I—uh—I know I’m being an awful nuisance, but do you think you could…?”
“Pull up for a moment?”
“Yes!”
He sighed and looked for a side-turning. To reassure Polly, Courcy checked the map.
“We’re averaging well over fifty miles an hour,” she said. “Towns and all. Medea can’t possibly be doing any better.”
“Great!” Laird said, and let the car roll to the side of the road.
“Uh—isn’t this a little public?” Polly ventured.
“As I remember France,” Laird grunted, “nobody’s apt to run you in for this. Make the most if it. By the way, does anybody here speak French?”
“Sort of,” Courcy said.
“You’re elected. Next time we go through a town, since we didn’t take time out for lunch, go buy us something to eat—bread, cheese, tomatoes, anything we can eat with our fingers. And a bottle of wine, too. This is going to be a long ride.”
The signs said N154 Orléans, N10 Tours.
Between Chartres and Tours they shared out what Courcy had bought: crusty bread torn into irregular hunks, lumps of cheese and pâté, leaky tomatoes, washed down with gulps of wine. She had bought cigarettes as well, a couple of packs of Gitanes. When he felt the rough smoke on his tongue Laird decided for the first time he was really in France. Before that, the journey had been too hectic for him to react.
“This is what Sammy liked to do,” Courcy said. “Except we didn’t picnic on the move—we went off down a lane and sat in a field.”
The sense of having an extra passenger grew stronger. Tours to Bordeaux: 207 miles…
Now they began to meet the evening traffic, choking the roads. Laird cursed the way Peugeots and Simcas kept getting under his wheels.
“Are you tired?” Dagmar asked—almost the first thing she had said since they landed.
“Not yet. But how are you on night-driving?”
“I—I’d rather not if I can avoid it.”