House of Green Turf

rock. If he craned to look upwards he could not distinguish a line where earth and sky met. It had rained fitfully all the way, and was raining still. The sky was shrouded, there were no stars, and no moon.

There must have been someone watching for him, to make sure that he took the Kempten road and drove into the trap. Maybe they had lost time in setting out after him when he swung past it and turned towards Austria, but he had been fool enough to mention Scheidenau, and they were on his heels now, he was sure of that. The young man in the leather jacket had loosed the hunt after him with a vengeance, and if he was going to shake it, it would have to be now, on this complex stretch where the echoes would play on both sides, and confuse every issue. He put his foot down hard, and gave the car its head. The bends were well engineered, a joy to drive round, but also blind and deaf, at every swing light and sound cut off together, sharp as the descent of a guillotine.

All his senses were so trained on the threat behind that he was, in any case, curiously vulnerable to any hazards ahead. Anything approaching from Austria was his friend and ally, he had no need to be wary of it. Where there was company on the road there was safety. Who could close on him and attack while neutral headlights were bearing down on the scene?

He swung at speed round a right-handed bend, sharp as a shrew’s elbow, and straight into the glare of headlights cut off sharp by the curtain of dark trees. Someone was running along the road towards him, a torch in an extended hand waving him down. He braked sharply and drew in to the right, and the face and the torch plunged to a halt and turned back, running alongside him. On the left of the road headlights leaned drunkenly into the ditch. A panting voice alongside implored him:

‘Bitte… bitte, halt! Unfall…’

Somebody else’s accident was due to be Francis Killian’s salvation. Why not buttonhole the pursuers, too, from safe ambush among the victims, flag them down and send them back to call an ambulance, if necessary, or the police? What an irony! Francis pulled in obediently to the side of the road, half on the bald grass verge, swung open the door and piled out of the car, turning to meet the young man who came panting towards him with the torch. He saw a young, frightened, boyish face, wild with relief, blazing at him wide-open welcome.

Something hit him hard on the back of the head. The lights and darks exploded before him, changed places, merged, blinked out into single and absolute darkness. The ground came up and struck him in the face, scoring his cheek and lips raw. He groped along the grass, and the grains of loam were large as boulders. Dimly his mind pursued logic, argued, reproached him. The enemy were in front, not behind. Then who was behind? Someone else, assiduous on his heels, but not the enemy. The enemy were these shadows who had struck him down. Enemies of the enemy, perhaps? Leave them a sign! Not far behind, he had wondered when they would close the gap. The fingers of his right hand, hooked deep into his left inside pockets, gouged out the wallet that held his photographs, and spilled it into the lush, overgrown autumn grass in the ditch below him. He prised himself up arduously from the ground, the lighter by that load, his head spinning, and levered himself upright on wavering legs, one arm flailing to ward off the first assault.

They were three, he saw them clearly, even photographed them on some emulsion in his mind, his eyes recording nothing. The image sank in, and left his eyes blind.

Two of the three rushed him, one from either side. The third, the boy with the torch, swerved round him as he swayed to his feet, and plunged on. Francis stiff-armed the first of his attackers half across the road, but the second one was on his back in the same moment, one arm crooked round his neck, dragging him over backwards into the shallow ditch. They rolled confusedly together, the wet grass stinging and cold against their faces.

Francis heard a car door slam and a motor thrum into life, and knew it for the note on his hired Dodge from Zurich. Its lights swung impetuously forward and back, forward and back in the road, cutting yellow swathes out of the darkness as it turned, and then it surged past them and roared away at speed in the direction of Felsenbach. That was the last thing Francis knew. His assailant enveloped him suddenly in both arms, and rolled over beneath him, holding him helpless and exposed for the second blow. This time the man with the cosh made no mistake. The world exploded in a flash of light, and collapsed into chaotic darkness. Francis slid slowly into the ditch, and lay still.

CHAPTER NINE

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The blanket of cloud on the heights had ripped into tatters and begun to dissolve away just before the smooth sound of the car ahead, steadily climbing, braked into a protesting whine, and the minor confusion of voices, barely audible, nevertheless made itself felt against the surrounding silence.

‘Now what?’ grunted George, who was driving. He put his foot down, willing to narrow the gap a little; nobody was going to hear them approaching, not until they reached that right-hand bend. They were making too much noise themselves, up there. They! Somebody had been waiting for Francis Killian, somebody for whom he wasn’t prepared, by all the signs. George wanted to know who. ‘I’m tired of this,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m closing up. Hang on, here we go!’

But there they didn’t go, or no farther than the twenty yards or so it took him to brake sharply, swing the wheel, wallow across the ditch where a rough logging track crossed it, and burrow an abrupt and hazardous way in among the trees on their right. For at that instant both he and his passenger had caught the sudden rocketing plunge of the Dodge into gear, the sawing alternations of its lunges fore and aft as it turned, and the triumphant roar as it launched into high speed. Its headlights were slicing round the fringe of the trees as the little black police Volkswagen rocked and waddled to a standstill deep among the firs, and George cut motor and lights and prayed that they had been neither seen nor heard.

The young Austrian detective had the passenger door open before the car was still, and was groping and stumbling his way back the few yards to the road. George, afraid to leave the wheel, clawed his way round to peer intently over the back of the driving seat. The car from Zurich shot by at speed, hurtling back the way it had come a few minutes ago, with enough aggression and bravura in the driving to demonstrate blind that it was driven now by another hand. Somebody crude, young and violent. They had followed Francis Killian yesterday, they knew his touch. George never saw the face behind the wheel, but he knew it was not Francis Killian’s face. He began to back his way out, tickling the wheel this way and that, grateful that he had grazed nothing in getting in, and fastidiously sensitive to the hazards in getting out. The Austrian detective came running, clambering back into his place and slamming the door just short of the last tree.

‘Not your man… young fellow driving… Couldn’t see any passenger. Which way now?’

‘Ahead!’ said George, and didn’t wait to have his judgment endorsed. They swayed drunkenly out on to the road. George cut the lights to sidelights, and nosed uphill, swinging the wheel for the turn.

There were other headlights, somewhere a hundred yards or so round that hairpin, manoeuvring rapidly but gently back and forth in a turn, just as the Dodge had done, but this time in the other direction. Their beams lurched upwards and levelled out, as though the car was just heaving itself clear of the ditch, and then danced forward and back and forward again, and the dwindling arc of their light wheeled, threaded the edge of the trees for an instant, and recoiled as the car came round, leaving the bend in the road darkened. But only for a moment. The moon sailed out from rags of cloud, pouring a wash of pallor down the tall faces of rock ahead, and bleaching the