About a mile to go now to the crest. If they were going to leave the road it must be soon, for the descent on the other side was through much more open country. It seemed that suddenly he was gaining on them a little; he could see the spark of red, obviously round another bend from his stretch of road, proceeding in a diagonal incline to the right, and now decidedly at a more sedate speed. He eased up slowly to hold his distance. Arrival at the point where he had seen the quarry change course gave him a shock, for he had been relying on the Mercedes as a guide, and travelling by mere unreliable moonlight or sidelights, or into the sharp cut-off of dipped headlights, which made progress hazardous and the angles of the road deceptive. So far from swinging to the right here, it turned somewhat to the left. He braked with his nose on the grass verge, and risked switching his lights on full beam for an instant. He had slightly overshot the opening of a narrow, stony track that branched off sharply to the right.
Where they could go, he could go, with room to spare. He backed a few yards, and turned into the track after them. His guess had been accurate, they had no intention of entering Austria by the road.
Now he had to use his lights, he would not have survived long without them. Luckily the driver of the Mercedes must also be having to concentrate hard, and the noise they were making up there would effectively drown out the noise he was making down here. Once launched on this track there was only one way to go, for trees and rocks encroached on it irregularly on either side. The surface was beaten earth, like any ramblers’ path in the mountains, liberally toothed with outcrop rock and loose stones. In places it was more like a dried watercourse than a track, and in other places more like a bog than either, and reinforced with half-peeled logs laid as a causeway. It climbed steeply, twice negotiating narrow wooden bridges which George took at a crawl, forewarned by the earthquake rumblings his quarry had set up in crossing. Most of the time he lost sight of the Mercedes altogether, but from time to time he caught a glimpse of the rear lights, and knew he was holding his own. Caution, not haste, was what mattered to them here. He could even have closed up on them, at some risk, but he was unarmed, and there were three of them, almost certainly provided with guns. Much better hang back and remain undetected, as rather surprisingly he still seemed to be, until he could make contact with the reinforcements called out by Werner.
He had not the least idea at what point they re-entered Austria; there was never anything to mark the change. Nor had he any notion of how far they had come on this travesty of a road; three miles of strained attention can seem more like thirty. But it occurred to him suddenly that they had ceased to climb, and on either side of the belt of trees that shrouded them he could see the faintly lambent sky, still frayed with broken cloud. Then the descent, which was mercifully more gradual than the ascent had been, but still testing enough. The track, doubling like a coursed hare, tipped them abruptly into a lane enclosed between stone walls, no wider than the way they had come, but at once smoother, an ordinary dirt road that might have led to some isolated farm, and probably did. This in turn brought them at length to a metalled road, fields opening out on either side. George rolled the Volkswagen cautiously up to the turn, and cut his lights.
Now he knew where he was. They were back on the main road, a good mile on the Austrian side of the frontier; and well away to the right, solitary on the open sweep of road, the rear lights of the Mercedes were receding rapidly in the direction of Scheidenau.
On this highway no driver had the right to conclude that he was being followed, however many cars he observed behind him. George switched on his headlights, and set off at full speed in pursuit.
They circled Scheidenau by a ring road, and beyond the last lights of the village emerged again on to the steel- dark road that headed towards Bregenz. George had hung back at the turn, and let the Mercedes go ahead far enough to convince the driver he was unmarked. Perhaps he allowed him a little too much rope. It couldn’t be long now. There should be either a road-block and a police check, or a patrol cruising this way to meet them, on the look-out for a dark-coloured Mercedes. So George idled contentedly his minute too long.
When he drove out on to the straight stretch along the floor of the valley there were no rear lights anywhere to be seen. He put on a spurt to reassure himself that the quarry was still around, but the night remained vacant, calm and clear. The moon was high, the wind had dropped, the rags of cloud had been fretted away into scattered threads. The road ahead was utterly innocent of traffic going his way; and the first thing he encountered was one more black police Volkswagen, cruising gently along to meet him.
Somewhere between the edge of Scheidenau and this point rather less than a mile along the road, the Mercedes and its crew of three and their kidnapped man had all vanished without trace.
CHAPTER TEN
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Ever since midday the Alte Post had been taken over by a wedding party. Maggie could hear across the water the sound of their fiddles and guitars, and the blown drifts of singing that grew beerier and gayer as the evening drew in. Several times during the dusk the guests had made brief exploratory sallies down to the water, the women like bright, blown petals swept along in a gale, but each time the showers had driven them in again to their dancing and drinking. The array of lights winked across the lake; the windows had been closed against the rain, and only wisps of music emerged now when some door was opened. Every time that happened, the night seemed to be shaken and convulsed with a distant burst of gigantic laughter.
Maggie went in from the verandah with a few drops of rain sparkling in her hair, and a half-hearted ray of moonlight, the first to break through the clouds, following at her heels. It looked as though they meant to keep up the party all night over there, surely she could have another half-hour of practice before she closed the piano.
The old authentic delight had come back, the intoxication that had been missing for so long. She was alive again, she could sing, she hated to stop singing. When this was over she must get into form quickly, and go back to pick up the wonderful burden. When this was over!
She had not looked ahead at all yet; her vision stopped short, charmed and exalted, at the recognition of her own deliverance. What if that lunch at The Bear had proved only a torment and a frustration? It would not always be so. Francis had promised to come to her here, and he would come; and this time they would be able to talk freely. There had to be respect between them, and an honourable understanding, everything circumstances had made impossible before. It was still true, for all their efforts at noon, that they had never met. Maggie looked forward to their meeting now with passion and impatience; she wanted to know him, and she wanted to be known. The world is too full of impaired and partial contacts that achieve nothing, satisfy no need, do justice to no one. Their relationship should at least close on a better footing than that. She had the Mahler song settings from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ on the piano. Contraltos are liable—Tom in one of his sourer moods had once remarked that there was no doubt about it being a liability!—to find themselves expected to include a good deal of Mahler in their recital programmes. Maggie, for her part, had no reservations at all. These full-dress romantic settings of folk- ballads four centuries old might stick in Tom’s gullet, but they were strong wine to her.
She sang that opening line, and as always it seemed to her a complete song in miniature, with a logical development, a single climax and a perfect resolution.
Many years ago, when she was first learning these songs, she had written in beneath the German words her own attempt at an English singing version. Her unfamiliarity with the original language had worried her, as though it stood between her and the depth of interpretation she wanted. It was easy enough to get someone to provide a
