lights. He’s staying in the left-hand lane. Roger and out.”
If he carried on like this all day, I might just kill him by dinnertime, I decided. I stepped on the accelerator and swung round the corner. I was just in time to see the two cars turn left at the traffic lights. No way was I going to catch them, so I settled for watching the screen. I caught up with them about a mile from the motorway. It looked like we were heading southeast, toward Germany
Once we hit the motorway, I called Richard and told him to fall back behind me. I kept a steady two kilometers behind Turner, which was far enough at 140 kph, and five minutes later, Richard appeared in front of me, showing down enough to slide into my slipstream with a cheery wave. By nine, we’d sailed past Maastricht and Aachen, the bug had seen us safely through the maze of autobahns round Koln and Bonn was fast approaching on the port bow as we rolled on to the west of the Rhine. The boring flat land of Belgium was a distant memory now as the motorway swept us inexorably through rolling hills and woodland. Somehow, the motorways in Europe seem to be much more attractively landscaped than ours do. Maybe it’s just the indefinably foreign quality of the scenery, but I suspect it’s more to do with the fact that the Germans in particular have had to take Green politics seriously for a few years longer than we have.
Just before eleven, we crossed the Rhine north of Karlsruhe, with no sign of slowing up. I rang Richard and told him to overtake me and get on Turner’s back bumper again. The motorway split just south of the city, the A5 carrying on south and the A8 cutting off east. Unlike Koln, there was no quick way to double back if we made the wrong decision. A few minutes later, he called telling me to stay on the A5. We carried on down the river valley, the wooded hills on the left starting to become mountains, the occasional rocky peak flashing in and out of sight for seconds at a time.
A few kilometers before the Swiss border, the blip on the screen started moving toward me. It looked like Turner had stopped. Judging by the state of my fuel gauge, he was probably buying petrol. I rang Richard and told him to pull off at the approaching services while I carried on across the border. I stopped as soon as I could after waving my passport at Swiss customs and poured petrol into my tank till I couldn’t squeeze another drop in. I bought a couple of sandwiches, bars of yummy Swiss chocolate and cans of mineral water, then rushed back to the car. The buckle was still behind me, but closing fast. I rang Richard.
“We both filled up with petrol,” he reported. “I waited till he’d cleared the shop before I went in to pay, then I followed him through the border. Where are you?”
“In the service area you’re about to pass,” I told him. “You can let Turner get away from you now. If you drive into the services, you can fall in behind me again.” I couldn’t believe it was all going so well. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We carried on past Basel and on to Zurich. By now, we were properly into the Alps, mountains towering above us on all sides. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on staying in touch with Turner and the buckle, I’d have been enjoying the drive. As it was, I felt as stressed as if I’d been sitting in city rush-hour traffic for the five and a half hours it had taken us to get this far.
We skirted the outskirts of the city and drove on down the side of Lake Zurich. About halfway down the lake, the blip on the screen suddenly swung off to the right. “Oh shit,” I muttered. I stepped on the accelerator, checking in my mirror that Richard was still with me. The motorway exit was only seconds away, and I swung off on a road that led into the mountains. I grabbed the phone, punched the memory redial that linked me to Richard and said, “Wait here. Turn round to face the motorway so you can pick him up if he heads back.”
“Roger wilco,” Richard said. “Call me if you need backup.”
I carried on, checking the blip on the screen against the road map. Cursing that I didn’t have a more detailed map of Switzerland, I swung the car through the bends of what was rapidly becoming a mountain road. A couple of miles farther on, I realized that staying on the main road had been the wrong decision, as the buckle was moving farther away from me at an angle. Swearing so fluently my mother would have disowned me, I nearly caused a small pileup with a U-turn that took a thousand miles off the tires and hammered back down the road and on to a narrow, twisting side road. About a kilometer away from the main drag, the screen suddenly went blank.
I panicked. My first thought was that Turner had met someone or picked someone up who had taken one look at the buckle, spotted the bug and disabled it. Then logic kicked in and told me that was impossible in so short a time. As I swung round yet another bend with a sheer rock wall on one side and a vertiginous drop on the other, I twigged. The mountains were so high and so dense that the radio signal was blocked.
I raced the car round the bends as fast as I could, tires screaming on every one, wrists starting to feel it in spite of the power steering. I was concentrating so hard on not ending up as a sheet of scrap metal on the valley floor that I nearly missed Turner. With the suddenness of daylight at the end of a tunnel, the road emerged onto a wide plateau about halfway up the mountain. In the middle of an Alpine meadow complete with cows that tinkled like bass wind chimes stood an inn, as pretty as a picture postcard, as Swiss as a Chalet School novel. On the edge of the crowded car park, Turner’s pale green Mercedes was parked. And the screen flashed back into life.
Heaving a huge sigh of relief, I drove to the far end of the car park and tried to ring Richard and let him know everything was okay. No joy. I supposed the mountain was in the way again. I got out of the car, took a black beret and a pair of granny glasses with clear lenses out of my stakeout disguises holdall and walked into the inn. Inside, it was the traditional Swiss chalet, wood everywhere, walls decorated with huge posters of Alpine scenery, a blazing fire in a central stone fireplace. The room was crammed with tables, most of them occupied. A quick scan showed me Turner sitting alone at a table for two, studying the menu. A waitress dressed in traditional costume bustled up to me and said something in German. I shrugged and tried out my school French, saying I wanted to eat, one alone, and did they have a telephone?
She smiled and showed me to a table near the fire and pointed out the phone. I got change from the cashier and gave Richard a quick call. For some reason, he was less than thrilled that I was sitting down to some Tyrolean speciality while he was stuck on the verge of the road with nothing in sight but the motorway and a field of the inevitable cows. “Go and get some sandwiches or something,” I instructed him. “I’ll let you know when we set off.”
I went back to my table. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Turner tucking into a steaming bowl of soup, a stein of beer beside him, so I figured I’d have time to eat something. I ordered Tyroler grostl, a mixture of potatoes, onions and ham with a fried egg on top. It looked like the nearest thing to fast food on the menu. I was right. My meal was in front of me in under five minutes. I was halfway through it before Turner’s main course arrived. Judging by the pile of chips that was all I could identify, he was eating for two. Frankly, I could see why he’d made the detour. The food was more than worth it, if my plateful was anything to go by. Definitely one to cut out and keep for next time we were passing Zurich.
By the time I’d finished and lingered over a cup of coffee, Turner had also demolished a huge wedge of lemon meringue pie. If I’d scoffed that much in the middle of the day, I’d have been asleep at the wheel ten miles down the road. I hoped he had a more lively metabolism. When he called for the bill, I took mine to the cashier, rang Richard to warn him we were on the move and headed back to the car. Minutes later, Turner was heading back down the road, with me a couple of bends behind him.
As we hit the motorway, I had another panic. Where I’d expected to see Richard in his Mercedes, there was a black BMW. As I sailed past, I glanced across and saw the familiar grin behind the thumbs-up sign. Moments later, as he swung in behind me, the phone rang. “Sierra Forty-nine to Sierra Oscar,” he said. “Surprise, surprise. I nipped back to Zurich and swapped the cars. I thought it was about time for a change.”
“Nice one,” I conceded. Maybe he wasn’t the liability I’d feared he’d be after all. And there was me thinking that he was as subtle as Jean-Paul Gaultier. This wasn’t the time to reassess the capabilities of the man in my life, but I filed the thought away for future scrutiny.
I figured we must be heading for Liechtenstein, haven for tax dodgers, fraudsters and stamp-collecting anoraks. No such luck. We carried on south, deep into the Alps. Richard was in front of me again, keeping tabs on Turner. The bug kept cutting out because of the mountains, and I was determined that we weren’t going to lose him after coming this far. Now Richard was in another car, I felt happy about him staying in fairly close touch.
A few miles down the road, my bottle started twitching. There was no getting away from it. We were heading for the San Bernadino tunnel. Ten kilometers in that dark tube, aware of the millions of tons of rock just sitting above my head, waiting to crush me thin as a postage stamp. Just the thought of it forced a groan from my lips. I’m terrified of tunnels. Not a lot of people know that. It doesn’t sit well with the fearless, feisty image. I’ve even
