It was. As the sun rose behind them, they breasted a hill and looked down into a shallow wooded valley beyond which a panoply of oaks and ancient beeches rose to a crested range before falling again. Glodstone brought the Bentley to a halt and took out the binoculars. But there were no signs of life on the road below them and no habitation of any sort to be detected among the trees.
'Well, now we have our route in and out secure and if I'm not mistaken, there's a track down there that might prove useful.' He let in the clutch and the Bentley slipped forward almost silently. When they came to the junction, Glodstone stopped. 'Go and take a look at that track,' he said, 'see if it's been used lately and how far it leads into the woods. By my reckoning it points towards the Chateau Carmagnac.'
Peregrine got down, crossed the road and moved through the trees with a silent expertise he had learnt from Major Fetherington on the Survival Course in Wales. He returned with the news that the track was almost overgrown with grass and ended in a clearing.
'There's an old sawmill there but it's all tumbled down and no one has been down there for ages.'
'How can you tell?' asked Glodstone.
'Well if they have, they didn't use a car,' said Peregrine. 'There are two trees down across the path and they'd have had to move them to get past. It's not difficult because they're not heavy but I'd swear they had been like that for a couple of years.'
'Splendid. And what about turning-room?'
'Plenty up by the sawmill. There's an old lorry rusting outside the place and you can put the Bentley in a shed behind it.'
'It sounds as though it will do for the moment,' said Glodstone and presently the Bentley was stealing up the track. As Peregrine had said, it was overgrown with tall grass and the two fallen trees were light enough to move aside and then replace. By the time they reached the disused sawmill, Glodstone was convinced. An atmosphere of long disuse hung over the crumbling buildings and rusty machinery.
'Now that we're here, we'll use the track as seldom as possible and for the rest we'll move on foot. That's where we'll score. The sort of swine we're up against aren't likely to be used to fieldcraft and they don't like to leave their cars. Anyway, we came here unobserved and for the moment they'll be occupied watching the roads for a Bentley. I'd say they'll do that for two days and then they'll start to think again. By that time we'll have proved the ground and be ready to take action. What that action will be I don't know, but by nightfall I want to be in a position to observe the Chateau.'
While Peregrine unloaded the stores from the Bentley and put them in neat piles in what had evidently been the manager's office, Glodstone searched the other buildings and satisfied himself that the place was as deserted as it seemed. But there was nothing to indicate that the sawmill had been visited since it had closed down. Even the windows of the office were unbroken and a calendar hanging on the wall and portraying a presumably long-dead kitten and a bowl of faded flowers was dated August 1949.
'Which suggests,' said Glodstone, 'that not even the locals come here.'
Best of all was the large shed behind the ancient lorry. Its corrugated iron doors were rusted on their hinges but by prising them apart it was possible to berth the Bentley under cover and when the doors had been shut there was nothing to show that the place was inhabited again.
'All the same, one of us had better sleep beside the car,' said Glodstone, 'and from now on, we'll carry arms. I doubt if we'll be disturbed but we're in the enemy's country and it's foolish to be unprepared.'
On that sober note he took his sleeping bag through to the office while Peregrine settled down beside the Bentley with his revolver gleaming comfortingly in a shaft of sunlight that came
