'Your name, monsieur?'
The Pastor clicked his heels. 'Obergruppen...er...Pastor Laudenbach. I belong to the Lutheran Church.'
The policeman made a note of the fact. 'Did anyone see the assailant?'
Dr Hildegard Keister pushed Badiglioni forward. 'You met him in the passage,' she said.
The Professor cursed her under his breath. 'That was the night before. It may not have been the same man.'
'But you said he had a gun. You know you did. And when you '
'Yes,' said Badiglioni, to cut short the disclosure that he had taken refuge in her room, 'he was a young Englishman.'
'An Englishman? Can you describe him?'
Professor Badiglioni couldn't. 'It was dark.'
'Then how did you know he was a young Englishman?'
'By his accent. It was unmistakably English. I have made a study of the inter-relationship between phonetics and the socio-economic infrastructure in post-Imperial Britain and I would say categorically that the man you are looking for is of lower-upper-middle-class extraction with extreme right-wing Protestant inclinations.'
'Sod that for a lark,' said Sir Arnold. Ulster was going to be on the agenda again at this rate. 'You were into Dr Keister's room before he had a chance to speak to you. You told me that yourself.'
'I heard what he said to Dr Abnekov. That was enough.'
'And where did you pick up your astounding capacity for analysing the English language? As an Eyetie POW, no doubt.'
'As a matter of fact I was an interpreter for British prisoners of war in Italy,' said Professor Badiglioni stiffly.
'I'll put him down as English,' said the policeman.
Sir Arnold objected. 'Certainly not. I had a fairly lengthy discussion with the fellow and in my opinion he had a distinctly foreign accent.'
'English is a foreign language in France, monsieur.'
'Yes, well I daresay it is,' said Sir Arnold, getting flustered. 'What I meant was his accent was European-foreign if you see what I mean.'
The cop didn't. 'But he did speak in English?'
Sir Arnold admitted grudgingly that this had been the case. 'Doesn't mean he's British though. Probably a deliberate ploy to disguise his real nationality.'
Another helicopter clattered down onto the terrace and prevented any further questioning for the time being.
In Bordeaux Dr Abnekov was undergoing micro-surgery without a general anaesthetic. He wanted to make sure he kept what was left of his penis.
Chapter 21
'Shit, that's torn it,' said Major Fetherington as they ground to a halt at a road block beyond Boosat. Three gendarmes carrying sub-machine-guns circled the car while a fourth aimed a pistol at Slymne and demanded their passports. As the man flicked through the pages, Slymne stared in front of him. He had been staring at the road ahead for hundreds of miles while the Major had dozed beside him and it had all been in vain. Obviously something catastrophic had happened. Even the French police didn't man road-blocks and keep the occupants of cars covered with machine-guns without good cause, but Slymne was almost too tired to care. They'd have to send a cable back to the Headmaster and then find a hotel and he could get some sleep. That would be some consolation. What happened after that didn't matter now. He wasn't even worried about the