He said, ‘Were not going to the frontier, are we? We were never going there?’
She swung the wheel and braked, with the leafy branches slithering over the canvas roof. The car stopped. Calmly she switched off the ignition and sat back, smoothing her green skirt over her knees. In the silence after the engine noise they listened to the trees sighing, throwing flashing streaks of sunlight into the dirt.
Neil waited, staring at Anne-Marie, feeling a sudden unreasonable panic: ‘Why have we stopped?’
She turned to him. Her face was a handsome mask; he hardly recognized her. ‘Monsieur Ingleby, you are a traitor.’
He heard a buzzing in his head. Leaves swept across the windshield, and he thought he saw something move under the trees ahead. The hairs on his neck felt like wet dog’s fur. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘You know what I mean.’ She leant down and lifted the handbag. He grabbed at it, She flinched away, and he felt her fingernails sting against his cheek. He lunged at her, and something hit him over the eye. ‘Sale lâche! Sale traître!’ she screamed
He put his hand to his head, sitting back, feeling dizzy. Then he realized that she had suddenly become very still. He looked at her, and saw her staring ahead out of the window. Her face was as white as the edges of her eyes.
There were men coming out of the trees towards them, from all sides, closing round. She slammed up the handle of her door, locking it. Instinctively he took hold of the handle on his side.
‘Lock, it!’ she shrieked. ‘Lock it!’ She switched on the ignition, her foot stamping on the throttle, and the car lurched forward, bumping into one of the men who let out a yelp and jumped aside, shaking his fists.
The wheels skidded out into the road, leaping over the broken ground, under the waving trees, round a corner.
A roll of barbed wire stood across the track a few feet ahead. She could not stop in time; the wire scraped over the bonnet, up against the windshield. The engine stalled. She switched on again. The car was still in gear and it bucked forward further into the wire, puncturing both front tyres.
Neil seized her arm: ‘Stop, for God’s sake!’ He turned and saw them coming round the bend, running. They were laughing and waving sticks and scythes that flashed in the sun. Neil had snatched out his passport and international Press card. He pushed down the handle on his side and started to open the door. She threw herself across his lap, screaming, ‘No, no!’
It was too late. One of them had pulled the door open, and he felt himself being dragged out, shouting, ‘Anglais! Suis anglais!’
One of the men was wearing an open khaki tunic with no buttons and dungarees tied up with string. He had bare feet, scaly with dust, and the vest under his tunic was blotched with oil stains. He was grinning, pressing a revolver into Neil’s stomach. Neil looked into a broad brown face with hair chopped so short that he could see the man’s scalp. He shouted again ‘Suis anglais!’ — waving his passport.
The man went on grinning. Neil had a glimpse of nickel teeth and black eyes glittering; and he heard Anne-Marie scream.
They were dragging her out, head first, down into the dust, wrenching the handbag from her, laughing. The green skirt was pulled up over her thighs and he saw her face, brown with dust, giving him one desperate half-mad look as he tried to duck down and run towards her.
Something hit him from behind and his arm went numb. A thin man in a woollen cap had grabbed her legs and was dragging her under the trees. One of her shoes came off and lay on its side in the road.
Neil had dropped his passport, noticing dimly that his arm was wet, the sleeve dripping into the dust. He stood shouting in English and French, ‘I’m English! I’m a journalist! English journalist!’
They laughed, not understanding. One of them was emptying Anne-Marie’s handbag on to the road. A purse and mirror fell out, a comb and handkerchief. The man held the bag up and shook it, and a pistol, lodged in a pocket of the bag, dropped with a thud. The barrel was wrapped in a thick bandage.
They all began shouting together in Arabic. Neil was rushed towards the side of the road. He saw Anne-Marie’s legs kicking out across the sun-scorched grass. She writhed round, her face dappled with moving shadows from the trees, and he saw her eyes turn to him again, the whites long and shining, her mouth opening in a scream.
The air exploded round him, and he watched the bullets smacking against her tight green dress. And her face crumpled and fell away under the waving branches of the eucalyptus tree.
He tried to run to her again but they were all round him, lifting sticks and knives, one of them moving forward with a burp-gun, across where Anne-Marie’s legs lay motionless under the leafy branches.
Then the sky grew dark.
CHAPTER 8
The man came through the swing-doors out of the rain down Fleet Street, into the bar of El Vino. They were there at the back of the room, round a table near the glass partition that closes off the rear saloon where guests are allowed to bring women in to drink.
He was a tall man with carefully combed grey hair and a worried face. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said, ‘there’s a jam right across Aldwych.’
‘What will you have?’ asked one of them, a florid man with a bowtie.
‘Hock and seltzer,
