I heard Nick’s footsteps coming along the corridor.
Sutcliffe blew a cloud of cigar smoke. As it cleared, I saw that his hand had come from his jacket pocket and he was holding a gun on me.
“No nonsense, Carver,” he said gently. “Believe me, in many ways I sympathize with your feelings. But that is as far as it goes.”
Nick opened the door behind me. I turned to look at him. As he came forward, I picked up the soda siphon and I let Sutcliffe have it. The liquid streaming out, I swung behind Nick, so that there could be no gunplay, and I whirled the hissing jet round catching him in the side of the face. Then I was through the door and racing down the corridor.
I don’t often pray, but I offered up a simple, direct number which I didn’t think called for a lot of deliberation above. Just, O Lord, I said, let Nick have been innocent enough in his profession to have left the car key in the Mercedes.
He had. And my case was on the back seat, too. Sutcliffe would murder him for it. The engine fired and I shot around in a wide dark circle on the gravel, kept the lights off and headed her down the drive. I took a large chunk off the nearside wing as I scraped one of the gate posts – and then I was away, lights flicking up and the narrow side road all mine. Okay, so I was mad. But where do you get in life if you just fill up all the forms, hand over your passport when told, queue here and queue there, and never do anything that gives the old adrenalin pump a chance to work into top gear? I’ll tell you. You just get to be old and pensioned with nothing but a lot of dusty memories that no one wants to hear about.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SNAKES AND LADDERS
I drove for about two hours and then I pulled off the road, about a hundred yards down a grassy ride, into a pine forest. I slept soundly in the back of the car until the dawn began to creep up and the birds inconsiderately started their chorus.
I started the car and jockeyed it off the ride and into the wood as far as I could get it. With luck it would be a day, maybe a couple of days, before anyone found it. Then, case in hand, I started walking, heading roughly north-east.
By ten o’clock I was in a small place called Lengries, where I bought myself a torch, a map, and a rucksack, and dumped my case. From Lengries I took a bus to a place called Bad Tölz. Here, I changed the Austrian money I had and then found a chemist. I handed over one of Frau Spiegel’s pills to him and asked him if he could analyse it for me. He looked a bit old-fashioned about this, but in the end told me to come back in an hour.
I went away and settled down to an early lunch and studied the map. Bad Tölz was about thirty kilometres north of the Achen Pass which marked the border between Austria and Germany. I worked out a route for myself back southwards to the Zafersee, which was a tiny pinpoint of blue on the map some way north of the pass and, so far as the map was concerned, had no road leading to it.
After lunch I bought a large pair of sunglasses and a flat cloth cap, and then went along to a garage and hired a small motor scooter for a week. That gave me trouble at first, but, by offering to double the usual deposit, I persuaded the garage man to overlook the fiddling details of credentials and guarantees. I drove along to the chemist shop and the old boy there was looking even more old-fashioned. He told me that, as far as he could make out, the pill was some compound of nembutal and veronal. One pill was enough to put a man flat on his back for a few hours. Three or four pills and a man would go on his back and never get up again. He started then on some spiel about how dangerous the pills were and that ordinary citizens should not have them in their possession, and it really was his duty to ... I backed out of the place at this point.
I went out of Bad Tölz fast, not wanting to give the chemist a chance to put the police after me. By late afternoon I had found the Zafersee, and also lodgings for myself.
The lake was two miles off the road running up to the pass. A small cart track led to it. It was in a little bowl in the hills, hemmed in with steep-sided, pine-thick slopes. The water was still and clear and deep. I guessed that the bottom was a tangle of long-submerged, waterlogged tree trunks where a body dropped in, properly weighted, would sink and be trapped for ages in the maze of dead timber. It was the kind of place where an expert frogman would think twice before going too deep.
The lodgings were a mile beyond the Zafersee, at the head of a small col over which the rough track rose and then dropped, through more forest, to a river with a large road running alongside it. It was a small wooden farmhouse, perched against the slope of a small alp,
