For the next three days I left early with sandwiches packed by Frau Mander and returned late for supper. I worked a ten-minute scooter range all round the place. This I’d marked on the map as a circle, centred on the lake, of about ten or twelve miles in diameter – and that covered a fair bit of ground. I never once saw anything that resembled the place I was looking for. I checked the local telephone directories for Hesseltod and Vadarci and drew a blank. I did everything I could and still drew a blank. Whenever I reached a hilltop or a view point I took out my field-glasses and went over the country below me. If any house or feature looked interesting I would go and check it. I asked postmen, publicans, and any local looking people that I met on the forest and hill tracks. To help with the language difficulty I flourished a drawing I had made from memory of the details of the slide. I got nowhere.
Every evening before I returned to the farmhouse I would stop half a mile from it and give it a good going over with my glasses before homing. I knew that Sutcliffe would have someone looking for me, and he knew roughly where to look.
The third evening my caution paid a dividend. Through the glasses I saw Nick talking in front of the farm to Herr Mander. I got back on the scooter and freewheeled away down the track. I had all I needed in my rucksack, the torch, the glasses, the Le Chasseur, my battery razor, a shirt and a pair of socks.
That night I slept rough in a hay barn a good twenty-five miles from the Zafersee. I woke hungry, and headed for the nearest village to get some food.
I was coming down a steepish hill towards a wide easy corner on a mainish sort of road when a car came down behind me, blared its horn, and went by, missing me by about an inch. The blare of the horn and the near swish of the car’s passing made me wobble, and I went into a skid that took me off the road. I finished up on the grass, cursing the bastard to hell. The scooter lay on its side against a heap of road stones.
I got up, dusted myself down, and eased off the cursing. I’d taken a patch of skin off my left hand and the wound was full of grit. On the other side of the road was a small cottage with a neatly kept garden. To one side of the cottage an iron pipe came out of the bank and a spout of water fell into a stone trough.
I went up to the cottage. An old man was sitting on a bench in the sun. I showed him my hand and pointed to the stone trough. He nodded. As I went to the trough I heard him call something in German into the house. I washed my hand clean and was about to wrap my handkerchief round it when a woman came out of the house. She was much younger than the man and could have been his daughter. She carried a towel in one hand and a tray in the other. On the tray was a length of bandage and a glass of wine. She gave me the wine, said, “Bitte ...” took my left hand, and began to wipe and then bandage it. She was about forty and smelt good, like fresh hay and baking bread. When she had finished I pulled my drawing from my pocket and began to go through my ritual, “Kennen Sie ...” and so on.
She took the drawing, shook her head over it, and then went to the old man and handed it to him. He looked at it in silence for a while, and then started a long conversation with her. I got the impression that they seemed to be arguing about something. In the end the old boy got up wearily from his seat and started down the garden path. The woman, with a big smile, motioned me to follow him.
Outside the gate the old boy paused, pointed to the scooter, and said something. I didn’t have to know German to realize that the old man preferred riding to walking.
I started it up. He climbed on to the tiny pillion seat and motioned me away down the road. He sat behind me for two miles, chuckling to himself, gripping tight to my waist, and now and then breaking out into bursts of German which meant nothing to me.
Then on a long curve of new road, he tapped me hard on the shoulder. On our left was a run of tall stone wall. We got off and we walked along the wall in the grass for a couple of hundred yards until, to accommodate the new road, the wall turned almost at right angles. Round the corner he stopped and smacked the wall as though it were the flank of a favourite horse. This next section of wall was much newer than the one we had been following. He said something in German and shook his head at my obvious stupidity. Then he made the obvious motions of opening big gates. He then stepped to one side, sank unsteadily on one knee and crossed himself. This done he turned to me and began to count on his fingers aloud, “Ein, Zwei ...” and so on. I could count fairly well in German. He stopped at “Zehn”.
I got it then. I walked across to the other side of the road and took a look at the wall. From the turn of the angle, to where it ran away
