'You were only sitting in this hotel room drinking coffee and generally relaxing while I risked a prison sentence of Christ knows how many years carting that suitcase round the rail yard and secreting it aboard the right wagon. Here's the number.'
She unzipped her breast pocket, took out a folded piece of paper and threw it at Horn. As she turned away he grasped her by the elbow, spun her round and threw her backwards onto the bed. Then Horn was on top of her, his eyes remote and devoid of all expression as he stared down at her like a specimen from his collection of rare editions which he suspected was a fake.
'You will never speak to me in that way again or I will arrange for a certain Gunther Baum to break your neck.'
'Drive like hell to Elsinore. The main station. Use the siren to shove other traffic into the ditch!'
The uniformed policeman who drove Bodel Marker, Chief of Intelligence, dived behind the wheel of the car he had brought to the front of Politigarden. Marker had already settled himself in the back and his chubby face was still flushed with fury. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, the driver caught the expression in Marker's eyes, a look of sheer blue murder. He concentrated on getting out of Copenhagen and onto the motorway where he could make speed to Elsinore.
It had happened as soon as Marker had returned to his office. To his intense annoyance he found his superior had let himself into his private sanctum with the master key. Marker had walked round his desk, sat in his own chair and stared at the man waiting in the visitor's seat. Marker said not a word, forcing the other to take the initiative.
'Sorry to break in here, so to speak, Marker.'
'Well, now you're here…' A deliberate absence of sir.
'This huge consignment of heroin which it is rumoured is passing through here on its way to Sweden. You know what I'm talking about, Marker?'
'I will in a minute, I expect,' retorted the normally amiable Intelligence chief.
'Forget you ever heard about it, Marker.'
'I need that in writing. At once. I'll call my secretary.'
'Hold on a moment.' The thin man with the curled lips and supercilious manner held out a restraining hand. Marker's own hand was half-way towards the intercom which would summon his secretary. 'This isn't something we want on record, if you understand me.'
'I don't understand you. Where does this instruction emanate from? I want the original source.'
'That is hardly your business, Marker.' Sharply, an attempt to wrest the initiative back from his subordinate.
'Come to think of it, my secretary isn't necessary.' Marker leaned back in his chair and smiled for the first time since he had entered his office, the soul of amiability. 'You see when I sat down I automatically pressed the button which set in motion my cassette recorder.'
'You!' Uncontrollable rage or a shattering reaction of terror? Marker, despite the closeness with which he had watched his superior's reaction, could not decide which emotion was uppermost. Of one thing he was sure; it was a whole minute before his visitor could bring himself to speak. He pulled out a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and openly mopped his forehead which was beaded with sweat.
'I cannot persuade you…'
To erase the tapes, to use a well-known phrase?' Marker completed for him. 'On the contrary, my first action will be to hand the cassette to a certain person with instructions that in the event of a third attempt on my life being successful it will be handed immediately to a journalist working for the German publication, Der Spiegel. I doubt whether the Stockholm Syndicate yet controls that particular magazine,' Marker added.
'I don't understand you, Marker. I must go now. As far as I am concerned this conversation never took place,' he ended stiffly and left the office.
Within seven minutes Marker had also left the office and was on his way to the car he had summoned. No tape existed; no machine had been activated. But Marker would never forget the look on his superior's face when he had bluffed him that such was the case.
Arriving by train, all passengers alight at Elsinore unless aboard an international express bound for Sweden — because there the rail line ends. Its only extension is to the water's edge — across a road and up an elevated ramp inside the bowels of one of the giant train ferries which constantly ply back and forth across the Oresund.
In June the channel neck of the Oresund — at this narrowest point no more than four miles across to the Swedish port of Halsingborg — is alive with the monster train and car ferries which have several different landing points round Elsinore harbour. On the morning Beaurain and Kellerman arrived in the Mercedes, the channel was enlivened further by yachts nimbly sailing and turning to keep out of the passage of the lumbering ferries.
Beaurain's 280E, without which he always felt lost, had been driven from Brussels to Copenhagen by the English driver, Albert, who always arrived at his destination in the nick of time. He reached the Royal Hotel fifteen minutes before Beaurain was due to depart for Elsinore. 'Why Elsinore?' Albert had asked as he drank his third cup of tea supplied by room service in Beaurain's room. 'Isn't that Hamlet's castle?'
'Because,' Beaurain explained as he completed his packing, 'one of the key Danish police chiefs we have just seen has confirmed a huge Syndicate consignment of heroin is passing along the usual route on its way to Stockholm. The route? Amsterdam to Copenhagen to Elsinore — where it crosses the water to Sweden.'
'A vulnerable link in the chain,' Albert observed between gulps of the dark tea, 'that bit where it crosses water. Means it has to go on a boat, and where do they put the consignment aboard the train?'
'Albert has put his finger on the key factor as usual,' Beaurain observed. He told the Englishman briefly about the suitcase Louise Hamilton had seen driven through the night to a house in Elsinore which backed onto the railway line.
Albert Brown, a small, wiry man of forty-two with a face permanently screwed up in an expression of concentration, was an ex-racing driver, a Londoner, and a man who never took anything at face value. He had joined Telescope when his wife had been killed brutally by a murderer released from Broadmoor lunatic asylum.
'So,' he concluded after listening to Beaurain, 'the Syndicate may still have to put this whopping great consignment aboard one of the international expresses crossing these straits to Sweden?'
'If the heroin really is in that suitcase,' Beaurain pointed out.
'And if it is and we can locate it, we deal the Syndicate a good jab in the jugular.'
'We do more than that,' Beaurain said as he prepared to leave the room. 'We create such havoc we'll provoke a major reaction against Telescope by the Syndicate which is what I want. A head-on collision, as Goldschmidt phrased it. The aim is to wipe out this evil thing.'
'We may be the only ones who can do it,' Albert said soberly, so soberly that Beaurain stopped picking up his case and stared at him because he had never known Albert, normally chirpy, adopt such a grim tone. 'I had a word with Monique before I started my mad dash here,' Albert continued. 'She gave me a message she said she'd sooner not trust to a telephone conversation. The chap who she spoke to was a Dr. Goldschmidt from Bruges. Chap who controls the Syndicate answers to name of Hugo.'
'Goldschmidt told me about Hugo he's one of the three-man directorate running the Syndicate,' 'That seems to be the point. I gathered Goldschmidt has only just come up with this piece of information — Monique said he seemed to be working like a beaver trying to dig up data for you. This Hugo nobody has a clue as to who he is — may, according to Goldschmidt's latest information, not be one of the three-man directorate at all. He thinks there could be a fourth man.'
With Beaurain behind the wheel, Kellerman by his side and Albert sleeping in the back, they overtook the police car containing Bodel Marker on the motorway to Elsinore.
Marker had heard about Beaurain's 280E and the way he drove it in an emergency; half the police chiefs of Europe had heard about it. Nervous about a third attempt on his life, he looked back at Beaurain who waved to him through the windscreen. Astounded, the Danish Chief of Intelligence relaxed back in his seat.
'What's Marker doing on the same road as us?' Kellerman asked.
'Something must have occurred to him later after he went back to his office — or something happened. This way we get to Elsinore much earlier. Just sit back and relax.'
It was the last attitude Kellerman felt like adopting. The police car containing Marker surged ahead, its siren
