After a quarter of a mile, he came to a junction. To the left, which Rocq guessed led back down into the town centre, the road was blocked by a massive road surfacing machine and a large yellow diversion sign pointing traffic back down the road he had just come up. Right, he guessed, would lead further up the mountain-side. He tried desperately to think what the men in the Range Rover were up to, who they were, and whether they had mistaken him for someone else. He remembered, suddenly, having noticed the Range Rover behind him on the road out of Geneva, and on the way to Montreux; but surely that one, he thought, had dropped way back? He realized now that they must have followed him all the way from the airport. But who knew he was going to Geneva? He racked his brains. Elleck and Theo were the only ones. He was convinced Theo was straight. It had to be Elleck. Elleck wanted him to get the account opened and the company formed, then he was going to get him out of the way. But Rocq hadn’t done any of the buying yet. Surely, he reasoned, if Elleck had been planning to kill him so that he could not talk, he would have waited until Rocq had finished the job? In the mirror he could see the menacing nose of the Range Rover coming up the hill.
He accelerated hard again, turning right, and drove past a cafe with a sunny terrace, full of men and women with their shirts off, the men with bare chests, the women in their bras and occasional bikini tops, sitting out, roasting in their sun tan lotions, as they sucked up the early afternoon sun. Rocq came to another intersection, with a choice of straight on, which appeared to go into woods, or a sharp left. Either way, the metalled road ended and it was cart-track. He didn’t want to get trapped in the woods, so he turned hard left, the tyres spraying out dust and pebbles.
The road was only fractionally wider than the car, and climbed steeply up above the cafe, before hairpinning round sharply to the right and traversing the side of the mountain. He slammed the gear shift into low and the car surged upwards, the rev counter racing around towards the red mark, the nose occasionally snaking as the ground beneath the tyres gave out, the engine howling. He took his eyes off the narrow road for a fraction of a second to look at the fuel gauge, and noticed with horror that it was on the empty mark. In his mirror he could see the Range Rover starting to turn up past the cafe. He wasn’t at all happy about this terrain; he had no idea where the track went nor when it might become unpassable in this car. Right now, the Range Rover had every conceivable advantage over him, including, he had no doubt, a full tank of petrol.
He came around the next corner, in a rallying power-slide with his nose dug in and tail hanging so far out he was concerned he was going to put a wheel over the edge, and found himself heading straight into the midst of a family of six in hiking gear, spread across the road walking downwards. He stamped on the brakes and they jumped angrily out of the way, shouting and gesticulating: he accelerated off, and immediately came across another family around the next corner. He climbed up through some trees, and then the road turned back on itself in the sharpest hairpin he had yet come across. As he climbed the next stretch, the road dropped almost vertically away to his right; if he drove off the road now, he knew the car would drop several thousand feet and land right among the rooftops of Verbier. He concentrated fiercely on the road, half wondering whether he should stop at the next group of hikers he came to, but fearful that they would be powerless to do anything against the men in the Range Rover, particularly if, as he suspected, they were armed.
The road began getting worse, and the car pitched violently through two potholes; he prayed the suspension would hold. Luckily, the car he was in was strongly built and, being French, had a suspension system that could cope with these types of road; even so, he had to hold on with all his strength to the four-pronged steering wheel as it bucked and tried to tear itself out of his hands. There was a long straight incline now, and as the rev counter surged over the red line, he pushed the gear shift into second, and kept the accelerator hard on the floor. The speedometer raced up to the 100 kilometre mark. There was a fearsome bang and the car bounced violently up in the air, over the root of a tree and snaked wildly to the edge of the road; one wheel went over the edge, and Rocq was certain, as he held the accelerator resolutely to the floorboard and the steering wheel on full left lock, that the car was going over the edge. But somehow, the wheel came back onto the top, and he managed to steer the Renault back into the centre of the track.
There were two loud blasts, and around the corner ahead came a truck, travelling fairly fast for its size and the incline. Miraculously the road widened for a few yards and, so close to the edge that it was a matter of luck whether or not the offside wheels left the road or stayed on, he managed to scrape through; then he smiled. The truck must surely, he thought, block the Range Rover’s path. The hard angry blasts of hooting behind, the sound of grinding metal, then to his horror, only a hundred yards back, he could see in his mirror, the Range Rover surging down the road after him. It was catching him now. The track had become so rough his speed had dropped to 40 kilometres, and even so he was hard pushed to tell when it was the wheels or when it was the sump that was hitting the ground. The Renault bucked and crashed, and he knew something must break very soon.
He flung the Renault into the next bend: there was a hair-pin turn on a steep incline. The front wheels refused to grip and he began sliding backwards. He stamped on the foot-brake, shoved the gear into reverse, reversed the car a few yards down; then he slammed the gear lever into low and tried again, as gently as he could with his whole body trembling in fear. The Range Rover was almost on top of him. The tyres gripped this time, and he began to accelerate again. There was thick woodland on either side now, and the track was not improving. He had to slow down to take the next bend, and again the Range Rover loomed menacingly in his rear mirrors. There was a bang, and the Renault lurched forward, followed by another bang, which broke Rocq’s grip on the steering wheel, and flung him upwards, cracking his head on the roof, then forward so that he cracked it again on the windscreen.
Somehow, Rocq managed to round the corner. The track suddenly improved, and the Renault was able to out-accelerate the Range Rover up it. They approached another hairpin: he changed down into second, then, at the last moment, stamped hard on the brakes, pulled the gear lever back to low, wound the steering wheel tightly over and yanked the handbrake on as hard as he could. The back of the car slid round and, accelerating fiercely again, he released the brake. The car came out of the bend accelerating hard, and the Range Rover dropped even further back; then the road deteriorated back into rutted cart-track, and he had to slow right down.
There was another jarring crash, and the Renault started snaking, right, then left, then right; the steering wheel did not respond and he realized to his horror that he was being pushed. There was another hairpin coming up ahead, and he could see the end of the tree line just beyond it; down to the left was an awesome drop. He had less than a hundred yards to get the car steering again, or he was going to be pushed over for sure. He accelerated furiously, and suddenly the Renault started to pull away. Bouncing and lurching ferociously, he somehow got around the corner.