There was a closed gate ahead of him; he aimed at the centre and carried on accelerating hard. There was a loud cracking, barbed wire whipped at the windscreen and then he was through and as he rounded a gentle curve, he saw they were at the top of the mountain and in what was clearly a local beauty spot, judging by the fifteen or so cars that were parked there. One couple stuffing their faces with sandwiches, in a Mercedes saloon, waved brightly at him; he wondered whether to stop and scream for help, but the menacing nose of the Range Rover on his tail decided him against that. He began the descent down the other side of the mountain. He accelerated hard, then slammed on the brakes; the terrain was now loose gravel, and the car slid wildly down it; for a moment he was terrified they were going to slide straight over the side, but then they slowed down. At that moment, the Renault was hurled forward several feet by the Range Rover, which then rammed it again; somehow, he managed to accelerate away from it again.
He knew it could not be long before he ran out of petrol. They came to another closed gate, and again smashed through it. He slid the Renault sideways around another hairpin, to discover a massive lorry crawling up less than 200 yards below him. Right now he no longer cared about anything, nothing except getting away from the Range Rover. He was not going to stop, he did not dare to stop; he knew he was going to have to fit past that truck, and if he didn’t and died, then so be it. The driver flashed his lights and hooted angrily, but Rocq carried on racing down towards it, trying to size up in his mind on which side he had the best chance: to the right was a sheer drop; to the left, shrubbery and the hill slope. He picked the left. For a brief moment, he thought there was going to be enough room, and the side of the lorry began flashing past, inches to the right; then the Renault slipped down the bank and the offside of the car came into contact with the lorry. The noise was fearsome: the windows smashed out, there was a rending, renting, grinding, then suddenly the lorry was past, and there was empty road ahead of him.
He heard, over the noise of the truck’s exhaust, the sound of locked rubber sliding across cart-track, then a tremendous bang followed by a clattering sound, followed by a hollow clanging interspersed with the splintering of wood. He stopped. Through what had been his offside window, he saw a streak of beige drop past. He jumped out of the Renault, and ran to the side of the road. Two thousand feet below him, the Range Rover was rolling and bouncing, pirouetting like a tiny ballet dancer on a trampoline. He saw it hit a rock ledge and bounce upwards; its two doors, bonnet and tailgate flew open together, then it carried on plunging down, and disappeared from his view.
Rocq got back into the Renault. He wasn’t enjoying his day out in Switzerland any more. He wanted to go home, and quickly. He carried on down, and eventually came out into the small village of Riddes. He wondered where he could find a policeman, then decided that, with his limited grasp of the French language, he was not quite sure how he would be able to explain why it was that he had found it necessary to steal a car and race a Range Rover up and down a mountainside. He looked at his Piaget watch; there was a plane back to London at 3.30. If he hurried he might just make it.
He passed a garage, but decided not to risk stopping; with all its dents, the car looked much too conspicuous.
He drove out of Riddes; a number of people, mainly children, shouted to each other and pointed at the smashed-in side of the car. He decided it would not be wise to stay in the car longer than was absolutely necessary and, when he came down into Martigny, he abandoned it in the first empty parking bay he saw, and took a taxi to Geneva Airport.
It was not until the Caravelle was airborne that Rocq began to unwind a little. He was still trembling, and wasn’t sure whether it was fear or rage. He ordered a Bloody Mary from the stewardess and then sat back to try and think clearly.
It was possible that it had been mistaken identity, but he discounted that. Four people knew he was going to Verbier: Elleck, Theo, Amanda and the avocat. Amanda he could discount. Which left three. Had he perhaps been conned into signing his life away to Theo and the avocat? Possibly, but he couldn’t believe his Italian friend was ruthless enough to have anyone murdered. There was only one person that he knew who he believed could be capable of murdering, or of having people murdered: Elleck. And yet, that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t even begun the buying yet for Elleck’s syndicate, and Elleck could hardly think it worthwhile having him bumped off just for his signatures — unless there was some immensely clever stunt Elleck had pulled; but he doubted it. He thought about the syndicate. Elleck had said little to him about his partners, but in Rocq’s view, any syndicate that was capable of setting off a chain of events that could, as Elleck had said, bring the world to the brink of war, was more than capable of ordering the bumping off of one solitary metal broker.
Rocq’s drink arrived; he put it down on the table and stirred it slowly, then took a large sip. There was something going on with this syndicate, he decided, that Elleck hadn’t mentioned. There were three reasons, he decided, why he might not have mentioned it: because he didn’t want Rocq to know; because he had forgotten; or because he himself did not know.
No one had ever tried to kill Rocq before, and he didn’t like the feeling one bit. Warning bells were ringing inside him, based on a cross between a hunch and the influence of many books he had read and films he had seen, that, having tried once and failed, whoever it was would almost certainly be going to try again. The two men in the Range Rover were almost certainly dead. News of their deaths would not filter back to whoever had given them their instructions for several hours, at the very earliest. During that time, it would be presumed that they had succeeded and that Rocq was dead. He decided it would be tomorrow, at the earliest, before they came looking for him again. By then, he intended to have wrung the truth out of Monty Elleck’s fat little neck.
28
The Monday following Rocq’s trip to Geneva was a blazing hot summer’s day, without exception right across Europe. There was plenty to do for the estate workers at Chateau Lasserre and it was this, coupled with the general feeling of lethargy that the heat brought about, combined with the thick summer foliage, that enabled the two men at the edge of the dense L-shaped forest, to work quietly and unspotted.
The men had in the woods two large reels, around which were wound lengths of wire flex and to which were attached, at twenty-foot intervals, light bulb sockets. Alongside the edge of the trees, so close that many of the sockets almost nestled against the roots, they laid one wire, 600 metres long and coming to a halt just in front of the L-part of the forest. As they unwound the wire, they placed a 150-watt light bulb into each socket.
When they had laid the full length, they repeated the process with the second wire, laying the trail of lights parallel, twenty feet apart. Then they connected the ends of the two wires into a junction box and connected that into the mains electricity supply of Chateau Lasserre, via a power cable that traversed the estate. When they had finished, it was seven o’clock in the evening.
Eight hundred kilometres away, in Switzerland, Viscomte Lasserre and Jimmy Culundis waited their turn on the Eighteenth green at Crans Montana Golf Club. The Viscomte was looking grim. He had lost the game at the Eleventh, and he was now one down on the bye; the best he could hope for was to halve it. The foursome in front of them appeared to be inspecting the borrow of every blade of grass. Lasserre was anxious to finish as he had a long flight back home, and unlike the Greek, he did not have the luxury of a personal private pilot.