They were three, he saw them clearly, even photographed them on some emulsion in his mind, his eyes recording nothing. The image sank in, and left his eyes blind.
Two of the three rushed him, one from either side. The third, the boy with the torch, swerved round him as he swayed to his feet, and plunged on. Francis stiff-armed the first of his attackers half across the road, but the second one was on his back in the same moment, one arm crooked round his neck, dragging him over backwards into the shallow ditch. They rolled confusedly together, the wet grass stinging and cold against their faces.
Francis heard a car door slam and a motor thrum into life, and knew it for the note on his hired Dodge from Zurich. Its lights swung impetuously forward and back, forward and back in the road, cutting yellow swathes out of the darkness as it turned, and then it surged past them and roared away at speed in the direction of Felsenbach. That was the last thing Francis knew. His assailant enveloped him suddenly in both arms, and rolled over beneath him, holding him helpless and exposed for the second blow. This time the man with the cosh made no mistake. The world exploded in a flash of light, and collapsed into chaotic darkness. Francis slid slowly into the ditch, and lay still.
CHAPTER NINE
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The blanket of cloud on the heights had ripped into tatters and begun to dissolve away just before the smooth sound of the car ahead, steadily climbing, braked into a protesting whine, and the minor confusion of voices, barely audible, nevertheless made itself felt against the surrounding silence.
‘Now what?’ grunted George, who was driving. He put his foot down, willing to narrow the gap a little; nobody was going to hear them approaching, not until they reached that right-hand bend. They were making too much noise themselves, up there. They! Somebody had been waiting for Francis Killian, somebody for whom he wasn’t prepared, by all the signs. George wanted to know who. ‘I’m tired of this,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m closing up. Hang on, here we go!’
But there they didn’t go, or no farther than the twenty yards or so it took him to brake sharply, swing the wheel, wallow across the ditch where a rough logging track crossed it, and burrow an abrupt and hazardous way in among the trees on their right. For at that instant both he and his passenger had caught the sudden rocketing plunge of the Dodge into gear, the sawing alternations of its lunges fore and aft as it turned, and the triumphant roar as it launched into high speed. Its headlights were slicing round the fringe of the trees as the little black police Volkswagen rocked and waddled to a standstill deep among the firs, and George cut motor and lights and prayed that they had been neither seen nor heard.
The young Austrian detective had the passenger door open before the car was still, and was groping and stumbling his way back the few yards to the road. George, afraid to leave the wheel, clawed his way round to peer intently over the back of the driving seat. The car from Zurich shot by at speed, hurtling back the way it had come a few minutes ago, with enough aggression and bravura in the driving to demonstrate blind that it was driven now by another hand. Somebody crude, young and violent. They had followed Francis Killian yesterday, they knew his touch. George never saw the face behind the wheel, but he knew it was not Francis Killian’s face. He began to back his way out, tickling the wheel this way and that, grateful that he had grazed nothing in getting in, and fastidiously sensitive to the hazards in getting out. The Austrian detective came running, clambering back into his place and slamming the door just short of the last tree.
‘Not your man… young fellow driving… Couldn’t see any passenger. Which way now?’
‘Ahead!’ said George, and didn’t wait to have his judgment endorsed. They swayed drunkenly out on to the road. George cut the lights to sidelights, and nosed uphill, swinging the wheel for the turn.
There were other headlights, somewhere a hundred yards or so round that hairpin, manoeuvring rapidly but gently back and forth in a turn, just as the Dodge had done, but this time in the other direction. Their beams lurched upwards and levelled out, as though the car was just heaving itself clear of the ditch, and then danced forward and back and forward again, and the dwindling arc of their light wheeled, threaded the edge of the trees for an instant, and recoiled as the car came round, leaving the bend in the road darkened. But only for a moment. The moon sailed out from rags of cloud, pouring a wash of pallor down the tall faces of rock ahead, and bleaching the hunched shoulder of the bend to the white of bone. George accepted the omen with aplomb, and switched off his lights altogether. He went round the curve on faith and moonlight, hugging the dark side.
The car that had just heaved itself out of the ditch opposite and turned was drawn up now, somewhat farther ahead than George had estimated, engine running, wheels barely turning, close to the grass verge. On the verge itself, faintly outlined by the roof-light through the open door, one man was stooping with his arms about the end of a long, unwieldy bundle, which he was thrusting into the rear seat of the car. Someone else was already in there ahead of it, hauling it in.
A limp, dead weight, all too recognisable as the feet were dragged aboard and the door slammed on them. The inside light blinked off, blinked on again as the front passenger door opened to let the last man leap aboard, blinked out once again as the car, broad and powerful, soared into speed and shot away.
Three to one, counting the man at the wheel; four, taking into account the young one whose job it was to whip away the hired Dodge somewhere into Germany, and no doubt get it a new paint job and a changed registration before daylight to-morrow. Much chance Francis Killian had had, George thought grimly, drawing a bead on the receding rear lights, with his foot flat to the floor and his lights still off. If they were, as he hoped, still undetected, they might as well stay that way as long as possible. The road surface, thank God, wasn’t bad at all, and the fitful moonlight made the edge of the grass show up like a kerb; and there was nothing meeting them, and at this hour of the night, with luck, there might be nothing all the way to the crest and the frontier. The lights ahead would indicate the bends, and give him a chance to use his sidelights without being spotted. With luck! With, in fact, a lot more luck than Francis Killian had had.
At the moment the chief trouble was that the big car in front was gaining rapidly.
‘Mercedes, I think!’ yelled the young Austrian in his ear, peering excitedly after the shape ahead. His name was Werner Frankel, and he had been assigned to George as escort and assistant because he had received the whole of his primary education and most of his advanced education in English, as a refugee with his family during and after the war, ‘We shan’t overhaul him!’
There was no arguing with that; they would be lucky if they could even keep those diminishing tail-lights in view.
‘Any hope of a telephone up here?’ asked George, keeping his foot down hard, and his eye on the distant spark.