Midnight Plus One

She straightened up slowly. 'And when it gets a bit quiet, give a shout. Yes, I'm learning the rules.'

Harvey said: 'D'you see what that was? Your girlfriend's van. The Clos Pinel truck.'

I rammed my head through the hedge again. The van was just pulling up at the customs house, people running out to yank open its doors.

The damn fool! Why was she taking this risk? But I knew why. I'd told her the route I planned, and she'd known this road would be the difficult place. So she'd waited somewhere until we'd had time to reaeh it – then come charging up.

They'd be pretty suspicious of her: a van that could easily hold four passengers, from a place not far from yesterday's shooting, coming on an odd route at an odd time. But she'd known that, of course – and was deliberately using it to distract them.

'Through the hedge,' I snapped. 'Quick! '

Harvey piled through, without asking questions. I shunted the girl after him, then Maganhard. Then myself. Long before Ginette was clear of the customs we were safe on the other side.

I wanted to stay and make sure she got through okay, but that might waste everything she'd gained for us. We had to move on. It was an old rule.

We went crouched, along a hedge towards the airport. Now the beacon was flashing straight in our faces. The high fence was only two hundred yards ahead.

Miss Jarman asked: 'We're going to come up against the airport, aren't we?'

'That's the idea. They had to borrow some French territory to lengthen their runway a few years ago; now the frontier runs along the fence, here. Once we're in the airport we're in Switzerland.'

Harvey said: 'Airports don't have the sort of fences you can just climb through.'

'I know. I borrowed some wire-cutters off Ginette.'

A couple of minutes later we reached the fence.

It was seven or eight feet of strong wire mesh strung between metal posts. I got the long-handled wire-cutters out of my briefcase and chewed away at a strand. It snapped with a loud click. I tried the next one more carefully, but still got a click. It was going to be a slow job: the mesh was only two inches wide and I had to cut a vertical slice about three feet high to give us a flap I could bend back.

Suddenly light poured over me. A searchlight, coming -impossibly – from the middle of the air. I froze. Then, behind the light, the soft whistle of throttled-back jets. An airliner on the approach had switched on its landing light.

I stayed still. The pilot would never see us, but the light could silhouette us for anybody in the fields behind us.

The airliner hit the runway with a squeak of rubber, then a sudden roar as the jets went to reverse thrust for braking. Under that noise, I snipped up the fence as fast and silently as scissors going through chiffon.

I turned to Maganhard. 'Welcome to Switzerland.'

From there it was fairly simple. Geneva-Cointrin is just one long runway with narrow grass areas on both sides. The airport buildings and workshops were all on the'far side; on ours, there were just heaps of building materials, banks of bulldozed earth that somebody hadn't got around to smoothing down, little brick huts that had something to do with power or radar or somesuch. Plenty of cover.

We walked half a mile along between the runway and the fence and then, when it was Switzerland on the other side as well, just cut ourselves out again. In both places I jammed the wire back into place and it might be a few days before anybody noticed the cuts. And even when they did, it wouldn't prove anything about a man called Maganhard.

We walked out into the suburb of Mategnin – tall new blocks of flats standing in the sea of mud that one day somebody was going to turn into a green lawn, unless he got another contract first, of course. It would have been dawn except for the clouds and the mountains, but the streets were still empty.

Maganhard asked: 'How do we reach the city now?'

'We walk round to the airport front entrance and pick up a bus or taxi.'

He digested this, and then said: 'We could have walked across the airport – it would have been less distance! '

'Of course – and pretended we were passengers? And shown our passports and explained how we got our feet wet on the plane?'

After that, he saved his breath for walking.

TWENTY

It was after six, in a dull dawn twilight, when we reached the airport buildings. The lights were still on inside, but were beginning to look pallid in the mauve light seeping over the, mountains on the east.

There were a few cars parked opposite the entrance, and a smallish bus towing a luggage-trailer parked alongside. Its lights were off.

'We'll go inside and clean up,' I said. 'Meet back at the door in five minutes.'

Miss Jarman headed off in her own direction. Even in the bright lights, she didn't look as if she'd been driven for nearly five hours in the back of a van and then gone for a two-mile hike across wet fields and through hedges. She had the natural glossiness which mud won't cling to. Just a little pale around the face and wet around the feet.

Maganhard looked as if he'd just lost a serious argument with a wildcat. His neat bronze raincoat was rumpled, smudged, and torn in two places; his trousers were wet and muddy, his hair was shaggy. He just stood there, looking ruffled and unhappy and determined to go on looking that way. He still thought I'd brought him across an unnecessarily rough route, and was damned if he saw why he should make the best of it.

We hustled him into the washroom, shielding him on either side. Harvey and I didn't look so bad, but mostly because our clothes had never looked so good. Harvey was pale, his eyes sunk in craters and the lines on his face deeper, but he looked alive again.

I'd hardly got started cleaning myself up when Maganhard said: 'You have not forgotten that we must ring up Monsieur Merlin.'

I had managed to forget it, of course, and would have been happy to keep it that way. But he was still paying for the trip. I brushed down my raincoat, washed my face, hands, and shoes, combed my hair, and was out looking for a telephone inside four minutes.

I rang Merlin's hotel, told them it wastrès important, and finally got Merlin himself.

'Mon Dieu!'he exploded. 'What has happened to you? I have heard nothing – not since Dinadan. For more than a day! All I get is the radio, the newspapers – all about shootings in the Auvergne! What is-'

I said: 'Shut up, Henri. We've got here now. If you want to see us, we'll be at Cornavin station in about twenty minutes.'

There was a pause, then he said: 'I meet you there.'

'Just walk through the booking hall up to the buffet.'

Somebody slipped into the telephone box next door. I glanced casually through the glass – and then said quickly: 'Cornavin in twenty minutes, then,' and slapped the phone back.

I was out and into the next box before she'd finished dialling. I smashed a hand down on the phone, breaking the connection, and jerked her out with the other hand.

She turned on a look of innocent, babyish surprise. 'Now why did-'

'You were doing well back on the frontier,' I said grimly. 'Don't spoil it all now. I told you phoning was out.'

'But only at the Château.'

'You could have asked me.'

I had one hand under her elbow and we were doing a twosome across the hall that couldn't have looked like a honeymoon at any distance.

She said sweetly: 'I thought you might say no.'

I just looked at her.

We reached the door at the same time as Harvey and Maganhard. Outside, the bus's lights were on and people were climbing wearily aboard. From the number of beards and guitars, it looked as if they'd come off a cheap night flight from Paris or London. I'd hoped for something classier – for reasons of camouflage, not snobbery. However rumpled, Maganhard still didn't look like a student on an Easter fling.

But at least students don't read the crime pages. We climbed in and paid our fare without attracting any interest.