Midnight Plus One

I sat beside the girl, Harvey and Maganhard just behind us. I leant my head back and said: 'We may be meeting Merlin at the station.'

'Station?' Maganhard asked.

'Cornavin, the railway station where the air terminal is. When we get there, we split up. Harvey with me.'

Harvey said: 'No.' Rule One: the bodyguard sticks with the body.

'I know.' I nodded. 'But nobody's going to try any shooting in a station. The danger's being picked up by the cops. I want you back with me, to make sure nobody starts tailing Maganhard – or up ahead to see if anybody's waiting for him.'

He saw the sense of it. 'All right. I guess so.'

Maganhard asked: 'What do we do then?'

'Catch a train to Bern.'

'I thought we were going to hire a car?'

'Well, we're not – just yet. And anybody else who thought so is wrong, too.'

Miss Jarman said coldly: 'I suppose you mean me.'

'I mean anybody.'

The bus filled up and people started sitting too close for safe conversation.

At that time of the morning, the bus belted through to the terminal in ten minutes. We came out under Cornavin station at half past six.

The other passengers trampled each other down in the rush to get their guitars. I turned to Maganhard and said: 'Go ahead with Miss Jarman. Get two second-class tickets to Bern – let her buy them. Then go up to the platform. Don't recognise us.'

The girl said: 'If I'm buying tickets, I need some Swiss money.'

'You've already got some. You were making that phone work, remember?'

She gave me a look, and led the way off the bus.

Harvey and I let them get ten yards ahead, then sauntered after.

The booking hall was a tall, sombre art-nouveau affair, the sort of place that's built to look grimy and cold and no amount of cleaning and heating will ever change it. Railway stations specialise in it.

There were a few building workers going to out-of-town jobs, a few families coming off the overnight sleeper from Paris and London, but all wearing the same aimless, hopeless expression that you see in concentration-camp pictures. They didn't look as if they could remember their own faces in a mirror at that time of day, let alone spot a wanted man.

Harvey and I did a quick circuit, then he shook his head briefly. I agreed: nobody had smelt like a plain-clothes man.

Only one ticket window was open. Maganhard hung back, while the girl went up to it. I nodded to Harvey and he went out up the long dim tunnel ramp that led to the platforms. If you were going to stake out the station, you'd wait up there at the top, at thebuffet express counter, where everybody had to come past you and you'd have an excuse for just standing and watching.

I went up behind Miss Jarman to get our own tickets. As she turned away, she stared straight through me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her rejoin Maganhard, and start for the ramp. Then they stopped. I grabbed my tickets and turned around.

Bouncing across the hall like a big white rubber ball in his natty raincoat came Henri Merlin. He had seen Maganhard, but missed me. Instinctively, I looked behind him.

A slight man in a grubby trench-coat and narrow-brimmed green trilby shoved through the main doors, started to hurry, then checked and turned quickly off to read a timetable poster. Damn!

I'd meant to tell Merlin to make sure he wasn't being followed – and also not to speak to any of us until I'd had a chance to make doubly sure. But I hadn't had time. Blast that girl and her telephoning!

Merlin and Maganhard were talking rapidly. I turned my back and sidled away towards the doors, keeping an eye on the trench-coat. He looked round and gave them a stare that was far too bright and beady for 6.45 am.

I had to do something. I had to get Maganhard away before the trench-coat realised who he was. Except that he'd probably guessed already. As I watched him, he suddenly hauled a folded newspaper out of his pocket, opened it, and riffled quickly through it as if he was searching for something.

I walked back past Merlin and Maganhard and the girl, still standing at the bottom of the ramp. A few yards inside it, I was out of sight of the trench-coat but not of them. I waved furiously.

The girl came up to me. 'Merlin was being followed,' I said quickly. 'Get Maganhard away, and up to the platform. And you still don't know me or Harvey. Right?'

She nodded. I turned and walked up the ramp. Harvey drifted out of the little crowd sipping coffee around the brightly lit buffet counter, and said: 'We're clean up here, too.'

I jerked my head at the ramp. 'Merlin's got here – and he was tailed. I've told them to break it up.'

Harvey said: 'Christ!' and started for the ramp. The bodyguard's place is beside the body. But I stopped him. 'If it's a cop it's too late, and if it isn't there still won't be any shooting down there. Just see if he's spotted Maganhard.' I hustled him back towards the buffet crowd. He gave me a stony look, then shrugged and let himself be hustled.

Maganhard and the girl came up the ramp, passed the buffet, and went to consult a timetable. The man in the trench-coat drifted up behind them, half checked when he saw they'd stopped.

I didn't need to point him out. He couldn't have been all that dim, so perhaps he was just unlucky in having to tail people who were moving briskly through a crowd that was walking like the awakened dead. But to anybody looking for him, his changes of pace were as obvious as a scream in the night.

Harvey said grimly: 'So he knows. We can't risk a train now.'

'We'vegot to take a train now. If he follows us on, at least he won't be doing any telephoning.'

'Something in that.' Maganhard and the girl turned and went up the steps to platform three. The trench-coat followed. Harvey moved casually into place a few yards behind.

I was about to go back down the ramp when Merlin came up it, a lot less bouncy now. He glanced at me, then left it to me to approach him. I did.

'Caneton – what is happening?' His fat face looked white and worried.

'You were tailed, damn it. Now he's after Maganhard.'

'Pas possible!'His face clenched in misery. 'I am a fool! I have forgotten too much. What can I do?' Then he decided. 'I come with you. I help get finished with him.'

He sounded as if he were ready to heave our new friend under a train. I said quickly: 'No-you-bloody-well-don't. I've got trouble enough. Is there anything useful you can tell me? D'you know anything about this man Calieron, the Belgian who's supposed to be after us?'

'I have tried. My friends in Bruxelles. But' – his shoulders lifted in a delicate shrug – 'but nobody knows him. I think it is not his real name. And for the bearer shares, he needs no name at all.'

I nodded gloomily. That's about what I expected. Well, he knows the business, all right.' A train rumbled in overhead. 'See you in Liechtenstein tonight. Don't get followed all the way there.'

As I ran for the steps, he was still waving his hands in remorse, misery, and despair. French lawyers are good at that.

TWENTY-ONE

It hadn't been our train. Up on platform three, there were twenty or so people standing around in silent clumps under the dim underwater light that seeped through the frosted glass roof. Harvey was near the steps, Maganhard and the girl twenty yards along, the man in the trench-coat studying his Journal de Genèvein between.

I asked: 'When's the train?'

'Should be in now.' He jerked his head at the trench-coat. 'Who d'y ou think he is?'

'I'd guess a cop. The other side can't have enough men to stake out every station and airport.'

'If he's a cop, where's his pal?'

He had a point. Policemen go in pairs when they can't go in packs. Even a tailing job really needs two or three people. But perhaps they'd been caught off balance by Merlin dashing out so early; they might have left just one man to watch the hotel at night.