'I'd love a shot,' I said between corners. 'Would you let me drive? Just for a bit.'
'Well, I don't know. There's the insurance…' It was the most worried he'd sounded so far. 'I'd love to let you, Kathryn, but —'
'I'm insured.'
'But, Kathryn, this is a Ferrari.'
'I've driven Ferraris. Uncle Freddy used to lend me the Daytona when I was staying at Blysecrag sometimes.'
'Oh? Well, yes, but that's front-engined, you see, quite different handling characteristics. The 355 is mid-engined. Much trickier on the limit.'
'He let me loose in the F40, too. And, of course, I wouldn't be going anywhere near the limit.'
He glanced at me. 'He let you drive the F40?'
'A couple of times.'
'I never drove the F40.' He sounded like a disappointed schoolboy. 'What's it like?'
'Brutal.'
'Brutal?'
'Brutal.'
We stopped at a semi-circular gravel terrace on a wide corner near the summit of a pass, just above the tree-line.
He pulled the car up and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then turned to me with a grin and let his gaze fall to my knees. I was wearing a skirt and jacket, silk blouse; just business-like, nothing provocative. 'If I let you have a shot of the car, what do I get in return?' He reached out and put his hand on my knee. It was warm and slightly damp.
I think I made my mind up then. I lifted his hand off and put it back on his own thigh, smiled and said, 'We'll see.'
He smiled. 'She's all yours.' He got out; he held the driver's door open for me. I slipped in. The engine was still running, idling quietly. The door closed with a thunk. I felt in my bag, pulled out my phone and checked the display. We had signal. I clicked the central locking while Poudenhaut was moving round the front of the car.
He hesitated when he heard the locks click, then tried the passenger's door. He bent down, knocking at the window glass with one crooked finger. 'Hello? May I come in?' He was still. smiling.
I fastened my seat-belt. 'I think you've been lying to me, Adrian,' I told him. I tested the accelerator, blipping the engine up towards the four thousand revs mark and letting it fall back again.
'Kathryn?' he said, as though he hadn't heard me properly.
'I said, I think you've been lying to me, Adrian. I'm not convinced you don't know more about this Silex thing than you're letting on.'
'What the hell are you talking about?'
'I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, Adrian. And I'd like to ask you a few more questions about what was really in there.' I reached into my bag and waved a piece of plastic and metal at him. 'And needed lots of heavy-duty phone connectors like this.'
He stared through the glass with a look of utter fury, then stood up, glanced around and ran behind the car. I watched in the rear-view mirror while he found a couple of large rocks from the side of the road; he ran back quickly and wedged them on either side of the car's offside rear wheel, stamping them into place. I reached over and tested the glove-box; still open. I pulled the keys out, letting the engine die, locked the glove-box on the key, then restarted the engine. Poudenhaut clapped his hands free of dust as he came back to the window. 'You were a bit slow there, Kathryn,' he said, bending to look in at me.
He sat on the car's wing, looking out at the road. I could still hear his voice quite clearly through the hood's layers of fabric. 'I suppose what we have here is a Mexican stand-off, isn't that what they call it?' He swivelled at the hips and looked round at me through the windscreen. 'Come on, Kathryn. If you're upset I put my hand on your knee, if that's what this is all about, we'll forget it ever happened. I don't know what you're talking about with this Silex thing and phone lines and so on, but let's at least discuss it like adults. You're just being childish. Come on, let me back into the car.'
'What was really going on, Adrian? Was it a dealing room? Is that what you had in there? Was that what the hidden room was all about?'
'Kathryn, if you don't stop this nonsense I'm just going to have to…' He patted his breast pocket, but his phone was in the car, connected to a hands-free kit. He smiled and spread his hands. 'Well, I suppose I'll just have to flag down the next car. The Swiss police won't be very happy about this, Kathryn, if they have to get involved.'
'Were you in on what happened to Mike Daniels, Adrian, or was that just Colin Walker on his own? Well, alone apart from the bimbo and the dentist?'
He stared at me, his mouth open. He closed it.
'And the wheeze of sending a number to Mr Shinizagi like that. What was it — a bank sort code? Account number? That must have been Mr Hazleton's idea, right? He's into numbers and puzzles and shit, isn't he? You can count to over a thousand using your fingers; he ever mention that to you? And, of course, if you use somebody's teeth as binary code, you can count to over two billion, or transmit up to a ten-figure number.'
He came rushing around the car and started pulling at the passenger door's handle. 'You just let me in now, you fucking bitch. You fucking smart-assed bitch, let me in now! Let me in or I'll tear this hood off with my own hands.'
'Your Swiss army knife's in the glove-box with the spare keys, Ade. Oh, what were you keeping the revs down to, Ade? Five thousand, wasn't it?' I blipped the accelerator for longer this time. The rev counter's needle swung sharply up: to six, then seven thousand. The rev counter was red-lined at eight and a half thousand, though it went up from there to ten thousand. The engine screamed, making a wonderful metallic, spine-tingling yowl; a noise that must have echoed off nearby mountains and very possibly exceeded the drive-by noise regulations of several Swiss cantons.
'What are you doing?' Poudenhaut shouted. 'Stop that!'
I stepped on the gas again; the engine responded instantly, producing another fabulous pulse of sound. 'Woah, we were up to eight thousand that time, Adrian,' I told him. 'Nearly into the red.'
He'd given up pulling at the door handle, possibly afraid that he'd break it. He was standing a couple of metres away, looking utterly distraught and trembling, whether with fear or rage it was hard to tell.
I stamped on the accelerator, pushing it briefly to the floor this time. The noise was crushing, vast, furious, like a whole pride of lions screaming in your ear at once. The needle on the rev counter flicked briefly into the red area on the dial, then fell away again and clunked back towards the idling zone. 'We hit the red zone there, Adrian. Can't be doing the car any good.'
'Fuck off! Just fuck off! Fuck you! Fuck you, you cunt! It's just fucking metal. Fuck you!' He looked like he was crying. He turned on his heel and stamped off towards the road, shoulders hunched. I let him get to the metalled surface, then floored the gas pedal and held it there for a few seconds. The car quaked, the engine screamed, wailing like something in the utmost extremity of agony. It would have been a hard thing to do for anybody with the slightest amount of mechanical sympathy, and I wasn't enjoying it but, then, it was a means to an end, and in the end our Adrian was right: it was just metal. No matter what it sounded like, the only real suffering was being done by him. Poudenhaut shook as he heard this noise, then he spun round and came charging back. He beat on the hood with his fists. 'Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! My car! Stop it!'