‘Fourteen hundred miles. We should be in Vienna by midday. Fiume, say, half-past two. I ought to make Yanina by eight o’clock, with Rex taking turn and turn about flying the plane. After that it depends on what fresh transport we can get.’
Next, they were in the plane again lifting out of the fogbound Paris to a marvellous dawn, which gilded the edges of the clouds and streaked the sky with rose and purple and lemon.
Richard was flying the plane in a kind of trance, yet never for a moment losing sight of important landmarks or the dials by which he adjusted his controls. The others slept.
When Marie Lou roused, the plane was at rest near a long line of hangars dimly glimpsed through another ghostly fog. Someone said ‘Stuttgart’ and then she saw Simon standing on the ground below her, conversing in German with an airport official.
‘A big, grey, private plane,’ he was saying urgently. ‘The pilot is a short, square-shouldered fellow; the passengers a big, fat, bald-headed man and a little girl.’
Marie Lou leaned forward eagerly but she did not catch the airport man’s reply. A moment later Simon was climbing into the plane and saying to the Duke:
‘He must be taking the same route, but he’s an hour and a half ahead of us. I expect he had his own car in Paris. That would have saved him time while we were hunting for that wretched taxi.’
Rex had taken over the controls and they were in the air once more. Richard was sitting next to Marie Lou, sound asleep. For an endless time they seemed to soar through a cloudless sky of pale, translucent blue. She, too, must have dropped off again, for she was not conscious of their landing at Vienna, only when she woke in the early afternoon that the pilots had changed over and Richard was back at the controls.
Yet, in some curious way, although she had not actually been aware of their landing, fragments of their conversation must have penetrated her sleep at the time. She knew that there had also been fog at Vienna and that Mocata had left the airport there only an hour before them, so in the journey from Paris they had managed to gain half an hour on him.
The engine droned on, its deep note soothing their frayed nerves. Richard hardly knew that he was flying, although he used all the skill at his command. It seemed as though some other force was driving the aeroplane on and that he was standing outside it as a spectator. All his faculties were numbed and his anxiety for Fleur deadened by an intense absorption with the question of speedspeedspeed.
At Fiume there was no trace of fog. Glorious sunshine, warm and life-giving, flooded the aerodrome, making the hangars shimmer in the distance. The Duke crawled out from the couch of rugs and cushions that had been made up in the back of the cabin to accommodate a fifth passenger, and chosen by him as more comfortable for his wounded arm. He questioned the landing-ground official in fluent Italian, but without success.
‘From Vienna Mocata must have taken another route,’ he told Richard as he climbed back. ‘Perhaps a short cut over the Dinarie Alps or by way of Sarajevo. If so he will have more than made up his half-hour lead again. I feared as much when I saw that there was no fog here. I can’t explain it but I have an idea that he is able to surround us with it, yet only when we follow him to places where he has been quite recently himself.’
Rex took over for the long lap down the Dalmatian coast above the countless islands that fringe the Yugoslavian mainland and lay beneath them in the sparkling Adriatic Sea.
They slept again, all except Rex who, a crack pilot, was now handling the machine with superb skill.
As he flew the plane half his thoughts were centred about Tanith. He could see her there, lying cold and dead, in the library a thousand miles away at Cardinals Folly. That dream of happiness had been so brief. Never again would he see the sudden smile break out like sunshine rising over mountains on that beautiful, calm face. Never again hear the husky, melodious voice whispering terms of endearment. Never againnever again! But he was on the trail of her murderer and if he died for it he meant to make that inhuman monster pay.
The Adriatic merged into the Ionian Sea. The endless rugged coastline rushed past below them on their left; its mountains rising steeply to the interior of Albania, and its vales breaking them here and there to run down to little white fishing villages on the seashore. Villages that in Roman times had been great centres of population through the constant passage of merchandise, soldiers, scholars, travellers between Brindisi, upon the heel of Italy, and the Peninsula of Greece.
Then they were over Corfu. Banking steeply, he headed for the mainland and picked up the northern mouth of the River Kalamas. The deep blue of the sea flecked by its tiny white crests vanished behind them. Twisting and turning, the plane drove upwards above the desolate valleys where the river trickled, a streak of silver in the evening light. The sun sank behind them into the distant sea. They were heading for the huge chain of mountains, which forms the backbone of Greece.
A mist was rising which obscured the long, empty patches and rare cultivated fields below. The light faded, its last rays lit a great distant snow-capped crest which crowned the watershed.
A lake lay below them, placid and calm in the evening light but glimpsed only through the banks of fog. At its south-western end the white buildings of a town were vaguely discernible now and then as Rex circled slowly, searching for a landing-place. Suddenly, through a gap in the billowing whitish-grey, his eye caught a big plane standing in a level field.
‘That’s Mocata’s machine,’ yelled Simon who was in the cockpit beside him.
Rex banked again and, coming into the wind, brought them to earth within fifty yards of it. The others roused and scrambled out.
The mist which Rex had first perceived a quarter of an hour before, from his great altitude, now hemmed them in on every side.
A man came forward from a low, solitary hangar as the plane landed. De Richleau saw him, a vague figure, half obscured by the tenuous veils of mist; went over to him and said, when he rejoined them:
‘That fellow is a French mechanic. He tells me Mocata landed only half an hour ago. He came in from Monastir but had trouble in the mountains, which delayed him; nobody but a maniac or a superman would try and get through that way at all. This fellow thinks that he can get us a car; he runs the airport, such as it is, and we’re darned lucky to find any facilities here at all.’
Richard had just woken from a long sleep. Before he knew what was happening he found that they were all packed into an ancient open Ford with a tattered hood. Simon was on one side of him and Marie Lou on the other. Rex squatted on the floor of the car at their feet and De Richleau was in front beside the driver.
They could not see more than twenty yards ahead. The lamps made little impression upon the gloom before them. The road was a sandy track, fringed at the sides with coarse grass and boulders. No houses, cottages or white-walled gardens broke the monotony of the way as they rattled and bumped, mounting continuously up long, curved gradients.
De Richleau peered ahead into the murk. Occasional rifts gave him glimpses of the rocky mountains round which they climbed or, upon the other side, a cliff edge falling sheer to a mist-filled valley.
He, too, could only remember episodes from that wild journey : an unendurable weariness had pressed upon him once they had boarded the plane and left Paris. Even his power of endurance had failed to last and he had slept during the greater part of their fourteen hundred mile flight. He was still sleepy now and only half awake as that unknown demon driver, who had hurried them with few words into the rickety Ford, crouched over his wheel and pressed the car, rocketing from hairpin bend to hairpin bend, onwards and upwards.