Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

'A man who has a… a sort of hospital, in the mountains near Chamonix. For Harvey. I know he cured another man who drank too much. I thought he might help.'

'Why didn't you tell me this?'

'I don't know,' she said quietly. 'It seemed sort of… private. And I didn't think you were taking me seriously.'

And that was just about true. For the sake of honesty rather than tact, I said carefully: 'Maybe I wondered if you were just playing at helping lame dogs over stiles.'

'I can't be sure myself,' she said simply. 'Lame dogs are very rare in our world, Mr Cane. Most of them are either wolves or overfed lap-dogs. All I can do is try and help him – and try and find out why.'

'It'll be a full-time job – even if you can get him to go with you.'

'I don't suppose I can. But I can go with him. I've told Mr Maganhard I'm leaving.'

I nodded. Maybe I was getting convinced, after all. But there was one thing more to be said. 'He's the sort of man he is partly because he drinks. If he stops drinking, he'll be a different man. You may not like the different man.'

'I know. It's a risk.'

The second wire broke. She said: 'Have you lost the wire-cutters we used at the airport?'

And damn me, they'd been sitting in my briefcase all the time. I was in a marvellous state for starting a battle.

She said: 'So I can drive, then?'

Somebody with some sense had better do something. I kicked the ends of the wire clear. 'You can drive.'

We walked back. Harvey said: 'What the hell's been keeping you?'

'Short exchange of views on the political situation in the Balkans. She's driving.'

'She'swhat! We figured she'd be staying here.'

'Changed my mind. She knows how to drive these cars. Cuts down the risk, when you think about it.'

'Not for her, it doesn't.'

'True.'

The girl climbed in the driving seat, which put her head higher than if she'd been standing on the ground.

Harvey said: 'Is this the old Resistance spirit? – equal opportunity for women to get killed?'

'Something like that.'

The starter whirred, the engine began its deep burble, like a gramophone record of a voice being played far too slow.

I turned away. Harvey said doggedly: 'I still don't like it.'

I jerked back. 'D'you think I like it – any of it? If I'd known this job would end up running a Rolls-Royce through the Western Front, I wouldn't have come within a thousand miles of it. But we came – so we're going the last two kilometres.'

'She could get killed.'

'Talk her out of it, then.'

I got into the back of the car, assembled the Mauser, and then remembered Morgan's big Webley which was weighing down my raincoat pocket. I thought about it, decided I wasn't a two-gun man, and handed it to Maganhard.

He started to object. I said: 'Nobody can force you to use it, Mr Maganhard. But if things go wrong, you may just feel like it.'

When I got down again, Harvey had finished his conversation with the girl.

I said: 'Well?'

He said: 'I still don't like it.' But he swung up on the right-hand running-board, his arm wrapped around the door pillar. I climbed up on the left one. Miss Jarman shoved the lever into first gear, and we were on our way.

The first few hundred yards of track were in good condition; they must have been used as a farm path. We were passing through grazing meadows, past clumps of trees, past odd-shaped grassy humps that were part of the old stone fortifications.

The girl could drive that car, all right. The engine sometimes slowed to a deep thumping like a pom-pom gun firing in a pillow factory – but she used the ignition retard instead of the gearbox, and kept in second gear. The faster, higher pitch of first gear would have carried a lot further. ' The path was angling gently away from the road above us, keeping more or less to the floor of the small valley, but wandering from side to side in a way that was meaningless until you remembered it was a military affair. Then you saw that it was taking advantage of every small fold in the ground, every clump of trees, to find cover.

Abruptly we were in among pines, weaving along just inside the edge of a forest that stretched uphill to the Flascherberg on our left. More cover; logical. But very dark.

Miss Jarman asked: 'Can I use the lights?'

I leant in through the window. 'No. But if I shout for lights, I want the headlights on full, undipped.'

'Is that a good idea?'

'If I don't think so, I won't shout.'

We crept on. The trees had no colour; just burned, black skeletons draped in tattered black robes. And you couldn't see five yards through them.

But nobody sets up gunfights among trees. Too narrow a field of fire, too dark, plenty of cover to jump behind… I remembered all that.

But did they?

I said: 'Push it along. Fast as you can.'

'I thought you said they'd wait until the very front,' she said.

'I still think so. I just got frightened.'

She may have laughed to herself, but we speeded up. She was winding the big, almost horizontal wheel from side to side; either she'd been seeing too many gangster movies, or the steering was very light and high-geared.

We cleared the trees, and the cringing feeling of waiting for a bullet passed.

Then, just past the edge of the forest, there was a low, long square shape: the first of the modern fortifications. I leaned in and said: 'Stop here for a moment.'

She let the car drift to a quiet stop. I walked across, and Harvey came up behind me. Without saying anything, we moved to either side as we closed up on the door of the blockhouse.

He asked quietly: 'What are we looking for?'

'Just studying the local architecture.'

He glanced at me, then nodded and started studying.

It was a very good blockhouse, if you happened to care about blockhouses, and the people who built this one had really cared. The walls at the loopholes were eighteen inches of solid concrete; the entrance was correctly cluttered with blast walls to keep out stray bullets or shell splinters; the loopholes were horizontal fan-shaped slits, wider at the outside. And the whole thing sunk several feet into the ground, so that only the top three or four feet showed.

It wasn't brand new any more. The camouflage paint had worn off, and the concrete had a damp and spongy feel, and came off in a gritty paste on your hands. But it was still eighteen inches thick.

Harvey ran a finger down the wall and said thoughtfully: 'Would have been a wonderful war.' Then he looked at me. 'You think the rest of it, up front, is like this?'

'Yes.'

'I'd been thinking of just holes in the ground, trenches. Like that.' He turned away. 'Would have been a wonderful war.'

After that, the fortifications came thicker and faster. An occasional pillbox in among a clump of trees; concrete platforms for guns; mortar pits gaping like open graves. The track got rougher, became just two ruts with small bushes and four-year-old trees sticking up between. The Rolls swept over them and scraped them to pieces on its underside.

I could have wished it any other colour but the one it was. In the drifts of moonlight the polished aluminium seemed to shine like a neon light.

The track flattened out on the valley floor. Half a mile away, up on our right, headlights flickered silently along the frontier road and stopped… Your papers please… just a routine check… Thank you very much, a good journey to you. A different world.

The car slowed. Harvey asked quietly: 'Is this it?'

I looked ahead – and it was.

It was a bank, about seven feet high, right across the valley. It had an even, unnatural look, like the slope at the end of a lawn. Then a flare of moonlight showed me more. It wasn't a bank, but a small plateau. The generals had decided that the higher the ground, the better fighting country it was – so they'd made it higher. The whole battle zone was set on a raised platform like a well-laid-out bowling green. It was all very logical, and all a little creepy.