Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

I looked at him sideways. His face was calm and his hands were still when he wasn't lifting his cigarette. But his eyes were watching ahead, carefully vetting each wall, house, tree as they grew in the headlights and then ran away behind us, proven innocent.

The car seemed to dwindle around me, fitting more closely, feeling more a part of me. Back-seat passengers don't breathe down your neck in a big Citroën, and we hadn't heard a squeak from them in half an hour. They had faded, had become no more weight or individuality than a couple of vague memories. The car was just Harvey and me in a dim cockpit, flickering through the night with the precision of a high-powered bullet.

It was one of those times when you know exactly, canfeel exactly, what the car will do – and the road also. It felt familiar, although it wasn't. I understood the pattern of it: what it would do next, how tight its bends would be, how steep its slopes.

It happens. And when it happens, you're right and you're safe. But it doesn't last. And you're never more wrong, more dangerous, than when it's stopped lasting and you don't realise it.

The dashboard clock said three-thirty. Two hours to dawn. Sixteen hours to Liechtenstein.

At four o'clock we were running down a tree-lined avenue into Vannes. It was the biggest town we'd meet for another hour.

'There's a Michelin Guide in the pocket in front of you,' I told Harvey. 'Look up this place and find me the post office. I want to ring Merlin, if there's a phone box there.'

'Why?'

'He wanted me to keep him in touch. And he may be able to find out something about the shooting in Quimper. It could help.'

After a while he said: 'Turn right in a moment. Alongside this square. Post office on your right in a couple of hundred yards.'

I drew up and switched off the engine alongside a dark telephone box. The silence was a sudden thing, rushing in on me, making me feel how noisy we must have been moving. Then I shook my head: it was far too early to start getting jumpy on this trip. I stepped out into the rain.

The box was open, and after a while I got the operator to wake up. I asked for Henri's private Paris number.

It rang several times, then a woman's voice said sleepily:'Allo?'

'Est il possible de parler à Henri? Voici Caneton.'

There was a pause, then: '//vous donnera un coup de téléphone dans quelques minutes. Quel est le numéro?'

I gave her the number, hung up, then went back to the car.

'Didn't get him yet,' I told Harvey. 'He's ringing back.' I slid into the front seat and started lighting a cigarette.

Maganhard asked: 'What are you ringing for?'

'To tell him what happened to his boy in Quimper. And see if that means anything to him. He might have some suggestions.'

Maganhard's voice got slightly harder, more metallic. 'I thought you were an expert?'

'An expert is a man who knows when to call in experts.'

The phone in the box jangled and I jumped for it.

Henri said:'Monsieur Caneton?'

'Hello, Henri. Bad news: your cousin in Brittany is ill, very ill.'

That is bad news. How did it happen?'

'Suddenly – very suddenly. Anything you think I should do?'

'Is he – he is well looked after, yes?'

'He's okay where he is for a day or two, anyhow.'

Then, perhaps I think you should go on as you go. You are at Vannes?'

'Yes. I'm just worried that what he's got might be – infectious. You haven't heard of any disease he's been near recently?'

'I have heard nothing. But now – in the morning – I will ask. You will ring me again?'

'Sure. Night, Henri.'

'Au 'voir, Caneton.'

I got back into the car. 'He doesn't know anything.' I started the engine again. 'We could turn off here and go for Rennes, then Le Mans and the northern route. But the road isn't as good. I think we'll keep going for Nantes.' A big yellow Berlietcamion growled round the corner ahead and trundled past us, shivering the ground.

Harvey said: 'Well, let's roll. The road'll be full of those things by breakfast.'

The road was straighter and faster now, the farmland around it looked thicker and richer in the headlights. We were almost off the Brittany peninsula.

But the spell had broken. I wasn't feeling the road as I had been before. We were covering ground, but the magic had gone.

There were occasionalcamions and farm lorries, the spray blowing away from their rear wheels like smoke. I realised we must be trailing a wake like a torpedo boat: nobody had a hope in hell of reading our number plate.

Nobody said anything. Just the flicker of light as Harvey or the girl behind me lit a cigarette. It was the last low hour before the dawn. The time when you know you haven't built up strength enough for a new day; the time when sick men decide the night has been too long, and give up and die. The time a good gunman knows to lay an ambush.

But nobody did. Soon after five we were winding through the industrial desert of Nantes, by-passing the centre through the northwest suburbs.

Harvey asked: 'How's the gas?'

'Wearing out. But I think we can make Angers. We've only done about two hundred and fifty kilometres so far.'

The girl asked: 'Can we stop to get some breakfast? '

'We'll get something in Tours.'

'Why wait till then?'

'It's more of a tourist town than anything this side of it: they aren't so likely to remember strangers.'

We went on. Up the valley of the Loire, on the N23. A good, fast road except where it suddenly twisted into descending turns down to the riverside villages. There was more traffic now; lorries carrying fish up from the sea, others bringing vegetables down from farmlands. And morecamions, carrying whatevercamions carry: Berliets, Somurs, Saviems, Unies, and Willeme tankers. All with the square, solid military look of French Légionnaires -and the same habit of walking over anything that got in their way.

The night began to wear thin around us; the shapes of trees and houses separated from the sky; the headlights grew pallid. Even the rain was thinning out; with the wind behind us, we were probably outrunning the front.

When it was light enough I twisted the rear-view mirror to have my first good look at our passengers.

Maganhard must have been about fifty and in one way he looked it: a heavy square face frozen in a suspicious frown. But the details were missing. The face was quite unmarked, unworn; the hair a thick pure-black mass swept carefully back from a sharp widow's peak. It looked like a metal sculpture from the twenties or thirties when they got the shape exactly right but made everything smooth and stylized to show that it was Really Art.'

He wore square glasses with thick black rims, a bronze-coloured raincoat of very simple cut, and his arms were folded across his chest showing a square wristwatch and a pair of angular gold cuff-links by one of those Scandinavian designers who can make stainless steel look like a million dollars and gold look like fifty cents.

The girl, Miss Jarman, was something else.

Her face was both innocent and haughty, which isn't a rare combination, but which rarely looks as good as it did on her. The face was a pure oval, rather pale, with thin arched eyebrows that were mostly pencilwork. Long brown hair in Garbo's Queen Christina cut, curled in under the chin. She was fast asleep, but doing it without letting her mouth come unbuttoned.

She didn't fit at all with Maganhard – or maybe she did, in a way. At least you could see why he wanted her in the front office, and somehow I was pretty sure that was the only place he did want her. She'd be very good at telling minor millionaires to go climb a tree without hurting their feelings. From her, they'd take it.

This had earned her a dark shaved-sealskin coat, probably on Maganhard's money but certainly not his design. It was a casual -wrap-around job held with a loose tie belt, as if it was just another coat. Under it, a white blouse.