“I drove here. I know the road.”
“You’d do well to eat your dinner there, it’ll be time. And on the way back, drive briskly. Understand? Don’t stop for anything or anyone, keep going, and keep a good pace. Your friends will be waiting for you,” said Ondrejov soothingly. “Don’t worry about them, they’ll be all right. Miss Barber, too. I’ll take care of her.”
“Who was the other one?” Dominic asked abruptly. “The one who went off with Tossa?”
“You don’t know? A Mr. Newcombe. It seems he feels himself to be in the place of a father. I assume her mother is thinking of marrying him.”
“Oh! I see!” His tone indicated that he did not see very clearly. He climbed into the driving seat of the van, and inserted the key. The engine quivered into life. “She isn’t alone, is she?” he asked, his mind suddenly very clear and very calm. “She won’t be alone?”
“She won’t be alone at all. I have two daughters, my boy. I have a grand-daughter. You can be easy.”
The miracle was that he instantly felt easy. He started the van moving. It rolled across the cobbles of the square, towards the neatly patterned width of roadway, sailed decorously into it, and vanished between the step-gabled façades at the far end.
Mirek Zachar materialised at Ondrejov’s elbow, large and placid from the shadow of the arcades, buckling his crash-helmet under his chin.
“This man Newcombe’s booked in here, at the Slovan. All right, I can keep the kid in sight, don’t worry. I know these roads better than he does. You’ll be at the bend by Král’s, in case?”
“Or someone else will. We’ll be keeping constant watch there. If anything goes wrong, if there’s anything even questionable, telephone.”
“Surely!” said Mirek, and straddled his Jawa and kicked it into life before it was out of the arcade.
“If you lose him,” threatened Ondrejov, raising his voice peremptorily above the din, “I’ll have your hide for a jacket!”
Chapter 9
THE MAN WHO REAPPEARED
« ^ »
Now that he was on his own he could think; he had a lot of thinking to do, and seven miles of driving to help him to do it. The one thing he knew for certain was that everything rested on him. They might come running from all directions to Tossa’s aid; the responsibility for her, nevertheless, belonged simply to herself and Dominic, no one else. And Tossa was a prisoner, and immobilised; so there was no one left but Dominic.
Unless, perhaps Ondrejov…? His actions were apparently orthodox, but there was something about him that continually indicated the possibility of deception, as though he enjoyed making all the signposts point the opposite way. But the trouble was that one couldn’t be sure, and there wasn’t time to wait and watch developments. So that left the answer the same as before; it was up to Dominic.
The details of Welland’s murder had to make sense, every murder must make sense. A distorted sense sometimes, where a distorted mind is involved, but Dominic had a feeling that there was nothing in the least deranged in this killing. Therefore, if he had all the facts at his disposal, he ought to be able to work it out; but since he had not all the facts, he must be prepared to fill in some of the gaps with intelligent speculation.
Start with something positive: someone was prepared to kill in order to ensure that people from Karol Alda’s English past should not contact him. First Terrell, then Welland, as soon as they got too near to finding Alda, and both of them within the same small valley. Therefore Alda was there to be found, either in person, or in such strong indications as could not fail to lead directly to him elsewhere. But because of the urgency which apparently had attached to removing the hunters at short notice, it seemed to Dominic more likely that the man himself was there. Not certain, but for present purposes a reasonable assumption.
Was it therefore necessarily true that Alda himself had done the killing? He was wary of thinking so; if he and his work were now vitally important to this country, and had to be kept secret, far more likely that the necessary killing would be undertaken by professionals experienced in the art, leaving the genius to work undisturbed. That was assuming that this was really national business, of course. If it was a personal murder with a personal motive behind it, then Alda was, presumably, taking care of his own privacy.
In either case, if it was as vital as all that, the next move was already implied. Because whoever had shot Welland had also got in a second shot at Dominic on that occasion. He knew, all too well, that there had been one witness there, probably he knew there had been two, and who they were. He could not know whether Welland had had time to give up his secrets to them before he died, and he could not afford to take risks. They were both dangerous to him, and due for removal. If he knew enough, Tossa would be his chosen target. But Tossa was safely out of circulation and out of his reach. And who had put her there? Ondrejov, that inscrutable, innocent countryman.
The striped fields under the hills danced by outside the windows of the van, and he was back at the enigma of Ondrejov once again. Was Tossa really being held because he—or his superior, or both—suspected her? Or because, like a true policeman, he refused to let her run free and be used for bait?
Either way, that left Dominic Felse next in line; and Dominic Felse was not out of circulation; he was here in the van, driving along a mountain road, alone.
Was there anything else positive to go on? Too much speculation was only beginning to confuse the issue. Yes, there remained, if nothing else, the few words Robert Welland had left behind him in dying. Tossa had reported them as: “But he couldn’t have known—nobody else knew!” And then, furiously: “Impossible!” Welland had almost certainly been convinced that Alda had killed Terrell. Therefore Alda must be the “he” who couldn’t have known, presumably, that Welland had actually located him. How, then, could he have acted on the knowledge? And then: “Impossible!” What was impossible in Welland’s eyes? Certainly not that Alda should attempt to kill him; that was something he could, by his own theory, have expected.
He had reached the curve of the road where the rutted track turned off to the right, into Zbojská Dolina. The van rounded the bend, and began to climb. Another mile, and the low roof and deep eaves of the Riavka hut budded suddenly like a mushroom out of the meadow grass, with the bluish, fragrant darkness of the firs behind.
Somehow he had arrived at a totally unexpected conclusion, and no matter how much he walked round it and looked for other ways, they all brought him back to this one need. In the tangle of secrecy, suspicion and subtlety they had all been hunting for one person, but without ever speaking his name, ever asking after him, ever pausing to consider that he might not even know they wanted him. Never had it occurred to them that he might not be hiding or avoiding them at all, but only quite oblivious of them, because they were too sure of their sophistication to ask their way to him, and let him speak for himself. It is the only thing the twentieth-century spy must not do, go straight towards his objective. But how if this wasn’t a real-life spy story at all, but something at once simpler and deeper?
He still didn’t know what he was going to do when he brought the van lumbering to a standstill on the stony level outside the Riavka gate. All he was sure about was that there was no time left for going roundabout. The police could hardly hold Tossa, once the ballistics report proved they had a rifle to hunt for, and how long would that be? Could he rely on more than this one day?
He needed immediate action; he needed an open, honest solution, however inconvenient to however many people, because only such a solution could deliver Tossa. Not simply free her from custody, but deliver her from her own complex captivities, and make her look forward into the world with the same wonder and clarity he had seen in her eyes just once, when she had believed she might be going to die.