Her head was twisted agonizingly back as fingers tangled brutally in her dark hair. The next moment she had been flung on to her face and Lisa was sitting triumphantly astride her shoulders, forcing her mouth and nose mercilessly down into the waterlogged soil. Susan squirmed and writhed desperately, bucking her body frantically in a vain attempt to shake free of the cruel hands at the nape of her neck. Her mouth and nose were clogged with the sticky mud. She was unable to breathe. But still the relentless pressure forced her face farther and farther into the suffocating wet soil. She could hear her heart hammering furiously in her chest. There was a terrible pain in her head and a roaring in her ears that threatened to engulf her… and then suddenly there was a sharp smack of flesh against bone, a choked cry from behind her, and the pressure was miraculously released!
Shaking, she levered herself painfully upright. Her father was standing above her, supporting the sagging, unconscious figure of Lisa by the collar of her jacket.
"I keep telling you you should take lessons in judo!" he said mildly.
Flinging the body of the inert blonde across his shoulder, he led the way back to the wrecked car. They were a sorry sight, the two of them. Susan was covered in mud from head to foot, her face bleeding and scratched, the leather dress split across the shoulders. There was an elongated swelling caked with dried blood above Templar's right ear. The great welt from the bicycle chain that had almost paralyzed his arm showed black and blue through his torn sleeve. The skin above one cheekbone was split and blood had coursed down his jaw to stain his shirt. The whole surface of his body was ravaged with cuts and abrasions. But the expression on each of their faces was triumphant. In the light from the Volkswagen's canted headlamps, they saw Stefan groaning feebly on the ground. Heinz and Klaus were still out for the count.
"We'll tie up these gentry and go for the police in a minute," Templar said through swollen lips. "But first there's a little matter to attend to."
Dumping the unconscious Lisa unceremoniously on the ground, he opened the backs of the cameras one by one and ripped out the exposed film, holding it up in the blinding beams of the VW's headlamps to destroy the offending images enshrined in the emulsion.
"There's only one thing I don't get," Susan said shakily. "Why didn't you use the gun again after, that first shot?"
Templar plucked a crumpled unlit cigarette from Heinz's unconscious lips, put it between his own, and lit it. His battered face cracked open into a smile.
"It would have been a little difficult," he said, blowing out a grateful cloud of smoke. "There was only that one bullet!"