'Useful chap, Doctor Rasmussen,' I said. 'Never know when you might have some specialised medical problem – burning, kidnapping, you know… but he'd be wearing a surgical mask, so Nygaard wouldn't- remember him.' After a moment, I added, 'So what's Mrs S-B's situation now?'

'Broke,' he said quickly. Then, after more thought, 'Quite broke. We sue for what we paid out, she must be refused limitation if she sent out an undermanned ship, she'll owe something like ten million – and I doubt her Mutual Club'll be much help once they hear how it happened. She'll lose the AD P Line; probably she'll end up washing Nygaard's nightshirts.'

'If we get down the hill alive.'

David said, 'I think I saw a car behind us.'

Coming out of the next bend, we were sure of it. Two headlights showing briefly, maybe seventy yards back.

'Wind it up, Willie.'

'What the devil d'you think I'm doing?' He was doing fine, really, hanging the car on the very edge of control and keeping it there. But a Volkswagen isn't a Jaguar. It isn't even a Cortina, and theirs had been the GT with the wide radial tyres.

On the next straight it simply walked up behind us – and its lights went off. An honest car would have put its lights on at that point.

'How long does this sort of road go on?' Willie asked grimly.

I looked at Kari. 'I do not know it so well – but I think until we go down to the lake.'

'You aren't joking.' We were winding gently, very gently, downhill – but the void on our right could still have been a hole right through the world.

Willie slowed into a left-hand turn with the centrifugal force shoving us out, out, out… And the Cortina nosed in to our left andclang.

The Volks twitched and slid and the void rushed in beneath us – and then we were sliding the other way and scraping along the cliff itself.

'Christ!' Willie fought the wheel steady. We straightened.

The Cortina cruised around the bend fifteen yards behind us, David was braced against the rear corner, white-faced buttight-lipped. Kari's expression was sheer puzzlement. Peoplelike Tanner and Kavanagh just weren't in her book of rules.

Willie said, 'For God's sake, man, if you're ever going to usea gun, why not now?' 'Yes.' But I only had six rounds left – and damn little good they'd be to me falling down, down, down into that swirlingemptiness a couple of feet to my right. I took the derringer from my sleeve, wound my window down. A cold hurricane rushed in.

Maybe they should institute a new class for pistol competition: offhand from a moving vehicle at another movingvehicle, to be shot on winding mountain roads in a snowstorm. And from a right-hand seat which means you have to twist your body right round and lay your arm out along the car. Probably it would be won by the actors who play in FBI movies.

Certainly not by me.

I could fire only slightly right of straight backwards, so onlyon a right-hand curve – the inside bends where centrifugalforce shoved us safely towards the rock wall on our left.

The moment I stretched out my arm, the Cortina checkedand dropped back. Tanner – it had to be him driving – knewexactly what I was doing, and he had a pretty good idea whatgun I was doing it with.

I fired one, but God knows where to.

Then we were slowing into another left-hander and the Cortina closing up and out of my line of fire. They touched usagain, but this time Willie accelerated into the curve on a prayer that it wouldn't go on too long. It didn't. Just as the front wheels started to go, he could flip the wheel across. We rocked but straightened. The Cortina came around muchslower and twenty yards back – but he could pick up thoseyards any time he wanted to.

A straight bit„then a gentle right-hander, and I stretched myarm and fired again. But he was a good thirty yards behind. He didn't need to be close except on the left-hand bends where I couldn't shoot anyway.

'Oh, hell,' I said. 'This is getting ridiculous. Drop me off around the next corner.'

'Dowhat?'

'Drop me off. We'll try a little justice instead of mere truth. But then go like buggerii.'

He gave a faint brief smile and nodded. 'All right, old boy. After the next left-hander.'

I reloaded the derringer and put it back in the arm clip. I might need both hands when I jumped.

Then we were coming through a reverse S, from a right-hand curve to a sharp left under an overhang of solid rock.

'Here?' Willie suggested.

'It'll do.'

'Of course,' he said thoughtfully,'they don't know this road any better than I do.'

He handled it beautifully. The Cortina closed up as we came into the straight between the two bends of the S – and Willie rammed on the brakes, far earlier than Tanner could have expected. If he'd been telepathic, he could have shunted us straight ahead – and straight over the edge of the corner. But he wasn't planning that for another ten yards; now he instinctively stamped the brakes. The Cortina's nose dug in, wiggled, hit us – but by then we were accelerating away in first and he was sliding to a stop in third.

We went around the corner with the engine screaming like a siren under Willie's foot. Then we were straight and he trod on the brake. I stepped out as gently as a commuter from the eight-fifteen.

Maybe I had four seconds; they were long ones. I walked across to the cliff, leaned back against it, cocked the derringer, and held it at arm's length in both hands.

The Cortina screeched around the corner, leaning angrily. Continental model, remember. Driver on the left. Take aim. At least he's got the sense to drive straight at me, trying to put me off…

Fire one. Recock as the glass explodes around the windscreen pillar and the car veers slightly away, not head-on now… fire two… the car snatching towards you, a tearing slam across your thighs and the sky whirling beneath you and a clattering banging screeching silence.

Reload, reload, reload.

Flat on my face in the snow I scrabbled two more rounds into the gun, snapped it shut, held it out…

Twenty yards along, the Cortina was leaning quietly against the cliff, exhaust steaming. Then the right-hand door opened in small, jerky movements and Kavanagh staggered out. The white bandage on one hand, but still the big black automatic in the other. I rammed my elbows on the road and aimed.

'Drop it, Kavanagh!'

He lifted his face and it was a bead curtain of blood. 'Sod you!' he screamed and the gun blasted – at somewhere. Blind, blind as a new kitten – but with at least six in that automatic.

'Drop the gun!' I yelled.

Instead, another shot that howled off the cliff above me.

Maybe I was lucky, at twenty yards; maybe I was getting good with that silly little gun. But I think it was the first shot that killed him. Still, you always fire twice.

I hobbled down the road – my version of running, since the front of my thighs felt like well-beaten steaks and there was a straight rip across both trouser legs. But almost no blood. Odd, that. I picked up Kavanagh's gun and leaned against the Cortina to look at the driver.

"Dave? Are you alive?'

He was bunched forward, face and both hands on the steering wheel. The windscreen just in front was a criss-crossed mess, centred on two small holes. Not bad.

'Major?' he said thickly.

I lifted the automatic – it was a Colt Commander, the lighter, shorter version of the old Army -45 – and aimed it near his right ear.

'It's me, Dave.'

'Bloody silly mess. You should've… been on our side.'

'Did I hit you?'

'In the throat… don't know what… but it feels bad. I mean, it… hardly feels at all. And that's bad… isn't it?'

He tried to lift his face to look at me, and it was studded with tiny glittering arrowheads of glass. But the moment his head lifted, the blood spurted across the wheel. He made a gurgling sound and flopped again.