The Devil Rides Out (47 page)

And the trick had worked. They had actually been discovered in that house of hell with Simon in the tell-tale robes, seated before the altar, while he performed what must certainly have appeared to the police as some evil ceremony and the other three had stood there, forming a small congregation.

How could they possibly hope to persuade the tall, suspicious-eyed
Monsieur le Chef de la Sûret
é Daudet of their innocence, much less get him to agree to their immediate release? Yet, as they stood there, Mocata was on his way to the place where he kept his special plane, if not already aboard it. Night flying would have no terrors for him who, if he wished, could invoke the elements to his aid. Fleur would be with him and he meant to murder her as certainly as they stood there. His determination to secure the return of Tanith made the sacrifice of a baptised child imperative, and before another twenty-four hours had gone he would be in possession of the Talisman of Set, bringing upon the world God alone knew what horrors of war, famine, disablement and death.

De Richleau knew that there was only one thing for it, even if he was shot down there and then-he sprang like a panther at the
Chef de la Sûreté's
throat.

The detective fired from his hip. Flame stabbed the semi-darkness of the vault. The crash hit their eardrums like the explosion of a slab of gelignite. The bullet seared through the Duke's left arm, but his attack hurled the Police-Chief to the ground.

Simon and Marie Lou flung themselves simultaneously upon the old detective Verrier. The thoughts which had passed through De Richleau's mind in those breathless seconds had also raced through hers. If they submitted to arrest their last hope would be gone of saving her beloved Fleur.

Richard had no chance to pull his gun. The third man had grabbed him round the body but Rex rapped the policeman on the back of the head with his iron bar. The man grunted and toppled on to the chancel steps.

Rex leapt over the body straight for Castelnau. Quick as a flash, the banker turned and ran, his long legs flicking past each other as he bounded down the empty aisle, but Rex's legs were even longer. He caught the Satanist at the entrance of the passage and grabbed him by the back of the neck. Castelnau tore himself away and stood panting for a second, half crouching with bared teeth, his back against the wall. Then for the second time that night Rex's leg-of-mutton fist took him on the chin and he slid to the ground like a pole-axed ox.

De Richleau, his wounded arm hanging limp and useless, writhed beneath the
Chef de la Sûret
é who had one hand on his throat and with the other was groping for his fallen gun.

His fingers closed upon it. He jerked it up and fired at Richard, who was dashing to De Richleau's help. The shot went thudding into the belly of the Satanic Goat above the altar. Next second the heavy
prie-dieu
which Richard had swung aloft came crashing down upon the Police-Chief's head.

Rex only paused to see that the banker was completely knocked out, then rushed back to the struggling mass of bodies below the altar steps.

Simon and Marie Lou had managed the little man between them. Almost insane with worry for her child, her thumb nails were dug into his neck and, while he screeched with pain, Simon was lashing his hands behind his back.

Richard was pulling the Duke out from beneath the unconscious
Chef de la Sûreté's
body. Rex lent a ready hand and then, panting with their exertions, they surveyed the scene of their short but desperate encounter.

‘Holy smoke! That's done me a whole heap of good,' Rex grinned at Richard. ‘I'm almost feeling like my normal self again.'

‘The odds were with us but we owe our escape to Greyeyes' pluck.' Richard looked swiftly at the Duke. ‘Let's see that wound, old chap. I hope to God the bullet didn't smash the bone.'

‘I don't think so, grazed it though, and the muscle's badly torn.' De Richleau closed his eyes and his face twisted at a stab of pain as they lifted his arm to cut the coat sleeve away.

‘I know what you must be feeling,' Simon sympathised. ‘I'll never forget the pain of the wound I got that night we discovered the secret of the Forbidden Territory.'

‘Don't fuss round me,' muttered the Duke, ‘but get that damned priest's robe off. If these people don't return to the Sûreté more police will come to look for them. We've got to get out of here–quick.'

In frantic haste Marie Lou bandaged the wound while Richard made a sling and the other two wrenched off the clothes of the detective that Rex had knocked out. Simon scrambled into them and, as he snatched up the man's overcoat, the others were already hurrying towards the entrance to the passage at the far end of the temple.

Richard rushed Marie Lou along the dark corridor and they tumbled up the flight of steps. Everything seemed to fade again after those awful moments when they had been so near arrest. She felt the cold air of the wharf-side damp upon her cheeks–they were running down the narrow passage between the high brick walls, back in the gloomy square where the old woman still sat crouched upon the steps near the squalid café. Rex had taken her other arm and, her feet treading the pavements automatically, they were hastening through endless, sordid, fog-bound streets. They crossed the bridge over the Seine and, at last, under the railway arches at Courcelles, found a taxi. When next she was conscious of her surroundings they were in a little room at the airport and the four men were poring over maps. Snatches of the conversation came to her vaguely.

‘Twelve hundred miles–more. Northern Greece. You cannot cross the Alps–make for Vienna, then south to Trieste–no, Vienna–Agram–Fiume. From Agram we can fly down the valley of the River Save; otherwise we should have to cross the Dolomites. That's right! Then follow the coastline of the Adriatic for five hundred miles south–east to Corfu. Yanina is about fifty miles inland from there. You can follow the course of the river Kalamans through the mountains–Shall we be able to land at Yanina, though–yes, look, the map shows that it's on a big lake. The circuit of the shore must be fifteen miles at least. It can't all be precipitous–certain to be sandy stretches along it somewhere–how far do you make it to Metsovo from there?–twenty miles as the crow flies. That means thirty at least in such a mountainous district. The monastery is a few miles beyond, on Mount Peristeri–pretty useful mountain, look. The map gives it as seven thousand five hundred feet–we must abandon the plane at Yanina. If we're lucky we'll get a car as far as Metsova–God knows what the roads will be like, after that we'll have to use horses in any case. How soon do you reckon you can make it, Richard?'

‘Fourteen hundred miles. We should be in Vienna by midday. Fiume, say, half-past two. I ought to make Yanina by eight o'clock with Rex taking turn and turn about flying the plane. After that it depends on what fresh transport we can get.'

Next, they were in the plane again, lifting out of fog-bound Paris to a
marvellous dawn, which gilded the edges of the clouds and streaked the sky with rose and purple and lemon.

Richard was flying the plane in a kind of trance, yet never for a moment losing sight of important landmarks or the dials by which he adjusted his controls. The others slept.

When Marie Lou roused, the plane was at rest near a long line of hangars dimly glimpsed through another ghostly fog. Someone said ‘Stuttgart' and then she saw Simon standing on the ground below her, conversing in German with an airport official.

‘A big, grey, private plane,' he was saying urgently. ‘The pilot is a short, square-shouldered fellow; the passengers a big, fat, baldheaded man and a little girl.'

Marie Lou leaned forward eagerly but she did not catch the airport man's reply. A moment later Simon was climbing into the plane and saying to the Duke:

‘He must be taking the same route, but he's an hour and a half ahead of us. I expect he had his own car in Paris. That would have saved him time while we were hunting for that wretched taxi.'

Rex had taken over the controls and they were in the air once more. Richard was sitting next to Marie Lou, sound asleep. For an endless time they seemed to soar through a cloudless sky of pale, translucent blue. She, too, must have dropped off again, for she was not conscious of their landing at Vienna, only when she woke in the early afternoon that the pilots had changed over and Richard was back at the controls.

‘Yet, in some curious way, although she had not actually been aware of their landing, fragments of their conversation must have penetrated her sleep at the time. She knew that there had also been fog at Vienna, and that Mocata had left the airport there only an hour before them, so in the journey from Paris they had managed to gain half an hour on him.

The engine droned on, its deep note soothing their frayed nerves. Richard hardly knew that he was flying, although he used all the skill at his command. It seemed as though some other force was driving the aeroplane on and that he was standing outside it as a spectator. All his faculties were numbed and his anxiety for Fleur deadened by an intense absorption with the question of speed—speed—speed.

At Fiume there was no trace of fog. Glorious sunshine, warm and lifegiving, flooded the aerodrome, making the hangars shimmer in the distance. The Duke crawled out from the couch of rugs and cushions that had been made up in the back of the cabin to accommodate a fifth passenger, and chosen by him as more comfortable for his wounded arm. He questioned the landing-ground officials in fluent Italian, but without success.

‘From Vienna Mocata, must have taken another route,' he told Richard as he climbed back. ‘Perhaps a short cut over the Dinarie Alps or by way of Sarajevo. If so he will have more than made up his half hour lead again. I feared as much when I saw that there was no fog here. I can't explain it but I have an idea that he is able to surround us with it, yet only when we follow him to places where he has been quite recently himself.'

Rex took over for the long lap down the Dalmatian coast above the countless islands that fringe the Yugoslavian mainland and lay beneath them in the sparkling Adriatic Sea.

They slept again, all except Rex who, a crack pilot, was now handling
the machine with superb skill.

As he flew the plane half his thoughts were centred about Tanith. He could see her there, lying cold and dead, in the library a thousand miles away at Cardinals Folly. That dream of happiness had been so brief. Never again would he see the sudden smile break out like sunshine rising over mountains on that beautiful, calm face. Never again hear the husky, melodious voice whispering terms of endearment. Never again–never again! But he was on the trail of her murderer and if he died for it he meant to make that inhuman monster pay.

The Adriatic merged into the Ionian Sea. The endless rugged coastline rushed past below them on their left; its mountains rising steeply to the interior of Albania, and its vales breaking them here and there to run down to little white fishing villages on the seashore. Villages that in Roman times had been great centres of population through the constant passage of merchandise, soldiers, scholars, travellers between Brindisi, upon the heel of Italy, and the Peninsula of Greece.

Then they were over Corfu. Banking steeply, he headed for the mainland and picked up the northern mouth of the River Kalamas. The deep blue of the sea flecked by its tiny white crests vanished behind them. Twisting and turning, the plane drove upwards above desolate valleys where the river trickled, a streak of silver in the evening light. The sun sank behind them into the distant sea. They were heading for the huge chain of mountains, which form the backbone of Greece.

A mist was rising which obscured the long, empty patches and rare cultivated fields below. The light faded, its last rays lit a great distant snowcapped crest which crowned the water-shed.

A lake lay below them, placid and calm in the evening light but glimpsed only through the banks of fog. At its south-western end the white buildings of a town were vaguely discernible now and then as Rex circled slowly, searching for a landing-place. Suddenly, through a gap in the billowing whitish-grey, his eye caught a big plane standing in a level field.

‘That's Mocata's machine,' yelled Simon, who was in the cockpit beside him.

Rex banked again and, coming into the wind, brought them to earth within fifty yards of it. The others roused and scrambled out.

The mist which Rex had first perceived a quarter of an hour before, from his great altitude, now hemmed them in on every side.

A man came forward from a low, solitary hangar as the plane landed. De Richleau saw him, a vague figure, half obscured by the tenuous veils of mist; went over to him and said, when he rejoined them:

‘That fellow is a French mechanic. He tells me Mocata landed only half an hour ago. He came in from Monastir but had trouble in the mountains, which delayed him; nobody but a maniac or a superman would try and get through that way at all. This fellow thinks that he can get us a car; he runs the airport, such as it is, and we're darned lucky to find any facilities here at all.'

Richard had just woken from a long sleep. Before he knew what was happening he found that they were all packed into an ancient open Ford with a tattered hood. Simon was on one side of him and Marie Lou on the other. Rex squatted on the floor of the car at their feet and De Richleau was in front beside the driver.

They could not see more than twenty yards ahead. The lamps made little impression upon the gloom before them. The road was a sandy track, fringed at the sides with coarse grass and boulders. No houses, cottages or white-walled gardens broke the monotony of the way as they rattled and bumped, mounting continuously up long, curved gradients.

De Richleau peered ahead into the murk. Occasional rifts gave him glimpses of the rocky mountains round which they climbed or, upon the other side, a cliff edge falling sheer to a mist-filled valley.