A fox broke cover, giving me so much of a fright that I almost ended his days for him which would have been fatal for all of us, but there was plenty of wildlife on the mountain besides Serafino and his boys. Wild-cats and martens and the odd wolf, although they all tended to run the opposite way at the first smell of a man.
I made good progress now and broke into a trot, my rifle at the trail, sliding down the occasional slope on my backside, and within fifteen minutes of leaving the others, I had descended a good three hundred feet.
There was a freshwater stream over on my right. I worked my way across, lay on my belly and splashed water on my face. It seemed as good a route down as any and it was more than likely that any shepherd building a hut would place it as close to water as pos-sible, especially when you considered what it was like in this country during the summer.
It was the voice I heard first, a kind of smothered gasp that was cut off sharply. I paused, dropping to one knee. There was silence, then a vigorous splashing and another sharp cry.
I had seen the Honourable Joanna Truscott twice in my life, both times on photos which Hoffer had shown us. In one she had been dressed for ski-ing, in the other for a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It was diffi-cult to accept that the girl I watched now from the bushes, floundering naked in a hollow among the trees where the stream had formed a small pool, was the same.
Her hair was tied back into a kind of eighteenth cen-tury queue and her face, neck and arms were gypsy-brown from the sun. The rest of her was milk white and boyish, the breasts almost non-existent, although the hips could only have belonged to a woman.
She scrambled out and rubbed herself down with an old blanket. I didn’t bother looking away. For one thing she didn’t know I was there and for another, there was something rather sexless about her. Strange how some women can set one aflame with all the fury of a petrol-soaked bonfire in an instant and others have no effect whatsoever.
She pulled on a pair of old trousers that had defin-itely seen better days, a man’s shirt, green woollen sweater with holes in the elbows and bound a red scarf around her head, knotting it under her chin.
As she sat down to pull on a pair of Spanish fell boots, I stepped out of the trees and said cheerfully, ‘Good morning.’
She was a tough one all right. ‘And good morning to you,’ she replied calmly and started to get up.
‘No need to be alarmed,’ I said rather unnecessarily. ‘My name is Wyatt-Stacey Wyatt. I’m from your stepfather, Karl Hoffer. I’ve three friends waiting for me now up the mountains. We’ve come to get you out.’
God, what a fool I was. She was on her own and unguarded, obviously free to roam at will. Why on earth that didn’t strike me at once, I’ll never know. It had been a strenuous night-perhaps I was tired.
‘What am I expected to do-stand up and cheer?’ she said coolly in that beautifully clipped, upper-crust English voice. ‘How did he tell you to dispose of me? Gun, knife or blunt instrument?’
I stared at her in astonishment and at the same time, some kind of light started to dawn. She had turned away from me slightly. When I got the front view
again, she was holding an old Beretta automatic pistol in her right hand and looked as if she knew exactly what to do with it.
‘Would you mind going into rather more detail,’ I told her. ‘I’m afraid I’m not with you.’
‘Why don’t you pull the other one,’ she suggested crisply.
I was still holding the A.K. at the trail. I dropped it at my feet and put the Uzi beside it. ‘Look, no hands.’
She wasn’t impressed. ‘What about the thing in the holster?’
I removed the Smith and Wesson, laid it down, then walked back three paces, squatted against a holly-oak and took out my cigarettes.