The James Bond Anthology

‘Sure, sure. Anything you want. By the way, Commander, how long are you planning to be around? Glad to have you with us for as long as you like. But it’s a question of your room. Seems there’s a big party coming in from Holland in a few days’ time. Top level staff course or something of the kind, and Admin says they’re a bit pushed for space.’

Bond had not expected to get on well with Colonel Schreiber and he had not done so. He said amiably: ‘I’ll see what my Chief has to say and call you back, Colonel.’

‘Do that, would you.’ The Colonel’s voice was equally polite, but the manners of both men were running out and the two receivers broke the line simultaneously.

The chief handler was a Frenchman from the Landes. He had the quick sly eyes of a poacher. Bond met him at the kennels, but the handler’s proximity was too much for the Alsatians and, to get away from the noise, he took Bond into the duty-room, a tiny office with binoculars hanging from pegs, and waterproofs, gum-boots, dog-harness and other gear stacked round the walls. There were a couple of deal chairs and a table covered with a large-scale map of the Forest of St Germain. This had been marked off into pencilled squares. The handler made a gesture over the map. ‘Our dogs covered it all, Monsieur. There is nothing there.’

‘Do you mean to say they didn’t check once?’

The handler scratched his head. ‘We had trouble with a bit of game, Monsieur. There was a hare or two. A couple of foxes’ earths. We had quite a time getting them away from a clearing near the Carrefour Royal. They probably still smelled the gipsies.’

‘Oh.’ Bond was only mildly interested. ‘Show me. Who were these gipsies?’

The handler pointed daintily with a grimy little finger. ‘These are the names from the old days. Here is the Etoile Parfaite, and here, where the killing took place, is the Carrefour des Curieux. And here, forming the bottom of the triangle, is the Carrefour Royal. It makes,’ he added dramatically, ‘a cross with the road of death.’ He took a pencil out of his pocket and made a dot just off the crossroads. ‘And this is the clearing, Monsieur. There was a gipsy caravan there for most of the winter. They left last month. Cleaned the place up all right, but, for the dogs, their scent will hang about there for months.’

Bond thanked him, and after inspecting and admiring the dogs and making some small talk about the handler’s profession, he got into the Peugeot and went off to the gendarmerie in St Germain. ‘Yes, certainly they had known the gipsies. Real Romany-looking fellows. Hardly spoke a word of French, but they had behaved themselves. There had been no complaints. Six men and two women. No. No one had seen them go. One morning they just weren’t there any more. Might have been gone a week for all one knew. They had chosen an isolated spot.’

Bond took the D.98 through the forest. When the great autoroute bridge showed up a quarter of a mile ahead over the road, Bond accelerated and then switched off the engine and coasted silently until he came to the Carrefour Royal. He stopped and got out of the car without a sound, and, feeling rather foolish, softly entered the forest and walked with great circumspection towards where the clearing would be. Twenty yards inside the trees he came to it. He stood in the fringe of bushes and trees and examined it carefully. Then he walked in and went over it from end to end.

The clearing was about as big as two tennis courts and floored in thick grass and moss. There was one large patch of lilies of the valley and, under the bordering trees, a scattering of bluebells. To one side there was a low mound, perhaps a tumulus, completely surrounded and covered with brambles and brier roses now thickly in bloom. Bond walked round this and gazed in among the roots, but there was nothing to see except the earthy shape of the mound.

Bond took one last look round and then went to the corner of the clearing that would be nearest to the road. Here there was easy access through the trees. Were there traces of a path, a slight flattening of the leaves? Not more than would have been left by the gipsies or last year’s picnickers. On the edge of the road there was a narrow passage between two trees. Casually Bond bent to examine the trunks. He stiffened and dropped to a crouch. With a fingernail, he delicately scraped away a narrow sliver of caked mud. It hid a deep scratch in the tree-trunk. He caught the scraps of mud in his free hand. He now spat and moistened the mud and carefully filled up the scratch again. There were three camouflaged scratches on one tree and four on the other. Bond walked quickly out of the trees on to the road. His car had stopped on a slight slope leading down under the autoroute bridge. Although there was some protection from the boom of the traffic on the autoroute, Bond pushed the car, jumped in and only engaged the gears when he was well under the bridge.