... perhaps she would be wise to erase this entire episode from his mind. But not here. Indeed the sooner they got away from this place the better. And so:
'It's okay,' she told him over her shoulder. Til explain things in the car. Then anything you don't understand will seem ... oh, very much simpler.'
And there might be one or two things she would like him to explain to her, too ...
... Like: 'How? How did you do it?' They were heading south for Dalwhinnie.
Despite that Harry was still under her spell, he couldn't answer her. Anderson's directive came first: that he must protect his talents at all cost. Wherefore he must lie. Beginning to sweat, he said, 'I played the highwayman, as you suggested, left it to the last second and jumped out on them. If the driver had had a moment to think ... he might have recognized me, run me down. But he didn't. He tried to avoid me, swerved, and never regained control.'
'But... are you crazy?' She gasped. 'You could as easily have died!'
'If they'd kept coming, I was ready to jump back into the bushes. It was them or me - or you.'
'You did it for ... ?' But there she paused. For she really didn't want to know this: that Harry had done it for her. She preferred to believe he'd done it because of her hypnotic programming - didn't she? But in any case, his answer had thrown her completely off track. So that she didn't think to ask how he had covered the mile from the place where she'd dropped him to the spot where the station-wagon had gone over the edge.
And she didn't even wonder why he'd been so quick off the mark with his cigarette lighter. But the Necroscope knew why: He hadn't wanted to give her time to notice the condition of the wrecked car's interior, the fact that he had bombed it. That would only have led to more questions, and he wasn't sure he'd have any satisfactory answers.
But in any case there were no more questions, never could be in connection with this episode. For long before they got to Dalwhinnie B.J. had already wiped it from the Necroscope's mind, told him it had been a nightmare to merge with al the others, and that he should simply forget it...
Unnoticed by the pair as they had puled away from the 'accident site,' another car parked on the grass verge three hundreds yards back from the bend had come to life, puled out onto the road, roled silently forward, and stopped where the fence was shatered and black smoke climbed in a column from the canopy of riverside trees to the blue-grey sky.
The driver - a slight man dressed in a lightweight black raincoat butoned to the neck, a huge white hat with a floppy brim, and side-shielded sunglasses - got out and made his way quickly down into the woods. Folowing B.J. 's and the Necroscope's tracks, and his nose, he was soon at the scene of fiery devastation.
The fire was burning uphil through the tinderlike undergrowth, towards the road which would form a natural firebreak. Thus the blazing vehicle, clearly visible as the source of the fire, was approachable. Likewise visible were the two blackening corpses, one slumped behind the wheel and the other seated upright beside the sprung door.
Keeping wel back from the fire, the slight man swept the scene with eyes that were bird-bright, yelow in the shade of his hat. A glistening black, steaming object roughly the size and shape of a cucumber hissed and made crackling noises some distance from the inferno. It shuddered and lay still even as the slight man took up a dead branch to prod it. Between this object and the car, a trail of sticky slime suggested that it had made its own way to where it had died.
It was dead, yes, but it couldn't be left lying there. Or sooner or later someone would be sure to examine it. And that wouldn't do at al. So using his branch, the man in the raincoat twitched the leech back into the inferno, into the furnace heat of the red-glowing car. That should do it.
Then without further ado the little man made his way back to his own vehicle, and drove quickly away from the scene. It was time he made report to his Masters in Sicily ...
In Dalwhinnie, B.J. 'phoned Auld John and told him what had