I said: “Bear with me, friend, we all have our little foibles. Meanwhile, go back to your Goethe.”

“Goethe, for God’s sake?”

I gave him the quotation: ‘Cause and effect together make up one indivisible phenomenon.’ I said: “Don’t try and separate them, Fenrek, ‘X’ follows ‘Y’ as surely as night follows day.”

He was shaking his head sadly when I left.

The police had thoughtfully towed my car away from the beach and left it where I could get at it again; Fenrek’s idea. And he had someone following me as I drove out through Estoril and on up the road towards Sintra. I thought it was very nice of him to keep such a careful eye on me, a sign that our friendship was as good as it had ever been. He always said it was good to have a man around when you were heading for trouble. But he didn’t know the kind of trouble I was heading for.

Come to that, neither did I, really.

I first became conscious of it just after I passed through Estoril, a Volkswagen bug that attracted my attention because it braked hard coming out of a side street and let me pass, then did the same thing again a few moments later when I was on the inland road to avoid the traffic. It occurred to me that the driver had been going up and down the cross streets waiting for me to pass: in other words, looking for me on that particular stretch of road. Through Lisbon itself, where I’d been driving circumspectly, there’d been no sign of it. But here it was on the open highway burning up the tarmac far faster than a normal Volkswagen can.

I let him get closer and listened to the sound of his motor; that’s one of the advantages of driving an open car. It sounded like the Porsche 911S mill, the fat six-cylinder 1991 c.c. that can push a bug to a good hundred and thirty—if you can hold it on the road.

I wondered for a moment if perhaps it was not Fenrek’s doing; but I discounted the possibility. The driver knew where to start looking for me, and only Fenrek knew where I was headed. Fenrek’s man, all right. I wondered if it were Pereira.

I didn’t want him to break his neck, so I made it easy for him and kept the Jensen down to a mere ninety on the straight, slowing to seventy-five on the curves and hearing the squeal of his tires as he tried to keep up. Then I thought that I was being unfair, so I slowed down when we reached the sandy coastal road again, then pulled in to the side of the road, and signaled him on. He sat there for a moment, a hundred feet behind me, then crawled forward and drew level.

Him? To my astonishment, it was a woman, a strikingly attractive woman, young to middle-aged, with close-cut black hair and a plump and lively sort of face. She wore what looked like a dark cocktail dress with bare white shoulders and a single diamond pin at the breast. Her eyes were large and black and intelligent, and at the moment they were looking at me challengingly, ready to smile, but not quite doing it.

I leaned across as she rolled down the window and said: “My apologies, Senhora. If I’d known how beautiful you are I’d never have allowed you to risk your neck quite so blatantly. But if you lose me, the Colonel will only be sad. Not angry; he expects it.”

She said calmly, a low, melodious voice: “Don’t count on it, Senhor Cain. You have got the power in that beautiful machine of yours, but you haven’t got the maneuverability. On a road like this, I can beat you.”

I was astonished, and told her so. “In that thing? You’ll snap your half-shafts in two if you pull that round a tight bend at more than eighty.”

She laughed. “You too, your tires are too wide. Believe me, I can take you any time.”

There was nothing arrogant in the statement, just a plain matter of indisputable fact.

I said: “I’m tempted to show you.”

She was highly amused now. She said: “You don’t know me, Senhor Cain, do you?”

“To my sorrow, Senhora, no.”

She said: “Estrilla da Gloria, does that mean anything to you?”

Estrilla da Gloria, Portugal’s famous woman racing driver. She looked more like a fashion model off the front page of Elle, and it was hard to imagine her at the wheel of a Formula 111 Cooper, but I’d seen her lap 1:48 in Monaco, in the wet, and anyone who can do that deserves a second glance.

I said: “I’m honored, Senhora, I saw you giving them all a very bad time at Tobacconists’ Corner last year. So what in the world are you doing working for Colonel Fenrek?”

She said: “It’s a dull life, racing cars. I like a little excitement once in a while. And, come to that, what are you doing working for him?”

I said: “But I’m not. As a matter of fact, at this precise moment, I’m sort of working against him. Before, we were just on parallel courses. Have you ever driven a Jensen FF?”

Her eyes were gleaming. “No, I haven’t.”

I swung open the door and stepped into the road. I opened the driver’s door of her little bug and said grandly:

“Why don’t we trade cars, and then we won’t have to race anymore.”

Her eyes widened, and she said nothing. She stepped out quickly with a lithe, easy movement that seemed to rob her of her plumpness (and now I saw there was nothing wrong with the shape of her hips) and slid in behind the Jensen’s wheel. She pushed the button, listened approvingly to the murmur of the big mill and said: “Fuel injection?”

“No, Carter four-barrel. And four-wheel drive, so it goes where you point it with a certain amount of alacrity.”

“Red-lined at forty-five? That can’t be right.”

I said patiently: “At forty-five on the tach you’re hitting a hundred in third, and you’ve got two more gears to fool around with. I’m going to the Alentejano, but calling in first at Fenrek’s hideaway, you know where that is?”

It was a bit blatant, I suppose. She laughed and said: “Yes, I know where my own house is. I’ll have drinks ready by the time you get there. Try not to break my half-shafts.”

She slipped the gear lever into first, shot away at speed, and before I even managed to find a way of getting my frame into that dammed bug, she was out of sight. I followed the road for a mile, pushing up to ninety or so till I saw her tail light far ahead of me, then cut the lights at the next bend, dropped down to twenty, took the side track that led to the sea down the side of the cliff, and headed towards the Bocca do Inferno.

In the darkness, I bumped on over the sandy track and down to the beach. I parked the bug under an overhang of the cliff, and had to run for nearly a mile, moving very fast, before I found the fishermen’s phone I was looking for, and I called the number of the house where Astrid was staying. I let it ring twice, rang off, and called again immediately, to let her know that it was official. This time, she picked the phone up instantly.

She said: “Uncle? I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“Not uncle,” I said, “it’s me.”

“Ah, Cabot! My dear, where are you?”

I said carefully: “A rather good-looking racing driver will be there shortly.”

“Oh good, how nice.”

“Give her my regards, and ask her to take you over to the Alentejano...”

“Her, did you say?”

“I did. That’s her house you’re staying in. Her name is Estrilla, and she is one of your uncle’s men. She’s driving my car, and she’ll be in a flaming temper, no doubt. But you are to stay with her at all times until I get there, all right?”

“Which will be when? And I suppose you don’t want to tell me what this is all about?”

I said: “A, in a couple of hours or so, and B, you suppose correctly. The less you know, the less your uncle knows, the better. You’ll probably see him soon after Estrilla calls him to say she lost me, and he’ll no doubt be in a flaming temper too. So, by and large, there’ll be a few cuss words floating around tonight. But don’t let them get you down. I’ll be with you in a couple of hours, and then well have a perfectly marvelous time together.”

I heard her sigh at the other end: “All right. I’ll wait for you till midnight, but not a second longer.”

“I’ll be there long before then. Remember, stick with Estrilla till your uncle gets there. And then, stay with both of them.”

Another long sigh. She said: “A hell of a love affair this is turning out to be.”

“Good-bye now.”

I rang off, and wondered about the weather; it had become a problem, and a serious one. The wind had swung round to the southwest, and it worried me considerably. This time of the year it’s supposed to die down at dusk, and instead, it was beginning to blow quite a bit. Not hard enough to be called a gale, but hard enough to keep the Bocca performing unseasonably, which I didn’t like at all. Even at this distance I could hear the roar of the waves pounding their way into the cave more than two miles along the beach there. I used the phone again to call the Meteorological Service, a very good one on this rocky, dangerous coast where there’s a lighthouse every few miles. There was one of their posts in the lighthouse at Cabo Raso.

The voice said: “Cabo Raso.”