I stared at him in the darkness.

"Did I hear—"

"Sure you did, Doc." He laughed softly. Top. The old man. The paternal parent. Says so on my birth certificate and everything." He was enjoying himself vastly. "Confirmation on the right here."

"It's perfectly true, Dr Mason," Solly Levin smiled. The dreadful Bowery accent was quite 'gone, yielding place to a crisper, more decisive version of Zagero's cultured drawl. "I'll put it briefly. I'm the owner and managing director—or was till I retired a year ago—of a plastics factory in Trenton, New Jersey, near Princeton, where Johnny managed to acquire a splendid accent and very little else. It was not, I might add, Princeton's fault; Johnny spent most of his time in the gymnasium, nursing his—ah—pugilistic ambitions, much to my annoyance as I wanted him to take over from me."

"Alas," Zagero put in, "I was almost as stubborn as he is himself."

"A great deal more so," his father said. "So I made him a proposition. I'd give him two years—it seemed enough, he was already amateur heavyweight champion—to prove himself, and at the end of that time if he hadn't made it he was to take his place in the factory. His first manager was as corrupt as they come and Johnny literally kicked him out at the end of a year. So I took over. I'd newly retired, I'd time on my hands, I'd a very strong vested interest in his well-being apart from the fact that he was my son—and, quite frankly, I'd begun to see that he really was going to get to the very top." He broke off there—so I took the opportunity to interrupt.

"Zagero or Levin. Which is it?"

"Zagero," the elder man answered.

"Why the Levin?"

"Some state and national boxing commissions refuse to permit a close relative to be either manager or second. Especially second. So I used an alias. A practice by no means uncommon, and officially winked at. A harmless deception."

"Not so harmless," I said grimly. "It was one of the worst acting performances I've ever seen, and that was one of the primary reasons for my suspecting your son and, in turn, for Corazzini and Smallwood getting away with what they did. Had you come clean earlier on, I would have known that they were bound, even in the absence of all possible evidence, to be the guilty men. But with Solly Levin—I'll find it very difficult to think of you as Mr Zagero, I'm afraid—with Solly Levin sticking out like a sore thumb as an obvious phony—well, I just couldn't leave you two out of the list of suspects."

"I obviously modelled myself on the wrong person—or type of person," Levin said wryly. "Johnny ribbed me about it all the time. I'm deeply sorry for any trouble we may have caused, Or Mason. I honestly never looked at it from your point of view, never realised the dangers involved in maintaining the impersonation—if you could call it that. Please forgive me."

"Nothing to forgive," I said bitterly. "A hundred to one I'd have found some other way of messing things up."

Shortly after five o'clock in the evening Corazzini stopped the tractor—but he didn't stop the engine. He came down from the driver's seat and walked round to the cabin, pushing the searchlight slightly to one side. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the tractor and the high ululating whine of the still-strengthening blizzard.

"Half-way, boss. Thirty-two miles on the clock."

"Thank you." We couldn't see Smallwood, but we could see the tip of his gun barrel protruding menacingly into the searchlight's beam. "The end of the line, Dr Mason. You and your friends will please get down."

There was nothing else for it. Stiffly, numbly, I climbed down, took a couple of steps towards Smallwood, stopped as the pistol steadied unwaveringly on my chest.

"You'll be with your friends in a few hours," I told Smallwood. "You could leave us a little food, a portable stove and tent. Is that too much to ask?"

"It is."

"Nothing? Nothing at all?"

"You're wasting your time, Dr Mason. And it grieves me to see you reduced to begging."

"The dog sledge, then. We don't even want the dogs. But neither Mahler nor Miss LeGarde can walk."

"You're wasting your time." He turned his attention to the sledge. "Everybody off, I said. Did you hear me, Levin? Get down!"

"It's my legs." In the harsh glare of the searchlight we could see the lines of pain deep-etched round Levin's eyes and mouth, and I wondered how long he had been sitting there suffering, saying nothing. "I think they're frozen or sleeping or something."

"Get down!" Smallwood repeated sharply.

"In a moment." Levin swung one of his legs over the edge of the sledge, his teeth bared with the effort. "I don't seem to be able—"

"Maybe a bullet in one of your legs will help," Smallwood said unemotionally. "To get the feeling back."

I didn't know whether he meant it or not. I didn't think so -gratuitous violence wasn't in character for this man, I couldn't see him killing or wounding without sound reason. But Zagero thought differently. He advanced within six feet of Smallwood.

"Don't touch him, Smallwood," he said warningly.

"No?" The rising inflection was a challenge accepted, and Smallwood went on flatly: "I'd snuff you and him like a candle."

"No!" Zagero said, softly and savagely, the words carrying clearly in a sudden lull in the wind. "Lay a finger on my old man, Smallwood, and I'll get you and break your neck like a rotten carrot if you empty the entire magazine into me." I looked at him as he crouched there like a great cat, toes digging into the frozen snow, fists clenched and slightly in advance of him, ready for the explosive leap that would take him across that tiny space in a split second of time and I believed he could do exactly what he said. So, too, I suspected, did Smallwood.

"Your old. man?" he inquired. "Your father?"

Zagero nodded.

"Good." Smallwood showed no surprise. "Into the tractor cabin with him, Zagero. We'll exchange him for the German girl. Nobody cares about her."

His point was clear. I couldn't see how we could offer any danger to Smallwood and Corazzini now, but Smallwood was a nan who guarded even against impossibilities: Levin would be a far better surety for Zagero's conduct than Helene.

Levin half-walked, was half-carried into the tractor cabin. With Corazzini and Smallwood both armed, resistance was hopeless: Smallwood had us summed up to a nicety. He knew we were desperate men, that we would fling ourselves on him and his gun a moment of desperate emergency: but he also knew that we weren't so desperate as to commit suicide when no lives were in mediate danger.

When Levin was inside, Smallwood turned to the young [German girl seated opposite him in the cabin. "Out!"

It was then that it happened, with the stunning speed and inevitability that violent tragedy, viewed in retrospect, always seems to possess. I thought perhaps that it was some calculated plan, a last-minute desperate effort to save us that made Helene Fleming act as she did, but I found out later that she had merely been driven and goaded into a pain-filled unreasoning anger and resentment and despair by the agony she had suffered in her shoulder from having had her arms bound for so many long hours in the cruel jolting discomfort of the tractor cabin.

As she passed by Smallwood she stumbled, he put up an arm either to help her or ward her off, and before he had realised what was happening—it must have been the last quarter from which he expected any show of violence or resistance—she kicked out blindly and knocked the gun spinning out of his hand to land in the snow beneath. Smallwood sprang after it like a cat—the speed was unnecessary, the low growl of warning from an armed Corazzini put paid to any ideas we might have had of taking advantage of the situation—picked up the gun and whirled round, the gun lining up on Helene, his eyes narrowed to slits against the beam of the searchlight, his face twisted into an unrecognisable snarl, the lips drawn far back over the teeth. I'd been wrong once more about Smallwood—he could kill without reason.

"Helene!" Mrs Dansby-Gregg was the nearest to her, and her voice was high-pitched, almost a scream. "Look out, Helene!" She plunged forward to push her maid to one side, but I don't think Smallwood even saw her: he was mad with fury, I knew he was, and nothing on earth was going to stop him from pressing that trigger. The bullet caught Mrs Dansby-Gregg squarely in the back and pitched her headlong to fall face down in the frozen snow.

Already Smallwood's moment of uncontrollable rage was spent as if it had never been. He said not another word, just nodded to Corazzini and jumped up on to the tail of the tractor cabin to keep us covered with searchlight and gun as Corazzini gunned the motor, engaged gear and lumbered off into the darkness to the west. We stood in a forlorn huddled little group and watched the train pass us by, the tractor, the tractor sled, the dog sledge and finally the huskies themselves, running on the loose traces astern.

I heard Helene murmur something to herself, and when I bent to listen she was saying in a strange, wondering voice: "Helene. She called me 'Helene'." I stared at her as if she were mad, glanced down at the dead woman at my feet then gazed unseeingly after the receding lights of the Citroen until both the lights and the sound had faded and vanished into the snow-filled darkness of the night.