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THE CASEBOOK OF GEEZA VERMIES

  Having ditched the car with someone affiliated with the race who met us at the airport, we high-tailed it into the terminal building as fast as we could inconspicuously go.

  We knew we couldn’t afford to draw attention to ourselves for a number of reasons. First and foremost were the Medicines I was carrying about my person, which would not have stood me in good stead with any local constabulary. Plus we had no way of knowing what action MacIntosh, the guy from the hotel might have taken. It was possible that we were already on the wanted list. I completely trusted Malika to have taken care of things one way or another, but it didn’t stop the fear from taking hold.

  And then there was the Professor. We didn’t think he was on to us, but if he was and then saw us charging headlong after him, he would panic and bolt and there was no way of knowing what might happen in that sort of situation.

  In any case, the race officials and Ollie had made us agree not to cause a scandal. It would create such bad publicity, not just for the event itself, but for the whole world of rallying that we had promised not to get the police and not to raise a scene. Basically, not to do anything if we couldn’t do it unnoticed. If we couldn’t bundle Humphries away with us nice and surreptitiously we were to follow him to France - for which they had paid the tickets. Once there we were to wait for him to break into the villa and only then call for the police, posing as friends of Donald, having apprehended a burglar.

  That is, if we weren’t too late and we might well be now, because although we could see the man himself, calm and unruffled, already through passport control and making his way to the departure lounge, we found that the check-in for that flight had now closed and we were going to have to wait for the next one. This meant hanging around sixteen hours for the next flight to L’aeroport de Nice-Cote d’Azur, or else a four hour delay and then flying to Genoa, about a hundred miles east of Nice across the Alps and driving the rest of the way. That seemed the best option so, having swapped our tickets over, all we can do now is wait…

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