Mediterranean Nights (37 page)

There seemed to be three voices, De Sejac's, another, gruff and surely, and the girl's.

‘No, no,' the Baron was saying, ‘not yet—I have other plans for you.'

Then the girl's voice, but so low I couldn't catch the words.

De Sejac laughed softly. ‘
Ma chère
, you have been marvellous, the most perfect pigeon—you could not have played your part better if I had trained you to it for years—the young fool walked right into the trap—all will be easy now.'

The girl spoke again, but a gruff voice, which must have been the chauffeur's, cut her short. He was evidently speaking to the Baron. ‘Have done,
mon vieux
—I have far to go before the morning—where are the telegrams?'

‘Ah, the telegrams,' repeated De Sejac. ‘Behold, they are here—I have written them in English, but I will translate them for you so that there can be no errors. The first one—that is addressed to Peter Heels, his valet, and it reads: ‘
Send light baggage and papers care of Chef de Gare Angoulême also hotel bill stop will wire necessary money stop am returning to England by car stop pack heavy luggage and return London wait my arrival. SINCLAIR
.” The other is address “Manager, Hotel du Palais, Biarritz”, and says: “
Wire amount of bill and despatch luggage Chef de Gare Poitiers stop instruct Chef release luggage on payment of bill he to remit to you. RICHARDSON, Room 4067
.” You will hand them in at Dax just as they are written—that is as far as he could be expected to go tonight. Tomorrow you will go on to Angoulême and collect the bags in which should be his cheque-book—also you will wire the money for the bill—that is essential or his valet would not be allowed to leave. The money which I give you should be ample, and whatever the sum may be we add it to the cheque which he shall sign for us tomorrow night. After, you will return here with all speed. Go now, I will unlock the gates, and see to the safe disposal of his car.'

‘Yes—it is good, there is no slip that I can see,' replied the other man cautiously—‘but what of her baggage, and in the meantime what of him—you are assured that there can be no escape?'

‘My careful Frederic,' purred the Baron, ‘for the luggage
of Mademoiselle there is ample time—as for him, in my hands he is quite safe. He will have an unpleasant day tomorrow—no food, no drink—it is always best to make short these operations whenever possible. It is a kindness in reality, and he will be more ready to take a pen in hand without further trouble. We will talk to him together on your return.'

A door slammed somewhere above my head and after that there was silence; evidently the two men had gone out together.

Slowly and painfully, for my head hurt like the very devil, I began to try and puzzle things out. The girl was one of the gang, of course, otherwise De Sejac would not have complimented her on her acting, and that explained why she had been talking so calmly with the chauffeur when I watched them through the window. I must confess that rattled me a bit; she was so very lovely and not a bit like the traditional vamp; but then, no really clever crook would be fool enough to choose the sort of woman likely to be suspected. But why, I wondered, that elaborate piece of by-play outside the ‘Florida' when he flung her in the car? I couldn't make that out at all, so I had to leave it for the moment.

I considered the two telegrams; why in the world should Toby's valet act on instructions coming from Dax when his master was still staying at the hotel in Biarritz? Then I got a sudden flash of enlightenment. De Sejac believed that it had been Toby that he had seen coming through the trees—Toby who had followed him in the car, and Toby who had come in through the window only to be knocked on the head! I should have spotted that before if my brain hadn't been so muzzy—but having got that far, all the bits of the puzzle began to fall into place.

De Sejac had evidently singled out Toby from the beginning as worthy of a hold-up. If he had got him out to the villa on any ordinary pretext, Toby would have been missed and the police informed. So a carefully thought-out plan had been staged to cover his disappearance. First the girl picks Toby up on the bathing beach and tips the Baron off that she has done her stuff. Then De Sejac gets into conversation with him in the lounge—that was where I got drawn into it—and he quickens the young man's interest in the girl by threatening to become a rival, although he makes out that
he doesn't even know her. After that it is easy for her to play up, and pretend to prefer the Frenchman until Toby is fairly boiling with jealousy. The critical point in the campaign arrived when De Sejac took her off to the ‘Florida': would Toby follow them or not? If he hadn't nothing was lost, it would only have meant another day or two's work until a similar occasion arose.

The chauffeur must have arranged the cars one behind the other—then all they had to do was to stand talking for a few minutes until Toby followed them out of the restaurant.

Directly they saw me approaching through the trees De Sejac did his kidnapping act, believing that Toby would see it and give chase. They probably counted on his missing the track in the woods to give them time to get into the villa. De Sejac and the chauffeur must have waited by the only open window until the would-be rescuer put his stupid head in—then biff!—they had him cold.

By degrees I began to work out the rest of the plot and it was devilish ingenious. Toby and his car had disappeared—in the morning his valet would get a telegram from Dax, his light luggage and cheque-book would be put on the train for Angoulême—where presumably he would pick them up and continue his journey. Money would be wired, apparently by him, to pay the hotel bill, upon which Heels would pack the heavy luggage and return to England where he would certainly not begin to worry about his master for at least a week. In the meantime De Sejac's man would collect the bags at Angoulême, bring them back to the villa, and Toby would be starved or beaten into signing a nice fat cheque. They would keep him a prisoner, of course, until they had cleared it and got the cash.

But why should the girl not have returned to her hotel? I wondered. Then, in a moment I had that too, and it was the cleverest bit of the whole boiling. Miss Richardson's bill was to be paid by wire as well, and her luggage sent to Poitiers. She had been seen about with Toby a good bit these last few days, and hotel servants talk.

It would be assumed that they had gone off together on a joy-ride. That was the perfect explanation for Toby's sudden disappearance. Her luggage being sent to Poitiers instead of Angoulême, was just the sort of transparent subterfuge that
anybody like Toby would be expected to employ to protect the lady's name. And how the servants would chortle about it! Poitiers was only another seventy miles on the road to Paris, and everybody would see through it as an unofficial honeymoon.

I began to speculate on what was likely to happen in reality; Toby's man would get the telegram all right, and doubtless pass it on to him. When he found that neither his car nor I had returned in the morning he would probably go to the police, but I didn't see what they could do. It was extremely unlikely that De Sejac had any right in the villa. He had probably found it deserted and felt that it would serve his purpose admirably, but there would be no connection between him and the real owner.

De Sejac would be livid when he discovered that he had trapped the wrong man, and I fell to wondering miserably what was in store for me.

VII

I never want to spend another day like the one that followed. It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't had that blow on the head, but an injury of that kind means fever—and fever begets thirst. After I had ruminated for a bit on the conversation that I've told you about, I dropped into an uneasy sleep. I don't think it could have lasted more than an hour or so, but my hands being tied behind me I could not get at my watch, and as the room remained in semi-darkness I had no means of judging the passage of time.

Soon after I woke up, I noticed that the streaks of light which filtered through the floorboards of the ceiling were white instead of golden, so I guessed that it was day—but how far advanced it was I could not tell; and from the brooding silence of the place I feared for the moment that in some way they had learned how their plans had miscarried, and left me there to die.

That was a pretty bad half-hour, I don't mind telling you—and it seemed an age to me. Once, I really panicked, and nearly burst a blood vessel in straining to free myself from the cords with which they had bound me, but it was useless—they
had trussed me like a Surrey fowl, and I couldn't free a single limb.

Then suddenly I stopped struggling. It was the girl's voice—low but clear, and she was singing somewhere above me, a song out of Noël Coward's
Bitter Sweet
. I rolled over into a more comfortable position and lay there listening.

Her voice struck some chord of memory in my mind, and I puzzled over it for some time, but in the end I came to the conclusion that it was just the tune that was familiar.

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun, and afterwards not a sound came from above through the whole of that awful day. Every hour of it seemed like a week in my normal existence, and I thought it would never end.

Towards the afternoon I became a little delirious I think; the throbbing in my head had passed into a dull ache, and the gag cut my mouth intolerably. My tongue was pressed back towards my throat, and it may have been only imagination, but I began to think it was swelling and I feared that I should choke. My lips were dry to the point of cracking, and my throat so parched that I doubt if I could have swallowed the drink I had never ceased to long for through the whole of that ghastly day.

I dozed off again, in a stupor of pain and torment, some time late in the afternoon, and when I awoke the tiny threads of light had changed again from the white of day to the yellow of electric candle power.

My first thought was one of relief, because soon now De Sejac or his man would be coming to visit their prisoner. Then little cold beads of perspiration started out on my forehead as I thought of what they might do to me when they discovered their mistake.

Criminals become dangerous when they are baulked, and my feverish mind conjured up a picture of their leaving me to die—a raving maniac in that empty house.

The trouble would start when the chauffeur got back empty-handed. Naturally Heels would not send the bags to Angoulême with Toby still in Biarritz. The gang would know then that they had slipped up somewhere, and there would be the devil to pay when they came down to visit me! I sat there with my back against the wall, aching in every limb and a prey to every sort of reasoned and unreasoned fear.
After what seemed an interminable interval I heard the door of the room above open and De Sejac's voice.

‘Bring them in, Frederic, bring them in, and we will go through them.'

There were footsteps, and two heavy thumps. You can imagine my surprise—it seemed that the chauffeur had secured Toby's bags after all, and I began to speculate on what could have happened. Perhaps Toby had not returned to the du Palais the night before. When he found that his car had disappeared he might have decided to console himself with the little French girl and gone to some hotel with her. If so, he had probably got back too late in the morning to stop Heels acting on the wire, and was even now cursing his unfortunate valet for a fool.

I had no chance to think of other possibilities, for at that moment a key turned in the lock of my room. De Sejac and his man were still talking in the room above, so unless it was the girl there must be a fourth member of the gang, and I braced myself to meet the coming trouble.

An electric torch flashed in the doorway for a second, and then flickered quickly round the walls—suddenly it came to rest upon my head.

‘Good God,' came a breathless whisper, and I was filled with an immense relief. It was Toby Sinclair's voice.

He hurried forward and untied me, but my arms were so cramped that for some moments I could not move them from their old position behind my back, nor could I close my mouth.

‘Poor old Brandon!' he exclaimed, but for all his sympathetic words there was a hint of laughter in his voice. ‘What the devil happened? You have got it in the neck!'

I jerked my head in the direction of the ceiling. For the moment I couldn't speak, and the pain of the returning circulation in my arms was agonising, but I didn't want him to give the show away just then.

‘All right,' he said in a quick whisper, ‘I understand—we'll deal with them in a minute—feeling better?'

‘Water,' I managed to gasp.

He nodded. ‘There's a sink in the passage—I'll get you some.'

It was brackish stuff, that water, and probably full of every
sort of germ, but I sucked it down in mouthfuls as if it had been Imperial Tokay. Toby chafed my arms while I was drinking it, and after that I felt better. Then I explained the situation in a succession of hoarse whispers.

The young brute sat beside me on the bed and fairly rocked with mirth. He seemed to think it a tremendous joke that I should have tumbled into this ghastly business instead of himself.

‘Damn funny, isn't it?' I croaked resentfully. ‘Still, let's keep the laughter for a little later on. How did
you
come to turn up here?'

‘Simple, my dear Watson.' I could feel him grinning in the darkness. ‘Heels got the telegram all right, and we thought it pretty queer, especially as you and the car had disappeared the previous night. Anyhow we put the bags on the train as instructed, wired to Angoulême for a fast car to meet us, and got tickets for ourselves. After that it was like shooting a sitting pheasant. All we had to do was to spot the chap that collected the bags and trail him here—I arrived about five minutes after he did!'

‘Listen!' I whispered, ‘they're coming down,' and sure enough we could hear heavy footfalls on the stairs.