Once more noises came from the telephone, and this time it proved to be the number that C.B. had called. With a nod to the others, he said, ‘Our luck is in. It is Malouet himself.’ Then he spoke for several moments in his own particular brand of French. It was good French from the point of view of fluency, but it did not sound good, as he spoke very quietly, and without using any of the exclamations or inflections of the voice which are such a feature of that language.
When he hung up, he said, ‘As you may have noticed, I had to be a bit obscure; but the old boy tumbled to my meaning. He confirms my own view of the matter. In the remote chance of our happening on somebody prepared to vouch for it that they saw Christina either taken aboard by force, or carried aboard unconscious, the authorities will not hold it against us if we force our way on to the yacht and insist on being taken to her. But if such evidence as we can get is to the effect that she went aboard of her own free will, the only way in which we can insure against a nasty comeback is for John, as her fiancé, to swear an affidavit, stating that he believes her to have been lured aboard for an illegal purpose; then we will be granted a search warrant.’
‘So that is all we have been wasting a precious ten minutes to be told,’ said John sarcastically. ‘Why didn’t you get on to your office in Whitehall and ask them to send us a couple of hundred forms to fill up?’
‘Johnny!’ his mother exclaimed. ‘You will apologise at once!’
‘Sorry, C.B.,’ he murmured a trifle sullenly. ‘But for goodness’ sake, let’s get going and do something.’
C.B. gave him a good-natured pat on the shoulder. ‘That’s all right, John. Now you can run and get the car out.’
‘I’ll just slip upstairs,’ said Molly.
John gave her a quick look. ‘Going to collect the armaments, Mother? Good! I’ll come with you.’
‘What’s that?’ exclaimed C.B., as they ran across the hall. Then he called after them, ‘If you are thinking of taking any of those museum pieces of yours, Molly, scrap the idea. Otherwise you can count me out.’
Both of them ignored him, and as John ran up the stairs close on his mother’s heels he muttered, ‘Funny he should say that, isn’t it? Just the line I took with you last night; but now things are very different.’
With a sigh C.B. decided he had better check up on them. His long legs moving effortlessly, he took the stairs three at a time, and entered Molly’s work-room just as they went down on their knees in front of a cupboard. She pulled it open, revealing on the bottom shelf an array of highly-dangerous objects. Among them were pistols, bowie-knives, grenades, a garotter’s cord, several stilettos and coshes, a knuckle-duster and a stick of gelignite. Looking down between their shoulders, he asked: ‘Has that Mills bomb still got its detonator in?’
‘Of course!’ Molly replied with an air of pride. ‘Otherwise it would not be a perfect specimen.’
‘You crazy woman! Some day a maid will have the bright idea of cleaning it, and when she pulls the pin out it will go off.’
‘Oh no. I’m much too fond of my little collection to let anyone clean it except myself,’ she replied lightly.
John was quickly cramming 9mm. bullets into the spare magazine of the larger of the two automatics. C.B. stooped and with a swift, unexpected grab picked up the weapon. ‘Nothing doing, partner,’ he said firmly, pushing it into his own pocket. ‘If you insist on risking a spell in a French prison, that is your look-out; but I dig my toes in at your taking a running jump to land on the guillotine.’
Turning an angry face up to him, John protested, ‘You said yourself that if anyone saw her shanghaied we could bust the yacht open without waiting for the police. It’s only common sense to take a weapon of some kind.’
Stooping again, C.B. selected a light cosh. It was a beautiful thing, about twelve inches long, its head egg-shaped and filled with lead, its stock a thin nine-inch steel spring, the whole being covered with dull black leather. ‘Here, take this then. But don’t lam anyone on the head with it; a blow on the shoulder would be quite enough to land most people in hospital for a week.’
‘Thanks,’ John murmured a little ungraciously; and he began to stuff it first in one pocket, then in another, in an endeavour to find a suitable place for it.
‘Ram it down the front of your trousers,’ C.B. advised. ‘Provided you don’t push it too far, the top end will keep it from slipping, and it won’t prevent you from sitting down in comfort. It is easy to draw from there, and if anyone frisks you for a weapon, in that position there is quite a good chance of it being overlooked.’
As John tucked away the cosh, C.B. turned to Molly. Relieving her of the smaller automatic, which she had been just about to slip in her bag, he said in a tone of mild reproof, ‘Now, ducks, I really can’t allow you to go around shooting people.’ But slipping out the magazine he handed it back to her and added, ‘Lord forbid that I should rob you of all your fun. You can point it at anyone you like now, and it’s a small beer to a magnum of champagne that it will prove every bit as effective.’
‘Oh, really, Bill!’ she pleaded. ‘Can’t I have just one bullet in the chamber, in case I get a chance to fire it? I do so want to see how much light the flash gives.’
‘No. I’d rather you took a pot-shot at me in the garden tomorrow night, if you must have a human target to aim at.’
‘You are rude! You infer that I couldn’t hit a haystack.’
‘Come on!’ cried John angrily, from the doorway. ‘By nattering like this you two are chucking away our only chance of saving Christina.’
C.B. glanced at his watch. ‘It is just twenty-two minutes since we discovered her disappearance. Not bad, considering I had to make a telephone-call to Nice. But we would have saved four minutes if you had gone to get the car out when I asked you to, instead of abetting your mother in her whimsies about weapons. Get cracking now.’
John dashed downstairs. The others followed him and collected their coats from the hall. As they walked down the garden path, C.B. said to Molly, ‘I’m taking you only as a spare driver, if we have to leave the car. I’ll have my hands quite full enough preventing that boy of yours from sticking out his neck. You are under orders again. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Molly, out of ancient habit and quite meekly.
Once they were in the car John lost not a second, and the moment they were under way he jammed his foot down on the accelerator. As they rounded the second corner they met one of the big auto-buses returning from the St Raphael direction to Cannes and had to swerve violently to avoid it. Molly was thrown sideways on the back seat; C.B. stiffened his long legs and cried: ‘Go easy, young feller, or you’ll break all our necks!’ Then he went on in his normal voice. ‘Don’t get the idea that I am sitting down on the job, but the fact is that five minutes either way is unlikely to make much difference now. Try to consider our prospects dispassionately. Jules has the best part of an hour’s start of us. If he meant to take her to the yacht and the crew were only waiting till he got her on board to put to sea, they will have sailed long before we get there. We couldn’t have caught them, even if we had set off the moment we discovered her disappearance. On the other hand, he could not have been certain that he would succeed in getting hold of her, or if he did at what hour he would be able to pull it off; so the odds are that he would not have ordered his crew to stand by from half-past eight till dawn, and will have to collect them.’
‘That shouldn’t take him long.’
‘It all depends how many of them there are and whereabouts they live when they are on shore. But that is not my main point: it is his mental attitude of which I am thinking. Once he has got her on board I see no reason at all why he should burst a blood vessel in getting the yacht out of harbour.’
‘He would hardly be such a fool as to gamble on our not learning of Christina’s disappearance until tomorrow morning. She may even have told him that we were expecting her to dine with us.’
‘True, but what has he
to fear if we do turn up? If we go on board he can have us thrown off again—that is unless we are accompanied by the police with a search warrant.’
‘How long do you reckon it would take us to get one?’
‘As we have not got the ghost of a case, we should have one hell of a job in persuading the police that we had real cause for alarm. We should have to show great persistence and tell our story four or five times before we got high enough up to secure action. With waits between interviewing a series of unenthusiastic officials, that might take us anything up to three hours. Jules must know all about the slowness of police procedure when the applicant for help can produce no definite evidence that any crime has been committed; so up till about eleven o’clock he can afford to snap his fingers at us. Anyhow, that is my appreciation of the situation. Either the yacht has sailed already or we’ll find when we get to St Tropez that, like Drake, we’ll have plenty of time for a game of bowls before we go into action.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ John admitted grudgingly. ‘I wish that I could take matters so calmly.’ But he moderated his pace a little, and did not let the car out full again until they were through St Raphael and had entered the long flat stretch round the curve of the great bay. It was ten to ten when he jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a halt on the cobbles of St Tropez harbour.
In summer, at that hour, it would still have been thronged with people, drinking both at the scores of tables outside the cafés on the waterfront and in the cabins of dozens of craft in the port itself. But it was too early in the year to sit outside at night, and the season for the small yacht owners had not yet begun.
Like most of the ports on that coast, the harbour formed a rectangle with tall, ancient houses on three sides of it. The basin was partially filled by several groups of shipping moored beam to beam. Most of them were fishing-boats, or sailing yachts that had been dismantled for the winter; a few were larger, fully-powered craft, although not of the size that millionaires had kept for luxury cruises in those waters before the war. Apart from riding lights, it was from the cabins of these bigger vessels that the only lights showing in the harbour came, but the landward end of it was lit by the windows of several cafés, which were still open and occupied by a sprinkling of people.
Scrambling out of the car, John glanced quickly up and down. Outside the cafés the broad quay was deserted, except for a group of three loungers standing some distance away on the edge of the pavement. In the uncertain light they looked like seamen, and he began to run towards them.
‘Hi!’ C.B. called after him. ‘Where are you off to?’
Slowing his pace, he called back over his shoulder, ‘I’m going to ask those chaps which the yacht is—if she’s still in the harbour.’
‘No, you’re not.’ In a few long strides C.B. caught up with him and added in his conspiratorial voice, ‘We don’t want to let the whole town know our business. You go back to the car and leave this to me.’
After giving the crestfallen John’s arm a friendly squeeze, he walked on to the end of the block and entered a café on the corner. He was absent for about six minutes. When he returned, he said: ‘She hasn’t sailed yet; but you can’t see her very well from here. Her berth is up near the entry to the port on the right-hand side; and from the description I was given we can’t mistake her. I’m told there is a good little fish restaurant up there that will still be open, and I’m beginning to miss my dinner; so while we are waiting for developments I think we’ll have a snack at it.’
‘Damn it, C.B.!’ John exploded. ‘How can you be so heartless while that poor girl –’
‘I know! While that poor girl is at the mercy of a double-dyed villain. Try to be your age, John. Count Jules’s only interest in Christina is to get her to England and collect a nice wad of banknotes. The odds are that he is feeding her on asparagus and pêche Melba at the moment and that, in her present state of mind, she is thoroughly enjoying herself.’
‘But you spoke of “waiting for developments”. Since the yacht’s still here we mustn’t waste a moment in finding out if she is on board. Why should we wait for anything?’
‘Drive me to my chosen grazing ground, sonny, and I’ll tell you on the way.’
With an ill grace John got the car moving, and C.B. went on in a lower tone, ‘I didn’t telephone old Malouet only to ask after his health. The police always have several narks on tap in all these ports. I wanted the name of the best one here. He told me to ask for Henri at that café on the corner. It is the favourite bistrot of the yacht stewards, and as barman there Henri picks up from them most of the dirt about what goes on. He pointed out de Grasse’s yacht to me and he is going to slip out for a quarter of an hour to get us a little info’. By the time we have fortified the inner man with oysters and a glass of wine, I shall be very surprised if he is not able to let us know definitely whether Christina is on that yacht.’
In the back of the car Molly burbled her admiration for his efficiency with the same delight that a mother will display at seeing her offspring do its parlour trick, but John only asked: ‘What happens if the yacht puts off in the meantime?’
‘Then you’ve had it, chum. There is nothing you can do to stop her sailing, anyway.’
They pulled up at the fish restaurant and went inside. Two of its tables only were occupied, by people lingering over the last stages of their dinners. C.B. chose one in a corner, which was well away from the other diners, and ordered marennes with a bottle of Pouilly. While they ate he talked in a low monologue about butterflies, the collection of which was his hobby; but his companions appeared singularly disinterested. When they had finished the oysters, he invited them to join him in attacking a dish of sea-urchins, but they declined; so, still discoursing on the habits of the Papilio machaon, he set about a plate of the spiky crustaceans himself.
He was only halfway through them when the outer door opened and a short, tubby figure came in. C.B. glanced casually in the direction of the newcomer, then as though suddenly recognising an old acquaintance cried, ‘Hello, Henri! How is the world using you?’
The plump man had been advancing towards a buffet on which were displayed a selection of seafoods, fruit and cheeses. At the greeting he turned his head, smiled, swerved from his course and, coming up to the table, bowed politely. ‘Thank you, Monsieur; I cannot complain. It is a pleasure to see you here; but unexpected so early in the year. Do you stay long?’
‘No, I am only down here on business for a few days this time.’ C.B. added something about Henri mixing the best Angel’s Kiss on the coast and introduced him to Molly and John in a mumble that made their names unintelligible. Meanwhile the patron of the place had come out from behind the buffet.
At his approach, Henri said, ‘Excuse me, please,’ turned, shook hands with him and asked, ‘Can you let me have two dozen crevettes? I have an American in my bar. He is a little drunk and he demands crevettes to eat while he goes on drinking; so I said I would slip out and get him some.’
‘Certainly.’ The patron smiled. ‘A pleasure to oblige you, Monsieur Auer.’
As he went off to get a paper bag in which to put the prawns, Henri said to C.B., in a voice hardly above a whisper, ‘The crew were warned for tonight, but given no hour of sailing. The girl is on the yacht. She arrived in the car of Count Jules at about nine. His chauffeur and the boatswain, Chopin, were with them. Chopin went off on foot—I expect to let his crew know the hour at which they will be wanted. Count Jules took the girl on board. There was no suggestion of violence. They were laughing together.’
‘Any idea when the yacht will sail?’ murmured C.B.
‘Not for a while yet, I think; otherwise the crew would have reported by now. It is possible that Count Jules is expecting a second passenger to arrive at a later hour. I fear there is no more that I can tell you.’
‘Thanks; you have been most helpful.’ C.B. slipped a five-mille note into Henri’s hand, and when the patron returned with the bag of prawns they were
talking of the prospects for the summer season. Having shaken hands all round, Henri bowed himself out, and C.B. looked across at John.
‘Now we know where we stand, anyway; and the situation might be worse. It would be if Jules had taken her to some dive along the coast, and we hadn’t the faintest idea where to look for her. But her having gone on board willingly rules out your doing the irate fiancé stuff except at the risk of being arrested if you offer him or any of his people violence.’
‘I could go to the yacht and demand to see her.’
‘You could, but I doubt if it would get you much further. The odds are they would let you go below, then beat you up and afterwards hand you over to the police with a cut-and-dried story about your having started it.’
‘To do that they would have to call the police in. Once they came on the scene I could bring a counter charge of assault against Jules and demand a full enquiry. There would be a good hope then of the authorities preventing the yacht from sailing. Tomorrow morning Christina will be herself again, and whatever may happen to me, you and Mother would be able to get her away from them.’
C.B. shook his head. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t work out like that. They are much too leery to call in the police before the yacht sails. They would probably put you ashore in a boat just as she is leaving harbour. Or they might take you along to keep you out of mischief; then swear afterwards that the row had started only after she had sailed!’
‘What do you suggest then?’ John asked impatiently. ‘I flatly refuse to just sit here and let things take their course.’
To the Devil, a Daughter Page 13
