Later, at Rome police-headquarters one of the chief detectives engaged on the case asked Dr. Morelle for his reason behind the statement he had given the newspaper reporters. Dr. Morelle indicated several of the counterfeit cheques which lay on the wide office-desk before him. “I saw some of these in Paris,” he said, “in Commissaire Principal Roland’s dossier. The serial number was the same. I recall that it is the serial number used for all travellers’ cheques issued by Transatlantic office in this city.”
It took six months to prove Dr. Morelle right, when the net finally closed round Giordano Trescalli, his business-men crowd, and the Lizard mob. Carla was one who contrived to wriggle through the meshes, so did the charming Frenchman, user of the violet scent. Two other fish who contrived to remain free were Danny Boy and Johnny Destiny.
Slipping back from Switzerland and into France, Johnny had gone to ground for a while in Marseilles; then he had drifted along the Cote d’Azur, until he had landed up in Vichy. It was a certain item of news he had picked up at the Grand Casino one evening which had brought a sudden gleam into his pale eyes. Next day he had taken a hired Simca Versailles and headed for Paris.
As he hustled the car through the old town of Billy, its medieval castle crumbling on top of the hill, and then along La Route Bleu, his mind was running before him, full of the big idea that had struck him.
This notion, it had come to him right out of nothing. Johnny Destiny smiled thinly to himself as his foot squeezed down harder on the gas.
Chapter Four
JOHNNY DESTINY HAD booked a room at the hotel off the Rue de Dunkerque, near the Gare du Nord, from which he would be leaving for London early next morning. But when he arrived in Paris in the late evening and drove to the hotel, he found inexplicably that no one behind Reception knew anything about him. The place was full and there wasn’t a room for him.
Irritated by the hotel’s muddling, and dismissing the thought which emerged from the back of his mind that this was an unlucky omen, Johnny marched out snarling to find accommodation elsewhere. It took him half-an-hour driving round, from the Madeline to the Place de la Bastille, from the Rue de Rivoli to the Champs-Elysées, before he eventually wound up at the Hotel Scribe.
He phoned the car-hire company to pick up the Simca as prearranged with the Vichy office, and then he went out for a drink at Georges Carpentier’s bar, where he sat and watched the tourists strolling by, and the window-shoppers out for a saunter. The summer night was warm but there was a cool breeze off the Seine, which filled Johnny with the exhilaration he remembered from his last visit to Paris way back at the end of the war.
He looked in at the Café de la Paix for a brief while, keeping a watchful eye against running into someone who might recognize him from Rome or even the old days in Germany. But there was no one; then he went back to his hotel for a steak Chateaubriand and half a bottle of Vin Rose and then sat out in the foyer over coffee and a smooth cognac.
He began to feel sleepy, the long drive from Vichy along the banks of the River Loire had tired him more than he thought. After admiring the jewellery and gold wrist-watches in the hotel’s show-case, Johnny left instructions to be called. “Reveillez-moi a six heures,” and he went upstairs to his room.
He took a leisurely bath, all the time his mind full of the idea that had sparked his trip to Paris. He lay in bed mulling it over, weighing the risks and chances, his pale eyes gleaming at the prospect of the profits and the yen to be back in the big-time once again, and then suddenly he was asleep.
Half-past six next morning he stood outside the hotel, gripping his small suitcase, waiting for the taxi that had been ordered to take him to the Gare du Nord. The taxi appeared and he was speeding through the Paris streets, with the workers streaming off the buses and the Metro, and hazy with a summer morning mist. Then the taxi was pulling up outside the grimy, barracks-like station.
He found the train for Calais relatively empty; and as the outskirts of Paris gave way to the rolling landscape which was beginning to wilt already under the brazen sky, Johnny browsed through the English and American newspapers he had bought in Paris. Presently Amiens Cathedral was receding into the distant blue and the train was speeding through Abbeville, then the pale khaki sand-dunes and Paris Plage; next Boulogne and then Calais Maritime.
It was just on midday when he boarded the steamer, with the sun beating down on the brass and white paint of the decks. He went below and left his suitcase in the smoking-room, then up on deck again to watch abstractedly the activity on the dock-side, the gulls swooping round the vessel, and diving to the debris that floated on the shining surface of the water. Presently with deep tremulous sighs the steamer swung away from the quayside, and headed out of the harbour, beyond the sand-dunes, to where the sea lay flat and glaring.
Without a backward glance at Calais, Johnny went below for lunch. The boat appeared about half-full of passengers, and Johnny found a table to himself in the restaurant.
It was several years since he had paid a brief visit to London, he was thinking, as he gave his order to the hatchet-faced waiter with a cockney accent. That was in the Hamburg days and he had flown over for a long weekend. It had been winter and his impression of London in the daytime was that it was dark and raining. Not that he’d seen much of London by day, he knew most about it at night, the night-clubs and restaurants. And the night-clubs were like any other night-clubs anywhere else in the world, only they clipped you in an English accent.
He was glancing out of the port at the brilliance of the sky and thinking that London in summer mightn’t be so bad, when a girl’s voice brought his attention round to a slim young woman who was standing at his table.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” she was saying to him. She was a brunette with a warm smile and a calm expression in her grey eyes. She was wearing a neat summery frock and her bare arms were only lightly tanned.
As Johnny nodded, he glanced round the restaurant and observed that although it was not very full, all the tables round about him, were occupied by at least one passenger.
“Go right ahead,” he said.
With a smile of thanks she sat down and began ordering her lunch. The girl made only monosyllabic replies to the one or two chummy observations Johnny put in, and he decided she was a typical English type, cold and standoffish and not given to talking to strangers, once the topic of the weather had been exhausted. She had only one course and then asked for coffee which she had with milk. Johnny was finishing his cup of black coffee and smoking a cigarette. He offered her his packet.
“Like American cigarettes?”
She took one with a little smile and he noticed that she had nice teeth.
“I do as a matter of fact,” she said. “Though I don’t smoke them very often. Not that I smoke at all very much.”
He lit her cigarette for her with the gold Cartier lighter he had bought in Rome and noticed her gaze linger on it in his lean sunburnt hand.
“It’s the French ones I can’t stand,” she said, as she drew appreciatively at her cigarette. “They’re so terribly strong.”
“You get used to them,” he said.
“They say you can get used to anything,” she said with a little laugh.
He grinned at her. “For my money,” he said, “Paris wouldn’t be the same without the French cigarettes’ scent.”
“Do you know Paris well?” she said.
“Not so well,” he said. “I suppose I was really thinking of the other places I know, like Marseilles or Nice, which wouldn’t be the same either, without the smell of French cigarettes.”
They sat for about twenty minutes talking in a desultory way. The cigarette seemed to make the girl relax, as she told Johnny how she was on her way back to London after a week in Paris. It was her first time there, and she said that in a way she would have liked to have stayed on for the other week remaining of her holiday, only she had made arrangements which she couldn’t change. She was going down to an aunt in Essex, she sa
id.
When she got up from the table, Johnny stood up, and together they went up from the coolness below on deck into the bright sunshine. Already the French coastline had disappeared from view and ahead of them glinted a hint of chalky-white on the horizon. They were standing against the side of the vessel on the upper deck. The girl was breathing in gulps of sea air while Johnny narrowed his gaze absently at the dazzling sea.
“Do you know that man?” the girl said suddenly. And Johnny’s head came up with a jerk to meet her grey eyes with a quizzical glance.
“What man?”
He hadn’t turned his head, looking beyond her shoulder he could see only a middle-aged couple talking quietly together, and beyond them an elderly man, whose back was towards him.
“Don’t look now,” she said, “but he’s just behind you. He’s been staring at you for the past minute. I wondered if he knew you.”
He shook his head. A warning bell rang at the back of his mind, a question-mark of danger formed out of his thoughts. There was always the chance of this, of someone he didn’t want should recognize him from way back when he’d gone A.W.O.L., for example, doing just that thing. He didn’t turn his head yet. It was the risk he had to take. He figured it was unlikely at that. He’d changed quite a bit the past few years. His body had thickened, he was more jowly about the face, there was plenty of grey around the temples and the nape of his neck. His skin was very dark, burnt by the sun of the South of France.
“I think he was having lunch at the same time that we were,” she was saying.
“I guess it’s you he’s looking at, not me.” Still he didn’t turn his head.
But she shook her head. “He looks rather like you, as a matter of fact. He’s turned away now,” she said. “Perhaps he guessed I was talking about him.”
Now, slowly, casually, Johnny turned to look at the man. He was leaning against part of the ship’s superstructure, his gaze now out to sea. He was thick-set, in his late thirty’s Johnny calculated, and, yes, he figured, there could be a kind of resemblance between them. His skin through which the beard showed round his chin was burnt dark by the sun. By the cut of his suit, Johnny concluded that he was an American, too.
Johnny didn’t recognize him, so far as he knew he’d never seen the man before. He turned back to the girl.
“Looks like he’s an American,” he said. “Maybe he heard my accent, and he was interested in there being another American around.”
The girl seemed to accept this explanation, though Johnny thought he caught a hint of perplexity in the look she threw beyond him. “He’s stopped looking at you now, anyway,” she said. “In fact, he’s walking away.”
Johnny didn’t turn to glance after the other man. He offered the girl another of his cigarettes, but she shook her head. Johnny took one himself, and cupped the flame of his lighter with his hand as he lit it. He dragged at it deeply, feeling vaguely disturbed, by the thought of the man walking away behind him. He knew for sure it was no one he knew, his memory for faces was all right. It always had been. But that couldn’t mean it wasn’t someone who, even if they hadn’t been socially introduced, had seen him some place, and knew who he was.
On the other hand, it could mean nothing. Just, like he had said, another Yank hearing him talking and giving him the casual once-over out of curiosity. No more to it than that.
The man didn’t reappear, and Johnny didn’t go in search of him, there was nothing to be gained by that. Presently the gulls gleaming white in the sunlight of the early afternoon were screaming round the decks as the steamer eased its way into Folkestone harbour. The girl had quit Johnny’s side earlier to check her luggage, leaving him to gaze speculatively at the chalky cliffs and green of the downs that rose above the little town, beyond the quayside buildings.
He didn’t see the girl again, though he looked out for her casually when he himself went below to pick up his own suitcase. He kept an eye peeled for the man, but didn’t spot him in the bustle of disembarkation.
So he was through the Customs, after a perfunctory examination and on to Folkestone harbour platform, walking along beside the train due to leave shortly for London. Like the steamer, the train was only half-full, and Johnny found a first-class compartment to himself. Putting his suitcase on the rack he got out of the compartment and stood on the platform, still looking casually for the brunette, still wondering if he’d see the man on the boat.
But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and he decided that she must have got ashore well ahead of him, he hadn’t hurried and she was by now somewhere on the train. The man didn’t show up either.
The platform-clock said half-past four and the train was pulling out and Johnny went along to the restaurant car for a drink. He threw a glance at the compartments he passed, but there was no girl, no man. Nor did he glimpse either of them in the restaurant-car.
It was sometime later when he was back in his compartment, glancing idly through a glossy magazine he had bought on the station bookstall. The compartment-door slid open and Johnny glanced up over his magazine. It was the man the girl had pointed out to him on the steamer.
He closed the door behind him, and sat down in the corner diagonally opposite Johnny. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even glance in Johnny’s direction.
Chapter Five
AT APPROXIMATELY THE same time that Johnny Destiny went aboard the cross-channel steamer at Calais, the telephone rang in the study at 221b Harley Street, London. Miss Frayle, who had been sitting with her pencil flying over a note-book taking down Dr. Morelle’s dictation, picked up the receiver. A man’s voice answered her, he sounded as if he was choking. “Roses — those roses —”
“What?” Miss Frayle said, her eyes wide.
“It’s a bowl of roses,” the man gasped painfully. “The scent — I can’t get my breath —”
“Who is that?” Miss Frayle asked quickly.
“It’s Mr. Beaumont — tell Dr. Morelle —”
His voice rasped her ear in another fit of choking as Miss Frayle turned to Dr. Morelle, who had not glanced up from the notes on his desk in which he was absorbed. But now he shot a look from under his dark brows at the telephone-receiver she held.
“Mr. Beaumont,” Miss Frayle said, answering his unspoken query. “He sounds rather ill —”
Dr. Morelle had crossed to her swiftly and he took the telephone. “Dr. Morelle here.”
“I’m choking to death, Doctor — this asthma. Someone put roses on the table in my sitting-room, and —”
“Did you take the adrenalin injection I prescribed for you?”
“Yes, yes — but it doesn’t help. I’ve got to see you.”
There followed another fit of coughing, and Dr. Morelle instructed the other to get into a taxi and proceed to Harley Street as quickly as he could. When Dr. Morelle had replaced the receiver, Miss Frayle said: “Poor Mr. Beaumont, what causes this asthma, Doctor?”
“It is a spasmodic condition of the bronchi, that is the two windpipes that lead to the lungs. The patient is unable to exhale the dead air, and feels that he is suffocating.”
Miss Frayle was looking puzzled. “How could roses have given him asthma? I mean, they’re such lovely flowers.”
“The symbol of love, eh, Miss Frayle?”
“I wasn’t thinking of them in that way.”
“Never mind, so long as you think of them.”
Miss Frayle blinked at him over her spectacles. “What do you mean?”
“I want you to hurry out and buy some roses.”
“Roses, Dr. Morelle?” Miss Frayle beamed, blushing slightly. “For me?”
“Get them from Finlayson’s in Oxford Street.” “Finlayson’s? But, Doctor —”
“Three dozen red roses, which to you symbolize love and romance, but which to Beaumont symbolize suffocation. Come along, don’t stand there gaping at me, I require them before Mr. Beaumont arrives.”
Miss Frayle had returned to Harley Street only a few minutes
from the curious errand upon which Dr. Morelle had dispatched her, when the front doorbell rang. It was as she expected the asthmatic patient. He was a youngish man, wearing a well-cut suit, and his face above his dark, subdued tie was a rather greyish tinge, with shadows under his eyes.
“Dr. Morelle’s waiting for you, Mr. Beaumont. I do hope you’re feeling better.”
“Yes, thanks. But I really thought I’d had it that time.”
Miss Frayle led the way to Dr. Morelle’s study. She opened the door and closed it again on Beaumont and Dr. Morelle who stood negligently leaning against his desk. His visitor took a step towards him and then his eyes dilated, his jaw dropped, and he indicated the desk as Dr. Morelle moved away from it.
“Those roses —” he gasped and went into a paroxysm of coughing, a shaking hand pointed at the bowl, full of red roses, dark red, deep pink and glorious crimson roses.
“Miss Frayle must have put them there, most careless of her,” Dr. Morelle said urbanely.
“I can’t breathe — the scent — I’m choking. Give me a shot of adrenalin —”
Dr. Morelle calmly moved aside from the bowl of roses on his desk, behind which was the macabre-looking human skull which served as a cigarette-box. The veins in Beaumont’s forehead swelled, and he looked as if he would suffocate. “I’ll give you a hypodermic,” Dr. Morelle said. “Let’s see, you’ve refused to have any skin-tests. You said you’d had some before you came to me?”
Beaumont nodded and quickly unfastened his gold cufflink and proceeded to push his shirt-sleeve high up his arm. His fingers were trembling in his agitation, his brow was moist with perspiration. The hypodermic flashed in the sunlight that streamed in through the window as Dr. Morelle picked it up in readiness to administer the injection. Dr. Morelle bent over the bare forearm. In a moment it was over. “Now try and relax,” he said to the other.
Dr Morelle and Destiny Page 3
