East of Algiers

by Francis Durbridge

  We were awakened by a buzz on the house telephone at ten o’clock. A quarter of an hour later our petit déjeuner was brought up on a nice big tray. We had barely finished our coffee and croissants when the ’phone buzzed once more. Mirabel was in the hall below and wanted to see me again.

  ‘I’m just going to have a bath,’ Steve said. ‘You can tell him to come up here.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not dressed yet,’ I told the telephone. ‘Would you mind coming up to room number thirteen? Or if you’d rather I’ll get dressed and be down in about ten minutes.’

  Mirabel decided to come up. Within a minute he was at the door. He had found time to shave and change his collar. Spick and span as he was, he looked very out of place in our chaotic bedroom. I pulled him up a chair and offered him a cigarette, which he refused. I thought, however, that his manner was more friendly than the previous night.

  ‘Are you any further on?’ I asked, trying to show the right amount of polite interest.

  ‘I have had time to communicate with our English colleagues and obtain some information about you, Mr. Temple. They tell me that though you have a gift for attracting trouble towards you, you are not usually the prime cause of it.’

  I laughed, imagining Vosper’s wording of such a message.

  ‘Then I’m off your list of suspects?’

  ‘I think so,’ Mirabel said and smiled. ‘You will be interested to hear that we have solved the mystery of the same woman being murdered twice. It now appears that the girl found in the dustbin behind your flat was not Judy Wincott at all, though she was half American too and her name was Diana Simmonds. Our mistake was a natural one, since a letter found in her bag bore the name Judy Wincott and the murdered woman resembled her enough for the concierge to mistake her for the Miss Judy Wincott who had enquired for you the previous evening.’

  Mirabel seemed prepared to dismiss the subject at that. I expected him to ask me a great many more questions and there were several that I would like to have put myself. But the Inspector limited himself to feeling in his breast pocket and producing a small object wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘I am returning the glasses to you as I promised,’ he said. ‘Without the case, though. Our people soon reduced that to its elemental components.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  Mirabel shook his head.

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Did you have the spectacles checked?’

  ‘Yes, of course. There is nothing unusual about them. They are a perfectly ordinary pair of spectacles.’

  He unwrapped them from their tissue paper and inspected them casually before handing them across to me.

  ‘Genuine tortoiseshell, too clear to conceal anything. And the lenses – well, there is nothing, is there?’

  I took the glasses reluctantly.

  ‘I can’t help wondering. All the trouble seemed to begin from the moment these spectacles came into my life…’

  ‘You can rest assured, Mr. Temple. If there were anything abnormal about those spectacles our experts would have found out about it.’

  The Inspector rose to his feet and pulled his jacket down.

  ‘I am sorry that your holiday has been interrupted in such an unpleasant way, and grateful to you for your co-operation.’

  He held out his hand.

  ‘Give my homage to madame, your wife. I hope you will have a pleasant journey to Tunis.’

  ‘We are free to carry on?’ I said, still surprised that Mirabel was letting us off so lightly. ‘You won’t require us to give evidence at the inquest?’

  ‘It will not be necessary,’ Mirabel assured me. ‘You can continue your journey and Mr. David Foster can recover his spectacles – which I feel he must be missing very badly.’

  I had risen to my feet at the same time as Mirabel but I still felt reluctant to let him go.

  ‘Will you forgive me, Inspecteur, if I ask you something?’

  Mirabel shrugged non-committally, but he waited for my question.

  ‘This woman who was murdered in the Avenue Georges V – do you know who she was?’

  ‘We have found that out,’ Mirabel said readily enough. ‘She had several names but the one she used the most of the time was Lydia Maresse. She was known to Interpol as an international criminal.’

  ‘Any idea of the motive for her murder?’

  ‘None at all.’

  I hesitated for a moment while Mirabel studied me quizzically.

  ‘Inspecteur – it surely does not escape you that there must be some connection between the two crimes, since Judy Wincott’s handbag was planted on the body found in Paris. Nor can it have failed to strike you as odd that my wife and I should have been so close at hand on each occasion.’

  Mirabel raised his eyebrows and studied his immaculate nails.

  ‘These facts had not escaped us, Mr. Temple. But we are satisfied none the less that you had nothing to do with either crime.’

  He suddenly smiled, offered me his hand again and turned to the door. It had almost closed on him when his head was poked in again.

  ‘If by any chance I need to contact you again I can always be sure of finding you. Thanks to Interpol we can reach the people who interest us in almost any country in the world.’

  Steve and I had half a day to kill. We were again booked for the afternoon flight, this time to Algiers. I felt that what she most wanted was a breath of honest fresh air, as far away from that accursed hotel as possible. Enquiries at the hotel desk revealed that it was quite feasible to hire a small yacht. Sailing is a sport both Steve and I are addicted to and by half-past eleven we were well out from the shore in a neat little dinghy with racy lines.

  For an hour we enjoyed the illusion that no inquisitive or prying eyes were watching us. From out at sea Nice, with its long promenade of white buildings, gay sun shades and the hills rising in tiers behind it, looked even more attractive than from land. A number of other craft were out on the water. Several speed-boats were towing water ski-ers at speed across the bay and there were a dozen other yachts of various sizes about. The water was not rough, but there was enough of a breeze to make sailing an energetic job that occupied most of our attention. Every now and then an aircraft taking off from the Nice airport skimmed low over our heads.

  The wind was whipping the hair away from Steve’s ears, and I could see the colour returning to her pallid cheeks. We had just gone about for the twentieth time and were sitting on the gunwale to counterbalance the dinghy when she pointed to one of the speed-boats which had been cruising in our vicinity for some time.

  ‘He seems very interested in us,’ she called to me above the noise of the spray and the water swishing under our bows. ‘I think he’s watching us through binoculars.’

  I glanced at the launch and then turned to laugh at Steve. She is a very attractive woman, but unusually modest, and she can never bring herself to attribute the attention and interest of other gentlemen to the very apparent attractiveness of her person. In the blue trousers and scarlet shirt she was wearing this morning she was likely to be the target for more than one pair of eyes.

  A sudden gust of wind made the dinghy tip over dangerously, and we had to lean right back to keep her sails up out of the water. It was quite a tricky moment, and several hectic minutes passed before we had things under control again. Our canvas hid the cruising speedboat from us until I brought the dinghy’s head round to work her back to the shore. The noise of wind and water was so high that we had been unable to hear the sound of the engine. Even when I did hear the powerful roar I thought that it was just another aircraft taking off.

  Steve’s shout switched my attention to our starboard beam.

  ‘Alter course, Paul. He’s coming straight for us!’

  I looked up and saw the speed-boat no more than twenty yards away. Her engines must have been at full power, for her bows were well clear of the surface. A cliff of water seemed to be sheering away from either side of her steeply sloping side
s. Every time she hit a wave the white foam went hissing outwards.

  She must have been doing thirty or forty knots. On her present course she must surely ram us.

  It was hopeless to shout and attract the attention of the pilot. He wouldn’t have heard us, and anyway his bows were riding so high that I doubted whether he could see us.

  I slammed the tiller over and ducked as the boom came across. The dinghy yawed. She had lost all momentum and wallowed in a trough of water, a helpless and motionless prey for the oncoming speed-boat. She bore down on us like a swooping hawk.

  When she was twenty yards away I shouted to Steve: ‘Jump for it!’

  Hand in hand we leapt into the sea, as far from the path of the speed-boat as we could. Even as we rose to the surface we heard the crash behind us and the splinter of wood. The big speed-boat had cut the flimsy dinghy clean in two. Next instant a wall of creamy water hit us, filling our eyes and noses, thrusting us deep under the water. All the time I kept Steve’s hand clutched in mine.

  When we got our heads above water and recovered our breath the hum of the speed-boat was quite distant. A wave lifted me up and I saw his wake disappearing in the direction of Monte Carlo.

  The biggest piece of wreckage left was a section of the mast, which had a life-belt attached to it. Dragging Steve, I paddled towards it and we each grabbed hold of one side.

  ‘Well,’ Steve remarked to me bitterly, between gasping breaths. ‘Do you still maintain that the man in that boat was only interested in my elegant torso?’

  As we bobbed aimlessly up and down, the coast seemed to be as far away as the Antipodes. None of the other craft in the neighbourhood had noticed the accident, and there was not enough of our dinghy left to attract attention. Luckily the water was not unbearably cold. I thought we could hold on till darkness at least. During that time someone must surely come near enough to spot us.

  In the end it was less than ten minutes before we were found. A rather slow but obviously safe fishing-boat came chugging out straight towards us. As it drew near I began to wonder if there was going to be room on board, since half the population of Nice’s old quarter seemed to have thumbed a ride out to watch the rescue.

  So many willing helpers reached down to haul us out of the water that our arms were nearly pulled out of their sockets. There were even some especially keen rescuers who would have been only too willing to apply artificial respiration to Steve.

  ‘Doucement, doucement! Faîtes place pour Madame.’

  The accent was pretty good, but there was still that slight broadness of speech which betrays the Englishman. I looked round and saw the young man who had shared our discovery of Judy Wincott’s body. His name, as I knew all too well by now, was Tony Wyse. He seemed to have been accepted by the crew and passengers as the leader of the salvage operations, and in answer to his instructions room was made for us while dry pullovers and jackets were pressed on our soaked bodies.

  ‘It was a bit of luck I saw it all happen,’ Wyse told us, as he held his lighter to the cigarettes we had accepted. ‘I’m interested in sailing myself, and I was watching your yacht through one of those penny-in-the-slot telescopes they have on the front.’

  Steve and I exchanged an amused glance. We had been speculating that morning on the convenience of those same telescopes for gentlemen who are keen on bird watching.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’ I asked him. ‘I’d like to lay my hands on the owner of that speed-boat. For one thing the dinghy’s a total loss and someone will have to pay for her.’

  ‘You needn’t worry about that,’ Wyse assured me airily. ‘They all have pretty comprehensive insurance.’

  His day attire was as colourful as his night wear. He sported a pair of fawn flannel trousers which were as innocent of wrinkle as of spot, intermesh shoes, one of those Spanish-cut shirts with horizontal stripes and sailor neck, which you wear outside your trousers, and a silk neckerchief tied round his throat – more for beauty than for warmth. ‘Killer’ was written all over him, but strictly a lady-killer. He was not a man’s man.

  ‘He did it on purpose,’ Steve stated rather wildly. ‘I knew he was watching us in a malice aforethought kind of way. If we hadn’t jumped into the sea we would have been killed. I tell you, Paul, it’s all because of those confounded—’

  ‘It certainly was a freak accident,’ I interrupted quickly, and turned to Wyse. ‘How did it seem to you?’

  Wyse raised a shoulder elegantly.

  ‘It’s hard to say whether he saw your boat or not. But you can’t seriously be suggesting that he ran you down on purpose, can you? I mean, you don’t even know who it was, do you?’

  Wyse’s tone was that of an elder soothing the fears of children who have just awakened from a nightmare.

  ‘Then why—’ Steve began.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said, and tried to quell Steve’s protestations with a wink. ‘It was just one of those million to one chances. We’re none the less grateful to you for coming so promptly to the rescue. It looks as if we may still catch this afternoon’s plane to Algiers.’

  ‘You’re flying to Algiers to-day?’ Wyse queried. He smiled broadly and his eyes rested comfortably on Steve’s face. ‘But this is going to be delightful. I shall be on the Algiers plane myself.’

  We caught the Algiers plane with only a minute to spare. It had taken me a long time to come to terms with the owner of the dinghy. We were forced to fling our things into the suitcases and bolt our lunch before careering out to the airport in a taxi. The other passengers had already been escorted to the big Air France machine. Luckily there were no customs or immigration formalities to be observed, and a smartly uniformed young woman marched us rapidly out to the aircraft, just before the steps were wheeled away.

  Our seats were half-way along the aircraft. At our own request we each had a seat next to the window, and so were sitting opposite to each other. By no means all the available space in the aircraft had been booked, but the seat next to Steve’s was occupied by a vision whose age I put at somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-seven. That she was French seemed obvious from the start. She drew her legs demurely aside to let Steve squeeze past and, under the guise of a friendly smile, the two women exchanged a wary, appraising glance.

  The contrast between them was very marked. Whereas Steve was dark and did not have recourse to much makeup, this girl was an ash-blonde. Her hair was so immaculately dressed and glistening that I felt certain she must have been to the coiffeur that morning. Her eye-lashes were too long to be all her own, her nails were varnished and her lips were tinted by a faintly mauve lipstick. Yet there was nothing flashy or cheap about her appearance. You felt rather that she was a very lovely woman who took the maximum care to present herself well.

  She must have been a novice at air travel, for when the illuminated sign was switched on she fumbled helplessly with her seat belt and got her own straps mixed up with Steve’s. Steve showed her how to fasten herself in.

  The French girl smiled charmingly and groped in her mind for words.

  ‘Sank you very mush,’ she said, and gave a shy laugh.

  ‘Not at all,’ Steve said. ‘You’re not very accustomed to air travel?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I said: you have not travelled by air-o-plane much before?’

  The French girl shook her head a little, but not so much as to disturb the ash-blonde hair.

  ‘Yes, sometimes already but not since several years.’

  The aircraft was turning on the tarmac, preparing to lumber out to the end of the runway. The stewardess, a reassuring smile on her face, was moving up the aisle, asking passengers to put their cigarettes out, making sure their belts were properly fastened. The French girl was leaning forward, looking out of the window rather nervously at the rapidly passing ground. I knew that Steve was trying to keep her mind from the take-off when she resumed the conversation.

  ‘You are staying in Algiers or going further on?’

&
nbsp; ‘I go to Tunis. But of course I must first stop at Algiers and catch the airplane to Tunis the next day.’

  ‘That’s what we are doing. We shall be fellow passengers again to-morrow then.’

  ‘Yes. I shall begin to know you very well. I saw you in the hotel last night when the police were questioning all the guests.’

  ‘Oh, you were staying there too, were you?’

  ‘It must have been terribly désagréable for you to find that poor girl like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Steve agreed. ‘It was.’

  ‘How horrible to think that you were in the very next room while an assassin was committing his crime!’

  Now that she was warming to the conversation the French girl’s English was improving. She seemed very interested indeed in all the circumstances of Judy Wincott’s murder and began to ply Steve with questions.

  ‘Do you believe it was an attempt to make the police believe you and your husband had committed the crime?’

  Steve shot me a startled glance.

  ‘Good gracious, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But it is a fact that if the other monsieur had not been there you would have been in a situation – très embarassante.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we would—’ Steve began.

  ‘Though myself I think that she was murdered before she was brought to the room next to yours.’

  ‘Oh?’ Steve said. ‘Then why did the murderer make such a noise about placing her body in the cupboard?’

  ‘Well,’ the French girl said thoughtfully. ‘He may have wanted that you should do précisément that which you did – precipitate yourselves into the room where the body was finding itself.’

  The aircraft had reached the end of the runway and the roar of the engines as the pilot tested them precluded further conversation. The stewardess had strapped herself into her own seat at the rear end. After a momentary hush the engines roared again and the machine began to rush over the ground at rapidly increasing speed. The French girl leant her head back against the seat cushion and I saw her throat move as she swallowed. It was the only sign she gave that she was nervous.