by John Creasey
“Yes, I’m here,” said Rollison, with an effort. “Sorry, Simon. But listen to this. The chambermaid at the hotel was killed this afternoon. The beggar you would not trust was killed this morning. It’s only by the grace of God that I came back alive. Don’t talk about dead bodies. I wish you hadn’t taken Violette to your pension. I don’t think you were followed, but it’s always difficult to be sure.”
“We shall be all right,” Simon sounded louder, and per haps a little less confident. “But this is bad. The police—”
“Yes,” Rollison said. “Perhaps. Later.” He could not ask the police to help Violette, yet. There was Gérard’s sister, too; poor Madeleine.
“Be very careful, Simon,” Rollison added earnestly. “Let me know what happens, and telephone every hour or so. What’s the telephone number of the pension?”
Simon told him.
“Thanks,” said Rollison. “And remember, be careful.”
He rang off.
There was silence until footsteps sounded outside the door; when they stopped, there was a tap. It might be the waiter with the whisky and soda. It might be – anyone; friend or enemy. Rollison moved away from the telephone, and went across to the door. He heard the clink of keys; that might be done deliberately, to fool him.
He opened the door, kept his foot,against it, peered out, and made sure that the man carried a tray with a bottle and a syphon on it. He opened the door wider, and the man came in. No one else appeared to be in the passage beyond.
“Where you like it, sir?”
“On that table, please.”
“Very good, sir.” The man was small, dark-haired, boasting a little black line of moustache. He had quick, jerky movements and very little polish. “That is all, sir?”
“Yes, thanks,” Rollison said.
The waiter went out, and the door closed with a snap.
Rollison poured himself out another whisky and soda. There hadn’t been time to fiddle with these bottles, and there was no sign of sediment on the bottom of either. He needed the drink badly. Suzanne had superseded the pictures of the others; it was a nightmare. He could go to the window and look out and see the balcony, five floors below, on which she had smashed her pretty little body.
The telephone bell rang again.
He moved towards it, half fearfully, took himself to task, yet understood what was happening to him. He was suffering from an accumulation of shock, and a form of exhaustion. He would never know how much the fight in the sea had taken out of him. And now he knew that Chicot might strike anywhere in any way. Nothing and no one was really safe – least of all the man whom many knew as the Toff.
He took off the receiver. “Hallo?”
A man asked: “Is that M. Richard Rollison?”
“Yes.”
“Good evening,” said the man, in a suave, not unpleasant voice. “I wonder if we might have the mutual pleasure of dining together. I am now in the foyer of your hotel, and we could dine there or—if you prefer it—at a restaurant of your own choosing.” He did not give Rollison time to comment, just paused slightly, to change the subject, and went on: “We have not met, but we have some common interests. I am a friend of M. Chicot.”
Chapter Thirteen
M. Chicot?
‘I am a friend of M. Chicot’ came out with a blandness which even shook the Toff, who did not reply at once. The speaker seemed to expect a startled silence, for he did not go on. Most men would have asked if Rollison were still there, or would have started fidgeting; not the man who called himself a friend of Chicot.
“I think it had better be here,” said Rollison at last. “The chef is reasonable.” He paused. “If you like any special dish, I’ll ask him to prepare it.”
It was the man who called himself a friend of Chicot’s time to pause; when he broke the silence, it was with a chuckle.
“I think I shall enjoy meeting you, M. Rollison. By all means, then, at the San Roman. I gladly leave the selection of a meal to you.”
“And wines?”
“Naturally.”
“And whisky?” asked Rollison, with gentle sarcasm.
The man startled him again, by laughing on a low-pitched note, as if the remark really amused him.
“Very funny,” murmured the Toff. “I shall have to introduce some belladonna into the meal tonight. Shall we say eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock,” agreed the other blandly. “I shall look forward very much to meeting you. I should tell you my name—M. Blanc.”
“In England,” murmured the Toff, “it would doubtless be Mr. Smith.”
‘M. Blanc’ chuckled and rang off.
“Well, well,” murmured Rollison, and put down the receiver slowly. He glanced at a travelling clock on the dressing-table; it was twenty minutes to seven. He smoothed down his hair, finished the whisky, locked the door, and went into the bathroom. He had a cold shower and a brisk rub down, and felt much better.
By then his mood was different; harder.
Until this morning he had been looking for a silly girl – well, a foolish girl – who was known to have been hypnotised by the glamour of the Cote d’Azur. There had been mystery, but not murder. Now two people had died violent deaths, chiefly – well, partly – because they had known and tried to help him. And obviously there were many girls who were in the same plight as Daphne Myall.
They put a heavy burden on his conscience.
Raoul had tried to kill him, while the three Arab swimmers had not brought those knives for the sake of making pretty patterns on the deck. After these failures – poison. Swift as the coming of dawn, the tempo and the gravity of this case had changed.
Why?
What had he learned, to worry Chicot and others so much? He let the question simmer in his mind, put in a call to his London flat, and then began to dress. Suddenly there were a great many things to do, and little time to do them in. M. Blanc intrigued him; but M. Blanc, whether a friend of Chicot or not, was almost certainly trying to distract him; to stop him from doing all that he needed to do.
He drew on the thin black trousers of his dinner-suit at seven-twenty-five precisely. He sat on the side of the bed and called Simon Leclair’s number, already beginning to worry because Simon hadn’t come through.
A woman answered. While she went to fetch M. Leclair, Rollison was seeing the clown’s big face, not red with greasepaint but with blood …
The picture vanished.
“Hallo, Toff!”
“In the life,” said the Toff, with great relief. “Simon, I thought you’d decided to desert Nice and go back to Paris. Everything all right?”
“The pension is not being watched.”
“Good. Two things to do, then. First, collect a bottle from Alphonse at the desk here, and get a chemist to analyse the contents, will you? I don’t like the look of the powder at the bottom.”
After a short pause, Simon said: “It is truly a wicked business, my friend. Yes, I shall do that.”
“And then try to find a way of getting Violette here,” said Rollison. “Disguise her any way you can to make sure she can’t be recognised, and have her walk through the dining-room at about half-past eight. Can you?”
“It will be dangerous, perhaps.”
“Not if she’s properly disguised. I’ll be dining with a Frenchman, and I want to know if his name is Blanc or if Violette knows him by any other name.”
“If it can be done, we will do it,” Simon promised.
When Rollison rang off, he lit another cigarette and allowed himself five minutes’ complete relaxation, leaning on the big square pillow and looking out of the window at the stars. The night was calm, the wind had dropped, the stars looked close and friendly. They gazed upon life and death, alike, and kept their secrets.
The telephone bell rang.
“M. Rollison, your call to London …”
“Thank you,” said Rollison, and found himself smiling, because of the man at the other end of the line. It was the man he wished could be here with him, who in a way was his almost perfect foil: Jolly, his general factotum, secretary, butler, chef, and friend. Since heavy losses on the stock markets had compelled the Toff to accept fees for his services, Jolly had also become a kind of business manager; it was he who always quoted fees.
Jolly’s voice came as clearly as if he were in this room. He would be standing by the telephone, probably wearing a green baize apron over black trousers, black waistcoat, and white shirt. His lined face would be set gravely, and his brown eyes would be rather doleful, because all that was part of Jolly. It might have started as pose, but it had become factual.
“Hallo, Jolly,” greeted Rollison. “Bearing up?”
“Good evening, sir,” said Jolly. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”
“Not a split second. How are you and how are things?”
“There has been no particular deviation from the average norm,” asserted Jolly, and accompanying that remark there might be the slightest of smiles in his eyes. “Two possible commissions came in by the morning post, but there is nothing urgent about either of them. Mr. Myall called this afternoon.”
“Ah,” said Rollison. “The same story?”
“Quite honestly, sir,” said Jolly, sounding more human, “my impression was that he is absolutely desperate. Apparently Mrs. Myall feels partly responsible for her daughter’s—ah—defection. I think we shall find that Mrs. Myall was extremely censorious and in fact lit the spark which finally sent her daughter away. Mr. Myall says that he is seriously worried about his wife’s mental health. I advised him to allow Sir Courtney Laverson to examine her, knowing that Sir Courtney is excellent in all mental sicknesses believed to be due to shock and a sense of guilt.”
“Yes,” said Rollison. “Good.”
“And that’s everything, sir.”
“Nearly everything,” said Rollison, slowly and very thoughtfully. “Something’s happened in the past twenty-four hours or so to quicken the pace over here. They’re getting homicidal.”
“Getting what, sir?”
“Homicidal.”
“I’m extremely sorry to hear that,” said Jolly, “I hoped that you would be having a rest, and—are you hurt?” That was the first time his voice sharpened.
“No, but others have been. Try to think of anything that we might have discovered in the past twenty-four hours. Some new factor might explain it. It could have sprung from something you’ve been up to over there.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t think that is very likely,” said Jolly at last. “I have been able to do very little. I was in touch again with M. Rambeau, to make sure that it was still in order for you to act as his agent.” He paused. “There is perhaps one thing—”
Rollison was sharp: “Yes?”
“He said that he was a little worried about the owner of the Baccarat Club in Nice. That is a night-club, of course, but there is also a gaming-room. It is very exclusive, and apparently the proprietor has been protesting to M. Rambeau about his intention to open a cabaret also in Nice. That project has become more imminent, of course, because you have been acting as M. Rambeau’s agent. You know what M. Rambeau is like, sir, rather—ah—explosively excitable, and in this matter he was extremely angry. I—ah—got the impression that he resented the interference from M. le Comte de Vignolles—”
“Who?”
“M. le Comte de Vignolles,” repeated Jolly firmly. “M. le Comte is the owner of the Baccarat Club, although the manager is often represented as the proprietor. I don’t wish to labour this point at all, but it had obviously made a deep impression on M. Rambeau. He did not appear to understand why there should be any protest about competition, and I gathered—perhaps that is too strong a word, I had a vague impression that M. le Comte had attempted to threaten M. Rambeau.”
“Well, well,” murmured the Toff. “To draw me off?”
“In a way, sir, yes. Until you broached the subject, I hadn’t seen it quite like that. I am aware that you cannot judge a French gentleman by English reactions, of course. The excitability is a little strange to me, and when it is allied to a member of the theatrical profession, then—”
“I know what you mean,” interrupted Rollison. “Did Rambeau say anything else?”
“Apparently it was to be war to the knife,” Jolly told him, using the cliché without hesitation. “M. le Comte said that he would plan to employ the highest-paid artistes in France at the Baccarat and—well, frankly, sir, I assumed that this was a kind of professional jealousy. With it heavy on his mind, M. Rambeau took the opportunity of talking to me about it. Also, he wanted to know how long you would be, and if you were being successful. I took the liberty of telling him again that you were on the—ah, point of success.”
“I wish I were. Did that soothe him?”
“I had the distinct impression that when he rang off—the telephone conversation lasted twenty-seven minutes, precisely—he was less troubled.”
“Soothing syrup from Jolly! Thanks. Spell Vignolles.”
“V-i-g-n-o-l-l-e-s,” spelt Jolly.
“Thanks again. Find an excuse for talking to Rambeau in the morning, will you?”
“I will, sir.”
“Fine,” said Rollison, and smiled as if his man were actually in the room. “Good night.”
“Good night, sir,” said Jolly, and added after a pause: “You will be very careful, won’t you?”
“Very careful indeed,” promised Rollison.
And he meant it.
He got slowly off the bed. It was twenty minutes to eight, and he would soon have to go downstairs.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he would have thought nothing of this meeting more than he had already. Now it was very different. He could imagine brown-skinned men leaping over the rails of the Maria; and he could imagine brown-skinned men climbing up the balconies of the San Roman, until they reached his room. By night, that would be comparatively easy.
He could imagine them lurking at the corners of the passages; or outside his door; or even in the lift.
He would have felt better had he been armed, but his automatic was either tucked in his shoe on the little beach near the Villa Seblec, or had been found by some of the men of the Villa and taken away. Probably it was there. He missed it, but there was one compensation – a curious little gadget which, oddly enough, had been presented to him by a Frenchman. The presentation had not been wholly voluntary, but it had been useful.
It was a beautiful piece of mechanism, and its deadliness was the greater because it looked so innocent. There might be fifty or a hundred cigarette-lighters in the dining-room of the San Roman that evening, but only one which was also a lethal weapon. The tiny bullets which this lighter fired could kill a man if they hit the right spot.
Rollison had an identical lighter, in a different pocket.
He dressed, slipped the two lighters into the respective pockets, and examined himself in the mirror. His white tuxedo fitted as only Savile Row could fit, and within reason, he was satisfied. The real trouble was with the reflections of people who were not there. A dying Arab, sinking through the crystal-clear water. A brown-eyed beggar with a soft voice, who had died while keeping his word. A swarm of flies. And Violette. What was there about Violette? That queenly pride, the almost boastful way in which she flaunted her body, yet was as natural as nature itself could be.
Was it asking for trouble to bring her here tonight?
Simon would not do it unless he felt confident that it could be safely done. He would overrule any decision which the Toff made; would try, but wouldn’t take wild c
hances. Yet it was important to find out the true identity of the man who had telephoned him.
It might be vital.
At five minutes to eight, Rollison left the room.
He had his right hand in his pocket, about the little cigarette-lighter. The fact that he felt so tense was an indication of the seriousness with which he took the threat. He watched the corners. He watched the open ironwork sides of the lift. He watched as he crawled past each of the four floors, alone in the lift but for a page-boy.
Suzanne had been hurled to her death, and the murderers might still be in the hotel.
Nothing happened.
He smiled at the lift-boy, and stepped into the foyer. Two or three people whom he knew slightly were there, but no one who might be M. Blanc. Alphonse was busy at the desk, but made an excuse to free himself when he saw Rollison approach. Rollison gave him the bottle, and told him that a messenger would come for it.
“Yes, m’sieu!”
“And if I get a message, have it sent into the dinning-room at once, will you?”
“But of course, m’sieu. Will you be dining alone?”
“I hope not,” said the Toff, and then sadly shook his head. “And I don’t mean what you mean, Alphonse! I am expecting a M. Blanc. Do you know him?”
“Blanc?” echoed Alphonse, wrinkling his lined forehead with outward solemnity. “No, m’sieu, the name is not familiar here. There was a famous cabaret artiste of great size, you understand, who called himself Mont Blanc—a joke, m’sieu—but I understand he drank too much English whisky!” Alphonse looked round the foyer, and saw another man come in. “I recognise everyone who is here, including M. le Comte de Vignolles. It is not often that he honours us.”
There was a subtle change in Alphonse’s manner.
There was an uneasy feeling in Rollison; for this was almost too much for coincidence.
Obviously the Comte de Vignolles was the man who had just come in. It was obvious at the first glance that he was used to being awned upon; that he expected the obsequious attentions of two porters and a small boy, who took his hat, his stick, and his white gloves. As he stripped these gloves off, he looked round the foyer as if seeking someone whom he would recognise.