Snatching up the fur coats, he hurried with them to an aged, semi-derelict Citroen that he had noticed at the back of the garage and pushed them into its boot, where it was unlikely that they would be discovered for some time; then, hurrying back to the van, he made a few rapid readjustments to its contents.
He did not alter the general layout of the various articles but drew them all a little nearer to the back of the van so that a space was left behind the driver's seat in which he could lie down without being observed by anyone who looked inside. Then, leaving the doors wide open, he took off his coat to form a pillow for his head and settled down to make himself as comfortable as he could.
He found that he was very tired now, and in spite of the hard boards upon which he was lying he dropped off to sleep; but he was soon roused by angry, excited voices. Evidently the driver had returned and discovered that the van had been broken into. There was silence for a time as the man went away, doubtless to report the theft of the fur coats, for when he returned Gregory could hear the Baroness talking to him.
At first her voice showed acute anxiety, but on ascertaining that only the furs had gone she quietened down and arranged with one of the garage hands to affix a padlock to replace the shattered lock, and a quarter of an hour later Gregory found himself a prisoner.
He did not mind that in the least. The great thing was that he had escaped observation. The Baroness would probably unlock the doors herself in due course, which would provide him with an excellent opportunity of coming face to face with her if he so wished; or, alternatively, if the van were left locked up for the night he felt confident that he would manage to break out of it. A few moments later the van began to jolt and drove out of the garage. They were on their way.
Apart from the fact that he suffered acute discomfort Gregory knew nothing of that strange journey. For a time they bumped over the pave streets of the city, then evidently came out upon an open road, as the van began to run more smoothly and considerably increased its pace. Gregory then knew that he had been right about the engine, as on certain stretches the van appeared to develop the speed of a racing-car and was certainly doing well over eighty miles an hour.
Soon after they started he made himself more comfortable by sitting up and rearranging some of the things about him to prevent his being jolted quite so badly. A crack of light coming through the door was just enough for him to see by and he arranged matters so that although the contents of the van were to some extent altered around he was still hidden by the pictures, if at any time a halt was made without warning and the van doors suddenly opened.
Gradually, as night fell, the crack of light dimmed. When they had been on the road for two hours it was only a faint line, and after another hour the interior of the van was unrelieved Stygian blackness. Swaying a little from side to side as the van raced on into the night, Gregory thought of Erika and wondered if the gods who had so often favoured him would grant him one more slice of luck so that he might be finished with his business soon and in another few days be back with her in England. Then he slept.
He was wakened by the van jerking to a halt, and looking at the luminous dial of his watch he saw that it was five-past one. They had been on the road for over six hours so it seemed highly probable that the Baroness had accomplished the first stage of her journey and meant to remain for the rest of the night at whatever place they had reached; but Gregory was soon disillusioned in his hopes of this. Five minutes later the van started off again; evidently it had stopped only for petrol. Their pace, he noted, was now considerably slower but they were steadily eating up the miles and after drearily rocking from side to side, for what seemed a long time, he again dropped off to sleep.
When he next woke he could see the line of light again, but from the sounds around him he felt sure that they had pulled up in a street. His watch showed him that it was a quarter to six, but even at that early hour there was a considerable amount of traffic about. He could hear the hum of passing motor-cars and occasionally the hoot of horns, so, although the van remained stationary for some time, he did not feel that it was as yet advisable to attempt breaking out.
The fact that the Baroness had not stopped anywhere on the road to sleep considerably perturbed him, for it looked, now that morning was come, as if she intended to go straight through to her destination; and every mile that they covered meant another mile for him to traverse on his return journey to rejoin Sir Pellinore. They had now been nearly eleven hours on the road, so even if he had been in a position to turn back at once he could not have reached Bordeaux before five o'clock in the afternoon, and Sir Pellinore was sailing that night.
Gregory had a good memory for maps and distances, and assuming that the Baroness was heading for Pointe des Issambres he tried to work out how far they might have got. Taking into consideration the speed at which they had been going during the early part of the journey, he came to the conclusion that they had crossed from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean coast of France during the night and were now probably in Nimes or Avignon.
Evidently the Baroness had been refreshing herself with petit dejeuner at some hotel, as soon after seven o'clock the van jolted into motion again. Their pace was now much slower; he judged it to be not more than twenty miles an hour and could guess the reason. If, as he supposed, they were travelling east on the Route Nationale, which links Nimes and Avignon with Cannes and Monte Carlo, at the two former cities they would have come into the streams of refugees which for days had been heading towards the South of France.
As time went on the streak of light became quite dazzling against the surrounding darkness and the strong sunshine beat down relentlessly on the roof, making the interior of the van intolerably hot. Gregory would have given anything for an iced drink, but he had to content himself with a pull at the lukewarm brandy-and-water in his flask and a couple of bars of chocolate for his breakfast.
At ten o'clock the van stopped again, but only for a few minutes, evidently once more to fill up with petrol, and it seemed as though this interminable journey would never end. By that time they had been on the road for fifteen hours so Gregory had reluctantly had to give up any hope of getting back to Bordeaux in time to sail with Sir Pellinore. A little grimly he realised that if France went out of the war he would have to make his way back to England as best he could. By mid-day the van had obviously left the main road. Its pace was no quicker but it constantly twisted from side to side and went up and down steep hills, so Gregory felt certain that they must have reached the coast.
It was a little before three in the afternoon when, after a halt of only one minute, the golden streak of light suddenly went out as though it had been turned off by a switch, then came on again quite dimly as the van was brought to a standstill. With a sigh of relief Gregory felt convinced that they must have reached their journey's end, as the difference in the light indicated that the van had been driven into a garage.
Rousing himself at once, he got out his gun and crouched there behind the small stack of pictures. The van was unlocked; he could hear the Baroness and her man unloading and carrying away a portion of its contents. They made three trips, then the van was relocked without his presence in it having been discovered. Two sets of garage doors, one behind and one in front of the van, were slammed, and there was silence.
Standing up, he climbed over the intervening packages and set about breaking out of his prison. As the padlock was a temporary affair and its hinges had only been screwed on, he did not anticipate much difficulty in forcing it. The third time he threw his weight against the doors there was a tearing of wood and they flew open. He just managed to save himself from pitching out, and jumped down on to the garage floor. The doors were shut but there was plenty of light to see by, so he picked up the few screws that had fallen from the padlock staple and, closing the van doors, reinserted them in their holes so that if anyone entered the garage it would not be noticed, at a casual glance, that the temporary lock had been interfered with; then he t
iptoed forward and, cautiously opening the door at the back of the garage, peered out.
The garage backed on to a garden. To his left, where the house lay, was a wide terrace with gaily-coloured sun-umbrellas and basket chairs. Below the terrace the garden paths twisted away among some dwarf pines, dropping steeply to a little cove which was lapped by the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean. To one side there was a promontory of huge green rocks, which was probably what gave the house its name, Les Roches.
Opening the door a little, he slipped out and warily made his way along to the terrace. Two wide french windows stood open there. Peering into the nearest he saw that they opened out of a large lounge-room that ran the full depth of the house and had other windows looking out on its far side. The room was empty, but at one side of it were stacked the six steel deed-boxes and other things that had been taken from the van. No sounds indicated the whereabouts of the Baroness or her man.
Gregory's brain was racing now that he had reached the end of the long chase, but he knew that he must act with caution or he might yet bungle matters. By now the man would almost certainly have gone to his room in the servants' quarters, which were on the far side of the house, to sleep after his nineteen-hour journey, and the Baroness had probably gone straight up to her room to tidy herself and rest. The problem was how to get at her, or lure her downstairs, without running into any other servants who might be about the place;
On consideration he decided that the best thing to do would be to go round to the front of the house, appear as an ordinary caller and ask to see her on the excuse that he had arrived with an urgent personal message from someone like Weygand or Reynaud. The probability was that he would be shown into the room which he had seen, and that she would then come downstairs. If she was alone—well and good; if a servant was with her—that could not be helped. This time Gregory was taking no chances and he meant to have his gun in his hand as she entered the room.
Tiptoeing back to the garage, he went through to its front entrance but found that the Baroness had locked that behind her, so he came out, and scrambling over a portion of the rock-garden that ran along the side of the garage he reached a low wall over which he could see that both the garage and the house gave direct on to the coast road.
He was just about to climb over the wall when a car appeared round the bend, moving at a great speed, but it braked as it roared up the slope and in a swirl of dust pulled up outside the house. Gregory's heart almost missed a beat from the sudden stress of mixed emotions—surprise—delight—consternation. In it was his old enemy, Herr Gruppenfuhrer Grauber.
His surprise was short-lived. There was, after all, nothing particularly extraordinary in the Chief of the Gestapo Foreign Department, U.A.—I, moving freely about in an enemy country in plain clothes, or that he should have had a rendezvous with his friend, Die Schwartze Baronin, to receive in person her report of the momentous conferences which had taken place in the last few days.
His delight came from this unexpected opportunity to settle accounts, once and for all, with this murderous pervert who had climbed to power over the tortured bodies of a thousand victims and was the living symbol of all that was most foul and loathsome about the Nazi tyranny.
His consternation was due to the fact that he knew the Baroness to be as subtle and poisonous as a female cobra and considered her quite enough to tackle single-handed without having to take on her equally redoubtable ally at the same time.
Gregory possessed immense self-confidence, but even he doubted his capability to overcome that ruthless pair in open daylight when there was at least one servant, and perhaps more, in the house who might come to their assistance. But just as the British destroyers had gone in against a superior force of Germans in the first battle of Narvik he also was determined to go in. Nevertheless, knowing that he would almost certainly be outgunned and that Grauber, at least, would get away, he decided to do his best to sabotage the Gestapo Chief's line of retreat.
Grauber had backed his car up to the front of the garage, where it was not visible from the house; then, getting out, he had gone to the front door where someone had let him in. Slipping over the wall and down into the roadway, Gregory opened the boot of the car, hunted round until he found a greasy leather tool-sack and took out a pair of pliers. Getting down on his hands and knees, he crawled under the car and partially cut through one of the wires of the steering gear. If Grauber did succeed in escaping a bullet he was not going to get very far on that twisting coast road without having a nasty smash; and, with luck, he would go right over the precipice to meet his death on the rocks below.
Crawling out, Gregory replaced the pair of pliers, shut the boot, scrambled back over the low wall and through the shrubs at the side of the garage to its garden end. He paused for a moment to regain his breath, then once more crept with catlike step along to the terrace, his pistol drawn ready in his hand.
Very, very cautiously he knelt down by the open French window, then gave one swift glance inside.
Grauber was there, and Gregory's heart thrilled again. A merciful God had at last delivered his enemy, bound, into his hands.
Evidently the Gestapo Chief had asked for the Baroness and had been shown into the big lounge-room to wait until she came downstairs. He was sitting in a low armchair, facing the door and with his back to the window. His fleshy pink neck, which protruded in ugly rolls above his collar, was on a level with Gregory's head and only a few feet away.
There was not a second to be lost. At any moment the Baroness might appear, then Gregory would have lost his God-given opportunity. He had no scruples about what he was going to do. Grauber would have killed him or Erika without warning or compunction, just as he had already killed scores of other people. Reversing his pistol, Gregory took a firm grip of the barrel. Rising to his full height he took one step forward and brought the butt of the pistol crashing down on Grauber's skull.
Grauber slumped forward without a sound. Not even a moan issued from his lips as the blood began to ooze up through the broken skin of his cranium. Jamming his pistol back in its holster, Gregory seized the Gestapo Chief by the back of the collar and, hauling him out of the chair, dragged his body behind a nearby sofa where it could not be seen from the door of the room. Then he pulled out his gun again and tiptoed across the parquet to take up his position behind the door.
His hand that held the pistol was steady but his heart was thumping. For once the big cards in the pack had been dealt to him. Not only had he put one enemy out of the game already, but the coming of that enemy so unexpectedly had solved for him the tricky problem of getting the Baroness downstairs without her suspicions being aroused by the announcement that a stranger was asking to see her and without any of her servants yet being aware of his presence there.
He had hardly placed himself when the door opened and the Baroness came in. From his post of vantage Gregory was immediately behind her as she walked into the room. With his free hand he gave her a swift push in the back; with his foot he kicked-to the door. She gave a little cry, stumbled and swung round to find herself looking down the barrel of his automatic.
Her dead-white face, framed in its bell of jet-black hair, could go no whiter but he saw shock and dismay dawn in her dark eyes.
'I've got you now,' he said quietly; 'and don't imagine that the Herr Gruppenfuhrer will come to your assistance this time, I've already dealt with him.'
She stared at him like a small, ferocious, trapped animal for a moment, then she murmured: 'I thought—I thought . . .'
'Yes,' Gregory went on for her, 'you thought that I was dead, but I survived your hospitality and I've come back from the gates of Death to claim you.'
'What—what d'you mean to do?' she breathed. 'Are you going to kill me?'
He nodded. 'As the price of your treachery you no doubt anticipate great rewards from your Fuehrer, but you're not going to get them. You are the woman who sold France to her enemies, and for that you are going to die.'
A new expression came into her face, neither resignation nor fear, nor determination to fight for her life, but a strange spiritual flame that lit up her whole countenance, as she cried in ringing protest: 'That's a lie!
I did not sell France; and I shall go down in history not as the woman who betrayed France but as the woman who saved her.'
Gregory was so taken aback by this extraordinary declaration that he could only stammer: 'You—you've done your damnedest to ensure that France shall surrender and desert her Ally.'
'Her Ally!' she sneered. 'For nearly a thousand years England was our hereditary enemy, and the Entente Cordiale is a thing of yesterday, based on false premises. That unnatural alliance will pass as swiftly as it came and will soon be forgotten. Deep down in you the truth is as plain to you as it is to me. The French and the English neither like nor understand each other and their paths lie in opposite directions. For a few decades Britain has used France as the weaker partner to be her bulwark against Germany. France suffered inconceivably more than Britain in the last war and, once again, she is being martyred in this one, while the English sit at home in their cities, safe and secure. But that is finished. Henceforth Britain must fight her own battles and France will go back as an integral part of the Continent to which she belongs.'
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