Siege at the Villa Lipp (37 page)

The upper road had been closed by the police to nonessential traffic as soon as the alarm had been given. The coast road, however, became jammed with sightseers who had stopped their cars to watch the fun. Motor-cycle police had to be sent to move them on.

A television crew, who had seen the fire while covering a ‘folkorique’ happening up at La Turbie, were allowed in to get pictures for the regional news. Yves slipped away immediately, and so did I. Fortunately, the TV men didn’t stay long. The blaze was already under control. I avoided the cameras by taking refuge in my bedroom, and used the time, with the aid of a candle from one of the sconces in the hall, to pack the rest of my things. I also smudged those surfaces likely to yield clear fingerprints to anyone looking for such things. The cook’s husband and the daily woman would get around to cleaning up when we had gone; but, since the whole place wasn’t going to burn down after all, the less there was of me there to find the better.

Melanie had no problem with the cameras. She was closeted with the police. As the owner of a burned-out car, she had to file a separate report on that incident as well as making her statement as a tenant about the house fire. Connell too, the one who had signed the rental contract for the Fiat it appeared, would have to file a separate report to complete the paper work.

By then, it was eleven o’clock.

I could be certain of at least one thing. When the
Chanteuse
was picked up, Frank would not be among those found on board. It was also likely that, with all the police activity in and around the Villa Lipp, his squads of hired helpers on land had been withdrawn from the vicinity. Now, they would be waiting at assembly points farther out - waiting to see what my next move would be.

It was time I made it.

I found Krom sitting with Henson and Yves in the drawing-room, and set the ashtray I had been using as a candlestick down on the table nearest to them.

Krom was obviously very tired. However, my hope that fatigue would make him easier to deal with was a vain one.

‘We have no electricity,’ I began cheerfully; ‘and the fireman tells me that someone will shortly arrive to turn off the main water supply. There is still the swimming pool, of course, if you don’t mind the taste of chlorine and care to use buckets, but most of it has already been pumped on to the flames by one of the fire trucks.’

He flicked me away contemptuously. ‘Spare us. You meant to disperse our gathering. You still mean to disperse it. The enemies outside having been disposed of, you are now ready to dispose of the enemies within. Dr Henson agrees with me.’

Her eyes were unfriendly. ‘The relief of the beleaguered city having been completed,’ she said, ‘the garrison is ready to march out with colours flying. The cavalry are left in possession after their ride to the rescue.’

I knew then what the trouble with
her
was. The quip about cavalry riding to the rescue had been made by Connell while he was in her bed. By inadvertently throwing the word ‘cavalry’ back at him when he had accused me, facetiously, of trying to escape, I had let them both know that I had invaded their privacy. I could expect no more co-operation from them in dealing with Krom.

‘The garrison may march out,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t advise flying colours. You don’t think Mat Williamson’s going to give up just because of a little set-back here, do you?’

Krom’s teeth were back in service. ‘I too, think it unlikely that the person who made that telephone call to you will give up. Was he the ‘Vic’ we heard mentioned earlier? I think he must have been. So, he won’t give up any more than Kleister and Torten will give up. They want their revenge, and they have waited a long time. Now that someone has shown them how to find you, they can follow you to the ends of the earth if necessary. We are more fortunate.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

‘Oh, but I
am
sure, and my witnesses agree with me. The truth about you will be our protection. All we have to do is publish it. It’s you that they want dead, not us. Mr Boularis has made that clear.’

I glanced at Yves. He smiled slightly. His closed session with them had been highly profitable. It was time for me to cut my losses.

I moved over and sat down by Krom. ‘I think you have something of mine, Professor,’ I pointed to the cassette in his shirt pocket, and then extended my hand as if to grab it. ‘That!’

He drew back, clutching it to his breast fiercely. ‘Ah, No! No, Mr Firman. If you want
this
back, you’ll have to buy it. And I’ll tell you what the price is. Don’t you want to hear?’

His protective embrace had been passionate enough to smudge beyond recognition any of my fingerprints that might have been left on the thing, but to please him I nodded.

‘How much?’

I want two things. I want the rest of the papers you had prepared for me, the ones I would have had if we hadn’t been interrupted, and I want a resumption of our meetings by this time next week at the latest. And they will be in Brussels, if you please. We have met discreetly there before, and in a public place. Why not again? I’m sure you know how to protect yourself there from fireworks, and your victims are used to waiting for satisfaction. Besides, they are obviously careful men. They are not likely to attack you in the lobby of the Brussels Westbury. So, in not more than a week’s time we can continue, eh? I shall be expecting you. What do you say?’

I stood up. ‘I think it’s time we thought about leaving, and I at any rate intend to be very careful
how
I leave. With luck, I may be able to persuade the gendarmerie to assist.’ I looked at Henson. ‘Melanie’s still with the local police. The Professor’s tired. I’d be glad of Some help, but it’s up to you.’

She followed me out to the gendarmerie van and stood by while I explained to the sergeant in charge what the fireman had said about going to an hotel.

He pulled a face. ‘At this time of year? You won’t find anything near here. Monte Carlo might have something of the kind you’re used to, but if you just want a place to sleep, Nice is your best chance. One of the commercial places near the central station.’

‘Would it be in any way possible, Sergeant, for you to use your radio to call us a taxi?’

Henson gave him a most appealing look. ‘Or even two taxis, Sergeant? There are six of us, as you see, and we have baggage.’

He said that taxis might be in short supply on the night of the Quatorze, but that he would use his influence with the radio dispatchers, those who were sober, and see what could be arranged.

The taxis came from Beaulieu, and were there within half an hour.

Melanie left the house keys with the cook’s husband before joining me in the back of the second taxi. Henson said that they would take the sergeant’s advice and head for Nice. No goodbyes were said. The whip had been cracked. Obviously, I was going to be sensible and safeguard what was left of my reputation by reporting for duty in Brussels the following week. They owed me no courtesies. Why should they pretend that they did?

As they were about to leave, I noticed that Yves wasn’t with them. At the same moment he slid into the front seat beside our driver. He had no bag with him, nothing.

‘I said, ‘Hallo.’

He didn’t turn his head. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

I had already told the driver that we wanted to take a night train to Paris from Monte Carlo. There probably wasn’t one, but modern taxi drivers only know about planes. I had no intention of going anywhere by train in any case, only of losing that taxi in a convenient place.

‘Monte Carlo,’ I said. ‘The railway station.’

No more was said until we were up the hill by the Hotel de Paris. Then, Yves suddenly told the driver to stop.

‘Leaving us?’ I asked.

‘I have a bad migraine,’ he said as he got out, ‘and there’s an all-night pharmacy just over there. Won’t be a moment.’

I waited until he was out of sight inside the place, and then told the driver to go ahead.

Melanie looked surprised.

‘He isn’t coming back,’ I said, ‘just hoping to delay us a few extra minutes. He’s telephoning Frank, trying to re-establish credit. His rating must be pretty low at present. They may even believe that he
knew
I was setting the fire. A report that we’re on our way out by train may help him for a few hours. If it had been true, if we were going to be there at the station waiting to be picked off like sitting ducks, they could have ended up forgiving him.’

‘All this violence, I detest it! When did you suspect him?’

‘When he said that he knew people who had worked for Mat Williamson, and that Mat was one to stay away from because he had a habit of ditching them.’

‘You mean it’s not true?’

‘It’s true in a way, but “ditching” is Frank’s word, part of the formula he always uses when he’s briefing someone who mustn’t suspect that Mat’s the boss. You can see why. Who would ever believe that the man hiring you would talk against his own head man like that? So, I knew that Yves had been briefed by Frank. Incidentally, Mat never speaks of ditching people, even when they have caused him deep distress, only of losing them.’

‘Then what do you mean by “true in a way”? What way?’

‘When Mat loses someone, it’s because the person is being discarded or ditched. That’s true enough. But nobody ever talks about it, as a rule, because nobody ever knows it’s happened, the losing I mean.’

‘Not even the lost one?’

‘Least of all the lost one. He’s dead.’

‘Detestable!’

As we neared the station, I told the driver that we had changed our minds and now wanted to go to the Hotel Mirabeau.

I was quite sure that the Mirabeau wouldn’t have rooms for anyone arriving without reservations at that stage of the season, and at that time of night. The driver was of the same opinion. I silenced him by declaring in a lordly way that I would demand a suite, and paid him off the instant he had our bags out. Because he was now in Monaco, and so not allowed to pick up another fare, he was on his way back to Beaulieu even before the Mirabeau’s night man was out there to tell us we hadn’t a hope.

A hundred francs got us another taxi and we didn’t have long to wait. The Monagasque driver had a charming manner, and his price for taking us to Menton, ten minutes away, was only mildly exorbitant.

We stayed in a no-restaurant hotel in a back street near the Sacré Coeur; and we didn’t go out more than was necessary.

The only time we went near a main road was to buy a couple of cheap radios. We bought newspapers at a kiosk on the nearby
quai.
There was a café-restaurant at the corner of the street. We had our meals there, and used their pay-phone to make our calls rather than go through the hotel switchboard.

Yves had an apartment in Paris and, since he was a keen skier as well as a highly-paid technician, a chalet near Megève. We took it in turns to call both his phone numbers, and we called three times each day. There was no reply from either until the evening of the fourth day.

It had been Melanie’s turn to make the calls, and her blank look as she returned to our table told me that there’d been an answer.

‘Paris,’ she said as she sat down. ‘A man’s voice. I asked twice for Yves. He asked who wanted him, and then offered to have Yves call me back. Pressed most flatteringly for my name and number. I hung up.’

‘A police voice?’

‘An over-friendly, coaxing voice. I thought police. Why don’t you try him?’

‘I’ll take your word for it. They say dialled calls are hard to trace, but that was last year. Who knows how hard or easy it may be now?’

We ate our food because we had ordered it and because it would have looked odd if we’d suddenly paid the bill and left. We couldn’t risk drawing attention to ourselves just then.

In our rooms back at the hotel, we stayed glued to the radios. I switched between the hourly France-Inter news from the local transmitter and an Italian FM station. Melanie stayed with Radio Monte Carlo. The first announcement came through on France-Inter, at the end of the ten o’clock local news and before the sports round-up.

Earlier in the evening reports had been received of a bomb incident in the vicinity of Cagnes. They had since been confirmed, though detailed information was still awaited.

The incident involved a car found standing on the scrubland beside a drainage ditch a few metres from the west-bound access road to the autoroute. The driver, a man in the late thirties, appeared to have been
‘plastiqué’
inside the car.

A curious feature of the accident was that the car itself had scarcely been damaged at all, according to Jean-Pierre Something-or-other, the man who had found it. He was a night watchman employed by the contractors working on the adjacent building site. He had seen nothing of the car’s arrival. He had been led to it by his dog while making his hourly tour of the area he was there to guard.

The car was the property of an international rental service. It had been signed for earlier that day by a man with a credit card in the name of Yves Boularis and an address in Paris. Other papers found on the victim, along with the credit card in question, identified the dead man as Boularis. There was a description of the car and a request to anyone who had happened to notice it, either in the Cagnes district that evening or earlier in Nice, to contact the police.

At eleven there was a repetition of the same story, but with additional details.

Boularis was a Tunisian who was listed in the central file of foreign residents as an import-export dealer in electronic equipment. The possibility of his having also been involved in the narcotics traffic had not been overlooked. Friends of the dead man and business associates were being sought for questioning.

There was a cryptic tail-piece.

A police spokesman had said that a disquieting feature of the case was the bizarre method that seemed to have been employed by the killer or killers. The dead man had been sitting with his seat belt fastened. The
‘plastiqué’
had not been detonated by an ignition-key contact or by any of the other methods commonly used in these cases. A possible suicide? Certainly not. Out of the question.