Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (13 page)

“So, you’re a German, eh!
You lying rat! I’ll make you talk. Take that!” As De Richleau spoke, he struck
his victim a glancing blow downward across the face. It was an old apache trick
and, as he knew would be the case, the kid of his glove taut over his knuckles
caught on the man’s cheek, tearing the skin open for a couple of inches.

“Pies!” whimpered the
man. “Pies! I do not follow you. I am printer. I work late. I often goes home
zis way.”

“And you do your printing
outside the stage-door of the Gaiety, I suppose?” mocked the Duke with an angry
chuckle.

Then, taking a firm grip
of the man’s left ear, he began to shake him violently by it, as he added: “I
have a prejudice against being followed. A very strong prejudice. And let me
tell you that to-night you have been very lucky. Had I had a knife on me it
would not have been my fist that I should have stuck into your miserable
stomach. See what an escape you have had! But things will yet go ill with you
should you persist in refusing to tell me what I wish to know. I shall tear off
both these big ears of yours and ram them down your throat. Then you will
suffer such acute indigestion that you will find it difficult to talk to anyone.
Are you prepared to answer my questions, or must I proceed to make you into a
cannibal?”

The man had seized De
Richleau’s wrist with both hands, and was desperately trying to stop the
alternate tugs and shoves that were rocking him back and forth and threatened
to wrench his ear from his head at any moment. But, finding the Duke’s grip too
firm to be broken, he suddenly moaned: “
Ja!
I talk! I talk! Only I beg
let go, mister.”

“Well?” said the Duke,
temporarily stopping his vigorous action.

“I haf follow you. But I
mean no harm. I follow only to make report on your movements.”

“Why?”

“I am a poor man. I make
a liddle money that way.”

“Who from?”

“Der Argus agency.”

“Who are they?”

“A firm for the inquiry
making.”

De Richleau nodded. “How
long have you been trailing Miss de Vaux?”

The man looked blank.
“Die spiel-fr
ä
ulein
you have given
abendessen?

I do not follow her. I
haf her name only from the porter at the restaurant.”

“You’re lying!” snapped
the Duke, seizing the man by the lapel of his coat in preparation for another
attack upon him.

With tears and blood
still running down his face, the terrified wretch cowered back against the
wall. “
Bitte! Bitte!”
he
begged, “I tell truth. But perhaps some other agent follow her. Those who
employ me tell me noddings.”

After a moment De
Richleau decided that the odds were he had now got as much of the truth as he
was likely to get from this poor underling of some shady detective agency. The
business of shadowing people, which entailed hours of hanging about on draughty
street corners, often in the rain, was, he knew, a poorly paid occupation, in
spite of its intense dreariness and discomfort; so, except where the police
were concerned, or in important cases, only the lowest type of nark was
employed upon it. Such people were rarely told to what end inquiries were being
made, and if Lottie de Vaux had a husband it seemed unlikely that he would be
in a position to afford having her watched by sleuths of a high calibre. What
little the Duke had learned fitted in with his original assumption. But there
was one more line he could try before releasing his victim.

Jerking the man forward,
he thrust his free hand into the fellow’s inside breast pocket. His fingers
closed upon a few thin papers. Pulling them out, he gave the German a push, and
said: “Stay where you are, or I’ll catch you and choke the life out of you.”

Then he turned, tucked
his cane under his arm, and walked up the road towards the nearest street lamp.

He had hardly covered ten
paces when he heard a slither of feet, followed by the sound of footsteps
pelting away down the passage. Despite the blood-curdling threat he had made,
he had expected that, as the fellow would have had to be a moron not to seize
such an opportunity to escape from his tormentor. Having no further use for
him, the Duke had thought it as good a way as any other to terminate the
interview.

Under the street lamp he
examined the papers. They were two letters recently delivered to Herr Heinrich
Kronauer at an address in the East End of London. Both were in German. One had
been posted in the same neighbourhood, and was simply a note making an
appointment for a hair-cut. The other had been posted in Hanover. Its writing
was uneducated, and it gave only news of a German family with a casual reference
to Herr Kronauer’s hair-dressing activities in Walthamstow.

It did not strike the
Duke as at all strange that his shadower had proved to be a German, as there
were then said to be over 100,000 Germans earning their living in England.
There was a German band, and often several, in every town of any size; every
theatre orchestra in the country contained a high percentage of them. Their
blond, cropped heads were to be seen among the waiters in every restaurant, and
hundreds of them worked in barbers’ shops. The latter fact confirmed the Duke
in his impression that his victim was no more than he appeared to be—simply a
poor foreigner who eked out a precarious living by occasionally taking on the
job of tailing people in the evening, and a pathetic rather than a sinister
figure.

Ten minutes later De
Richleau had reached the Coburg, but before turning-in he took the trouble to
look up the Argus Inquiry Agency in the telephone book. It was not there.

That did not surprise
him. It simply showed that the man had lied about the name of his employers,
and, in the circumstances, it was to be expected; for they would certainly not
have employed him further if his indiscretion had led to a violent character
like De Richleau appearing at their office the following day and threatening to
murder everyone in it.

With a shrug, De Richleau
closed the book and retired to bed. But his head had hardly touched the pillow
when he sat bolt upright again. Why the point had failed to register before, he
could not think, but it was only at the threat of further maltreatment that the
man had admitted as a possibility that some other agent might have been
detailed to follow Lottie. His job, as he had confessed from the first, had
been to report upon the movements of the man he had followed down Lansdown
Passage, and not merely because he had happened to be Lottie’s cavalier of that
evening. In his terror the poor sleuth had given it away that he had not even
known Lottie’s name until he had got it from the porter outside Romanos.

That
put a very different complexion on the matter.

Belatedly
,
but swiftly now, De Richleau realized that he had fooled himself by allowing
his theory, that Lottie had a husband who was trying to secure evidence on
which to divorce her, to dominate his mind. Lottie did not even enter into the
affair. The sleuth must have been put on to watch him, De Richleau, before
either of them even knew of Lottie’s existence.

But why?

Could it possibly be that
the German Secret Service had already got wind of his projected activities in
Serbia? That seemed in the highest degree improbable. Yet what other
explanation was there? It recurred to him that his victim had used the word ‘agent’.
That might easily be an inexactitude due to a foreigner’s imperfect
understanding of English. On the other hand, the term was more generally
applicable to persons acting under official orders than to the casual employees
of a private firm. Perhaps the two visits he had paid to Major Hankey’s office
since lunching with Sir Bindon Blackers at the Carlton Club had aroused the
interest of a spy whose job it was to watch comings and goings there. If so, to
order the tailing of such casual visitors as a matter of routine, the German
Secret Service in Great Britain must be both much more active and employ a far
larger personnel than he had supposed.

Once made, these somewhat
perturbing speculations did not rob the Duke of any sleep. But, when he
recalled them immediately on waking the following morning, he decided that,
even if he were barking up the wrong tree, caution counselled observance of the
old tag, ‘he who is forewarned is forearmed’; so he decided to take such
precautions as he could to evade observation during his mission.

As his reservations on
the Orient Express were already made, and his baggage already labelled ‘Belgrade
Via
Dover-Ostend’, short of putting himself to enormous
inconvenience, there seemed nothing he could do to cover his tracks for the
moment; so he pushed the matter into the back of his mind and, after a hearty
breakfast, set out for Victoria.

The day was fine, and now
that May had come the streets had assumed an air of summer gaiety. The more
solid citizens were making their way to business in black top hats and short
coats as usual, but here and there a less conventional figure was to be seen in
a straw boater with a bright ribbon. In South Audley Street he passed a party
making an early start for a day’s racing in a coach-and-four, and all the men
on its roof were sporting grey toppers. Then, in Grosvenor Place he noticed a
little group of sailors wearing the wide-brimmed round straw hats still
favoured by the Navy; while all along the way there were girls and women in
colourful dresses, crowned with the milliners’ flower-decked creations of the
period, and holding ruffled parasols.

At Victoria station De
Richleau kept an alert eye open for his acquaintance of the previous night; but
that unfortunate personage was no doubt endeavouring to explain away his
battered appearance to some customer he was shaving in Walthamstow, as he was
nowhere to be seen; neither could the Duke spot any other suspicious character
covertly observing him. So he took his seat on the train some moments before it
was due to leave, and the journey to Dover passed without episode.

In those days, in the
greater part of the world true freedom still existed. Men had not been robbed
yet of their natural right to go where they would, either on business,
pleasure, or, taking their families and all their worldly wealth with them, to
settle in a distant land for the remainder of their days. Passports were rare
and potent documents, issued only at the request of travellers going to
uncivilized parts of the earth, where they might need to call upon His Majesty’s
Consuls to assist them in securing pack mules, guides, or native porters for a
journey into little-known territory. And, such was the prodigious plenty and
wealth of Britain that no Customs officer had ever dreamed the day would come
when he would be called on to search outgoing passengers’ baggage, as a
precaution against a woman going abroad with her engagement ring, or a man
taking a York ham as a present to friends with whom he was going to stay on the
continent.

In consequence, the Duke
walked from the train on to the Dover-Ostend boat without let or hindrance,
and, proceeding at once to the first-class upper deck amidships, settled
himself comfortably in a steamer chair that had its back to a roped-off part of
the deck abaft the funnel.

He had been seated there
only a moment when out of the crowd that was seething about him emerged a tall,
youngish man of about his own age, who greeted him with surprise and pleasure.
It was a Count Julien Esterh
á
zy,
whom he had met, and by whom he had been most kindly entertained, a few years
previously in Budapest.

When they had shaken
hands, De Richleau quickly removed his dressing-case from the chair beside the
one in which he had been sitting, and the two old acquaintances settled down
side by side to gossip about their doings since they had last seen one another.

The crowd sorted itself
out; the porters grabbed their tips and hurried down the gangways: the steamer’s
siren blew two long blasts, signifying that she was about to proceed to sea.
Only then did the two men catch the sound of footsteps and scraping chairs
behind them. At the last moment, the private party, for whom a portion of the
after-deck had been roped off, had come aboard and were now being ushered to
the space reserved for them.

Esterh
á
zy
sat up and turned his head to take a look at the newcomers. Then, with a quick
exclamation, he jumped to his feet and swept off the travelling cap he was
wearing. At his sudden gesture, the Duke stood up too. Next moment he found himself
gazing straight into the face of Her Imperial Highness, the Archduchess Ilona
Theresa.