No one seemed to have any particular appetite that night at Lady Julia’s dinner party, Erskine was popular with every one and Lady Julia herself was more disturbed than she cared to own. With her distress was mingled an anger which was almost passionate.
“I don’t care,” she declared, “whether this band of criminals is composed of English or Americans, Italians or Monegasques themselves. I say that it is a disgrace that they should remain undetected. I have written to tell the Prince so to-night. The Chef de la Sûreté of Paris should be invited to send some of his best men down at once. This last murder of poor dear Reggie Erskine was blatant. One might almost think that the whole Principality was in league with these people.”
“It’s the Principality that’s going to suffer most,” Terence Brown pointed out, “and a few hundred thousand francs mean nothing to them. So far, I haven’t heard of any one leaving, but the place is going to have a most awful slump, if this goes on.”
“And it deserves it,” Lady Julia exclaimed viciously. “We seem to be without any form of protection here.”
“The trouble is,” Thornton intervened, “that the authorities here have got so used to covering up any unpleasant little incident that happens—and so clever at it too—that now the incidents have assumed a different aspect, they find themselves stifled before they start. All the precautions they have taken to prevent suicides or these fights that take place in the Casino getting talked about make it terribly difficult for their own police, however intelligent they may be, to deal with these new conditions.”
“Then the sooner they get outside help, the better,” Lady Julia snapped. “I should get the best men down from Scotland Yard and from Paris. Amour propre be hanged! The criminals are probably English or French, so an English or French detective would be far more likely to get at the truth than this local gendarmerie. There’s no telling which of us will be the next.”
“For my part,” Maggie Saunders observed, “I don’t think that I shall play at all, or if I do, I shall howl about my losings and keep my winnings to myself.”
“That is very sensible,” Savonarilda agreed. “It does not make us any the more comfortable to reflect that it has always been people who have talked about their winnings in the Sporting Club here who have met with trouble.”
There was a change in the music. Every one looked up expectantly.
“It is the mannequin parade,” Lady Julia announced. “Really, I don’t feel that I have the heart to look at them to-night.”
Roger was not well placed for seeing the nine young women who were one by one slowly threading their way amongst the tables of the ornate, magnificent room, to the strains of a slow minuet, but he was conscious almost at once of some curious emotional disturbance amongst the guests of the party, a shrinking back in their places of two of the women, an expression of fear in Lady Julia’s face, something approaching horror in the deep lights of Savonarilda’s Sicilian eyes. He swung his chair around to command a view of the room. He remembered what Jeannine had told him and realised the significance of the little shivering wave of unanalysable emotion which seemed somehow to be throbbing in the atmosphere of the room. It was the night for the parade of black evening frocks. One by one the young women glided amongst the tables to the open space where on gala nights there was dancing. They were clad in net, chiffon, georgette, lace—but every gown was fashioned of unadorned and unrelieved black! There was a ghostliness, indefinable and inexplicable, in their silent procession. Jeannine, who came last, though her movements were wonderful as ever, her carriage superb, the little poise of her head in itself a perfect gesture, seemed in her pallor and the strangeness of her expression like one of the wedded virgins of death. An absolute silence fell upon the room, the music and the soft fluttering of the gowns practically the only sounds. Conversation was strangled. Many of the women confessed afterwards that they had felt on the verge of hysterics. For the first time in her life Jeannine, so completely detached and impersonal in the following of her profession, looked away from vacancy as she passed Lady Julia’s table and searched for Roger’s eyes. He was never sure if it was fancy but she seemed to him to be calling for help almost in the same way that she had done once before, in those minutes of supreme terror. He forgot his role as onlooker, he forgot the depression from which he too was suffering, and he smiled understandingly back. He tried to send to her through the overcharged air the message of courage that he felt she needed….
“Horrible!” Lady Julia suddenly murmured.
“But don’t forget that it was arranged beforehand,” Mrs. Terence Brown reminded her, from the other end of the table. “I know people who came expressly to-night for this parade of black evening toilettes. A very good idea, I thought it. Of course, no one could have imagined these horrible surrounding circumstances.”
The sommelier had an inspiration. He darted around with the wine, for which every one was grateful. In a very few minutes the mannequins had reappeared—this time wearing marvellous white evening gowns. The spell was broken. Conversation was resumed. Every one talked eloquently perhaps, but feverishly upon any subject that tumbled into their brains. By universal consent they did their best to set their heels upon that tangle of cruel memories.
Soon after midnight the first part of the enterprise which Roger had thought out step by step was safely accomplished. He had driven in his coupé on to the Moyen Corniche and when he had arrived at the corner where he had met Marie Louise, the corner where the curving, dangerous track wound its way down to Beausoleil, he turned out all his lights, descended with his engine free, his car controlled by its very excellent brakes, until he had passed the Hotel du Soleil. To all appearances, there was not a single light burning in any part of the place. Roger glided on until he reached the deep obscurity of some overhanging trees just by the first bend—very nearly the spot where once before he had paused and looked up the hill towards danger. Here he left the car, satisfied that it would start again with a touch, pulled out his revolver, examined it carefully and, keeping well on the grassy edge of the ditch, reclimbed the hill. As soon as he reached the bar, he recrossed the road. There was still not a sound to be heard but through the chinks of the closed door he realised that one light had been left on. He tried the handle but found, as he anticipated, that it was locked. The darkness was still intense but away where the moon was soon to rise it seemed to him that there was a coming break in the skies. He crept past the front and around to the side of the house. Kneeling down, he could see that there were lights in several of the windows. One of the rooms indeed must have been fully illuminated. Still, however, there was no sound, nothing but a nerve-paralysing intense silence. He leaned against the wall and tried to think out some definite plan of action. One curious discovery had brought him up here in the middle of the night on this apparently purposeless errand. How was he best to turn it to account?
The faintest breath of wind stealing round the corner of the building whispered amongst the leaves of the olive trees. Roger knew very well what that meant. In half an hour or even less there would be a rift in that bank of dense clouds and the edge of the moon would be showing. With the light would come danger. Noiselessly he stole back towards the lane. There was a vast shadow as of some shed or building which seemed to him unfamiliar. He crept towards it. Gradually it grew into shape and he realised that it was a saloon-bodied motor car. He moved on a few paces until it grew more distinct. There was no possibility now of mistake.
It was the great lilac-coloured automobile of Monsieur Pierre Viotti! It was within a dozen yards of the garage but for some reason it had been left outside.
Roger crept back towards the hotel. Another little puff of breeze came around the corner. This time it brought with it the night perfume of tobacco plant and all the fragrance of the drooping mimosas. Still no sound. There were men inside—he was sure of that. There was life—an ugly, sinister phase of life it might well be—but over it all the pall of a deep brooding silence. Roger felt then that it was inspiration indeed which had brought him but inspiration leavened with folly. To have come alone was his mistake. It was not for nothing that lights were glimmering out of half-a-dozen rooms of a building which in the daytime was reported deserted; not for nothing that Monsieur