“Stop one moment,” Roger begged. “Seems to me this would be a very nice spot to spend a few days when one wanted to be quiet. Could one look at the rooms?”
“I will ask Mademoiselle.”
The waiter disappeared into the hotel and returned, having in charge a florid-looking young woman who had made lavish use of her cosmetics. She welcomed her enquirers cordially.
“We wondered whether you happened to have a bedroom and sitting room for a few days?” Roger asked.
The girl was in despair.
“And only this morning,” she confided, “a gentleman arrived with his servant and took the last rooms we have. Perhaps next week—”
“We’ll enquire again next week,” Roger promised.
She expatiated to them on the beauty of the view, the safety of the drains, the mid-week privacy of the place. Sunday was, without a doubt, their busiest day and the week-ends—
“Well, what would you have?” she demanded, with a gay little laugh. “They tell me that it is the same in England.”
“The same the world over,” Thornton declared solemnly. “By the by, I am the owner of an English illustrated paper. Can I have the names of your guests and would you like me to publish a photograph?”
“As to the photograph, with pleasure, if Monsieur has a camera to take it,” the girl replied. “The names of the guests,” she added, “you will find in the visitors’ book.”
They passed into the little hall which connected the hotel with the restaurant. Mademoiselle produced a handsome calf-bound volume which she spread open in front of Thornton. He scribbled down some names.
“Absolutely bona fide, all this,” he observed, as they strolled down the path which led to the road. “Two young men from Norwood, with the name of their golf club—Chislehurst, I think it was. A man and his wife from Bordeaux and another man, who dares to proclaim himself a painter, from St. Paul. You must be wrong about this place, Roger. You see for yourself that there are enough guests here to take up every room in the house. I expect they get a loose lot out from Nice now and then, but they can’t very well help that.”
“You yourself are satisfied, then?” Jeannine demanded.
“I certainly am,” Thornton replied.
“And I’m afraid I must admit that I am also,” Roger added reluctantly.
“And I not,” Jeannine declared. “I do not care that there are good and respectable people here. I do not care that there is no evil to be seen. It is there.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have touched us,” Thornton observed, with one of his quiet smiles.
Mademoiselle came hurrying out to them as they were stepping into the car.
“There will be rooms free on Wednesday,” she announced. “Not the corner suite with the bath, but the one next to it—Number Fourteen.”
“We will telephone up to-morrow morning,” Roger promised. “We have lunched excellently.”
“Au revoir j’espère, Monsieur,” Mademoiselle fluttered, with a little wave of the hand.
They glided off down the hill towards Monte Carlo. Thornton leaned forward.
“Sloane,” he said, “I think after all we shall have to pass that place O.K. There isn’t a thing there to take exception to. If they’d been out to do us any harm—well, first of all they could have poisoned the cocktails, they could have poisoned the food, they could have pretended to show us the rooms and locked us in. In short, we were very much at their mercy. Added to that, I haven’t seen a person who looks anything like a criminal.”
“The place isn’t in the least like what I expected to find,” Roger confessed.
“You are both of you—how do you call it in English?—boobies!” Jeannine declared. “If this hotel were being kept by a bad man for bad purposes, would he not provide himself with the means for deceiving people? On Sunday, for instance, as to-day—everything would be in order. In the week days it is different. Passers-by are few. It is easy to close up the rooms.”
Thornton, an unusual thing for him, was inclined to be a little irritable.
“Mademoiselle has—what we call in England—a bee in her bonnet. You see the whole place as it stands. There is not the scope there for any deception. There is no room large enough, for instance, to be the meeting place for a gang of criminals. However, what does it matter? I, at any rate, am convinced. So is Sloane.”
Roger nodded thoughtfully.
“I think that the proprietor, Monsieur Viotti, is probably in with a roughish lot of people in Nice and they use his hotel during the week for any sort of purpose they like, but I must confess,” he added, as he swung around a bend of the road, “that to-day has altogether shaken my idea that the place might be the permanent headquarters of a gang of criminals. I found nothing sinister about it at all.”
Jeannine sighed.
“It is useless,” she declared. “How can I persist? You are clever men with brains and you judge from what you see and with your reasoning powers. I am a foolish girl and I do not care what I see or what I do not see. I am not impressed. I judge only from my feelings.”
Thornton had recovered his good humour.
“Mademoiselle’s attitude is not to be ignored,” he said. “I can assure you that inspiration has often succeeded in our profession where brains and perseverance have failed. In this case, though,” he went on, “although I agree that a man who drives about in a car painted that hideous shade of lilac, and who is altogether such an insufferable little bounder as Monsieur Viotti, might be capable of any villainy, I do not fancy that the Hôtel du Soleil shelters more than his peccadilloes.”
“If the florid young lady is one of them,” Roger remarked, “his tastes are at least not exotic.”
“Stupid men, both of you,” Jeannine lamented.
CHAPTER XVIII
It happened that Jeannine and Roger were both standing at one of the high windows of the Sporting Club, looking out across the harbour at the commencement of the strange business.
“Ciel!“ the former exclaimed. “What is it that arrives?”
Every one was asking the same question. Behind them the croupier had paused in the act of spinning the ball. There was a general chorus of exclamations. People from all parts of the room came hurrying up to the windows. A gun from the Rock, without warning or any apparent cause, had been fired—its echoes were still reverberating amongst the hills.
“There must be a warship coming in,” some one exclaimed.
They all looked out seawards but there was no sign of any lights.
“It can’t be a warship,” some one else pointed out. “There’s not a single harbourage left in the port. There have not been so many yachts in for years. Besides, only the smaller craft would venture in, anyway.”
The manager of the Sporting Club came hurrying to the window. He looked out with a blank expression upon his face.
“One could imagine trouble of some sort,” he muttered, “but there is no sign of disturbance.”
“There might be an outbreak of fire up at the Palace,”