It was at that moment that we heard stumbling footsteps on the bare, wooden stairs up to the loft.
It was Melanie and she was looking flustered. She was also out of breath.
I signalled to Yves to turn the sound down. ‘What is it, Melanie?’
‘I went for a walk you know, and I think — only think mind, Paul — that this place may be under surveillance. Cars stationary on both upper and lower roads. It’s difficult to be certain at night, but I thought you’d better know.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
All three of us had a bad night, but at least Melanie and I got some sleep. Yves had none.
About an hour after Melanie’s warning, he returned to the listening post over the garage to report his preliminary findings. Since he had spent most of the hour crawling between bushes and being bitten by insects, he locked a mess.
He borrowed my handkerchief and dabbed at some large scratches on his hands and arms while he explained how he had got them. There had been parked cars on both roads, as Melanie had said. He had seen one on the lower road by the garden gate and two, one on each side at distances of about a hundred and fifty metres from the entrance. It had been in the oleander thickets along the upper boundary fence, where he had gone to take a closer look at the two cars outside, that he had run into trouble. At some time, the chain-link boundary fence had been damaged by a car or truck going off the road after taking the bend too fast. Concrete posts had been put up to prevent a repetition of that particular accident, but the gap in the fence had been temporarily blocked with a barbed-wire entanglement which no one had bothered to remove after the fence had been repaired.
Still, he had been able to get a look at both cars by waiting for the headlights of the occasional passing car to show them up. Each had two persons in it, though of what sex he had not been able to see, and each had a local Alpes Maritimes registration. Each also had its front wheels on full left lock. In addition, both on the lower road and the upper, the places at which the cars were parked were where the roads widened slightly. If you wanted to park on those roads for any ordinary reason — you wanted a smoke and a chat, you wanted to neck or eat a sandwich — those were the places you would logically choose. Not as logically, perhaps, if you wanted to mount a simple surveillance operation against the Villa Lipp because your view of it would be so restricted; but if you wanted to prevent any of the occupants leaving the place without your knowing or, if you wanted to prevent their leaving by car altogether, you were in exactly the right position. You had the lower gateway under observation if they tried leaving on foot, and with your two cars on the upper road you could foil any attempt at a get-away by road simply by starting up, driving four metres and then standing on the brakes. If you kept your ears open for the sound of engines from below, you could have the road blocked on both sides of the entrance before the escaping cars could reach it.
And, of course, we, or rather Melanie, could be imagining things.
I would not have blamed Yves in the slightest if he had thought that possibility as being one at least worthy of discussion. In fact, he did not even hint at it. He appeared to respect Melanie’s instincts as much as he respected his own.
‘One parked car would be of no importance,’ he said; ‘two would be an interesting coincidence. Three parked cars at this time and in those places and postures I will not accept as explainable in terms other than those of surveillance until I hear that explanation. Then if I am able to snap my fingers and say, “Of course, how stupid of me,” I will go to bed. Meanwhile, I must continue to ask obvious questions. Who are they? Who are they working for? What are their orders? Why are they behaving as they are?’
‘There’s one other explanation you might try on yourself,’ I said. ‘This is a rich neighbourhood. Oh, I know there may not be much in the way of valuables in the Villa Lipp, but one or two of the pictures ought to be marketable. The owner is known to be absent. They could be a gang casing the joint.’
‘Then why aren’t they doing so? Why are they just sitting there, all six of them, where they can see so very little but can so easily be seen? And why six? Locking a house over before deciding to rob it is a one-man job and he comes in the daytime with credentials from an insurance company. One is forced to conclude that these people mean to advertise their presence, that they mean to be seen.’
‘Perhaps they’re selling protection. There used to be a gang along this coast who’d strip your house of everything, including the carpets and kitchen stove, if you didn’t pay them.’
This was ignored. Yves had turned to Melanie again.
‘I might not have gone for a walk,’ she said doubtfully.
‘But they did see you?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Did they see that you had found them interesting or suspect?’
‘I doubt it. I can’t be sure.’
‘Then I think,’ he said, ‘that we should see what happens when they know that they have been spotted.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Patron, either they are very close in because they intend to do something violent almost at once and will not allow anyone to escape, or they are applying psychological pressure to make us leave.’
‘They might be out there to make us run, but I don’t think they could be meaning to do anything violent unless they knew that, apart from your revolver, we aren’t armed. There aren’t enough of them. It really comes back to your first question. Who are they?’
‘I could go and ask them,’ Melanie said.
She does sometimes say stupid things. ‘All you’d get would be a blank stare,’ I said.
‘I think,’ said Yves, tactful as ever, ‘that there may be a simpler way of letting them know that we are aware of them. We could just close the entrance gates. They can be seen from where the cars are parked.’
‘Do they close? With all those shrubs growing through and around them, I would say that nobody ever closed them. They’re probably rusted open.’
Yves tried not to look reproachful. ‘When we moved in, Paul, oiling the hinges was one of the first things I did. The lower road gate also.’
‘Sorry. Can they be locked? I know there are plenty of ways of getting into this place, but if one were going to be violent, charging in by car with a bunch of armed hoodlums would be the most intimidating.’
“There is a chain in the garage. I could arrange things so that undoing the chain from the closed gates would be a noisy operation.’
“Then do that, please. The lower road gate, too, if you can.’
‘That has a lock and a key.’
He went off. I heard the distant sound of the front gates closing and then a rattling of chain. Almost immediately afterward, Melanie, who had been sitting by an open window in a room nearer the driveway, came to report that, on the gates being closed, both cars had at once started up and been driven away.
After Yves had dealt with the lower road gate, he returned to report that, on his opening and slamming it noisily before locking it, the third car had also left. He had one additional item to report. Just before he had done his opening and slamming act, he had heard someone’s voice. It had been his impression that the voice had been coming through a small loud-speaker of the kind you would expect on a miniature walkie-talkie set, and that the set had been in the hands of the car passenger. He had glimpsed for a moment a short, chromium-plated whip-antenna, of the kind used on such sets, sticking at an angle through the passenger-side window space. The words he had heard the voice uttering had been: ‘. . now. Okay. Out.’
The three words had been spoken in English, though by what nationality of English-speaker he firmly declined to guess at. All that seemed likely was that he had been hearing the end of a conversation between an occupant of one of the two cars which had been on the upper road and the passenger in the single car on the lower. The rest of the conversation had taken place while he had been moving from the main gate down to the one in the wall.