Krom’s lips tightened and he remained silent; but Connell wasn’t so fussy about his dignity.
‘What sort of friendly advice?’ he asked.
‘You know that banks all over the world transfer money to one another by means of what’s called the “tested-cable” system? You do? Good. Then you’ll also know that crooks have used tested-cables to swindle banks, often via their computers, out of millions of dollars which have proved to be untraceable. Well, if crooks can make untraceable transfers, think how much easier it must be when the payers are thought of as honest men and the payees are simple debt collectors.’
Henson made a cooing sound. ‘What an absolutely brilliant idea!’ she exclaimed.
‘No, Dr Henson.’
‘No what, Mr Firman?’
‘I will not be flattered into accepting with only a token murmur or protest the suggestion that using tested-cables was my idea. It wasn’t. The head of the collection agency thought it up.’
‘Oh? And who was he?’
I wasn’t falling for that one either. ‘He? It may have been a woman. I don’t know, Doctor.’
Krom gave his witnesses meaning looks. ‘You see, Mr Firman is a slippery fellow. Do you know that, in Brussels, he actually had the impertinence to tell me that most crime is committed by government, and that delinquency is a function of the class struggle?’
‘Oh dear!’ Dr Henson choked slightly on the cigarette she had at last lighted. ‘That sounds more like cut-price Trotskyism than anarchy.’
‘It’s double-talk,’ said Krom, ‘and I told him so. Quite unnecessarily, of course, because he is intelligent enough to know that himself.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘We have heard the divided responsibility claim ad nauseam, Mr Firman. It is not accepted. You thought everything up. You were at the controls of the extortion machine you call a collection agency as well as those of the so-called tax-consultancy which kept it fed with information. Your version of the Oberholzer conspiracy is nothing but a pack of lies. What do you say to that?’
‘That you are impolite, Professor, as well as mistaken.’
‘Would you prefer me to call it the Firman conspiracy? What does the name matter? However you choose to masquerade now, you were the figure around which it all pivoted. Yours were the controlling hands, yours the organizing mind. That is the central, the essential, fact.’
‘Central and essential to your case it may be, Professor. That does not make it a fact. To a man of your academic standing and repute I hesitate to use harsh language in a discussion of this kind, and at the breakfast table too, but I must tell you, and in front of your witnesses, that at the centre of your case is what used to be known as an idée fixe. Nowadays, it’s called a hang-up.’
He said something loudly about my personal character. What he said was probably quite unpleasant and it may even have been true; but, as he said it in Dutch, I can’t be sure. I was about to ask him to translate, when we were interrupted by Melanie.
She did not come out on to the terrace, but called to me from a drawing-room window. I turned and she beckoned. Obviously, what she had to say was not to be overheard. I excused myself and went to the window.
‘What is it?’
‘Yves wants to see you. He didn’t want to show himself because he was rather dirty. He’s up in his room.’
‘Is it urgent?’ I didn’t want to leave just then in case they thought I was running away.
‘Yes, Paul. I think it is urgent.’
‘All right. You go over and tell them that I’ll be back in a minute.’
I went up to Yves’s room. He had been in the shower and was drying himself. He greeted me with the glum phrase that had begun to irritate me. Only this time he varied it slightly for emphasis.
‘Nous sommes vraiment foutus,’ he said.
‘Just tell me what’s happened. I’ll draw my own conclusions, Yves.’
He gave me the mournfully threatening look that had reminded Connell of a termite inspector he had known. ‘I have not forgotten that I am under your orders, Patron.’
‘Good. What’s happened?’
He smiled disagreeably. ‘What has happened is, Patron, that I am becoming more nervous every minute. Have you been all over this house?’
‘Most of it. Why?’
‘Then you will know that on the attic floor there are two windows from which, if one keeps moving from one to the other, one can in daylight see practically all the land surrounding this house.’
‘Yes.’
‘At sunrise I moved up there to keep watch with binoculars. At about six-thirty, I saw something I didn’t like. It was on that piece of land beyond the lower road to the right of the bay.’
‘You mean the headland with the tamarisks on it?’
‘Those small trees? Yes. There are bushes too. There was a person there.’
‘That land isn’t on this property. It belongs to the commune, I think. What sort of person?’
‘The first thing I saw was a flashing of light of the kind you get when sun reflects off lenses, but it was difficult to see because the flashing was coming from behind the bushes.’
‘Someone keeping the same sort of watch on this place as you were keeping from the attic?’
‘That’s what I thought. I also thought that it must be an amateur, someone who didn’t know enough to keep in the shadow of a tree to avoid reflections of the sun. So, when Melanie brought me coffee, I told her what I had seen and went down to take a closer look at the watcher. I thought too that perhaps I might frighten this amateur a little.’
‘And?’
‘It wasn’t an amateur there and I didn’t frighten anyone but myself.’ He put on some clean undershorts and a pair of slacks as he continued. ‘What I had seen flashing was the bottom of two new, shiny cans of tomato-juice cocktail mixture. They had been taped together and hung by black thread from a tree branch so that they were just behind a bush. Attached to the tape was a cord going back through the other bushes for perhaps thirty metres. This served two purposes. It kept the cans pointing in this direction, and it enabled the person hidden at the other end to move the cans slightly as they would have moved if they had been hand-held binoculars.’
‘So you followed the cord back and found that the person had gone.’
Yves sat on the edge of the bed and, reaching beneath it, picked up a shoe. ‘That is not all I found.’ He held up the shoe. ‘Please look at that.’
It was a blue canvas espadrille of the kind which used to have plain rope soles but which now have soles of crepe rubber. What was odd about this one was that there were extensive burn marks on it, the sort of marks that you would expect to see if it had been worn to stamp out the embers of a brush fire.
‘What happened?’
‘I followed the cord to where it ended along a narrow path and then I trod on this.’ He reached under the bed again and pulled out a square of charred plywood the size of a chess board, with a long bolt attached to the centre.
‘What is it?’
‘The pressure plate of a very small, insultingly innocuous, incendiary bomb.’
‘What do you mean by innocuous? It burnt your espadrille.’
‘If they had wanted to, they could have blown a foot off. This bolt broke a small tube of sulphuric acid when I trod on the board. All it ignited, judging from the smell, was a very small amount of chlorate of potash mixed with sugar. I was glad I was wearing socks though.’ He took the shoe from me and poked a finger through a burnt spot. ‘They were just having fun, you see, Patron. I don’t like practical jokes of this sort being played at my expense.’
‘You didn’t see anybody?’