De Richleau decided that his best plan would be to search the house from the bottom up, otherwise while he was on an upper floor Ferrer might slip out of a downstairs window. The villa was fairly modern; but most Spanish houses that are larger than a cottage have a cellar, so he swiftly cast round for the entrance to one. He expected to find it somewhere in the back of the premises but a swift scrutiny of the floors convinced him that in none of them was a camouflaged trap-door.
Going out into the hall he paused to listen intently for a moment. He feared now that Ferrer might be making the best of the time he was being given to tie sheets together into a rope; so that he could get away by lowering himself from one of the windows. Not for the first time, the Duke cursed the dubious loyalty of the Catalan police. Had it not been for that he would have brought a score of policemen with him and had the house surrounded; but a leak could have ruined this chance, the like of which might not come again, to catch Ferrer; so he had decided against it.
Dolores had evidently wriggled out of the lavatory window, or was sitting quietly there. The only sound that broke the stillness was Veragua's moaning. Reassured, de Richleau moved a few paces down the hall towards the door opposite that beside which Veragua lay, expecting it to lead to a sitting-room. As he did so he brushed past a red velvet curtain that hung on the side of the hall formed by a straight staircase that ran up from it. Wondering why there should be a curtain in such a pointless place, he pulled it back. The reason became plain. It concealed a door under the stairs. With grim satisfaction he wrenched it open.
The result was a bitter disappointment. Instead of the flight of steps leading downward that he had expected, it was full of coats, macintoshes and a variety of junk. Pushing the door to, he listened again. There was still no sound from upstairs but queer noises were now coming from the lavatory. Dolores was not battering upon its door but seemed to be kicking one of its walls and uttering muffled cries. What she was up to he had no idea, and he did not care.
He again took a pace towards what he believed to be the sitting-room, but it suddenly occurred to him that Ferrer might be crouching at the very far end of the cupboard under the stairs, hidden behind the junk that was in it.
Fetching the lamp from the end of the hall he opened the door again and set it down on the floor just inside the cupboard. Now, he was faced with a very dangerous situation. If he put his head in and Ferrer was lurking there, and had a pistol, he might be shot himself before he could shoot Ferrer.
The cupboard was only about three feet deep but about eight feet long, its roof sloping downwards from inside the doorway to within a foot or so of the floor. With a sudden movement he thrust his pistol round the doorjamb and fired two shots blind in the direction of its far end. If Ferrer had been there he must either have been hit or made some spontaneous movement as the bullets thudded into the underside of the stairs within inches of him. But the crash of the shots was followed by complete silence.
Disappointed again, and more worried than ever that by now Ferrer might be escaping from the house, de Richleau bent down and picked up the lamp. As he did so it lit the whole cupboard. He caught his breath and his eyes widened with excitement. They had fallen upon part of a line on the floor that ran at right angles to the floorboards.
The line emerged from under a big cardboard carton. Quickly he set the lamp down again, pocketed his pistol, and hauled the carton out of the cupboard. It was heavy and full of books. Beyond it there were two others, but the removal of the first was enough to show him that the line he had spotted was one edge of a trap-door. It must lead to a cellar and all the odds were that Ferrer was down in it.
He would have gone to his bolt-hole at the first ring of the front door bell. In her hurry and in the semi-darkness of the cupboard Dolores had failed to pull the cartons into place after he had descended, so that they would completely cover the top. But for that, de Richleau realized, he might have searched the house with a toothcomb, then left it in the belief that either Ferrer had not been there or had escaped before he had had a chance to catch him.
The problem now was how to get at him. To go down the steps into the cellar would be to walk into a death trap. The man at the bottom would have an overwhelming advantage. He had only to stand round the corner to the stairway with his pistol levelled and, as the intruder emerged from it, shoot him. But de Richleau had behind him ample experience of house to house fighting, during which pockets of resistance had to be mopped up. It took him only a minute to decide what to do.
Having thrust the heavy carton of books back, so that with the others on the hinge side of the trap-door their weight would prevent Ferrer coming up and making a desperate bid to get away, the Duke hurried back to the kitchen. There, he collected some bundles of faggots, a tin of oil, some wax tapers and a rolling pin. With these items he returned to the narrow hall and set about preparing to smoke Ferrer out.
First he hauled all the cartons of books out of the cupboard so as to leave the trap-door free. He then poured oil all over the faggots and pushed a wax taper into each. Lastly he tied two of the oil-soaked faggots to raincoats that were hanging in the cupboard. The combination of oil and rubber when on fire would, he knew, produce the most suffocating smoke.
When he opened the trap-door no glimmer of light filtered up from below. That shook him a little, as he felt that Ferrer should have considered himself safe enough down there to light a candle. He became worried then that a man so experienced in being hunted as Ferrer would, quite probably, have made himself an escape exit, and by now might have crawled through a tunnel to emerge in the garden. But the thought did not deter him from putting the matter to the test.
He lit one of the tapers, waited until the oil-soaked wood of the faggot had caught, then pitched it down into the cellar. As quickly as he possibly could he got the others well alight and heaved them, with the raincoats, after them. Flames leapt up at the bottom of the stairs. Above the crackling of the wood the sound of hurried movement came up to him. His handsome, slightly saturnine features broke into a grin. Ferrer was down there all right, and now desperately engaged in trying to put the fire balls out; but the odds against his succeeding were very heavy.
De Richleau quietly lowered the trap-door into place, so that none of the smoke that was now billowing up should escape. Picking up the rolling pin that he had brought from the kitchen, he went up the stairs until he was standing above the door to the cupboard. Leaning over the banister he waited.
The wait seemed interminable. Yet it was no more than three or four minutes. Suddenly there came a loud bang, as the trapdoor was thrust up and thrown back. After that there came the sound of someone gasping for breath, and eddies of smoke began to seep out into the hall. For a full minute nothing further happened. Then a head, that peered swiftly right and left, emerged cautiously from the open doorway of the cupboard.
But, to the Duke's amazement it was not Ferrer's head. Ferrer had had brown hair. This man's was red - startlingly red - the red that is known as 'carrots'. Nevertheless, with the head had appeared a hand that held a revolver. Whoever he was, as an occupant of this villa he must be an enemy. De Richleau leaned forward over the banister and brought his rolling pin down hard on the man's head. Without even a murmur his knees buckled and he fell in a heap on the floor of the narrow hall.
For two minutes de Richleau remained where he was, waiting for Ferrer to follow this other man out of the cupboard beneath him. But no second head appeared, neither was there any sound of footsteps on the cellar stairs. All he could hear were Veragua's groans and a continuation of the muffled noises from the lavatory. Putting down the rolling pin, he took out his pistol and came downstairs. Having shut the cupboard door as a precaution against Ferrer surprising him by suddenly emerging from that quarter, he turned the body of the red-headed man over and stared down at him.