Paul Temple: East of Algiers. Francis Durbridge
tell him to come up here.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not dressed yet,’ I told the telephone. ‘Would you mind coming up to room number thirteen? Or if you’d rather I’ll get dressed and be down in about ten minutes.’
Mirabel decided to come up. Within a minute he was at the door. He had found time to shave and change his collar. Spick and span as he was, he looked very out of place in our chaotic bedroom. I pulled him up a chair and offered him a cigarette, which he refused. I thought, however, that his manner was more friendly than the previous night.
‘Are you any further on?’ I asked, trying to show the right amount of polite interest.
‘I have had time to communicate with our English colleagues and obtain some information about you, Mr. Temple. They tell me that though you have a gift for attracting trouble towards you, you are not usually the prime cause of it.’
I laughed, imagining Vosper’s wording of such a message.
‘Then I’m off your list of suspects?’
‘I think so,’ Mirabel said and smiled. ‘You will be interested to hear that we have solved the mystery of the same woman being murdered twice. It now appears that the girl found in the dustbin behind your flat was not Judy Wincott at all, though she was half American too and her name was Diana Simmonds. Our mistake was a natural one, since a letter found in her bag bore the name Judy Wincott and the murdered woman resembled her enough for the concierge to mistake her for the Miss Judy Wincott who had enquired for you the previous evening.’
Mirabel seemed prepared to dismiss the subject at that. I expected him to ask me a great many more questions and there were several that I would like to have put myself. But the Inspector limited himself to feeling in his breast pocket and producing a small object wrapped in tissue paper.
‘I am returning the glasses to you as I promised,’ he said. ‘Without the case, though. Our people soon reduced that to its elemental components.’
‘Did you find anything?’
Mirabel shook his head.
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Did you have the spectacles checked?’
‘Yes, of course. There is nothing unusual about them. They are a perfectly ordinary pair of spectacles.’
He unwrapped them from their tissue paper and inspected them casually before handing them across to me.
‘Genuine tortoiseshell, too clear to conceal anything. And the lenses – well, there is nothing, is there?’
I took the glasses reluctantly.
‘I can’t help wondering. All the trouble seemed to begin from the moment these spectacles came into my life…’
‘You can rest assured, Mr. Temple. If there were anything abnormal about those spectacles our experts would have found out about it.’
The Inspector rose to his feet and pulled his jacket down.
‘I am sorry that your holiday has been interrupted in such an unpleasant way, and grateful to you for your co-operation.’
He held out his hand.
‘Give my homage to madame, your wife. I hope you will have a pleasant journey to Tunis.’
‘We are free to carry on?’ I said, still surprised that Mirabel was letting us off so lightly. ‘You won’t require us to give evidence at the inquest?’
‘It will not be necessary,’ Mirabel assured me. ‘You can continue your journey and Mr. David Foster can recover his spectacles – which I feel he must be missing very badly.’
I had risen to my feet at the same time as Mirabel but I still felt reluctant to let him go.
‘Will you forgive me, Inspecteur, if I ask you something?’
Mirabel shrugged non-committally, but he waited for my question.
‘This woman who was murdered in the Avenue Georges V – do you know who she was?’
‘We have found that out,’ Mirabel said readily enough. ‘She had several names but the one she used the most of the time was Lydia Maresse. She was known to Interpol as an international criminal.’
‘Any idea of the motive for her murder?’
‘None at all.’
I hesitated for a moment while Mirabel studied me quizzically.
‘Inspecteur – it surely does not escape you that there must be some connection between the two crimes, since Judy Wincott’s handbag was planted on the body found in Paris. Nor can it have failed to strike you as odd that my wife and I should have been so close at hand on each occasion.’
Mirabel raised his eyebrows and studied his immaculate nails.
‘These facts had not escaped us, Mr. Temple. But we are satisfied none the less that you had nothing to do with either crime.’
He suddenly smiled, offered me his hand again and turned to the door. It had almost closed on him when his head was poked in again.
‘If by any chance I need to contact you again I can always be sure of finding you. Thanks to Interpol we can reach the people who interest us in almost any country in the world.’
Steve and I had half a day to kill. We were again booked for the afternoon flight, this time to Algiers. I felt that what she most wanted was a breath of honest fresh air, as far away from that accursed hotel as possible. Enquiries at the hotel desk revealed that it was quite feasible to hire a small yacht. Sailing is a sport both Steve and I are addicted to and by half-past eleven we were well out from the shore in a neat little dinghy with racy lines.
For an hour we enjoyed the illusion that no inquisitive or prying eyes were watching us. From out at sea Nice, with its long promenade of white buildings, gay sun shades and the hills rising in tiers behind it, looked even more attractive than from land. A number of other craft were out on the water. Several speed-boats were towing water ski-ers at speed across the bay and there were a dozen other yachts of various sizes about. The water was not rough, but there was enough of a breeze to make sailing an energetic job that occupied most of our attention. Every now and then an aircraft taking off from the Nice airport skimmed low over our heads.
The wind was whipping the hair away from Steve’s ears, and I could see the colour returning to her pallid cheeks. We had just gone about for the twentieth time and were sitting on the gunwale to counterbalance the dinghy when she pointed to one of the speed-boats which had been cruising in our vicinity for some time.
‘He seems very interested in us,’ she called to me above the noise of the spray and the water swishing under our bows. ‘I think he’s watching us through binoculars.’
I glanced at the launch and then turned to laugh at Steve. She is a very attractive woman, but unusually modest, and she can never bring herself to attribute the attention and interest of other gentlemen to the very apparent attractiveness of her person. In the blue trousers and scarlet shirt she was wearing this morning she was likely to be the target for more than one pair of eyes.
A sudden gust of wind made the dinghy tip over dangerously, and we had to lean right back to keep her sails up out of the water. It was quite a tricky moment, and several hectic minutes passed before we had things under control again. Our canvas hid the cruising speedboat from us until I brought the dinghy’s head round to work her back to the shore. The noise of wind and water was so high that we had been unable to hear the sound of the engine. Even when I did hear the powerful roar I thought that it was just another aircraft taking off.
Steve’s shout switched my attention to our starboard beam.
‘Alter course, Paul. He’s coming straight for us!’
I looked up and saw the speed-boat no more than twenty yards away. Her engines must have been at full power, for her bows