CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

THE HIDDEN EAR.

"No, d.i.c.k! A trifle farther this way," whispered Freda Crisp, who with a piece of string had been measuring the blank wall of the sparely-furnished hotel sitting-room.

"Do you think so? I don't," replied a lean, well-dressed, rather striking-looking man of middle-age, who held in his hand a steel gimlet, nearly two feet in length, such as is used by electricians to bore holes through walls and floors to admit the pa.s.sage of electric-lighting wires.

"Slip out and measure again," urged the woman, who was wearing a simple blouse and a navy-blue skirt which looked rather shabby in the grey afternoon light. "It won't do to be much out."

The man, whom she had addressed as d.i.c.k, carefully opened the door of the room a little way, peered out into the corridor, and waited. There being no sign of anyone stirring--for hotels are usually most quiet at about half-past three in the afternoon--he slipped out. He took the string and, stooping to the floor, measured from the lintel of the door to the dividing wall of the next room.

Twice he did so, and then made a knot in the string, so that there should be no further mistake.

On creeping back to where the woman awaited him, he said:

"You were quite right, Freda. Now let's get to work."

So saying, he again measured the distance from the door, being on his knees the while. Then, still on his knees and taking the long gimlet, he screwed it into the plaster and worked hard until the steel slowly entered the wall, driving a small hole through it and at the same time throwing out a quant.i.ty of white dust upon the floor.

"It's through?" he exclaimed presently, and withdrawing the tool, placed his eye to the small round hole.

"Excellent. Now we'll take the wires through."

Again the man, d.i.c.k Allen, opened the door noiselessly, and creeping out with a coil of twin wires, unrolled it from his hand and, as he went down the corridor, placed it beneath the edge of the strip of thick green carpet, and into a sitting-room four doors along.

He laid the two twisted wires still beneath the carpet, and carrying them behind a heavy settee, he took from his pocket what looked like a good-sized nickel-plated b.u.t.ton. The front of it was, however, of mica, a tiny bra.s.s screw set in the centre. To it he carefully attached the fine silk-covered wires, tightening the screw securely. Then, taking a big safety-pin from his pocket, he attached the b.u.t.ton to the back of the settee, where it was completely hidden.

The microphone-b.u.t.ton hung there as a hidden ear in that luxuriously-furnished room.

When he returned to his companion he found that she had already driven in a tin-tack, around which she had twisted the two wires. To pa.s.s the wires beneath the door was impossible, as they would have to run over a long stretch of stone and somebody might trip over them.

Afterwards she put on her hat and fur coat, and the pair left the big Hotel du Parc and strolled down the wide, bustling boulevard, the Rue Noailles, in that great city of commerce, Ma.r.s.eilles. The hotel they had left was not so large nor so popular as the great Louvre et Paix, which is perhaps one of the most cosmopolitan in all the world, but it was nevertheless well patronised. At the Louvre most travellers pa.s.sing to and from India and the Far East stay the night, after landing or before embarking, so that it is an establishment with a purely cosmopolitan clientele. But the Parc was a quieter, though very aristocratic hotel, patronised by British peers and wealthy Americans on their way to the Riviera or the East, and also by foreign potentates when landing in Europe.

The truth was that when the Moorish Minister of the Interior--the white-bearded old Moslem who had come over on an informal visit to the French President--arrived in Ma.r.s.eilles accommodation could not be found for him at the Louvre et Paix. So he had naturally gone to the Parc, where the best suite had been placed at his disposal by the officials at the Quai d'Orsay.

News of this had reached d.i.c.k Allen on his arrival from Nice, and Freda, posing as an English society woman, had taken another suite for the purpose of keeping observation upon the old Moorish Minister, whom his English friend Barclay had arrived in Ma.r.s.eilles to visit.

Already it was nearly five o'clock, so the woman Crisp and her companion strolled along to the big Cafe de l'Univers in the Cannebiere, where they sat outside over their _aperitifs_, well satisfied with their preparations.

"When I dined at the Louvre et Paix last night I sat close to Barclay.

The old Moor was with him, and I distinctly heard Barclay say that he would call at the Parc at nine to-night. The old Moor looks very picturesque in his native costume with his turban and his white burnous."

"Ma.r.s.eilles is so cosmopolitan that one meets almost as many costumes here in the Cannebiere as on the Galata Bridge at Constantinople,"

laughed Freda. "n.o.body here takes any notice of costume. Besides, all the Arab business men from Algeria and Tunis who come over wear the same Arab dress. In any other city they would be conspicuous, but not here."

d.i.c.k Allen, a clever crook, by the way, who had been in many intricate little "affairs" as the accomplice of Gordon Gray, Porter, Claribut and Freda, remained silent for a moment or two.

"A Moorish costume would be a jolly good disguise one day, wouldn't it?

I've never thought of that before, Freda," he said.

"Providing you knew a few words of Arabic and could speak French fairly well," the woman answered.

"The first I could easily pick up. The second I can already do fairly well. Just a little staining of the face, hands and hair, and the transformation would be complete. I'll remember that for the future."

"Yes, my dear d.i.c.k. One day it might be very handy--if the police were very hot on the track. You could pose as an Algerian fruit merchant, or something of the sort, while they'd be looking for the Englishman, d.i.c.k Allen?"

Both laughed. Each had their reminiscences of being hard pressed and having to exercise their keenest wits to elude their pursuers.

"What you've told me about that old parson in England rather worries me," said the man. "What can he know about Hugh?"

"Nothing, my dear d.i.c.k. Don't worry. It's all bluff! Leave it to Gordon. He directs everything. He wriggled out in the past, and he'll do it again."

"That's all very well. But I tell you I'm not so sure. Jimmie wrote to me the other day. The butler stunt at your house at Welwyn is all very well, but the game must be blown sooner or later. Believe me, Freda, it must?"

"I know. But we're not staying at Willowden always."

"But Gordon has his radio-telephone there. He talked to me on it to Nice the other night."

"Yes. But we shall clear out at a moment's notice--when it becomes desirable, and the little local police sergeant--no, I beg his pardon, he's fat and red-faced and goes about on a push-bike--will be left guessing why the rich tenants of the big house have gone away on holidays. We've departed upon lots of holidays--haven't we, d.i.c.k? And we'll go once more! Each holiday brings us money--one holiday more or one less--what matters? And, after all, we who live with eyes skinned on people with money deserve all we get. England has now changed.

Those stay-at-home cowards of the war have all the money, and poor people like ourselves deserve to touch it, if we can manage to lead them up the garden, eh?"

And the handsome adventuress laughed merrily.

"But surely our present game is not one against war profits?" the man remarked, during a lull in the blatant cafe orchestra.

"No. We're up against saving ourselves--you and I and Gordon and Jimmie. Don't you realise that not a word must ever leak out about young Willard? Otherwise we shall all be right in the cart--jugged at once!"

"I hope old Homfray knows nothing. What can he know?"

"He may, of course, know something, d.i.c.k," the woman said in an altered voice. "If I had known what I do now I would never have been a party to taking his son Roddy away." She paused for a moment and looked straight at him. "We made a silly mistake--I'm certain of it. Gordon laughs at me. But Jimmie is of my opinion."

"But can't we close the old man's mouth and trust to luck with his son?

He'll become an idiot."

"Gordon is bent upon getting this concession. So are you. So let us do what we can. The installation of that delicate microphone into the old Moor's room is a mark up to you."

"It usually works. I've used it once or twice before. But let's hope for the best--eh, Freda?"

"Yes," laughed the handsome woman carelessly--the adventuress who was so well known each winter at Cannes or at Monte Carlo, or in summer at Aix or Deauville. In the gayer cosmopolitan world Freda Crisp was known wherever smart society congregated to enjoy itself.

The pair of crooks afterwards dined at that well-known restaurant the Ba.s.so-Bregaillon, on the Quai de la Fraternite, a place noted for its "bouillabaisse"--that thick fish soup with the laurel leaves and onions and coloured with saffron, which is the great delicacy of the city.

Both Freda and her companion had been in Ma.r.s.eilles before upon other adventurous missions. d.i.c.k lived in Nice, and was really a secret agent for the blackmailing exploits of others concerning those who played at Monte Carlo when they were supposed to be at home attending to business or politics; or the wives of men who were detained by their affairs in Paris, New York, or London.

Mr Richard Allen lived very quietly and respectably in his little white villa on the Corniche road. He was known everywhere along the Riviera from Hyeres to Mentone. That he was a wireless amateur many people also knew. But of his real and very lucrative profession of blackmail n.o.body ever dreamed. Yet of the women who flock to the Riviera each year who dreams that the nice amiable, middle-aged man whom one meets at hotels or at the Casino, and who may offer to dance, is a blackmailer? Ah!

How many hundreds of the fair s.e.x have in these post-war days been misled and, bemuddled by liqueurs, fallen into the clever trap laid for them by such blackguards?

Blackmailers stand around the _tapis-vert_ on the Riviera in dozens.

n.o.body suspects them. But their victims are many, and their failures few. And of the vampires of the Cote d'Azur, Allen was one of the most successful--allied as he was with Gordon Gray, who, when necessity arose, supplied the sinews of war.