Into The Trap by John Creasey

Author:John Creasey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Stratus

Chapter Fourteen

Decision

Allingham had said that he wanted Mannering to sell the Carla collection. Thelma Courtney wanted to make sure that they were still safe – or so she said. They were two entirely different reasons for wanting his help, but by stretching his imagination a little it was easy to see how they could become one.

Was she working with Allingham?

Had Allingham tried to scare the wits out of him, to prepare him for what was to come? Did Allingham think that he could put his hands on a cracksman capable of stealing those jewels? Had he, Mannering, upset their plans by bursting in on Thelma and Gerald Allingham and thus forced this change of approach?

He didn’t know.

It was possible that everything that had happened from the time he had left the Grange had been deliberately designed to lead to this challenge – to goad him into finding out if the Carla collection was still at the Grange.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that Thelma Courtney and Allingham were working together. Assume that they knew he must not suspect that. Then the rest fitted in. Allingham had tried to blackmail him into promising to handle the pearls; Thelma Courtney had challenged and, in a way, bribed him to get the pearls out of the vault. In that was an inverted process, which became clear enough once it was seen the right way up.

He could go on from there.

Thelma Courtney and Allingham, working together, had first taken the jewels and cashed in. Why? They were her jewels, but only while she remained with her husband. Supposing she was planning to leave him and live with Allingham? She would want money; and the jewels could easily be turned into money. There was no reasonable argument in favour of her discovering the loss and deliberately saying nothing about it, unless it was to her advantage to keep quiet. Get that clear – it could be greatly to her advantage if she and Allingham were building up a fortune on which to live when she left her husband.

Into this careful scheme there intruded a third faction; not Nigel alone, but men working through Nigel. He had started the breach in the Allingham-Thelma wall by stealing the fake diamonds. He was only the tool of the real bad men; and Allingham and Thelma might believe that they were after the Carla collection and the diamonds were merely a lead up. So she had to find out. She also had to have a plausible reason for acting as she had done. She had built that reason up round the domestic circumstances – an elaborate form of sob-story.

But the men behind Nigel were stronger than she had realised.

They had their spy in the maid, who knew something of what was going on; who had been instructed to find out exactly what passed between her and Mannering that evening. They – this mysterious ‘they’ – were prepared to take big risks to get the collection; and jewels worth nearly half a million pounds justified risks.

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