Send No More Roses 1977

Author:Eric Ambler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-09-29T19:55:40+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

All three of us had a bad night, but at least Melanie and I got some sleep. Yves had none.

About an hour after Melanie's warning, he returned to the listening post over the garage to report his preliminary findings. Since he had spent most of the hour crawling between bushes and being bitten by insects, he looked a mess.

He borrowed my handkerchief and dabbed at some larger scratches on his hands and arms while he explained how he had got them. There had been parked cars on both roads, as Melanie had said. He had seen one on the lower road by the garden gate and two, one on each side of the main entrance, on the upper road. The latter were both at distances of about a hundred and fifty metres from the entrance. It had been in the oleander thickets along the upper boundary fence, where he had gone to take a closer look at the two cars outside, that he had run into trouble. At some time, the chain-​link boundary fence had been damaged by a car or truck going off the road after taking the bend too fast. Concrete posts had been put up to prevent a repetition of that particular accident, but the gap in the fence had been temporarily blocked with a barbed-​wire entanglement which no one had bothered to remove after the fence had been repaired.

Still, he had been able to get a look at both cars by waiting for the headlights of the occasional passing car to show them up. Each had two persons in it, though of what sex he had not been able to see, and each had a local Alpes Maritimes 06 registration. Each also had its front wheels on full left lock. In addition, both on the lower road and the upper, the places at which the cars were parked were where the roads widened slightly. If you wanted to park on those roads for any ordinary reason - you wanted a smoke and a chat, you wanted to neck or eat a sandwich - those were the places you would logically choose. Not as logically, perhaps, if you wanted to mount a simple surveillance operation against the Villa Lipp because your view of it would be so restricted; but if you wanted to prevent any of the occupants leaving the place without your knowing or, if you wanted to prevent their leaving by car altogether, you were in exactly the right position. You had

thelower gateway under observation if they tried leaving on foot, and with your two cars on the upper road you could foil any attempt at a get-​away by road simply by starting up, driving four metres and then standing on the brakes. If you kept your ears open for the sound of engines from below, you could have the road blocked on both sides of the entrance before the escaping cars could reach it.

And, of course, we, or ratherMelanie, could be imagining things.

I

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