Spy Hunter by H.B. Lyle

Author:H.B. Lyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

11

Up went the legs, down went the legs. Across went the legs. And back off the dance floor went the legs. The crowd cheered, the waiters whirled and the band struck up once more. The Moulin Rouge, Concert Bal – that’s what the posters called it. And the Moulin Rouge was where Mata Hari said she’d be that night.

Wiggins signalled to the waiter for another. He sat alone at a small round table in the corner of the vast, pulsating music hall. Young couples swamped the dance floor as the professionals disappeared for a break. He brought the last of the red wine to his lips just as the waiter – a marvel of speed, elegance and awe-inspiring disdain – whipped his coins away and placed down a second bottle. He was not blind drunk. That was just a story he liked to tell Kell and his superiors, to keep them from feeling threatened.

He hadn’t gone back to the hotel since leaving it that morning. He assumed the Élysée Palace was being watched – or rather, that Mata Hari was being watched. Large hotels were never safe places to stay. The staff knew everything that went on in a hotel, and a large hotel was full of people paid peanuts who happened to know where you were when you slept. You only had to buy off one of the staff, be it the bellhop or the maid, the concierge or the manager, and you could effectively have them all. Hotel staff gossip was wilder than a forest fire in August. Wiggins knew – he’d done enough surveillance jobs as a kid for Sherlock Holmes, from tailing a cattle baron in Claridge’s to watching an heiress at the Savoy. A shilling for a chambermaid would get you all the gen in half an hour.

Consequently, he’d left the hotel by the servants’ stairs and strolled out of the back entrance into the Parisian streets. It would have been pointless to try to work out who might have been watching Margaretha anyway. It could have been any one of the staff, or even Claudette the maid. It meant that anyone who knew where Margaretha was knew where he’d been for the last few nights and that needed to stop. And it was easy to follow Margaretha. As Mata Hari she was probably the most visible woman alive. She was a walking advertisement for herself. She commanded everybody’s attention wherever she went. He’d seen that at the station in Brussels, and he could see it again here, in the great heaving concert hall of the Moulin Rouge.

She sat in one of the boxes that lined the first floor of the hall. Wiggins sat on the other side of the hall, with the stage off to his left. Above the stage, the band played on an elevated platform. Lined up beneath the boxes opposite, top-hatted drinkers ordered at a long bar, while the electric lights cast a golden glow. He could see Mata Hari easily,

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