Birdcage by Victor Canning

Author:Victor Canning [Canning, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0688034535
Published: 2019-10-10T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

KERSLAKE HAD ASKED Sarah and Richard to have dinner with him at eight o’clock. They left the villa at half-past seven and Kerslake, who had parked his car down a side road off the one which they had to take and then walked across country to the slope above the villa, watched them go through his field-glasses. Keeping in the cover of trees and shrubs he walked down to the front of the villa. The two servants were safely in their lodge at the drive entrance.

He took the key from under the stone trough, unlocked the door, put the key back in its hiding place, and then went in letting the door lock itself on the automatic catch. Women, he smiled ruefully, remembering Margaret, were great ones for forgetting things. If they came back he would hear the car and have plenty of time to make his way out through a rear window. In the hall he picked up the telephone and called his hotel to give a message to the receptionist. He was expecting a Senhorita Branton and a Senhor Farley to dinner—would they please present them with his apologies and tell them that he would be a little late because he had been held up on the road from Faro with a puncture? In the meantime they were his guests and would the hotel please serve them with any drinks they wished to have.

There were only two rooms he wished to search in detail, Sarah’s and the man Farley’s. He did Sarah’s first. He took the key from the bureau and opened the safe. It held only the letters from Mrs Ringel Fanes’ husband. Closing it and swinging the bookcase back he ran his hand along the back side of the three rows of books and then his eye carefully over the books themselves. They were mostly paperbacks, some religious works, and some hard-covered book club editions.

He next searched the bureau in the window. In one of a series of ivory-knobbed little drawers mounted at the back of the bureau he found the note from Lady Jean Branton, witnessed by Father Ansoldo and the maid, Melina, leaving the contents of a parcel—containing, he guessed, the Venus girdle —to Sarah. With it was the card giving information about the belt, stating that it had been given to her by Lord Bellmaster. If it had been worth thirty thousand pounds in 1948, he thought, God knew what it was worth now. Lord Bellmaster had been a generous lover . . . but then, the man had millions. But for all his money and power, he thought, he had no way of ridding his mind of the maggot of fear which worked there.

Methodically, efficiently, and quickly he went through the bedroom. This was no training course exercise now with Quint in the sidelines watching and appraising. Everything he saw and touched he would remember. On a small table by a side window was a scatter of needles, cotton, threads and scissors and a summer dress with the skirt hem tacked-up in preparation for shortening it.

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