Mistress Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

unknown man had cut Rita out from behind his back. That was a nuisance, but not a dangerous one. She suited him very well in a physical sense, but she was replaceable. Women – apart from his wife, who belonged to his other world of sacred respectability – were like the car he was driving. They were beautiful and a novelty when new, but should be changed before they got old. They could be changed as easily as a car – and as often – if one was willing to pay the price. Secondly, this man knew of his narcotic smuggling racket and was preparing to blackmail him over it.
    Thirdly, the unknown Mr X did not know his true identity – that he was Paul Jacobs, antique silver dealer of Cardiff. But he was working on it and had to be stopped.
    It was dark when he reached the outskirts of Brussels. Driving through the confusing maze of roads with the ease of familiarity, he arrived at the Boulevard Adolphe Maximus and checked in at his hotel.
    A porter drove his car around to the garages at the rear, while he went up for a bath and a rest before dinner. He lay on his bed before dressing, staring up at the ornamental plaster of the high ceiling.
    He chewed his lip as he polished up the plan that had been born when he helped the giggling Rita from the club the night before.
    When the pieces had all fitted into place in his mind, he swung himself off the bed to dress. As soon as dinner was over, he went out into the bright lights of the city. After walking a little way from the hotel, he hailed a taxi. Using good French, with a deliberate German accent just to confuse the trail in the unlikely event of there ever being one, he gave directions to the driver. The car turned into the Boulevard Leopold and ran parallel to its overhead viaduct for some distance. Then they cut across in the direction of the Gare du Nord. Outside the station, Paul paid the man off and walked into the station entrance. As soon as the cab drove off, he turned sharply to his right and walked up the Rue de Brabant.
    Some distance up, he turned off into a side street and, after a few more right-angled turns, found a shuttered bakery on the comer of an alleyway. The cracked paint above the front of the shop announced that it was Emil Corot et Fils. He dived into the gloomy tunnel alongside the shop and found a door, almost invisible in the darkness. Paul rapped hard on the peeling panels. Three heavy knocks, a pause – three more knocks, softer this time.
    After a long delay, there was the sound of bolts and a chain being unfastened. The door creaked open, but no face appeared. Jacobs stepped inside and walked down a short passage to another door, which led to a dimly lit storeroom, filled with sacks and cardboard cartons. A thick powdering of flour lay over everything.
    He turned inside the room and waited to greet an old man who shuffled after him from the passage. They spoke in French, but the bent old baker had little to say. He had red, inflamed eyes and a drooping moustache. Like his storeroom, he was covered in white dust.
    He slouched across the room to a pile of cartons marked Syrian Figs . Opening the tops of two of them, he took out a layer of cellophane-wrapped cooking figs, each parcel being about half a kilo. Beneath this layer was a layer of thin plastic bags containing white powder. There were several dozen in all and the old man carefully took them out and stacked them on top of a box.
    â€˜I’ve already unpacked them from the figs,’ he muttered unnecessarily. Paul was not interested; he knew well enough how the drugs had arrived from the Levant. Each carton contained fifty kilos of figs, a hundred packets in all. In certain marked cartons, the fig packets one layer deep in the box had a plastic bag of heroin or morphine embedded through the fruit.
    Old man Corot shuffled in his senile way to a large cupboard against the wall. He took out two smart fawn-coloured suitcases and brought them over to the pile of