Mistress Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

floor. This was his other pied-a-terre in London, known only to himself and Snigger. Rita Ronalde had no idea it existed and it was from here that Paul did all his narcotics distribution, with the help of the barman at the Nineties
    He pushed the cases wearily under the bed, set the alarm for 8 a.m., and had a few hours’ sleep in the single bedroom. All too soon the clanging of the clock woke him. He washed and shaved, then emptied the clothes from the fake cases into a similar pair of normal ones.
    He made his way back to Euston, had some breakfast and caught the Irish Mail to Belfast travelling via Holyhead. From there he crossed the border into Eire and went back to Dublin. As far as the border officials were concerned, he was Arthur Graham, an English textile representative. They had never seen him or his samples before and he aroused no interest.
    All the times had been carefully worked out many weeks before, so that he arrived at Dublin airport a mere hour before the take off. He became Hans Korb once again and arrived in the Belgian capital late on the Thursday evening.
    Next morning, the garage foreman sorrowfully explained that nothing could be found wrong with the carburettors of the Mark X. Another large tip helped him to get over his grief and, by mid-morning, Paul Jacobs was thundering back over the auto-route towards Ostend, the car seeming none the worse for having its carburettors disembowelled for nothing.
    At the Dover end of the trip, he had the most rigorous Customs examination of the whole trip. Whether the officers happened to pick on him as someone on whom to vent their mid-winter boredom or whether they had any reason to suspect him, Paul did not know.
    He stood by the car with the complacency of an easy conscience as they spent twenty minutes looking through all his luggage and examining every nook and cranny of the car. An officer in overalls even crawled beneath the car with a torch to see if anything was strapped to the half-shaft housings or steering gear.
    They eventually waved him away with that stony stare that only Customs Officers and police constables can generate. By five o’clock on the Friday evening, he was putting the Jaguar away in the garage behind Newman Street.
    Rita was expecting him this time and had carefully left off her jeans to please him. To please him even more, she was wearing a negligee and a pair of earrings – nothing else. Within ten minutes, she had taken off the earrings and he had attended to the negligee. He was so occupied for the rest of the evening that he had no opportunity to get to his hidden recorder.
    Next morning, Rita went out to look for a new dress in Oxford Street, in preparation for his promised celebration next evening. As soon as she was well clear, he squatted down on the bedroom floor and took out the machine. Sure enough, there was an inch thickness of tape on the spool. The unwelcome voice of the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ grated on Paul’s ears when he played it back. Again, there was nothing to give away the man’s identity. Rita infuriated him by using strings of mushily endearing names, but never once his real one. After some archly suggestive byplay, the voices got down to business.
    â€˜I still haven’t found a thing to show who he really is,’ complained the woman.
    â€˜You must do … for God’s sake, Rita, he must have some steady pad somewhere … look, stop messing about and find out.’
    â€˜I tell you I can’t,’ she stormed angrily. ‘You don’t know him; he’s as tight as a bloody oyster. No papers anywhere, no nothing.’
    They carried on in this way for a few minutes, the man complaining and the girl making excuses. Then they calmed down and the last few feet of the tape were more semi-erotic slush.
    Paul punched the stop button with vicious finality. He replaced the equipment, but didn’t bother to set it ready again. Its job was done, he thought, as