The Toff and the Deep Blue Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

He opened the door again; there was Suzanne, standing at a point of vantage to see stairs, lift, and passages. She beckoned him with jerky, excited movements.
    He went out, closing the door.
    â€œBut, m’sieu,” Suzanne breathed, when she saw him again.
    â€œGo back and tidy my room,” Rollison said. “If anyone wants me, say that I’m having treatment for my leg, that I may have to go to hospital!” He gave her a wink which rivalled the prodigious one of Simon, then hurried along the passage. But he walked with curious gait, not like his own, and hunched his shoulders so that no one would have been surprised to hear that he was an electrician or a plumber or some artisan in the hotel on business which interested the customers only when it inconvenienced them.
    A door leading off the end of the passage led to the service stairs and service lift. He chose the stairs. Luck so often favoured the bold. No one saw him until he was passing the open door of a huge kitchen, which looked like a palace built in stainless steel peopled by spacemen dressed in spotless white from the hem of their long aprons to the top of their stove-pipe hats. No one took any notice of the Toff. He went out of a service door, into a narrow cobbled street. A van stood outside, and men were unloading netting sacks of oranges, onions, green-leaved artichokes, and French beans. He moved swiftly towards the wider street at the end, and something glistened at his feet: the polish of his shoes.
    He kicked into a pile of rubbish, smearing them, and hurried on.
    He wanted a taxi, or better, but unlikely, a drive-yourself car; in it he would head as fast as he could for a headland which was very like the Cap Mirabeau, with one vital exception.
    It was in the opposite direction from here.
    Simon Leclair would be having a wasted journey. That was a little hard on Simon, but he was a married man with a married man’s responsibilities, whereas the Toff was single.
    The beggar had simply said that he thought he had seen the girl of the photograph in the grounds of the Villa Seblec, at a point called the He de Seblec.
    The killer driver had given his address as the Villa Seblec.
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    The taxi moved away from the spot where it had dropped Rollison. The driver was not going far – just round the headland into some shade, drawn off the main road at a spot where he would not be noticed. He would doze there in the slothful warmth of midday, more than content with the five-thousand francs in his shabby leather wallet.
    Rollison had known exactly where to come because of the beggar’s directions. Now he studied the lie of the land in the shade of a glorious bush of bougainvillea, so deep and rich and naming a red that it seemed to be born out of the sun. He stepped out into the burning heat, moving swiftly and sweating slightly. No one was in sight. This road was protected from the cliffs below by a low stone wall. The road wound out of sight, cut out of the side of the cliffs themselves.
    A mile along, the beggar had told him, was a private road leading to the lie de Seblec and two villas, one called Le Coc, the other the Villa Seblec. By climbing the wall by this mass of bougainvillea, and taking a precarious route over the rocks, he would probably be able to reach the spit of land without being seen from the villas.
    The beggar would be looking out for him.
    Rollison climbed the wall. Below, the rugged cliff dropped almost sheer for two hundred feet; if he fell he would be thrown into the sea.
    From here, it looked a deep, deep blue.
    Rollison scrambled over pale grey rocks in which long, coarse grass grew, a few wild geraniums showed up vividly, and flowers he couldn’t name grew from cracks in the rock. He would not be seen until he got near the sea, where Gaston the beggar would be waiting for him.
    Gaston had told him that he had followed the raven-haired girl here, and watched – and seen Daphne Myall.
    The heat was a