simply couldn’t believe it. You won’t either, because it was Gabrielle.
Which absolutely just wasn’t possible. Wellieboots and I had been across the Coupee as soon as it was open and gone straight down to the harbour and got the first boat going, so there was no way anyone could have got to France any faster than we did. But there she was.
“How very extraordinary,” said Julia, pausing in bewilderment from her reading of the telex. “How on earth can she have done it?”
“Who knows?” I said. “Perhaps she flew over on her broomstick.”
In truth, however, the reappearance at this juncture of the Contessa in the Place Chateaubriand in St. Malo was a matter of no greater astonishment to me than I can suppose it will be, dear reader, to yourself.
She didn’t look as if she was doing anything frightfully secret or mysterious — she just went into the bank next door for a minute or two and then came back and sat down and started ordering lunch.
I couldn’t go over and say hallo and ask how she’d got there, because of not wanting to be spotted by Wellieboots. It was obvious by this time that she was the one he was out to get the goods on, and of course I jolly well wasn’t going to let him, but the way I saw it was that my best chance of foiling him was to let him go on thinking she was all alone and at his mercy, little knowing he’d got Catseyes Cantrip to reckon with.
That meant I couldn’t let Gabrielle spot me either, in case she waved at me or something and blew my cover. It seemed a pity to be sitting eating lunch in the same square and not being able to talk to her, but looking on the bright side it was still a lot better than doing a possession action in West London County Court. Hope that turned out all right, by the way.
To get to the bank I’d have had to walk straight past her, so I had to get the waiter to change me some money into francs. He gave me about half the going rate of exchange and looked at me as if I was loopy. He thought I was even loopier when I asked for my bill before I’d finished eating, but I didn’t want to get caught on the hop if anything happened suddenly.
I nearly did, all the same. I was taking more notice of Gabrielle than old Wellieboots, like anyone would with any sense, and she’d only just started making signals for her bill when I looked round and saw him heading for the gateway. So quick as a flash I was up and after him.
What happened next was pretty sinister. He pootled along to a car park a few hundred yards from the gate, went over to an oldish blue Renault, and climbed into the driving seat, cool as a cucumber. Then he just sat there, obviously waiting for Gabrielle to come along and drive off in one of the other cars.
Which to the razor-sharp intellect of the ace investigator meant just one thing — viz that he hadn’t only known where she was going to be and what she was going to be doing, but he’d known it enough in advance to fix up to have a car waiting for him in the same place as hers. Well, have a think about ways he could have found all that out, and if you can think of one that isn’t jolly sinister I’ll buy the next three bottles of wine in the Corkscrew.
Did I ever tell you about an old mate of mine at Cambridge who was an absolute whiz with locks? He wasn’t all that hot on land law, though, and he gave me some quite useful tips in exchange for helping with his essays. One of the things I used to practise on was the boot of a Renault — in top form I could do it in ninety seconds flat, just with an ordinary penknife like one’s always got in one’s pocket. And the car Wellieboots was sitting in was exactly the same model.
It seemed sort of meant, somehow. I walked on a bit, so as not to be coming from the same direction he was expecting Gabrielle from, and then I looped back, doing an imitation of a suave young English milord strolling casually through a car park. When I got to the Renault I ducked down at the back of it and got to work — there was a wall behind me, and not a lot of people about, so I’d have been unlucky to get spotted.
It took me just under two minutes, which wasn’t bad considering I was out of practise. I’d just finished when I saw Gabrielle walking across the car park towards a rather snazzy Mercedes. Wellieboots must have seen her, too, because he started his engine. So I opened the boot and nipped in.
It was one of those things that seem like a good idea at the time and a slightly less good idea about a minute later, but by that time we were moving quite fast.
Don’t let’s have a bit in our book where Carruthers gets stuck in the boot of a car for five hours. I suppose there are some chaps who write books who could go on for pages about it and make it sound jolly exciting, but I just don’t see how they do it. You can forget describing the scenery for a start, because there isn’t any.
It was the most boring five hours I’ve ever spent, even counting that time you got me to see three Shakespeare plays one after another in the same day. It was a lot more uncomfortable as well, because the only way there was room for me was with my knees scrunched up against my chin and my head at right angles to my spine, and not able to move anything more than about an inch. I couldn’t even risk dropping off to sleep, because I’d got my handkerchief looped round the door handle and I had to keep hold of both ends of it to keep the door sort of shut but not shut at the same time — I’d never tried opening the boot of a Renault from the inside, and I thought it would be a bad time to find out I couldn’t.
It felt as if we were driving mostly on motorway, and by the time we stopped I suppose we must have gone about two hundred and fifty miles. I was practically past caring whether anyone spotted me climbing out, but I made myself count to sixty to give Wellieboots time to get clear. Then I opened the door a bit and had a squint round.
It was beginning to get dark, and I was in a big garden with walls round it at the back of a largish house. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so I crawled out. I thought for a bit that I was never going to be able to stand up straight again, but I managed it in the end. Then I looked round and there was the Mercedes, parked a few yards away.
When I got outside into the street I could see the town we were in was the kind of place Gabrielle would be keen on — tremendously historic-looking, with a big castle and lots of cobblestones, and a covered market like you see in old towns in the country. The place we were parked at the back of looked like a rather grand sort of hunting lodge, but when I got round to the front it turned out to be a hotel, called after some bird called Blanche.
It seemed like a pretty fair bet that Gabrielle and Wellieboots would both be having dinner there, so I pootled in and asked for a table.
The headwaiter gave me a slightly cross-eyed sort of look, as if I wasn’t quite as swanny as he’d have liked me to be — that’s Frogspeak for having a clean shirt on and a crease in your trousers and generally not looking as if you’d spent the past five hours in the boot of a Renault. Still, he gave me a table all right — tucked away in a corner where no one would notice me, which was fine as far as I was concerned.
He can’t have thought Wellieboots was all that swanny either — he was at a table in another darkish corner, with a boar’s head with big tusks mounted on the wall behind him. There wasn’t a lot of difference between them, but the boar was friendlier-looking.
It was quite a while before Gabrielle came in, and when she did she was with a tall dark chap who I suppose you’d say was frightfully good-looking — not all that young, though, and probably putting on weight a bit if he hadn’t had his clothes cut so as to hide it. I couldn’t think to begin with how he came into the picture, but then I remembered her saying she was going to meet her husband somewhere on the way back from the Channel Islands. So obviously that’s who it was.
The headwaiter perked up like anything, because Gabrielle was looking tremendously swanny, and took them to a table outside on the terrace, with lots of flowers and candles and things. Her husband must have fixed it up in advance to make it all sort of romantic. You’d have thought he hadn’t seen her for months — he kept kissing her hand and looking into her eyes and generally being pretty soppy — but I suppose foreigners always carry on like that, specially Italians.
I could see that Gabrielle was in a bit of a tizz, though. She kept taking things out of her handbag and putting them down all over the place, as if there was something that ought to be there and wasn’t — the sort of thing you’re always doing but she usually isn’t — with a lot of hand-waving, and all the waiters gathering round trying to look helpful and sympathetic. I thought she must have lost her chequebook or her credit cards or something, but one of the waiters eventually got round to serving me and, according to him, it was her pen. I still didn’t think it was like her to make such a fuss, but I suppose it was the one she told me about that was a present from her husband, and she was in a flap in case he was miffed about it.
“Or do you suggest,” said Selena, regarding me with an expression not wholly sceptical and again refilling my teacup, “that it was because she remembered where she might have lost it?”
“But if she lost it,” said Julia, “in such dramatic circumstances as that would seem to imply, then surely she
