Mission To Siena
James Hadley Chase
Chapter I
PRELUDE TO MURDER
Police constable Elliott stood in a shop doorway and surveyed the east side of the square with placid indifference.
It was a dark, wet November night; the time was a few minutes after eleven o'clock, and because of the rain and the hour, the square was deserted.
It had been raining steadily for the past three hours. Water gurgled in the gutters and dripped from the street lamps that made yellow pools on the glistening pavement. A cold wind added to the misery of the wet, and Elliott thought longingly of his comfortable sitting-room, the bright fire that would be burning, and of his wife who he hoped would be thinking of him. He scowled up at the dark sky, looking for a break in the clouds.
A woman's voice said, 'Can you please direct me to Polsen's hotel?'
Elliott lowered his gaze and regarded the girl who stood before him. Her back was to the street lamp and he wasn't able to see much of her. She was wearing a white mackintosh and a close-fitting black hat, and she carried in her right hand a canvas and leather hold-all.
She spoke with a foreign accent that could have been Spanish or Italian. Elliott, who was no language scholar, couldn't decide which it was.
'Polsen's hotel, miss?'
'Yes.'
'A hundred yards up on the right.'
He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway and pointed. The girl turned to look in the direction he indicated, and the light from the street lamp fell on her face.
Elliott decided she would be twenty-five or six. The first thing he noticed was her red gold hair that showed just below her hat: a tone of colour he had never seen before. Her eyes were set wide apart, and as far as he could judge in the uncertain light, appeared to be as green as emeralds. There was a sensual quality in her beauty that aroused the male in him, something that hadn't happened to him in years.
'Thank you,' the girl said and made to move on.
'Just a moment, miss,' Elliott said. 'If you are a stranger to London, I ought to tell you that Polsen's hotel isn't much.'
The girl looked away across the wet square. He wasn't sure if she were listening to what he was saying.
'It's got a bad reputation, miss,' Elliott went on. 'It's not the sort of place a young lady like you should stay at.'
The girl looked at him.
'Thank you. I am not staying there,' she said. 'Good night.'
She turned and walked quickly away into the rain and darkness, leaving Elliott looking after her, frowning.
He lifted his massive shoulders under his glistening cape. Well, he had warned her, he told himself. He couldn't do more than that. He wondered who she was and where she had come from. He wondered too why she was going to Polsen's hotel. Polsen's was one of the many room-by-the-hour-and-no-questions-asked hotels in the district: no worse than the others, but distinctly unsavoury and sordid.
He shook his head. You wouldn't have thought a girl like that... Then because he had been on the same beat for fifteen years and was utterly bored with the routine, he ceased to ponder why she should be going to the hotel. If he worried about the actions of everyone who asked him the way, he told himself, his life would become a burden.
He moved on, carrying the image of the girl's beauty with him on his lonely, wet patrol.
Jack Dale, the night clerk of Polsen's hotel, watched the fat, elderly man hurry across the dingy hall to the revolving door and disappear into the rain.
He shrugged his thin shoulders. He supposed the fat man had a train to catch. He grinned cynically, wondering what tale he would tell his wife to account for his lateness. It was the elderly and the married who came to Polsen's.
A girl, her shabby cloth coat showing large damp catches, came down the stairs. Any claim she had to prettiness was marred by granite-hard eyes and a thin, bitter mouth.
She came over to Dale and tossed a key on the ink-stained blotter. She dropped a crumpled pound note beside the key.
'Going out again?' Dale asked as he picked up the note and slid it into a drawer. 'It's raining like hell.'
'Of course I'm going out again,' the girl said crossly. 'I haven't made enough this week to pay the rent. If this rain goes on much longer, I don't know what I'm going to do.'
Dale grinned.
