have had a good try. You aren't the only one who has looked on the Tortoise as a joke. The Paris police thought he was a harmless lunatic and Renaldo Busoni lost his life.'
'Busoni? Wasn't he the Italian attache?' 'That's right. He was fished out of the Seine after receiving threatening letters from the Tortoise. I got the report with a hint that Italian officials over here might be threatened in the same way.'
'Who is the Tortoise?' Don demanded.
'He is a very dangerous and ruthless extortioner: a man who will stop at nothing.'
'So Ferenci isn't his first victim?'
'Oh no; there have been nine others over a period of fourteen months,' Dicks said. 'Two of them were murdered in the States, three in France and four in Italy. Mr Ferenci is the first to be murdered in this country. The trouble is we have no idea who paid the Tortoise's demands. We feel pretty sure there must be a great number of men and women in Europe and in the States who are paying up and saying nothing. If you had told me Ferenci had been threatened by the Tortoise I would have advised him to pay up.'
'You're not serious, are you? That's odd advice from a police officer.'
'It happens to be good advice,' Dicks said quietly. 'His wife wouldn't be in the London Clinic now if he had paid up and he would be alive.'
'But that's not the point. You are admitting the police would have been helpless to protect him.'
'That's what I am admitting. Let's face it. We haven't enough policemen to shadow any but the V.I.P.s day in and day out. The Tortoise is patient. Sooner or later he gets his man. Mr Ferenci wouldn't have rated a day and night bodyguard.
We would have to do something about the Italian ambassador's staff if one of them was threatened, but Mr Ferenci was an ordinary individual. We couldn't have looked after him for weeks on end. You've seen how the Tortoise works. You, Mason and Dixon were guarding Ferenci. That didn't save him, did it?' Dicks tapped out his pipe, blew noisily down it and began to fill it again. 'The Tortoise knows that if he fails to make good his threat a crack will start in the racket he has built up. Pay up or die is his slogan. People are paying up because they believe they haven't a chance to survive if they don't.'
'But Ferenci didn't know that,' Don said sharply. 'The Tortoise meant nothing to him.'
'That's true. The Tortoise is starting his racket over here. No one knew about him before Ferenci died, but they know about him now. After the way the newspapers handled the murder, no one can fail to know about him. The next rich man who gets a threatening note from the Tortoise will know it isn't a joke. I think Ferenci was deliberately killed to advertise the arrival in this countiy of the Tortoise.'
'It's up to your people to catch him,' Don said grimly. 'That's what you are here for.'
'It's not going to be easy. We have no lead on him. If we do catch up with the killer, he isn't the Tortoise. If we catch this redheaded woman, she isn't the Tortoise either. The French police did manage to catch one of the Tortoise's dagger-men and persuaded him to talk, but he didn't tell them anything of any use. He said he was hired by a man who made an appointment with him on a dark road. This man - he may or may not have been the Tortoise - arrived by car and stayed in the car. The dagger-man didn't see his face. He took his orders and did the job. So you see the Tortoise is quite a headache. The American, French and Italian police have been wrestling with the problem for the past fourteen months. Now it's our turn.'
'You don't sound veiy confident that you'll catch him,' Don said.
'I know how you feel, Mr Micklem,' Dicks returned. 'You have just lost a good friend, but we can't work miracles. You can be sure everything will be done that can be done. It is an international job, of course. It's my guess he operates from Italy.'
'Why Italy?'
'Two reasons: every one of the Tortoise's victims have been Italians and this...'
He took from his pocket a flat box, opened it and produced a broad-bladed knife with an ornate wooden handle. 'Take a look at this. It is the knife that killed Mr Ferenci. Make anything of it?'
Don took the knife and examined it.
'I don't pretend to be an expert,' he said after he had turned the knife over, 'but I'd say this is a copy of an Italian throwing knife of the medieval period: say about the thirteenth century. If I remember rightly I've seen something like it in the Bargello in Florence.'
'That's correct,' Dicks said, nodding. 'Between them, the police in the States, France and Italy have nine such knives.
They have all been taken from the bodies of the Tortoise's victims. Every effort has been made to trace the knives without success.'
'The red-headed girl, Lorelli, is an Italian,' Don said. 'Her accent was unmistakable.'
'That's another pointer.'
'Well, surely we are getting somewhere,' Don said. 'Why does he only attack Italians? Is it possible there's a political hookup? I know Ferenci was a rabid anti-Fascist. Know anything about the other victims' politics?'
'They are a mixed bag: nothing to go on. Some.were anti-Fascists, some Christian-Democrats, some Fascists. I've worked along that line but it gets me nowhere.'
'Have you asked yourself why he calls himself the Tortoise?' Don asked. 'It's not a name to strike fear into anyone - a most unimaginative name for an extortioner. Why the Tortoise? There must be a reason. A tortoise is slow and harmless: the exact opposite to this killer. There must be a reason.'
'I wondered about that myself, but I haven't any bright ideas. It might be a deliberate smoke screen.'
'I don't think so. And another thing - why go to the trouble of manufacturing a copy of a medieval knife? Why not use a knife without the elaborately carved handle? I have a hunch that the tortoise and the knife are something this killer has adopted as a trademark for a very positive reason. We might get somewhere if we found out that reason.'
