A fourteen-year-old boy sat alongside me in the plane, going through a pile of Batman comics. He passed a couple over to me and I leafed through them. They didn’t give me any ideas that I thought would work.
I got into the hotel around seven, and flopped on the bed with my shoes on, too tired and depressed to order myself a drink. I pulled the list of ship details from my pocket and went over it again. It wasn’t any more helpful than staring at the ceiling but it made a change.
Olaf had done a good job. The ship was the Sveti, cargo boat, timber trade from Odessa, Russian owned. She did a regular route to Istanbul, Athens and through the Mediterranean to Algiers, where she now was. Olaf had made a note that she had arrived two days over normal schedule at Algiers. In the coach air terminal in Paris I had picked up a B.E.A. red-white-and-blue flight brochure—About your flight, votre vol, ihr Flug—which was full of good maps. From Athens through the Mediterranean the Sveti had to pass between Sicily and North Africa. That brought her route very close to Bizerta, close enough for Duchêne to have quietly slipped his party aboard. The run from Bizerta along the coast to Algiers was straightforward, but somewhere along it I guessed that the Sveti had made a two-day diversion. That put within her range Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Majorca and the rest of the Balearic Islands, even Spain itself—though I had an idea that the U.S.S.R. did not trade with Spain. Even so, that would not have stopped the Sveti heaving to at night off the coast while a party went ashore. I dropped the brochure and asked the ceiling how in hell one man, and a love-stricken Swede, could cover that area of possibilities? Looking for a needle in a haystack was easier. At least you only had the stack to deal with. The Prime Minister’s son could be in any of dozens of haystacks. I settled back on the bed and considered praying for the miracle of second sight. I even considered taking a pin and trying a jab over the map. In fact I did it. The oracle announced that Dawson was a hundred miles south of Rome in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Rome made me think of Duchêne. Duchêne made me think of Paulet. Clever Paulet, who kindly brought me beer, sandwiches and a backhander—yet still I liked him. Not that that was going to stop me breaking his neck or putting a bullet into him if it would get Wilkins out of her jam. A dead Paulet would upset his girl friend Thérèse. To lose you, my darling, would make life empty for me. A thousand embraces. That’s what she’d written to him.
I sat up suddenly. Manston had asked me if there was any detail I had not mentioned. Well, there was—because I had forgotten it myself until now. Paulet’s office address I’d kicked over—they knew it, anyway. And they knew his real wife’s address. But only I knew Thérèse’s address.
I got a cab to the top of the Avenue Wagram, and then walked down to the Place des Ternes. I went into a bar and had two pernods. Suddenly I was feeling good and hopeful for no reason at all.
I went out into the velvety, spring-warm, Gauloise-flavoured Paris evening. It was an old house on the Avenue des Ternes, turned into apartments. There was no concierge. Just a row of name plates in the hallway with bell pushes alongside them. Mademoiselle Thérèse Diotel was apartment Number 3. I went up two floors. There was one door on the landing with Thérèse’s card slipped into a brass holder. There was a fanlight over the door. No light showed through it. That didn’t mean she was not in. She didn’t know me—but she was a clever girl, would have to be to be hitched up with Paulet. Any excuse I made would have to be a good one. The trouble was I couldn’t think of a good one. Nobody comes to sell Larousse dictionaries on a Sunday evening, and I couldn’t say I was an old friend of Paulet’s from the K.G.B. training school in Moscow. So I did something which I hadn’t done since my small-boy days. I rang the bell good and hard and ran away. Up the next flight of steps to the turn where I could just hang my head down and watch the door. Nothing happened. I went down and repeated the performance just to be sure. She could have been taking a bath or even entertaining a lover—after all, Paulet had been away some time. Nothing happened.
I went back and did the door lock with a piece of perspex. The small hallway was in darkness. I let it stay that way and went through into the main room, after checking a kitchen to the left of the hall and a bathroom to the right. The main room was in darkness. I pulled the curtains and switched on the light. A door across the room led into a bedroom. I could see the end of the bed, and a red dress draped over a small chair. I went in, pulled the curtains and switched on the light. The bed was made and had a frilly sort of canopy over the top end. There were frills like candy floss over the dressing table, and a yellow-and-black stuffed Esso tiger sprawled over a little sofa. Everything was neat and tidy. I did a quick tour again of the kitchen and bathroom and main room. The whole place was neat and tidy, and with the feeling of not having been used for some time. No washing-up left, no evidence of meals, nothing in the kitchen
