satisfactory.
Unbuttoning his square jacket, he took it off. She had rid herself of her petticoat and was standing in bloomers and a cotton bodice. With a well-practised gesture she pushed the bloomers down, gave them a swift kick with her right foot lifting a shapely leg high into the air and, as the bloomers left her toe, caught them in her right hand.
As he unknotted his muffler he laughed his appreciation of her little trick, while thinking that many a sailor home from the seas might travel farther and fare worse than with this lively little red-head.
She then sat down on the edge of the bed to undo the suspender clips that attached her stockings to her long whale-boned stays. It was for her to sit down that he had been waiting. Moving round behind her, ostensibly to hang his coat on a peg in the door to the other room, he pulled from his left hand pocket a silk sock tied at the top and having in it a big fistful of sand. As he swung the sock the sand formed a ball in its toe. With a swish, he brought it down hard on the back of her head.
Stunned by the impact, without even a moan, she heeled over sideways and slipped off the bed. Picking her up, he laid her back on it at full length. From a pocket in his coat he took some lengths of tape with which he tied her wrists and ankles, then he picked up from the floor a handkerchief she had dropped, and stuffed it into her mouth. As the handkerchief was quite small it did not make a very efficient gag, but had he used a larger one there would have been a possibility that she might suffocate while unconscious, and he felt confident that the little ball of linen between her tongue and palate would be quite sufficient to prevent her, when she did come to, from making a noise loud enough to attract attention. Finally, he used another length of the tape to make a loop round her neck, then tied its end to the iron bed-rail above her head, so that, with her ankles and wrists bound, she could not get off the bed without choking herself.
As he looked down at his handiwork he thought, 'Poor little devil, I expect that by this time next week she will be working for some other blackguard; but with luck tonight I'll rid her of a murderer.' Then, to console her for the blow on the head, he took some more money from his pocket and made the amount on the shelf up to a hundred pesetas.
Readjusting his muffler, he put on his jacket and, while doing so, he saw that the door on which he had hung it had, at about chest level, an oblong slit like a letter-box in it. He had not noticed it before, because on the far side of the door it was masked by a strip of material the same colour as the paintwork. For a moment he wondered what purpose it served, then decided that it was probably used as a spy-hole so that anyone in the big bedroom could lift the flap, peep through and see what was going on in the smaller. But, having more important things to think about, he quickly dismissed it from his mind.
Picking up the lamp he carried it into the larger room and set it down on a small table. At his first swift glance round his eye lit on a camera hanging by a strap from a hook on the door giving on to the corridor. From what he had seen of Sanchez's as they had struggled together in the moonlight it looked the same. A moment later he had verified that it was because the leather was stained from its having been partly submerged in the lily pool. Opening it up he removed the spool, unrolled the film and held it up to the light to find that it was a new one, no part of which had been used.
There was no desk or bureau in the room so he decided that the chest of drawers was the best place to start his hunt for the negative. Its contents were almost entirely clothes belonging to
Inez. Quickly he turned them over and thrust his hands into the corners of the drawers, one after another, but they yielded nothing of interest. Next he tried the wardrobe. One hanging space held Inez's dresses, the other garments belonging to Sanchez. He went through the latter most carefully but the pockets had in them only a few old bills, lottery tickets and betting vouchers. The shelves and drawers of the central compartment were evidently shared, and contained scarves, mantillas, socks and shirts. Less hopefully he went to the dressing-table; its two shallow drawers had in them only Inez's manicure and make-up things.
Anxiously now, he stared round for likely hiding places then, stooping, looked under the bed. Beneath it there were three corded wooden boxes. Pulling one of them out he got the cord undone and with the aid of a long steel buttonhook prised the case open. Its contents revealed that Inez was a born hoarder. The box held the oddest collection of junk, valueless except to its owner. He prised open the second box and, to save time, upended it so that its contents spilled out over the floor. Among the pile of old handbags, bull-fight programmes, small gaudily painted figures of saints, garter rosettes, a pack of for tune-telling cards and some fancy scent bottles, were two albums. One was half-filled with picture postcards, mostly of a low comic variety or of holiday resorts; the other held photographs, but they were only faded snaps of Inez at various ages and, presumably, her family and friends. The third box held another medley of souvenirs from her perhaps more innocent past.
Angrily, de Quesnoy pushed the three boxes and most of the junk they had contained back under the bed, scrambled to his feet and cast around afresh. His searching eyes stopped again at the wardrobe as the thought came to him that there might be something on top of it. Pulling over a chair, he stepped up on to it and peered into the hollow behind the cornice. Hidden there from ground level lay a flat leather satchel. Seizing it, he jumped down and tried to open it but found it to be locked. Praying that he had at last found what he sought, and not a collection of love letters to Inez, he again used the long steel buttonhook to force its lock. Taking the satchel by its ends he tipped its contents out on to the bed. Twenty or thirty negatives and photographs shot out. One glance at them was enough. His eyes lit with triumph.
Quickly he shuffled through them, seeking the one of Gulia and himself, but he could not find it. Then it struck him that nearly all the prints were very similar. They had a blob of light up in the right-hand top corner and vague whitish figures lower down to the left. Picking up two of them he carried them over to the lamp.
As he examined them under the better light he gave a grim smile. They revealed the use to which the letter- box-like slit in the communicating door between the two rooms was put. While Inez entertained her clients Sanchez took photographs through it. The blob of light was the lamp up on a shelf, turned low; the whitish figures now spoke for themselves.
On examining some of the others the Count found that in many of them Inez's face was turned away but in every one that of the man showed. As photographs all of them were very poor, but in the majority the man's features were clear enough to identify him.
It was easy to see the vile game Sanchez was playing. Having taken his photograph he waited until Inez's customer left her, then slipped out and followed him. Judging by the men down in the bar most of them would be mates and bosuns from cargo vessels, or passengers who had come ashore for the evening from small coasters. On such birds of passage Sanchez would have wasted his time. But all the odds were that quite a number of port officials and local tradesmen also patronized the Silver Galleon. Those who had also patronized Inez would have been traced by Sanchez to their homes and, no doubt, several of the married men among them were now being squeezed by him for a quota of pesetas every week.
De Quesnoy recalled how Sanchez had boasted to him in Barcelona about blackmailing the unfortunate little Marquesa. It would have been his success in that which had led to him adopting as a regular occupation this infamous way of making money. In disgust the Count threw the prints he was holding back on the bed.
Among them he had seen no print that could possibly have been of Gulia and himself, but he had not yet examined the negatives. Gathering them together he took them to the lamp and, one by one, held them up to the light. As he looked at the sixth he gave a little gasp of delight. This was it, and as he stared at the negative he could hardly believe his good fortune.
In the left upper corner there showed the sharply outlined profile of a small bronze bust, one of a pair that had stood on the top of a low secretaire in his room at San Sebastian. For him that identified beyond all doubt the place of which the shot had been taken, but there was nothing else that could, and the only other thing visible on the negative was a little less than half of a woman's body from her raised arm to her foot. Gulia's elbow protruded because her arm had been round his neck. The blinding flash of the magnesium flare made her limbs in the negative dead black, and the diaphanous nightdress she had been wearing had not even blurred the lovely outline from bust to waist and along the curve of her hip. But where her face should have been, and the back of his head and body, the negative was completely blank.
In an instant he guessed the reason. When Sanchez had tripped and fallen flat in the lily pool the camera case must have come into violent contact with the stone rim of the pool or the ground. The jolt must have damaged the camera itself, so that before Sanchez had a chance to develop the film a little light had seeped in and ruined it.
With a sigh of thankfulness he put it in his pocket.
