Dennis Wheatley - Vendetta in Spain

'Neither are you a friend of Sanchez,' she took him up quickly. 'That was made very clear from your fear that he would send a knife whizzing at you.'

'No,' he agreed. 'It would be pointless for me to continue to pretend that Sanchez and I are anything but enemies.'

Her black eyes, no longer misted by tears, flashed angrily. Stamping her foot, she burst out, 'Then why in the name of Shaitan did you not tell me so in the first place?'

'Because I believed him to be your lover.'

'What led you to believe that?'

Putting up his revolver, he showed her the photograph of herself and said, 'On about the twenty-fourth of August Sanchez fled from Barcelona and there was some reason to think that he had gone to Granada. Recently he has been in San Sebastian. Four nights ago I had a fight with him, and this photograph fell out of his pocket. As it was taken in Granada, that confirmed my belief that he had been lying low here. From that it was no great jump to the assumption that he was your lover and you had been hiding him.'

With a glance at the photograph she muttered sullenly, 'You were right. He came here first last summer on a holiday. He is a handsome devil and I let him have his way with me. That lasted for about ten days. He turned up again this August and told me that he was on the run. I had no permanent lover at the moment; so we took up with one another where we had left off and I let him share my cave.'

'How long did he remain here this time?'

'About a fortnight. He left on a Wednesday. I think . . . yes . . . it was September the 8th.'

'And he has not been back since. Today, I mean; even to see you for an hour or leave a message for you?'

'He neither has been back, nor will be.'

'You cannot be sure of that. I believe him to be making his way south by slow trains and branch lines. That could easily take him a day longer than I reckoned on. He may quite well turn up tomorrow.'

'I tell you he will not. He will never return here; no, not if you wait for him till Doomsday.'

'How can you be so certain of that?'

La Torcera's face suddenly contorted into a fierce scowl and she cried, 'Because he knows that if he did I'd stick a knife in his guts. He left me for another woman, and not content with that the swine stole my savings to go off with her.'

Convinced that all this time she had been lying to protect her lover, de Quesnoy had remained blind to any other possibility. But her bitter words had the ring of truth. Now it flashed upon him that he had completely misinterpreted her act of spitting in his face. She had done so not because he had somehow given it away that he was after Sanchez's blood, but because she had accepted his statement that he was Sanchez's intimate friend.

He gave a rueful laugh. 'It seems that for the past quarter of an hour we have been at cross purposes. That was my fault, of course; although I had no means of guessing that Sanchez had given you grounds to hate him. Still, now that we understand one another we must work together, and with luck I'll be able to aid you in getting your revenge. Have you any idea where he would be likely to have made for after leaving San Sebastian last Tuesday?'

She shook her head. 'No, none. I wish I had. I'd give a year's work to get even with him.'

'While he was here did he never mention to you any other places in which he had friends who might have hidden him?'

'No. He spoke little of his affairs, except when following in the newspapers what had occurred after he left Barcelona. The school his father ran there was closed by the police, and his father, brother and many of his friends were arrested. He attributed all this ill-fortune to a Conde de Quesnoy who, according to news he received here through the anarchist grape-vine, had had a miraculous escape from death and had denounced them all.'

De Quesnoy smiled. 'Although I am not a Prince I can give you my word that I am a Conde. I am that Conde de Quesnoy of whom he spoke. It is tfue that I denounced these anarchists and Sanchez's having escaped the net is one reason why I am hunting him. But I suppose you have anarchist sympathies yourself; so had you not personal grounds for wishing to be revenged you would refuse to help me catch him.'

She shrugged. 'I think we gipsies are all anarchists at heart, but we have enough troubles without mixing ourselves up in politics; and all of us thought the attempt to kill the handsome young King and his bride a most wicked thing. That you are an anarchist-hater and hunting Sanchez on that account makes no difference to me. I'd still aid you to catch him if I could, but I see no way to do so.'

After a moment's thought, de Quesnoy asked, 'What of this woman for whom he deserted you? Tell me about her.'

'She was not one of the troupe, but a girl of the town named Inez Giudice; a little red-headed bitch in her early twenties.'

'Was she a native of Granada?'

'No. After they had gone I made inquiries about her and I learned that she had been living in Granada for only about six months. She is the daughter of a Cadiz shipwright, and had been brought up there.'

'That may prove a clue worth having,' murmured the Count. 'Since Sanchez was being hunted by the police he would still have had to keep under cover, and if she had lived in Cadiz all her life she would have friends there who could hide him; particularly as with your savings they would have had ample money to make it worth-while for such friends of hers to aid them. It seems to me that the odds are definitely on their having gone to Cadiz.'

La Torcera nodded. 'You are probably right. But about the money, I have no wish to mislead you. It was not the savings of a lifetime; no more than about eight hundred pesetas. I had put by a considerably greater sum, but I confess that last spring I squandered it on a handsome young matador for whom I developed a sudden foolish passion.'

'Eight hundred pesetas,' repeated the Count. 'No, that would not have kept them very long if they had to use money to keep still tongues in other people's heads. And Sanchez was in no position to earn any money. If he has returned to her they must by now be on their uppers.'

With a shrug and a cynical smile La Torcera replied, 'At all events they'll not starve. She is a whore by profession, and you may be sure that Sanchez would feel no scruples about sending her out on to the streets to earn enough to keep him in food and wine.'

'Did you ever see her?' the Count asked.

'Yes; she was twice brought here to see the troupe perform by a man who enjoyed Flamenco. He was, I suppose, one of her regular patrons. Sometimes Sanchez used to watch the dancing from behind the curtain that screens the entrance to the big cave. That is probably how he first saw her and became enamoured of her. But every few nights he became bored from having nothing to do up here, and in spite of the risk he ran I could not prevent him from going down into the city. It must have been on one such occasion that he saw her again and became acquainted with her. In any case, after he had left me, and I was near distraught with grief and rage, the brother of one of the girls in the troupe told me that he had seen them together on the station platform. That is how I know that it was she who took him from me.'

'Then you would be able to recognize her?'

'Yes, anywhere,' La Torcera's eyes glowed with vindictiveness. 'And should I ever come upon her I'll pull every hair from her red head.'

'I think not,' said de Quesnoy quietly. 'At least not until after she has led us to Sanchez.'

La Torcera glowered at him. 'What do you mean by that?'

'I mean that as there seems a good chance that he went with her to Cadiz and by now has rejoined her there, it is my intention that we too should pay a visit to that ancient port. Since you say you would have no difficulty in recognizing her and the city is of no great size, by haunting the bars and public places where prostitutes ply their trade it should not be long before you spot her and can find out where they are lodging. Once you have done that I will settle accounts with Sanchez for both of us; his woman I shall be happy to leave to you.'