Dennis Wheatley - Vendetta in Spain

That night they followed the same routine as they had on the previous one, but again La Torcera had no luck.

Next morning de Quesnoy paid another visit to the park and sat there for quite a time considering the situation. It was now October the 3rd, so six days since Sanchez had taken that incriminating photograph in San Sebastian. If it had been his intention to return to Cadiz he could easily have reached the city, even by slow trains, three days ago. The inference that he had, had been drawn only from the fact that his latest woman, Inez Giudice, was a native of Cadiz. On leaving Granada he might quite well have gone off with her elsewhere. If so, for the time being there was no possible means of tracing them.

However, the Count reasoned, six days having elapsed, by now Sanchez should have made an attempt to exert some form of blackmail through the photograph. Allowing two days for him to reach the place where he meant to go to earth, a third for a letter from him to reach San Sebastian, a fourth for Gulia to send it on to Granada and a fifth for the hall-porter to forward it on to him in Cadiz, it should have arrived that morning. As that schedule made no allowance for delays, de Quesnoy felt it might easily be another couple of days before Sanchez's ultimatum reached him.

When it did, the advantage would lie with the enemy, as there could no longer be any hope of taking him by surprise. To stand any chance of getting hold Of that damnable photograph he, de Quesnoy, would have to walk into whatever trap Sanchez might set for him. It was a gloomy prospect; but there was still a chance that Sanchez might be in Cadiz, or that Inez might be found and bribed or forced to give information as to his whereabouts; so there must be no relaxing the search for them until the letter turned up to provide a definite, if dangerous, new opening.

That night La Torcera again set off on her quest while the Count kept a lonely vigil. She returned much earlier than expected. It was only a little after midnight and he had not long left the lounge to go up to their suite. To his delight he saw at a glance that she had news. Her eyes sparkling with excitement, she exclaimed:

'I've found her! It was shfcer luck. I was doing my act as usual in one of the bars when I overheard two men at a table talking. One said to the other, "Have you been to the Silver Galleon lately? There's a red-head there, a girl named Inez, that I used to know as a kid. She left Cadiz some time ago but she came back last month. She won't play for less than ten pesetas, but you can take my word that she's worth every centavo of it." '

'And then?' asked the Count eagerly.

'I felt sure he must have been speaking of the bitch we're after; so in another bar I asked the whereabouts of the Silver Galleon. It is a fair-sized inn some way from the red-light district but still on the water-front. It lies behind the little park in which stands the memorial to the Cortes. I went off there at once and my luck was in. The place has a cosy little bar and is frequented by the better class of seamen. There were eight or ten of them in there drinking and playing dice, and only two girls: Inez and another. I hung about for a bit and again luck favoured me. One of the men had been standing her drinks and they went out together. I shuffled after them and managed to see that they didn't leave the house. They went upstairs together; so evidently she's got a room there and the landlord is in on it, taking a rake-off on her earnings.'

T suppose you saw no sign of Sanchez?'

She shook her head. 'No, none. But at that hour it would have been surprising to see them together. If she is keeping him, as I have no doubt she is, the last thing he would do is to go about with her in the evenings. Even if he loitered in the same bar it would soon get round that he was her bully and be likely to scare off her possible customers.'

'That's true. Anyhow, your having run her to earth is half the battle. With luck now, she'll lead me to him.'

For a moment de Quesnoy was tempted to go out there and then on the chance that by the time he reached the Silver Galleon Inez would be back down in the bar hoping to pick up another customer, but he put the idea from him. She might be spending the night with the man who had gone upstairs with her, or when he had left her decide not to come down again; and he did not want to show himself in the bar until he could be reasonably certain that she would be there.

Next morning he made out a draft on the Banco de Coralles for four thousand pesetas in favour of La Torcera. With the thousand he had already given her she would be receiving about £200 for her services, but he did not consider that an excessive price for having enabled him again to get on Sanchez's track, seeing that there had been no other possible way of his doing so.

He thought it very unlikely that her troupe at Granada would refuse to take her back after her few days' absence or, if they did, that she would not be able to get a job as a dancer in a cafe. In any case, with her normally modest way of living, such a sum would keep her for a year, or provide a much fatter nest egg than that of which Sanchez had robbed her. Even so, as he had promised her the money, he was surprised and touched when, on his giving her the draft, she burst into tears, kissed his hands, called down blessings on him and declared him to be a true hidalgo.

Before lunch he went out and bought at a ready-made clothes shop a blue cloth suit with a square-breasted jacket, a muffler and a flat cap with a shiny peak, which would give him a somewhat nautical appearance. Then, thinking it probable that he might be up all night, he went to bed in the afternoon and had a long sleep.

In the evening he had an early meal sent up to the sitting-room and afterwards changed into the rig-out that he had bought earlier in the day. No letter forwarded on by Gulia had arrived that morning, so La Torcera's having located Inez Giudice remained his only chance of getting on Sanchez's trail. That he might not have returned to her after his trip to San Sebastian, or had returned and since left her for some other woman, were, the Count realized, depressing possibilities. But should either prove the case he might still hope to deal with Inez as he had with La Torcera and secure from her a new lead to his quarry.

At half past nine, still speculating, not altogether pessimistically, on his chances of settling accounts with Sanchez that night, he walked out of the Hotel Atlantico. He had left La Torcera up in the sitting-room immersed in a new batch of picture papers. Now that she had done the job that he had required of her and he had paid her off, it was his intention the following morning to put her safely on a train back to Granada. The one thing he did not expect was that he would never see her again.

The Red-headed Harlot

Having been indoors most of the day de Quesnoy had intended to walk to the Silver Galleon, but it was something over a mile away and within a few minutes of leaving the Atlantico there was a distant rumble of thunder, then it came on to rain; so he picked up a carriage. It set him down opposite the flamboyant monument commemorating the Cortes held in Cadiz in 1812, that had given Spain her famous Liberal Constitution, then he walked through the park in the direction La Torcero had told him that the Silver Galleon lay.

He found the inn without difficulty. It stood on a corner and was a rambling old seventeenth-century two-storied building with tiled roofs that buckled here and there, gable windows and an archway in its front that faced on to the park and port. After inspecting its two visible sides, the Count walked through the archway to find, as he expected, that it led to a yard that had stabling for three or four vehicles and about a dozen horses. A covered wagon stood in its centre but no one was about.