Dennis Wheatley - Vendetta in Spain

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.

No damning print could have been made from it, so there was no longer the least risk that Jose de Cordoba would ever learn of his wife's desperate infatuation or believe that his friend had betrayed him with her. Even if by some freak of chance he did see the ruined negative and thought he recognized the bronze bust in it, there was nothing whatever to prove that the portion of woman's body was Gulia's. It might have been another similar bust in another house and any well-made tallish woman. That being the case, the Count decided to keep it as a memento of a night upon which he had been tempted almost beyond endurance.

The fact that the negative had been spoilt explained why Sanchez had made no use of it, and why no blackmailing letter had been forwarded on by Gulia. As de Quesnoy realized that, he wondered what Sanchez was up to now. Inez had said that he spent most of his nights drinking and arguing at a political club. Perhaps on some nights he did, and this was one of them. But he certainly did not spend all of them that way, as was shown by the photographs spread out over the bed.

Suddenly an idea came to the Count that made him laugh. How surprised Sanchez would have been if he had remained lurking in the room that night and, on hearing Inez bring a customer up to the room next door, got his camera ready, then on peering through the letter-box slit found that her customer was the deadly enemy that he believed to be still in San Sebastian.

It was at that moment that he was taken by surprise himself. He heard a noise behind him. Swinging round he saw that the door to the corridor had opened, and framed in the doorway stood Sanchez.

The Broken Mirror

The explanation for Sanchez's unexpected arrival flashed instantly upon de Quesnoy. To guard, as far as possible, against Inez having been picked up by some other man before he reached the Silver Galleon he had gone there* early. It could not have been much after a quarter past ten when she had taken him up to her room. Most nights she would probably not have succeeded in attracting a customer who would pay her price until about eleven. His search of the bedroom and looking through the photographs must have taken him longer than he thought and had brought him up to the time when, normally, Sanchez would return with the hope of finding that she had a man with her whom he might be able to photograph and blackmail.