Everything in his life, it seemed, was brand new. His recently acquired dog, Ranger, a handsome Dutch Decoy Spaniel, lay puddled round his slippered feet, sleeping in the warm yellow sunlight. He had reached down to idly stroke the dog’s head when Ranger looked up suddenly and growled loudly.
“Good lord, what on earth is that, Mrs. Purvis?” Ambrose sputtered.
“What is what, Mr. Congreve?”
There had come down the hall such a pounding and banging at the front door as ever you heard and yet the woman was blissfully unaware, snipping away at the blue Chinese toile paper.
“That infernal pounding. At the front door, I believe. Is the bell out of commish?”
“Let me find out, sir. Did the bell ring?”
“Mrs. Purvis, please.”
“I’m just going as fast as I can then, aren’t I, sir?”
Ranger raced down the worn olive-green Axminster carpet of the hallway ahead of her, barking furiously. Congreve, nose buried in the Times, tried to ignore the muffled conversation coming from the front hall and concentrate on an article he was reading. Apparently, the bloody French were holding naval exercises with the Chinese. And it wasn’t the first time. This was the seventh. Something was clearly afoot with England’s irksome neighbors across the Channel. After years of trying to forge a united Europe, they seemed to be striking out on their own. It was a hoary tale, but a true one. Perhaps he’d lean on young Bulling a bit more heavily in future.
“It’s two gentlemen to see you, sir,” Mrs. Purvis said, returning.
“About what?”
“Didn’t say, Mr. Congreve. Only that it was a matter of some urgency.”
“Good lord, is there no escape?” Congreve said, getting to his feet and zipping up the wool jumper he’d slipped into against the early morning chill. “Tell them I’ll be right there, Mrs. Purvis. Invite them inside, offer tea, but keep an eye on them. And see if you can call off the dog, please. It wouldn’t do to have him bite a policeman.”
“Policemen? How’d you come by that?”
“I may have mentioned that I am a detective, Mrs. Purvis. It’s my nature to take a mystery and bend it to my will.”
“But—”
“Men in pairs, Mrs. Purvis, are always coppers.”
“Or they may be a nice gay couple, mayn’t they be, Mr. Congreve?” she said, with a twinkle of her blue eyes.
Chapter Three
Cannes
TONIGHT, THE TRAFFIC ALONG LE CROISETTE, THAT BROAD, palm-lined boulevard that hugs the shoreline of this normally glittering village, was minimal. It was fiendishly cold. A few desultory black Mercedes taxis cruised the big hotels and, now and then, a startlingly red Ferrari or chrome-yellow Lamborghini with inscrutable Arabic license tags would roar up under the porte-cochere of the Majestic or the Hotel Carlton and disgorge a leggy blonde just down from Paris to visit her “sick uncle.”
Thing about all these bloody sick uncles, Hawke had noticed on prior occasions, was that they seldom if ever emerged from their shuttered lairs to take the air. So, what on earth did they do in there with those leggy nieces all day?
At just after ten that evening, a Friday night in early May, in a gilded grey-and-white bedroom at the Hotel Carlton, Alexander Hawke, recently arrived, and a woman, recently encountered, were making noisy love, thrashing about on an ornate and very rumpled bed. Kissing the woman hard on the lips, he stole a glance at the faintly glowing blue dial on his wrist. The dive watch confirmed the atomic clock in his head, an internal biological device that was usually accurate to within one minute.
Yes. Time to get a move on.
“Du vent,” the woman murmured, pausing in her own fluid rhythms to gaze at the louvered shutters banging violently against the French doors of the terrace. The howling cold wind had to be gusting upward of thirty knots.
“Yes,” he said, gently stroking her cheek. “What about it?”
“C’est terrible, eh?”
“Hmm,” Hawke said, a bit preoccupied at the moment.
Hawke’s back arched involuntarily. A cry escaped his lips. She was still breathing hard, sitting astride him, and he admired her strong ivory profile in silhouette. She was naked save for the black sable stole draped over her shoulders, loosely fastened at the neck with a diamond brooch, probably an old Van Cleef by the look of the setting. Beads of sweat formed a rivulet between the hills of her dark-tipped breasts and there was a light sheen of moisture on her high forehead.
She was strikingly beautiful. Astonishingly so. Her name, Commander Hawke had only recently discovered, was Jet. She was, apparently, a celebrity sufficiently famous to have but a single name. A film star of some magnitude in China. Hawke, who favored the luminous black-and-white motion pictures made on Hollywood back lots or at Shepperton Studios before and during the war, had never seen one of her films. Nor did he care to. His idea of a one-name star was Bogart.
In fact, beyond her dark eyes, her red lips, the soft contours of her body, and the confines of this vast bed, there was very little he did know about the woman.
They had met that very afternoon at a posh luncheon at the Hotel du Cap over at Antibes. A German tycoon named Augustus von Draxis had hosted the affair (held on the green lawns beneath the pines of his pale blue Villa Felix), and he had graciously ferried a few guests over from the Carlton pier aboard his sleek Riva launch. As it happened, Hawke and the woman were seated together in the stern for the short and stormy voyage across the bay at Cannes to Cap d’Antibes. It was spectacularly rough going, and he had admired both her cheek and her cheerful nonchalance.
“Well, you’ve certainly got good sea legs for a woman,” Alex Hawke said to her. Her expression hinted that she did not take this as a compliment.
“Il fait froid,” she said, shivering. She was eyeing his somewhat shabby Irish fisherman’s sweater. Besides his navy kit and dinner jacket, he didn’t have much in the way of wardrobe. The woman was wearing a very short black dress, raw silk, with bare shoulders and a necklace of large Tahitian black pearls in graduated strands. Quite expensive baroques, Hawke thought, noticing their irregular shapes. Jet had not dressed for heavy weather. She had dressed for men.
“Sorry,” he said, pulling the thing over his head and handing it to her. “How thoughtless.” He still had on his old blue flannel shirt, which offered a modicum of protection from the wind.
“Right,” she said, somehow donning his thick woolen sweater with only minimal further disturbance to either her severely styled black hair or her dramatic makeup. He found himself watching her every move. Her gestures were economical, almost balletic, and Hawke found himself mesmerized. He knew quite a few men who were besotted with Oriental women. He had never quite understood the fascination until this very moment.
Looking perhaps at his own thick black hair and sharp blue eyes, she interrupted his reverie. “You are Irish, no?”
“No. I’m a half-breed. English father, American mother.”
She seemed to consider that briefly, but gave no reply. She did, however, adjust her black pleated skirt, giving him a glimpse of lush pale thigh and filigreed stocking tops held up by black suspenders. It was a fashion statement he’d always found profoundly appealing.
“Staying at the Carlton, are you?” Hawke asked. He wasn’t all that accustomed to flirting (if that’s what this was), and he felt awkward. If his poor attempts at conversation with this beautiful woman sounded like so much cheap tin to his own ear, he could only imagine what they must sound to hers.