Both of them ignored him, and as John ran up the stairs close on his mother's heels he muttered, `Funny he should say that, isn't it? Just the line I took with you last night; but now things are different.'
With a sigh C. B. decided he had better check up on them. His long legs moving effortlessly, he took the stairs .three at a time, and entered Molly's work room just as they went down on their knees in front of a cupboard.
She pulled it open, revealing on the bottom shelf an array of highly dangerous objects. Among them were pistols, bowie knives, grenades, a garotter's cord, several stilettos and coshes, a knuckle duster and a stick of gelignite. Looking down between their shoulders, he asked
`Has that Mills bomb still got its detonator in?'
`Of course!' Molly replied with an air of pride. `Otherwise it would not be a perfect specimen.'
`You crazy woman ! Some day a maid will have the bright idea of cleaning it, and when she pulls the pin out it will go off.'
`Oh no. I'm much too fond of my little collection to let anyone clean it except myself,' she replied lightly.
John was quickly cramming 9 mm. bullets into the spare magazine of the larger of the two automatics. C. B. stooped and with a swift, unexpected grab picked up the weapon. `Nothing doing, partner,' he said firmly, pushing it into his own pocket. `If you insist on risking a spell in a French prison, that is your look out; but I dig my toes in at your taking a running jump to land on the guillotine.'
Turning an angry face up to him, John protested, `You said yourself that if anyone saw her shanghaied we could bust the yacht open without waiting for the police. It's only common sense to take a weapon of some kind.'
Stooping again, C. B, selected a light cosh. It was a beautiful thing, about twelve inches long, its head egg shaped and filled with lead, its stock a thin nine inch steel spring, the whole being covered with dull black leather. `Here, take this then. But don't lam anyone on the head with it; a blow on the shoulder would be quite enough to land most people in hospital for a week.'
`Thanks,' John murmured a little ungraciously; and he began to stuff it first in one pocket, then in another, in an endeavour to find a suitable place for it.
`Ram it down the front of your trousers,' C. B, advised. `Provided you don't push it too far, the top end will keep it from slipping, and it won't prevent you from sitting down in comfort. It is easy to draw from there, and if anyone frisks you for a weapon, in that position there is quite a good chance of it being overlooked.'
As John tucked away the cosh, C. B. turned to Molly. Relieving her of the smaller automatic, which she had been just about to slip in her bag, he said in a tone of mild reproof, `Now, ducks, I really can't allow you to go around shooting people.' But slipping out the magazine he handed it back to her and added, `Lord forbid that I should rob you of all your fun. You can point it at anyone you like now, and it's a small beer to a magnum of champagne that it will prove every bit as effective.'
`Oh, really, Bill!' she pleaded. `Can't I have just one bullet in the chamber, in case I get a chance to fire it? I do so want to see how much light the flash gives.'
`No. I'd rather you took a pot shot at me in the garden to morrow night, if you must have a human target to aim at.'
`You are rude! You infer that I couldn't hit a haystack.'
`Come on!' cried John angrily, from the doorway. `By nattering like this you two are chucking away our only chance of saving Christina.'
C. B. glanced at his watch. `It is just twenty two minutes since we discovered her disappearance. Not bad, considering I had to make a telephone call to Nice. But we would have saved four minutes if you had gone to get the car out when I asked you to, instead of abetting your mother in her whimsies about weapons. Get cracking now.'
John dashed downstairs. The others followed him and collected their coats from the hall. As they walked down the garden path, C. B. said to Molly, `I'm taking you only as a spare driver, if we have to leave the car. I'll have my hands quite full enough preventing that boy of yours from sticking out his neck. You are under orders again. Is that clear?'
`Yes, sir,' said Molly, out of ancient habit and quite meekly.
Once they were in the car John lost not a second, and the moment they were under way he jammed his foot down on the accelerator. As they rounded the second comer they met one of the big auto buses returning from the St. Raphael direction to Cannes and had to swerve violently to avoid it. Molly was thrown sideways on the back seat; C. B. stiffened his long legs and cried
`Go easy, young feller, or you'll break all our necks!' Then he went on in his normal voice. `Don't get the idea that I am sitting down on the job, but the fact is that five minutes either way is unlikely to make much difference now. Try to consider our prospects dispassionately. Jules has the best part of an hour's start of us. If he meant to take her to the yacht and the crew were only waiting till he got her on board to put to sea, they will have sailed long before we get there. We couldn't have caught them, even if we had set off the moment we discovered her disappearance. On the other hand, he could not have been certain that he would succeed in getting hold of her, or if he did at what hour he would be able to pull it off; so the odds are that he would not dare have ordered his crew to stand by from half past eight till dawn, and will have to collect them.'
`That shouldn't take him long.'
`It all depends how many of them there are and whereabouts they live when they are on shore. But that is not my main point: it is his mental attitude of which I am thinking. Once he has got her on board I see no reason at all why he should burst a blood vessel in getting the yacht out of harbour.'
`He would hardly be such a fool as to gamble on our not learning of Christina's disappearance until to morrow morning. She may even have told him that we were expecting her to dine with us.'
`True, but what has he to fear if we do turn up? If we go on board he can have us thrown off again that is unless we are accompanied by the police with a search warrant.'
`How long do you reckon it would take us to get one?'
`As we have not got the ghost of a case, we should have one hell of a job in persuading the police that we had real cause for alarm. We should have to show great persistence and tell our story four or five times before we got high enough up to secure action. With waits between interviewing a series of unenthusiastic officials, that might take us anything up to three hours. Jules must know all about the slowness of police procedure when the applicant for help can produce no definite evidence that any crime has been committed; so up till about eleven o'clock he can afford to snap his fingers at us. Anyhow, that is my appreciation of the situation. Either the yacht has sailed already or we'll find when we get to St. Tropez that, like Drake, we'll have plenty of time for a game of bowls before we go into action.'
`I suppose you are right,' John admitted grudgingly. `I wish that I could take matters so calmly.' But he moderated his pace a little, and did not let the car out full again until they were through St. Raphael and had entered the long flat stretch round the curve of the great bay. It was ten to ten when he jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a halt on the cobbles of St. Tropez harbour.
In summer, at that hour, it would still have been thronged with people, drinking both at the scores of tables outside the cafes and on the waterfront and in the cabins of dozens of craft in the port itself. But it was too early in the year to sit outside at night, and the season for the small yacht owners had not yet begun.
Like most of the ports on that coast, the harbour formed a rectangle with tall, ancient houses on three sides of it. The basin was partially filled by several groups of shipping moored beam to beam. Most of them were fishing boats, or sailing yachts that had been dismantled for the winter; a few were larger, fully powered craft, although not of the size that millionaires had kept for luxury cruises in those waters before the war. Apart from riding lights, it was from the cabin of these bigger vessels that the only lights showing in the harbour came, but the landward end of it was lit by the windows of several cafes, which were still open and occupied by a sprinkling of people.