The Cold Blooded Vengeance: 10 Mystery & Revenge Thrillers in One Volume. E. Phillips Oppenheim

quite quietly sometimes. Williams here has no other duty except to guard the entrance. Williams, you will allow this gentleman and these two ladies to pass in at a quarter to twelve.”

      The man looked at them searchingly.

      “Certainly, sir,” he said. “No one else?”

      “No one, under any pretext.”

      Sir Timothy hurried back to the hall, and the others followed him in more leisurely fashion. They were all three full of curiosity.

      “I never dreamed,” Margaret declared, as she looked around her, “that I should ever find myself inside this house. It has always seemed to me like one great bluebeard’s chamber. If ever my father spoke of it at all, it was as of a place which he intended to convert into a sort of miniature Hell.”

      Sir Timothy leaned back to speak to them as they passed.

      “You will find a friend over there, Ledsam,” he said.

      Wilmore turned around and faced them. The two men exchanged somewhat surprised greetings.

      “No idea that I was coming until this afternoon,” Wilmore explained. “I got my card at five o’clock, with a note from Sir Timothy’s secretary. I am racking my brains to imagine what it can mean.”

      “We’re all a little addled,” Francis confessed. “Come and join our tour of exploration. You know Lady Cynthia. Let me present you to Mrs. Hilditch.”

      The introduction was effected and they all, strolled on together. Margaret and Lady Cynthia led the way into the winter-garden, a palace of glass, tall palms, banks of exotics, flowering shrubs of every description, and a fountain, with wonderfully carved water nymphs, brought with its basin from Italy. Hidden in the foliage, a small orchestra was playing very softly. The atmosphere of the place was languorous and delicious.

      “Leave us here,” Margaret insisted, with a little exclamation of content. “Neither Cynthia nor I want to go any further. Come back and fetch us in time for our appointment.”

      The two men wandered off. The place was indeed a marvel of architecture, a country house, of which only the shell remained, modernised and made wonderful by the genius of a great architect. The first room which they entered when they left the winter-garden, was as large as a small restaurant, panelled in cream colour, with a marvellous ceiling. There were tables of various sizes laid for supper, rows of champagne bottles in ice buckets, and servants eagerly waiting for orders. Already a sprinkling of the guests had found their way here. The two men crossed the floor to the cocktail bar in the far corner, behind which a familiar face grinned at them. It was Jimmy, the bartender from Soto’s, who stood there with a wonderful array of bottles on a walnut table.

      “If it were not a perfectly fatuous question, I should ask what you were doing here, Jimmy?” Francis remarked.

      “I always come for Sir Timothy’s big parties, sir,” Jimmy explained. “Your first visit, isn’t it, sir?”

      “My first,” Francis assented.

      “And mine,” his companion echoed.

      “What can I have the pleasure of making for you, sir?” the man enquired.

      “A difficult question,” Francis admitted. “It is barely an hour and a half since we finished diner. On the other hand, we are certainly going to have some supper some time or other.”

      Jimmy nodded understandingly.

      “Leave it to me, sir,” he begged.

      He served them with a foaming white concoction in tall glasses. A genuine lime bobbed up and down in the liquid.

      “Sir Timothy has the limes sent over from his own estate in South America,” Jimmy announced. “You will find some things in that drink you don’t often taste.”

      The two men sipped their beverage and pronounced it delightful. Jimmy leaned a little across the table.

      “A big thing on to-night, isn’t there, sir?” he asked cautiously.

      “Is there?” Francis replied. “You mean—?”

      Jimmy motioned towards the open window, close to which the river was flowing by.

      “You going down, sir?”

      Francis shook his head dubiously.

      “Where to?”

      The bartender looked with narrowed eyes from one to the other of the two men. Then he suddenly froze up. Wilmore leaned a little further over the impromptu counter.

      “Jimmy,” he asked, “what goes on here besides dancing and boxing and gambling?”

      “I never heard of any gambling,” Jimmy answered, shaking his head. “Sir Timothy doesn’t care about cards being played here at all.”

      “What is the principal entertainment, then?” Francis demanded. “The boxing?”

      The bartender shook his head.

      “No one understands very much about this house, sir,” he said, “except that it offers the most wonderful entertainment in Europe. That is for the guests to find out, though. We servants have to attend to our duties. Will you let me mix you another drink, sir?”

      “No, thanks,” Francis answered. “The last was too good to spoil. But you haven’t answered my question, Jimmy. What did you mean when you asked if we were going down?”

      Jimmy’s face had become wooden.

      “I meant nothing, sir,” he said. “Sorry I spoke.”

      The two men turned away. They recognised many acquaintances in the supper-room, and in the long gallery beyond, where many couples were dancing now to the music of a wonderful orchestra. By slow stages they made their way back to the winter-garden, where Lady Cynthia and Margaret were still lost in admiration of their surroundings. They all walked the whole length of the place. Beyond, down a flight of stone steps, was a short, paved way to the river. A large electric launch was moored at the quay. The grounds outside were dimly illuminated with cunningly-hidden electric lights shining through purple-coloured globes into the cloudy darkness. In the background, enveloping the whole of the house and reaching to the river on either side, the great wall loomed up, unlit, menacing almost in its suggestions. A couple of loiterers stood within a few yards of them, looking at the launch.

      “There she is, ready for her errand, whatever it may be,” one said to the other curiously. “We couldn’t play the stowaway, I suppose, could we?”

      “Dicky Bell did that once,” the other answered. “Sir Timothy has only one way with intruders. He was thrown into the river and jolly nearly drowned.”

      The two men passed out of hearing.

      “I wonder what part the launch plays in the night’s entertainment,” Wilmore observed.

      Francis shrugged his shoulders.

      “I have given up wondering,” he said. “Margaret, do you hear that music?”

      She laughed.

      “Are we really to dance?” she murmured. “Do you want to make a girl of me again?”

      “Well, I shouldn’t be a magician, should I?” he answered.

      They passed into the ballroom and danced for some time. The music was seductive and perfect, without any of the blatant notes of too many of the popular orchestras. The floor seemed to sway under their feet.

      “This is a new joy come back into life!” Margaret exclaimed, as they rested for a moment.

      “The first of many,” he assured her.

      They stood in the archway between the winter-garden and the dancing-gallery, from which they could command a view of the passing crowds. Francis scanned the faces of the men and women with intense interest. Many of them were known to him by sight,