Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes Read Free Book Online

Blackbeard was trailing them. If so, then we had downright bad luck meeting them. All we can do is to disinterest anyone who might have become interested in us through them.” Richard smiled wryly. “You see, young Thornley didn’t mention his brother or Peter until we had reached the station. So there we were, talking for most of the journey, and anyone who passedthe door of the compartment might have thought we were all together. The joke was on me.”
    Frances kissed him. “It probably is only a harmless incident. What about throwing off suspicion with dinner?”
    Half an hour later they left the hotel. The streets were quiet, the restaurants and cafes crowded. A worried Frenchman, hurrying past them, caught sight of a girl’s laughing face under a pert white hat with a red rose, and turned to watch. English, he guessed, as he marked the cut of the man’s suit and that peculiar stride which goes with such a suit. And without a care in the world, he thought. He hurried on, speculating on that peculiar people.
    At that moment he was right. Frances and Richard had abandoned care. Their holiday had begun.

5
PAWN TO KING’S FOURTH
    June ended with their first week in Paris. They were very much on holiday. They rose late and breakfasted at their open window in the warm sunlight which then invaded the small courtyard. The insignificant little man who had watched them from the shadows of his room since their first morning at the hotel still sat far back from his window, but his interest was waning. He wasn’t a romantic, and the appearance each morning of a pretty blonde girl in a dressing-gown pouring coffee for a tall young man who lazily stretched himself on a couch at the open window was beginning to bore him. The leisurely manner in which they breakfasted and dressed annoyed him as much as the sound of their laughter and their English voices. He was wasting his time, he thought angrily, as he watched them leave their room after midday as they always did. The chamber-maid could take care of them.
    The second insignificant man who took over at this point wasequally bored. His feet hurt and he had never been interested in history anyway. He followed Frances and Richard from one church to another, from exhibition to exhibition, from palaces to slums. Towards the end of the week he was beginning to wait for them in a cafe and let them visit the inside of the buildings themselves. For he too had become convinced he was wasting his time.
    The third insignificant man, who joined Richard and Frances while they were having dinner, had slightly better luck. He liked theatres and night clubs. Even the two evenings which they spent more soberly, just sitting at a table in the Café de la Paix, were pleasant, because by that time he was convinced that the Englishman and his wife weren’t going to complicate life for him. So he relaxed and enjoyed the thought that his expenses were paid. He was the only one of the insignificant men who was sorry to receive instructions at the end of the week to switch over to a newly arrived American. He had become so accustomed to their obvious approval of drinking their coffee and liqueur on the pavement in the French manner that he would not have been surprised to see them approach the Café de la Paix again, on Saturday night. He would have approved the fair-haired girl’s black dress and the small white hat with its gay red rose perched over her right eye.
    Frances was nervous, so she talked constantly as they walked up the Avenue de l’Opéra.
    “I’ve enjoyed this week, even if my feet feel two sizes bigger,” was how she summed it up.
    Richard nodded. “It hasn’t been so bad. Life has been simpler than I thought it would be. I begin to feel I was over-suspicious of Blackbeard.”
    Frances stared. “I haven’t seen him again; have you?”
    “No, nor any possible relatives either.” Which would have pleased the insignificant men; no tribute to their ingenuities could have been