Dangerous Deception by Anthea Fraser Read Free Book Online Page A

back of the booklet. I opened it and read:
    Sweetheart: I’m passing this to Sinbad to await your arrival. By the time you read it, the full company should be there. Aladdin has directions to the loot, but needs your input as to location. Remember you’re supposed to be lovers
, but in public only –
no shared room! You know the initial impact you have on people, so keep him in check and remember I’ve a very jealous nature! Seriously, darling, take care. We’ve worked so long for this. Shipment arranged according to plan. Burn this when you’ve read it. As always – ‘Jack’
.
    I stared at it for a long time, while my anger ebbed away and panic spread its sticky tentacles over me. The game wasn’t a game any more. I wished vehemently that I’d not opened the envelope. But I had and whoever had pushed it under my door – Sinbad, presumably, whoever he might be – would know that I had.
    My fingers were shaking so much I had difficulty in refolding the paper. I slipped it and the booklet back in the white envelope, and only then did I remember the buff one. Since the damage was done, I might as well open it, too.
    It contained a single slip of paper, printed in the same hand as the note on my dressing-table.
    How now, Goldilocks!
it began breezily.
Glad to report Aladdin will be with us by lunch-time tomorrow. Operation Beanstalk scheduled for Tuesday – reconnaissance necessary Saturday or Sunday among holiday crowds. Can’t disclose identity except in emergency – you know the rules! – but will be on hand if needed. Good luck! Over and out
.
    â€˜Sinbad’
    Snippets of conversation flitted through my brain like crossed telephone wires:
The young lady won’t be here till Sunday
. Evidently someone didn’t know that.
When the gentleman joins you … The chap can’t get here till tomorrow
.
    So what could I make of it all? I wondered feverishly. It seemed a man and woman should have arrived here today, but had been independently delayed. Jack had phoned the Plas Dinas – where, perhaps, they’d arranged to meet and come on together? – to let her know ‘Aladdin’ had been held up, but was told she’d already left for Carreg Coed. So he’d phoned Sinbad – on his mobile, presumably, since the hotel knew nothing of the call. And Sinbad, not knowing the girl’s arrival had also been postponed, assumed, like Gareth before him, that I was she.
    But what lay behind it all? What did the cross on the plan of the castle signify, what was ‘the loot’, and what, in heaven’s name, was ‘Operation Beanstalk’? In a macabre way, the use of these nursery names made the whole affair more menacing.
    My first basic instinct was flight. If I left straight after breakfast, with luck no one but the Davieses would miss me till lunch-time, and by then I could have got clear. But Sinbad, having delivered his message, might well be keeping an eye on me.
    I had a terrifying vision of the little car racing for its life up the tortuous mountain roads, with Aladdin and Sinbad, in grotesque pantomime masks, hot on my heels.
    Anyway, where could I run to? My name and address were in the hotel register – there was nowhere I could hide indefinitely.
    Useless, now, to plead innocence. From whatever motive, I had opened the envelopes and seen the plan. I couldn’t in any event appeal to Sinbad, because I didn’t know who he was. For that matter, I couldn’t trust
anyone
at the hotel, for if ‘the full company’ was gathered here, there was no saying how many were involved.
    There remained the police, but what could I tell them? I didn’t know anything, I had only a plan with a pencilled cross, and I could imagine official reaction to stories about Sinbad and Aladdin.
    There was also still a very faint chance that the danger was imaginary; it
could
still be an elaborate scavenger-hunt,