The Black Baroness by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online

information about the machinations of the enemy and transmitting it to Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust in London.
    Gregory dared not go near the British Legation or be seen with any of its officials, for fear of arousing suspicion among Paula’s set, so he could not put anything through in the Legation Bag, but as Norway was still at peace there was no censorship of mail leaving the country and he was able to communicate by the ordinary post. There was the risk that his letters might be opened or stopped by people in the Norwegian post-office who were in the pay of the Nazis, but that had to be taken, and in order to minimise such a risk he sent a duplicate of each letter that he wrote, on the following day, and used the utmost discretion in his communications.
    His first effort was to buy an English edition of Ibsen’s play,
The Rats
, on the blank front page of which he wrote:
With best wishes for a happy birthday, from Gregory
. Underneath his signature he put
Oslo
and the date. That would be quite sufficient to inform Sir Pellinore that he had got safely out of Russia and had arrived in Norway, but the astute old gentleman would naturally speculate on the meaning of this strange present, and, having looked through it to see that no passages were specially marked, he would undoubtedly concentrate upon the title.
    By the same air-mail Gregory sent a postcard to his faithful henchman, Rudd, on which he wrote the laconic message:
Having a grand time here, except for the fact that the whole place is overrun with vermin
, knowing quite well that Rudd would immediately take the postcard to Sir Pellinore, who, linking rats and vermin, would guess that Gregory referred to the human variety.
    A few days later he wrote a long, chatty letter to his nonexistent half-brother, Otto Mentzendorff, an entirely bogus personality who was supposed to be Sir Pellinore’s foreign valet. In it he said that he had succeeded in obtaining a situation as butler to a German Countess, although he omitted to mention the Countess’s name. He then went on to describe life as the Countess’s servant and the parties she gave, disclosing the fact that all her German women acquaintances had Norwegian men-friends who held positions of some importance. There was not a word of harm or slander in the letter; it was just the sort of screed that one gossip-minded servant with a sense ofhumour might have sent to another, and a good half of it was devoted to a description of a mythical young woman who was supposed to be the Countess’s lady’s-maid upon whose virtue the writer had very definite designs.
    By the time he had been in Norway a fortnight the details about his commerce with this buxom young Norwegian had reached such heights of both temperament and temperature that if anyone was following the correspondence the reader would have paid scant attention to the rest of the letter but waited for the next instalment with the utmost anxiety.
    Had the writer’s plan for getting into the girl’s room succeeded or not?
No time for more; they’re calling for drinks
.
    Yes, it had, but he feared that their mistress had seen him slip through the door. Was he discovered?
No time for more. That accursed front-door bell again!
    No, he had not been discovered, but the girl had been so scared that she had turned him out immediately and forced him to leave by the window. There followed the night on which they had had the house to themselves—a godsent opportunity; supper; the girl well primed with cherry brandy. Then:
No time for more. The Countess will wear the legs off me! I am late in taking her filthy poodle for its evening outing
.
    So the hectic saga continued, and Sir Pellinore was kept well posted as to who was taking an interest in whom in Oslo. The man who featured most prominently in these reports was the Air Attaché at the German Legation, a Captain Kurt von Ziegler. He was a lean, fair-haired man with a long, pointed nose and rather a pleasant smile, and he