"Damn the scoundrel!" he ripped between clinched teeth. "How I wish I could show him up! Who was with him?"
Nikka and I both shook our heads.
"There were three people in the tonneau," answered Nikka, "but the cover was up, and they were buried in wraps. Did you notice your pretty lady, Watty?"
"No, sir. I couldn't say."
All the way to Dover Hilyer's green car tracked our wheel marks two or three hundred yards behind. Once, near Godmersham, Hugh speeded in an endeavor to shake him off. But Hilyer stuck to us without difficulty, and ran up close enough to show his derisive grin at the end of the spurt.
On the channel boat again we had the sensation of being watched, although we could not have pointed to any persons and accused them of spying; and certainly none of the members of the Hilyer house party was in evidence. Hilyer, himself, called good-by to us from the dock.
"Have a good time," he shouted genially. "If you get to Constantinople, you may see me later."
At Calais we passed the Customs and passport officials expeditiously because both Hugh and Nikka were personages—a doubtful asset, as we were soon to learn. And on the Paris train we actually thought that we had eluded surveillance—until we rolled into the Gare du Nord and started to disembark. It was Nikka who discovered the little red chalk mark on the door of our compartment, and Watkins who spotted a furtive individual who slunk down the corridor as we stepped into it, a rat-faced fellow of the Apache type that had disappeared during the War and somehow floated back with other scum to the surface of peacetime life.
We were all of us familiar with Paris, Nikka and I perhaps more so than Hugh. And we drove to a small hotel near the Louvre which is noted for its table, its seclusion and its steady patronage. Aside from the fact that it is a little difficult to get a bath there, it is the best hotel I know of in the French capital. The proprietor welcomed us as old friends, and we were provided with the choicest fare and the most comfortable rooms he had to offer.
The four of us were dog-tired—remember, we had been steadily "on the prod," as Hugh said, since we wakened in the early morning hours to repel Toutou's invasion, and the nervous strain had been wearing. But before we turned in, after M. Palombiere's magnificent dinner, Nikka telephoned a private number at the Prefecture of Police.