Dorothy nodded. “I watched her closely while she was in here, and so far as I could make out she didn’t find anything that interested her particularly. The Lawsons must have guessed wrong about Janet writing her father.”
“Well, no, they didn’t,” declared her new ally. “Janet wrote a letter, just as they surmised.”
“But where could it be?” asked Dorothy in a startled whisper, and sat bold upright in bed.
“Probably destroyed by this time,” Mr. Tunbridge chuckled. “There’s no need to worry on that score, Miss Dixon. When Ashton Sanborn spoke to your cousin this afternoon by means of Howard Bright’s headphone set, he learned that Janet proposed doing just what this clever pair here figured upon. Of course she had already written the note, and as there was no safe way to get rid of it in her room, he told her to take it with her when she left. And now if you’ll be good enough, I wish you’d tell me what happened after you took her place in the flat.”
Dorothy gave him a short sketch of her encounter with her uncle and Martin Lawson in Janet’s room, and of the conversation between the two men in the corridor afterward. “All the way up here,” she ended, “I pretended I had a grouch. Mr. Lawson tried to start a conversation several times, but he soon found it wasn’t much fun talking to himself and he gave it up as a bad job.”
“Excellent,” applauded the secret service man, “and quite in keeping with your behavior in the flat. You have done most remarkably well, Miss Dixon. Only—you won’t mind if I warn you not to let first success make you careless.”
“Do you really believe that these people mean to do away with me if they discover I am not what I appear to be, Mr. Tunbridge? It sounds a bit too melodramatic, don’t you think?”
“These Lawsons, husband and wife, are playing for gigantic stakes.” The detective’s voice, though barely audible was extremely grave. “They will stop at nothing. When crooks have at least two murders behind them, they’re not likely to stop at a third.”
“Then—then they are not what they pretend?”
“Certainly not. They’re a pair of high class European crooks named du Val.”