“Thanks many times,” said Timothy.
He went first to the Credit Lyonnais, and found the manager extremely polite but uncommunicative. It was not the practice of the bank, he said, to disclose the addresses of their clients. He would not say that Madame Serpilot was his client, but if she were, he could certainly not give her address to any unauthorised person. From this Timothy gathered that Madame Serpilot was a client. He went on to the Mairie and met with better fortune. The Mairie had no respect for persons. It was there to supply information and what the Mairie of Monte Carlo does not know about Monaco, the cleverest detective force in the world would be wasting its time trying to discover.
Madame Serpilot lived at the Villa Condamine. The Villa Condamine was not, as the name suggested, in the poorer part of Monte Carlo but in that most exclusive territory, the tiny peninsula of Cap Martin.
“Has madam been a resident long?”
“For one hundred and twenty-nine days,” replied the official promptly. “Madame hired the villa furnished from the agent, of the Grand Duchess Eleana who, alas! was destroyed in that terrible revolution.”
He gave Timothy some details of the family from which the Grand Duchess had sprung, the amount of her income in pre-war days, and was passing to her eccentricities when Timothy took his departure. He was not interested in the Grand Duchess Eleana, alive or dead.
CHAPTER XIX
HE went to the house agent on the main street and from him procured the exact position of Madame Serpilot’s residence.
“An old madame?” said the agent. “No, monsieur, I cannot say that she is old. And I cannot say that she is young.”
He thought a moment, as though endeavouring to find some reason for this reticence on the subject of her age, and then added: