I now saw distinctly that there was some deep plot in progress, and recognised that in all probability my pretty little friend was in peril.
She, the daughter of the missing jeweller of the Rue de la Paix, had been entrapped, and I was carrying her into the hands of her enemies!
Since my association with Bindo and his friends I had, I admit, become as unscrupulous as they were. Before my engagement as the Count’s chauffeur I think I was just as honest as the average man ever is; but there is an old adage which says that you can’t touch pitch without being besmirched, and in my case it was, I suppose, only too true. I had come to regard their ingenious plots and adventures with interest and attention, and marvelled at the extraordinary resource and cunning with which they misled and deceived their victims, and obtained by various ways and means those bright little stones which, in regular consignments, made their way to the dark little den of the crafty old Goomans in the Kerk Straat at Amsterdam, and were exchanged for bundles of negotiable bank-notes.
The police of Europe knew that for the past two years there had been actively at work a gang of the cleverest jewel-thieves ever known, yet the combined astuteness of Scotland Yard with that of the Paris Sureté and the Pubblica Sicurezza of Italy had never suspected the smart, well-dressed, good-looking Charlie Bellingham, who lived in such ease and comfort in Clifford Street, and whose wide circle of intimate friends at country houses included at least two members of the present Cabinet.
The very women who lost their jewels so unaccountably—wives of wealthy peers or City magnates—were most of them Charlie Bellingham’s “pals,” and on more than one occasion it was Charlie himself who gave information to the police and who interviewed thirsty detectives and inquisitive reporters.
The men who worked with him were only his assistants, shrewd clever fellows each of them, but lacking either initiative or tact. He directed them, and they carried out his orders to the letter. His own ever-active brain formulated the plots and devised the plans by which those shining stones passed into their possession, while such a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan was he that he was just as much at home in the Boulevard des Capucines, or the Ringstrasse, as in Piccadilly, or on the Promenade des Anglais.
Yes, Count Bindo, when with his forty “Napier,” he had engaged me, and I had on that well-remembered afternoon first made the acquaintance of his friends in the smoking-room at the Hotel Cecil, had promised me plenty of driving, with a leaven of adventure.
And surely he had fulfilled his promise!
The long white road, winding like a ribbon through the dark olives, with the white villas of Cannes, the moonlit bay La Croisette, and the islands calm in the glorious night, lay before us.
And beside me, interested and trustful, sat the pretty Pierrette—the victim.