Read Online Hide the Baron by John Creasey - Free Book Online Page B

did not know that two men were plotting, at that moment, to kill both him and Joanna Woburn.
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    Lucien Seale, a large, bony man who had a cold aloofness when meeting strangers, and who was almost a stranger to his intimates, carried the black box out of the taxi which had stopped at Horsham station, and went into the booking hall. The small man who had been with him during the attack on Joanna also got out, but they didn’t travel together. These two had left the escape car, in which the two red-flag men had driven off.
    Seale made quite sure that no one took any particular interest in him, then booked a first-class single to Victoria. He strolled on to the platform. A train was due in ten minutes, and half a dozen people waited about. Seale bought an early London newspaper, and stood by the bookstall, from where he could see the ticket barrier on this platform and on the other side. No one who worried him arrived.
    With the box under his arm, wrapped in the Evening News, he caught the train. He had a first-class carriage to himself as far as Guildford, where a young couple and an old man got in. Beyond a first cursory glance, none of these looked at Lucien Seale.
    Inwardly, he relaxed.
    At Victoria, he was very careful indeed, and it was over a quarter of an hour before he left in a taxi which he picked up outside the station. When he reached his house, near Hampstead Heath, it was a little after eight o’clock, and nearly dark. No one else was there, and he let himself in with a key.
    The house was silent.
    He walked up to the first floor, with the flat box still under his arm, and entered a room which looked more like an office than a study; was furnished in sharp, modern fines. It had a window overlooking a long, narrow back garden, and the garden and house in the next road. Net curtains were placed across the window so that it was impossible for anyone to look in.
    He did not open the box.
    He had been in the house for five minutes when the telephone bell rang.
    â€œHallo,” he said, and listened carefully. “Yes, come at once. Make sure you are alone.”
    He put the receiver down, and then went slowly to another room at the front of the house. This was also curtained so that it couldn’t be overlooked, but he could see out. The front garden was long and narrow, and on the other side of the road there were the walls of a large garden surrounding a big house, darkening in the evening light. No one stood watching.
    When the small man who had been with him at Horsham station arrived, he drove up in a small car.
    He wasn’t followed.
    He also let himself in with a key, and the two men met at the head of the stairs.
    They made a sharp contrast.
    The large man’s face was very thin, had a bony, almost hungry look. His high cheekbones suggested that his ancestry wasn’t all British. He had a curious stealth of movement, and a fixed gaze. The impression that strangers had of him was his lack of humanity. He hardly looked real, but he was real enough, no one was ever likely to like him as a person.
    The other was round-faced, chubby, rather a pleasant-looking little man, with round eyes and a soft little mouth, and a bald spot in dark hair. He would have been at home in any bar or night club, or on any dance-floor. There was nothing robot-like about him, yet when he met the large man, there was similarity; one of tension.
    â€œHeard from the others?” the chubby man asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThey’ll be all right.”
    â€œI am not at all sure that they’ll be all right,” said Lucien Seale. “I see no point in refusing to see the possibility of danger. If it had been handled properly, all would be well. I had arranged for Merrow to be attacked, and that the old man would do everything he could to save Merrow. And he would have. But when Pete lost his head, and killed Gedde and nearly killed the old man, we were in trouble. We wanted the old man alive,