Mistral suddenly felt very sorry for her aunt. She was old and cross and at times her face was as hard as granite.

‘She could not look like that and be happy,’ Mistral thought, and she felt a sense of pity well up inside her.

She was just about to say something affectionate to Aunt Emilie, she even contemplated slipping her hand into hers, when Emilie perceived a card lying on a table just inside the door of the sitting room.

‘Who left this?’ she asked, walking towards it and picking it up.

‘I have no idea,’ Mistral answered. ‘Jeanne did not say that anyone had called.

She looked round for Jeanne, but the maid had gone. It was then that Emilie gave a cry and it seemed to Mistral to be a cry of horror. She was holding the card close to her eyes so that she could read it, and her face, drained of all colour, was strangely contorted.

‘Henry Dulton!’ she said in a high voice which suddenly cracked. ‘Henry Dulton!’

7

Emilie sat alone in the sitting room waiting for Henry Dulton. On his card, written in the thin spidery writing which she knew so well, were inscribed the words,

I will call on you at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

She read the sentence over and over again, striving to find in it some meaning but the obvious one – that he had recognised her and was coming to claim her acquaintance.

All night she had tossed sleeplessly on her bed, trying to think how she could delude and circumvent him or how she could keep him quiet for at least a few more weeks.

To the last question she knew the answer. Money! She could recall all too vividly Henry Dulton’s greed for money, the way he would undertake any commission, however squalid and unpleasant, if it was made worth his while.

She could see him now coming to 5 Rue de Roi for his commission on the clients he had introduced. She had always hated him, hated the way he came softly, almost silently, into a room, the way his eyes were shifty behind the pale lashes which, matching his almost colourless hair, gave him the appearance of a sleek ferret.

Yet he had his uses. It would have been stupid to dismiss him because of a mere personal prejudice, and she had accepted him, as she had accepted the other employees at No. 5, with a philosophical toleration.

Yet it was the most diabolical ill fortune that Henry Dulton of all people should have turned up at Monte Carlo just at this particular moment. She had never imagined him working anywhere except in Paris, and yet she should have known that where there was wealth and luxury and pickings to be obtained from those who were rich Henry Dulton would be around.