“I’m not surprised to hear you say that Miss Trevert has been doped,”
Robin remarked. “I found her here in a house on the outskirts of
Rotterdam in the hands of two men, one of whom is believed to be
implicated in a mysterious case of suspected murder in England. Through
the part he played this morning, he has probably run his head into the
noose. But he’ll have it out again if we delay an instant. I told the
manager that yarn about the dentist to avoid enquiries and waste of
time. I have here a note from some man I don’t know, addressed to Miss
Trevert, warning her of a grave danger threatening her. It corroborates
to some extent what I have told you. Here ... read it for yourself!”
He handed the doctor the note signed “W. Schulz.”
The doctor read it through carefully.
“What I would propose to you,” said Robin, “is that we two should go
off at once to this Herr Schulz and find out exactly what he knows.
Then we can decide what action there is to be taken ...”
He paused for the doctor’s reply. The latter searched Robin’s face with
a glance.
“I’m your man,” he said shortly. “And, by the way, my name’s
Collingwood ... Robert Collingwood.”
“There’s a car downstairs,” said Robin, “and a guide to show us the
way. Shall we go?”
Five minutes later, under the newsboy’s expert guidance, the car drew
up in front of the small clean house with the neat green door bearing
the name of “Schulz.” Leaving the boy to mind the car, they rang the
bell. The door was opened by the fat woman in the pink print dress.
Robin gave the woman his card. On it he had written “About Miss
Trevert.” Speaking in German the woman bade them rather roughly to bide
where they were, and departed after closing the front door in their
faces. She did not keep them waiting long, however, for in about a
minute she returned. Herr Schulz would receive the gentlemen, she said.
Within, the house was spotlessly clean with that characteristic German
house odour which always seems to be a compound of cleaning material
and hot grease. Up a narrow staircase, furnished in plain oil-cloth
with brass stair-rods, they went to a landing on the first floor. Here
the woman motioned them back and, bending her head in a listening
attitude, knocked.
“_Herein_!” cried a guttural German voice.
The room into which they entered would have been entitled to a place in
any museum for showing the mode of life of the twentieth-century
Germans. With its stuffy red rep curtains, its big green majolica
stove, its heavy mahogany furniture, its oleographs of Bismarck, Roon,
and Moltke, it might have been lifted bodily from a bourgeois house in
the Fatherland.
A man was sitting at a mahogany roll-top desk as they entered. The air
in the room was thick with the fumes of the cheap Dutch cigar he was
smoking. He was a sturdily built fellow with blond hair shaven so close
to the skull that at a distance he seemed to be bald.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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