Read The Keys of Hell for Free Online

look the same in the fog.”
    “Better come back with me to my hotel,” he said. “It’s just around the corner.” He slipped off his jacket and draped it round her shoulders. “I could probably fix you up with a bed.”
    Laughter bubbled out of her and for a moment she was once again the gay exciting girl he had met so briefly at the Embassy ball.
    “I’m sure you could.”
    He grinned and put an arm round her. “I think you’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.”
    There was the scrape of a shoe on the cobbles behind them and he swung round and saw the other man lurching into the fog, hands to his smashed face.
    Chavasse took a quick step after him and Francesca caught his sleeve. “Let him go. I don’t want the police in on this.”
    He looked down into her strained and anxious face. “If that’s the way you want it.”
    There was something strange here, something he didn’t understand. They walked along the jetty and turned onto the waterfront. As port towns went Matano was reasonably tame, but not so tame that pretty young girls could walk around the dock area at three A . M . and expect to get away with it. One thing was certain. Francesca Minetti must have had a pretty powerful reason for being there.
    The hotel was a small stuccoed building on a corner, an ancient electric sign over the entrance, but it was clean and cheap and the food was good. The owner was a friend of Orsini.
    He slept at the desk, head in hands, and Chavasse reached over to the board without waking him and unhooked the key. They crossed the hall, mounted narrow wooden stairs and passed along a whitewashed corridor.
    The room was plainly furnished with a brass bed, a washstand and an old wardrobe. As elsewhere in the house, the walls were whitewashed and the floor highly polished.
    Francesca stood just inside the door, one hand to the neck of her dress, holding it in place, and looked around approvingly.
    “This is nice. Have you been here long?”
    “Almost a week now. My first holiday in a year or more.”
    He opened the wardrobe, rummaged among his clothes and finally produced a black polo neck sweater in merino wool. “Try that for size while I get you a drink. You look as if you could do with one.”
    She turned her back and pulled the sweater over her head as he went to a cupboard in the corner. He took out a bottle of whisky and rinsed a couple of glasses in the bowl on the washstand. When he turned she was standing by the bed watching him, looking strangely young and defenseless, the dark sweater hanging loosely about her.
    “Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down,” he said.
    There was a cane chair by the French window leading to the balcony and she slumped into it and leaned her head against the glass window, staring into the darkness. Out at sea, a foghorn boomed eerily and she shivered.
    “I think that must be the loneliest sound in the world.”
    “Thomas Wolfe preferred a train whistle,” Chavasse said, pouring whisky into one of the glasses and handing it to her.
    She looked puzzled. “Thomas Wolfe? Who was he?”
    He shrugged. “Just a writer—a man who knew what loneliness was all about.” He swallowed a little of his whisky. “Girls like you shouldn’t be on the waterfront at this time of the morning, I suppose you know that? If I hadn’t arrived when I did, you’d have probably ended up in the water after they’d finished with you.”
    She shook her head. “It wasn’t that kind of assault.”
    “I see.” He drank some more of his whisky and considered the point. “If it would help, I’m a good listener.”
    She held her glass in both hands and stared down at it, a troubled look on her face, and he added gently, “Is this something official? A Bureau operation, perhaps?”
    She looked up, real alarm on her face, and shook her head vigorously. “No, they know nothing about it and they mustn’t be told, you must promise me that. It’s a family matter, quite private.”
    She