Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,114
enough.”
He sat down, crossed his legs, and lounged.
“The very point I made to Mycroft. However, our government does not intend to lose its distinguished guest on a channel crossing. He is far less protected on a steamer than on an express train. His chief of staff and his bodyguard will sit with him in a locked and guarded first-class saloon until he is safely in Dover. One or two of our Scotland Yard friends will come aboard there. You and I will merely have a roving brief, keeping our wits and our noses alert for any whiff of danger during the voyage.”
As international law then stood, Plon Plon would come under the protection of the British crown as soon as the Comtesse de Flandre entered British territorial waters. Thanks to Mycroft’s discussions at Lancaster Gate that morning, such protection was to be represented solely by Sherlock Holmes, with my assistance, until we reached Dover. If the note waiting for me at my club was indeed a challenge, it was plain that his enemies as well as his friends knew well in advance of the prince’s plans. In that case, I drew an uncomfortable conclusion. Either we should discharge our duty to the prince successfully, or we should probably all be dead before the Comtesse de Flandre docked at Dover.
9
For the rest of the week, I found it difficult to share Holmes’s enthusiasm for a fight to the finish. We might simply be victims of our antagonists’ sense of fun. We should board the Comtesse de Flandre at Ostend and disembark at Dover eight hours later, just as though no villainy had been intended. We should watch in the darkness and fog without ever setting eyes upon Plon Plon and his little court in their “royal saloon.” Perhaps whatever meaning we had read into the cryptic words “Comtesse de Flandre” and “New Moon” was entirely of our own invention. Only time would tell. Worst than that, we might land in England to hear that some monstrous robbery or homicide had taken place elsewhere; all our careful planning would have merely ensured that we were not there to prevent it.
I lay awake and tried to imagine why even the most inventive gang of criminals would announce to the world that it was about to board such a ship, hold a prince to ransom, overcome armed guards and a steel grille, and then escape in the middle of the sea. They would be fools to try it. Moran, whatever else he might be, had shown he was no fool. They certainly dared not remain on board when the steamer docked in England, for the harbour police would be waiting at Dover, supplemented by waterguard officers and reinforced if necessary by a party of riflemen from the duty regiment at Dover Castle.
It made very little difference to me when Holmes announced that he was going ahead of me as far as Brussels, a seventy-mile journey by rail. He would travel back by train to Ostend and we should meet at the pier an hour before the Comtesse de Flandre sailed. My friend’s appointment, arranged by courtesy of Brother Mycroft, was with the British military attaché at our Brussels embassy. Though our mission involved a ship belonging to the Belgian government, it had been decided not to involve the authorities in Brussels or Ostend. Mycroft, always a prudent man, therefore insisted on having some diplomatic authority on our side in the event of what he vaguely called “complications.”
On the day of our crossing to Ostend, I woke with an unexpected lightness of heart. All this would prove to be a fuss about nothing. If the final accounting came with Colonel Rawdon Moran, as it might well do, it would take some other form. At any rate, it seemed most unlikely to come yet.
As usual, I had packed my belongings and was ready while Holmes was still getting his things together. Despite my scepticism, I did not neglect to include my Webley revolver with its six chambers loaded.
“I suppose Belgian law is the same as ours,” I said cheerfully: “one is permitted to carry a firearm for reasonable self-defence.”
He shrugged this off: “I hardly think it will come to matters of Belgian law.”
He then closed the drawer of his “chemical table,” where he usually kept his Laroux pistolet. I had not seen it lying in its usual place and assumed he must already have it with him.