The Devastators Read Online Free Page B

calling?”
    “I’m supposed to start the ball rolling, so to speak, by making a date with a certain genealogist.”
    “A certain what?”
    “A gent who draws family trees,” I said. “Dr. McRow, fortunately, has two weaknesses. One, as I’ve said, is money. The other is ancestors. He apparently started life without any, except the usual connection with Adam and Eve. In the U.S. he was born on the wrong side of the tracks, socially as well as financially, but after coming to Scotland he apparently got the notion that his family had once been big and important there. That’s how the trail was picked up again after being lost over in South America. He’d sent in his name—it had to be his real name, of course—to an ancestor-hunting outfit here in London. He’d hired them to prove a connection, however dim and distant, between his branch of the McRow family and some fine old Highland clan. For a man in hiding, it was a crazy breach of security, but then there’s no real proof the guy’s rational outside the laboratory. Anyway, this is where Buchanan started, and we’re supposed to kind of follow in his footsteps until we hit a better lead… Shhh, here we go.”
    The switchboard had got me the number. A man who identified himself as Ernest Walling, of Simpson and Walling, was asking my identity and business. I gave the true name and the false story—the yarn about wanting to trace my own ancestors that we’d cooked up for the purpose. After I’d finished, Walling was silent for a little, presumably digesting the information.
    “Ah, I see,” he said presently. “Would it be convenient for you to come here at four o’clock, Mr. Helm? That will give me time to do a little preliminary research, and I will be able to say more definitely whether or not I can help you.”
    “Four would be fine.”
    He hesitated again. “Ah, you say you are staying at Claridge’s? And you are from America?”
    “That’s right.”
    “You wouldn’t happen to know an American gentleman named Buchanan, Paul Buchanan?”
    I laughed. “America is a big place, Mr. Walling. I’m afraid I don’t know any Buchanans.”
    “No, of course not. He called on us recently and I just wondered… I will be glad to see you at four, Mr. Helm. Thank you for calling.”
    I put down the phone, frowning. “He mentioned Buchanan,” I said to Winnie. “That could mean something, but I’ll be damned if I know what.”
    “At this stage of the game, one hardly ever knows what,” she said. “Damn it, I’m stuck. Give me a hand, will you?”
    She’d got out of bed, and she’d started pulling her nightie off over her head, forgetting to untie the flowing sash beforehand, and now she couldn’t reach it. I yanked one end of the bow and it came loose. She emerged from the lingerie quite unselfconsciously, revealing a nice little body, brown practically all over—but I noticed that she had got too much sun on the back and shoulders. They had peeled badly, not too long ago. Subsequent careful exposure to sun or a sunlamp had almost restored the uniform brown pigmentation, but not quite. Looking closely at her face as she turned, I now saw similar traces in her nose, masked by makeup.
    It happens to lots of girls who try to do all their tanning on the first day of vacation. It wasn’t out of character for the role she was playing, but I had a hunch the burns had not been the result of loafing too long on a South Seas beach, drink in hand. She’d apparently had a rough time out there. Well, it was none of my business.
    “Well, we’re committed,” I said. “If the Simpson-Walling phone is tapped, or the office is wired for sound, as Washington seems to think, somebody’s already checking on a gent named Helm, staying at Claridge’s. We can expect the hostile eyes and ears to focus on us any minute.”
    She grimaced. “You don’t have to tell me. I hope you’re not one of the men in whom sex is followed by acute starvation. I’d like to