He smiled grimly. He nodded in the direction of the flames. “That’s the game. Burn the place down for the insurance. They’re just fixing the flames to reach the lobby building, sprinkling thermite dust along the covered way. I couldn’t care less. If I took them on now, I’d only be saving Mr. Sanguinetti’s property for him. With us as witnesses, he won’t even smell the insurance. And he’ll be in jail. So we’ll just wait a bit and let him have a total loss on his books.”
I suddenly thought of my precious belongings. I said humbly, “Can we save the Vespa?”
“It’s all right. You’ve only lost those glad rags—if you left them in the bathroom. I got the gun when I got you, and I slung the saddlebags out. I’ve just been salvaging the Vespa. It looks in good shape. I’ve made a cache of everything in the trees. Those carports will be the last things to go. They’ve got masonry on both sides. They’ve used thermite bombs in each of the cabins. Better than petrol. Less bulky, and they leave no traces for the insurance sleuths.”
“But you might have got burned!”
His smile flashed white in the shadows. “That’s why I took my coat off. I must look respectable in Washington.”
It didn’t seem funny to me. “But what about your shirt?”
There was a crash and a great shower of sparks way down the line of cabins. James Bond said, “There goes my shirt. Roof falling in on top of it.” He paused and wiped his hand down his dirty, sweating face so that the black smudged even worse. “I had a feeling something like this was going to happen. Perhaps I should have been more ready for it than I was. I could have gone and changed the wheel on my car, for instance. If I’d done that we could get out now. We could work our way round the end of the cabins and make a dash for it. Get to Lake George or Glens Falls and send the cops along. But I thought that if I fixed the car our friends would have an excuse to tell me to get moving. I could have refused, of course, or said that I wouldn’t go without you, but I thought that might lead to shooting. I’d be lucky to beat those two unless I shot first. And with me out of the picture, you’d have been back where we started. That would have been bad. You were a major part of their plan.”
“I felt I was all along. I didn’t know why. I knew the way they were treating me meant that I didn’t matter, that I was expendable. What did they want to use me for?”
“You were to have been the cause of the fire. The evidence for Sanguinetti would have been that the managers, this Phancey couple, and of course they’re in it up to their necks”—I remembered the way their attitude to me had changed on the last day; the way they too had treated me with contempt, as rubbish, as something that was to be thrown away—”they would say that they had told you to turn off the electricity—perfectly reasonable as the place was closing down—and use an oil-lamp for the last night. The remains of the oil-lamp would have been found. You had gone to sleep with the light on and somehow upset it. The whole place blazed up, and that was that. The buildings had a lot of timber in them, and the wind did the rest. My turning up was a nuisance, but not more than that. My remains would have been found too—or at any rate my car and wrist watch and the metal from my bag. I don’t know what they’d have done about my gun and the one under your pillow. Those might have got them into trouble. The police would have checked the car with Canada and then the numbers of the guns with England, and that would have identified me. So why was my other gun under your pillow? That might have made the police think. If we were, well, sort of lovers, why was I sleeping so far away from you? Perhaps we had both been very proper and slept as far apart as possible and I had insisted that you have one of my guns to protect a lonely girl in the night. I don’t know how they would have worked it out. But my guess is that our friends, once I told them I was a policeman, may have thought about guns and other incriminating hardware that wouldn’t be destroyed in the fire and might have waited a few hours and then gone in and raked about in the ashes to take care of that sort of trouble. They’d have been careful about their raking, and of their footprints in the cinders, of course. But then, these people are pros.” His mouth turned down. “By their standards, that is.”