‘You must mean me.’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re living in a dream. All my life I’ve avoided having anyone near and dear to me. They’re always coming for loans or something.’
Duchêne rolled his cigar to the other corner of his mouth. Paulet picked up a sandwich which had fallen on the floor when he had hit me. Outside the window Mimo began to whistle gently ‘Winchester Cathedral’ as he watched the Arab porter, who had got his feet free of his bonds, come shuffling urgently up the drive, the rest of the cords round his body making him look like a walking mummy. Mimo fired a shot into the sand a yard to his side. The Arab sat down and stayed sat as Mimo went down to him, still whistling. You couldn’t help liking Mimo, you couldn’t help liking Paulet—but it was easy to dislike Duchêne.
Fishing in his jacket pocket, he pulled out a letter and handed it to me.
‘Read this,’ he said.
I did. It was from Wilkins:
Dear Mr Carver,
Olaf and I were stopped on the road to Leptis Magna. I am not allowed to tell you more. I do not know what has happened to Olaf—but I am being treated with every consideration.
Shocked as I am by this turn of events—the result entirely of your egotistical stupidity—I beg of you at least from now on to act as the bearer of this letter would wish.
I am told that if you do not I shall suffer some mishap.
Return to London and do as these people say. This is not a time for any of your obstinate heroics. Please be wise.
Distressed though I am about my personal predicament, I am much more concerned about Olafs.
Tell him, if he is free, not to worry too much about me, or to blame himself for being hoodwinked by his false countryman into making the trip to Leptis Magna.
Calmly though I write, I am naturally very angry at what has happened. When I am free I shall have to consider very seriously whether I shall return to my present work.
Bluntly, do as these people request, since I am assured by them that it will not involve you in anything criminal.
Unless you do this, they have made it very, very clear that the consequences will be serious for me.
Both of us have had our disagreements in the past—and usually in your pig-headed fashion you have ignored my advice. Why is it that you have always to make a mess, not only of your own life, but of other people’s? None of this would have happened if you had gone straight back to London from Libya.
No rash action on your part can help me now. Frankly my life is in your hands. For once please, please, do exactly as you are told.
Yours,
Hilda Wilkins
I read it twice. It was Wilkins’s handwriting without doubt. It wasn’t Wilkins’s style, quite. Any communication she made to me, verbal or written, was usually briefer and quick to the point. But this time—since she was in a dangerous position and worried about her beloved Olaf—she had let herself go.
I said to Duchêne, ‘If she comes to any harm, and I get the chance, I’ll gut you!’
‘No harm is going to come to her—so long as you act sensibly. She herself tells you to do that too.’
‘You give me your word?’
‘I do.’
Paulet said, ‘The moment you have completed your mission, she will be set free.’
‘This was your idea?’
Paulet nodded. ‘Central Bureau were opposed to it until we pointed out its advantages.’
‘We have got to have a go-between,’ said Duchêne, ‘to carry out negotiations for us. Someone who knows the other side and is trusted by them, and someone we know and can trust because he understands the consequences of keeping faith with us.’
‘You’ve bought Freeman and Pelegrina out?’
He nodded. ‘For a substantial sum. After all, they did the preliminary work, clumsily but effectively.’
‘And what’s happening to them?’
‘That is not your affair. What good is money to them unless they have security as well? We have made an honest bargain with them. We do the same with you.’
‘And Bill Dawson?’
‘He is in this house. We have seen him and he is in good health.’
‘I don’t care so much about his health—though I’ll hand the good news on to his father. What I want to know is what kind of deal you’re thinking of making for his return? Not just a cash transaction, surely?’
‘Clearly not, Mr Carver. Equally clearly, your curiosity will have to wait until you meet Saraband Two. Only one point remains to be stressed. So far the British authorities have kept this whole matter a secret. The press and the public have no idea he has been kidnapped. For our purposes it must remain that way. If you say or do anything which will bring this affair into the open—then you know what will happen to Miss Wilkins and to yourself.’
He didn’t have to stress that to me. It was obvious. And there were two or three kinds of deals he could make over Bill Dawson. What I wanted to know—but wasn’t going to ask him because I didn’t want him to realize the point had occurred to me—was how, if the affair had been kept quiet so far, he had come to know about it and had decided to take advantage of it, staying in the background until the last moment and using me hard all the time. There was something very fishy there.
‘Where’s Olaf?’
‘We held him for a while after we took Miss Wilkins, then we released him on the coast road some miles from Tripoli.’
‘What, to go back to the police and make a stink about it all?’
‘He won’t get far with Captain Asab. The Libyan authorities have instructions to keep this quiet.’
‘Olaf isn’t the kind to stay quiet. And, by God, if he gets near you he’s capable of doing things to you which would make any efforts of mine seem charitable.’
Duchêne shrugged his shoulders.
Paulet said, ‘All you have to do is be sensible and wait for Saraband Two. If Manston gets in touch with you when you return to London, you know nothing. Nothing until you receive your instructions from Saraband Two. You can say that you were late getting back to London because you broke your journey in Rome for a day or so.’
‘You think I can get away with that—or with not telling him about you?’
Duchêne shrugged. ‘Who cares? You will get instructions on those points from Saraband Two. You will not, I imagine, be asked to perform too complicated a dance.’
I stared at him. For the first time since I had known him he had allowed himself a touch of humour. Not that there was any hint of it on his face. But he had to be feeling good to have gone so far out of character.
‘Ha-ha,’ I said flatly.
It was practically the last thing I said to them. I was kept another half-hour in the room. I didn’t see Freeman or Pelegrina. Finally Mimo and Peter Brown of Wimbledon drove me back to Tunis to catch a plane to London. They had collected my cases from the Bizerta hotel and had paid my bill. Decent of them.
It was a hard drive for both of them. By nature they were affable souls who liked nothing better than a little light gossip to make the miles spin by without tedium. But Duchêne must have given them instructions not to talk. Maybe he thought they might let something slip, something which I could use. If one thing was for sure, it was that Duchêne was not trusting me an inch. The only hold he had over me was Wilkins—and it was a sound one. When Wilkins came out of this one safe and well, I knew that I was in for the worst half-hour of my life. Worse still, long before she got at me I knew that I was going to have Olaf to deal with. All I could hope was that he would leave me sufficiently in one piece to be able to deal with Saraband Two and then the Sutcliffe-Manston outfit. I had a dark future ahead and my face must have shown it, because as Mimo and Peter Brown left me at the airport, Mimo patted me on the arm and said, ‘Do not worry too much. Everything will be all right. One day you tell your children about this and have a big laugh.’
‘Children? I’m not even married.’
‘Is that necessary?�
��
I went into the airport buildings, tempted to phone the police, or Manston at the Tripoli Embassy, and put them on to the Villa La Sunata. Temptation lasted only a few seconds. The villa would be cleared by now and I should only be making things impossible for Wilkins. I was sitting in a big cleft stick and any move I made was just going to be from one discomfort to another.
However, on the plane I found some comfort. Not much, but enough. I knew my Wilkins and I knew her philosophy and her literary style. To begin with she was not afraid of anything that walked on two legs, and she had a sturdy conviction that melodrama was not something that could touch her life. She didn’t believe that she could be kidnapped. If it happened she would still refuse to believe it. The only real affliction in her life was a tendency to catch colds easily, a sniff her only valid protest against fate.
As for her literary style, it was anything but long-winded. Short, tart and to the point was Wilkins’s style.
Eighteen thousand feet above the Gulf of Tunis I opened her letter—which Duchêne had left with me, since he knew eventually I would have to show it to Manston as part of my credentials and serious intent as a go-between—and began to work out the simple code which Wilkins and I had established long ago. I’d had the devil’s own job to persuade her, years ago, that one day it might be useful. This was the first time in two years that she had ever used it. All I had to do was to list in running order the first and last letters of each paragraph. That gave me ONSHIPREDSTACKBLUEBAND. Which gave me ON SHIP RED STACK BLUE BAND.
Clever Wilkins. Somewhere, at least to begin with, she had been held—after the hijacking on the Leptis Magna road—on a ship whose funnel was red with a blue band round it. Single funnel, probably. Probably, too, a cargo boat of some kind. Well, probably again, that ship could have been in harbour in the last week in some port between, say, Alexandria and Sfax, maybe as far up as Tunis. If Olaf came raging after me, I could hand it to him and he could postpone killing me until he had tried to trace it.
*
I got in late, poached myself a couple of stale lion-stamped eggs and ate them on two toasted pieces of ready-sliced, untouched-by-hand, flavourless loaf. I washed it down with half a glass of milk that probably came from a cow untouched by human hand, finished up feeling slightly sick and, as a specific against indigestion and growing gloom, made myself a very strong whisky and soda.
I sat and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring and Saraband Two to announce himself. I wanted action to chase away the blues. I didn’t get it.
Mrs Meld, seeing the light on when she put her cat out for the night, came in, eyes puffy from watching television, and said, ‘Have a nice time then, Mr Carver?’
‘Splendid.’
‘That’s the spirit then. I’ll be in to do your breakfast in the morning per usual. See what happened to the bedroom ceiling?’
‘No; I haven’t been in there.’
‘Part of it fell down. Just like that. While I was hoovering. Meld says he’ll fix it. Save you a big builder’s bill.’
‘Did he say which year he would do it?’
She laughed. ‘That kind of mood, is it? Well, we all feel down in the mouth after a holiday.’
She hadn’t got it right by a long chalk. I wasn’t down in the mouth. I was right down in my boots.
I was in the office by half past nine the next morning. In the outer office Mrs Burtenshaw put down the Daily Telegraph and greeted me without enthusiasm. Business was at a standstill, she said, and she had had a nice postcard from Wilkins two days ago. I didn’t comment that she might never have another if I didn’t play my cards right.
In my own office I had to use both hands to get the basset hound off my chair. He hit the ground with a thump and promptly went to sleep on the carpet under the desk so that I had no room to stretch my legs out.
I reached for the phone, feeling as gloomy as a Great Dane, and called Mrs Stankowski.
The glorious Gloriana answered it and seemed delighted to hear my voice. It did nothing to cheer me up. All I wanted was contact with Saraband Two and to be on my way. I told her about La Piroletta, that she had the python bracelet and was willing to sell it back. I gave her the name and address of Letta’s Paris agents so that she could get in touch with her. Gloriana said she would consider what to do about the bracelet, and then asked me to come and have dinner with her that evening in her flat. I said I would, forcing some enthusiasm into my voice out of politeness.
I put the receiver down and sat there wondering if they had tapped my phone, and, if they had, how long it would be before somebody was around to see me.
It took an hour, actually. Mrs Burtenshaw rang through and said there was a Mr Vickers to see me. I told her to send him in. I knew Mr Edwin Vickers and where he came from—and I knew now that they were running a tap on my phone.
He came in fish-faced, drifting like a dried leaf in an idle breeze, eyes mournful, mouth turned down, and his suit needing a good brush and pressing, a troglodyte from the submerged two-thirds of Whitehall.
He took the chair across the desk and competed with me and the basset hound for leg room under the desk.
‘The last time I saw you,’ I said, ‘you were going to retire and help your brother-in-law run a hotel in Scotland.’
‘Brother. He decided he didn’t want me. We never got on, anyway. And anyway, they held over my retirement date. Shortage of trained operators.’
He was flattering himself. He could have fallen down a drain opposite the Cenotaph and nobody would ever have missed him. ‘What’s the big message this morning?’
‘I’m requested—by you-know-who—to check your itinerary back from Tripoli. Seems to have taken you a day or so longer than it should.’
‘I stopped off in Rome for a night. Eden Hotel. Had a customer I thought I might sell the Coliseum to.
‘Keep the hotel bill?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? You were on expenses, weren’t you?’
‘No, I wasn’t. My services were terminated in Tripoli by my client. Anyway, what’s the big interest?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Check your movements, they said.’
‘Well, you’ve checked them. Anything else?’
He nodded. ‘They want you to sit tight in London. If you try to leave the country you’ll be stopped.’
‘I could write to my M.P. about that.’
He stood up and helped himself to a cigarette from my desk box. ‘Do that—if you know who he is. That your dog?’
The basset had come out from under and was rolling leisurely on his back in a patch of sunlight by the window.
‘No. He just appears every morning in early spring—and then suddenly he’s gone for another year. Away mating, I suppose.’
He bent down and rubbed the back of his hand along the length of the basset’s tummy. It was a long rub.
‘I’m fond of animals,’ he said.
‘How do they feel about you?’
He straightened up, gave me a sad look, shook his head and backed to the door as though he feared either the dog or myself would go for his lean throat. At the door he said, ‘They said to keep your nose clean for once if you know what is good for you.’
‘In those words?’
‘No. I colloquialized them.’
Colloquially, I told him to get out. He did, looking a little shocked. He was too meek, that was the trouble. His kind might eventually inherit the earth but before they did people would always be trampling on them.
After he’d gone I sat there for a long time worrying about Wilkins. Yes, worrying. It was no good not admitting it. I was worrying about her. I’d got her involved in this and although I’d been told she would be safe as long as I played ball there were certain aspects of the situation that nagged at me. This had gone from a simple kidnapping-for-cash case right up to the high levels of security double-dealing and ice-cold bargaining where ordinary mortals begin to gasp for oxygen.
Half an hour before mi
dday Olaf burst in—straight from the airport. He hadn’t shaved and his eyes had a murderous glare in them. His pilot’s pea-jacket swung open over his barrel chest and he thumped it with one big fist as he came up to the desk.
‘I want Hilda,’ he said. There was a faint odour of rum on his breath.
‘So do I,’ I said, ‘but shouting won’t get her back.’
‘She not come back and I break your neck and all the necks I can find.’
‘Sit down and stop behaving like a walking volcano.’
‘Something is to be done right away. The police in Tripoli are useless. Polite but useless. Everyone is useless. I am looking forward to the Roman antiquities at Leptis Magna and so is Hilda. This worm who says he is from Kalmar—his neck, too, I break eventually.’
‘Sit down.’
Surprisingly, he did. I got up and went to the special clients’ cupboard and came back with a bottle of Bacardi and a glass.
‘Carry on the treatment and listen.’
He poured himself a liberal glass and drained it before I had even got under way. I didn’t worry about his drinking (though Wilkins would have given him hell had she been there) because he was clearly the type who could drink rum as though it were milk—and did, when he had to keep up his strength.
Before I could get going he helped himself to another glass and said, ‘In five years we are to be married. By then I have saved ten thousand pounds. This holiday it was all arranged. We looked forward to great happiness to come—and now, what?’
‘Just listen,’ I said patiently, ‘and when you’ve listened don’t ever repeat a word of what I’ve said to anyone under any conditions. Okay?’
‘I should trust you, is that it?’
‘It may be hard, but try. In fact, you’ve got to if we’re going to get Wilkins back.’
‘Why you call her Wilkins always? Her name is Hilda. It is not right to make a woman sound like a man.’
I sighed. Love and anxiety were mixing up his thought processes. ‘You call her Hilda,’ I said, ‘because you love her and she loves you. But to me she is Wilkins, because I have a great respect and affection for her and she is my business partner. Carver and Wilkins. And, for God’s sake, let’s stop quibbling over points of chivalry. Now just throttle back on the rum intake and listen.’
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