The Quest of Julian Day

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘I wonder what can have happened to that girl. She’s taking her time, isn’t she?’

  Clarissa laughed. ‘You silly! She’s beautifying herself for the conquering hero. You can’t expect her to hurry over that.’ And I ordered another round of drinks.

  Soon afterwards a porter came up and gave me a telephone message which had just come through. Miss Shane was terribly sorry but she would be unable to lunch as she had been sent for on urgent business by the police.

  We could only imagine that Essex Pasha wanted to question her in order to check up on my statement to him. It was disappointing that she was unable to join us but it could not be helped, so we went in and I was able to enjoy the first really decent meal I had had for days.

  We sat on the terrace afterwards until about four o’clock. In Egypt all roads lead to Shepheard’s and the coming and going of its patrons, who include members of every nation under the sun, together with the colourful street-scene below, provides a fascinating spectacle which always makes one want to linger there unless one had urgent work to to.

  It was Harry who suggested that Sylvia must soon be back and that we might stroll along to the Continental so as to be there when she got in.

  The two hotels are in the same street and only a few hundred yards apart so a few minutes later we had exchanged the terrace at Shepheard’s for the terrace at the Continental. Sylvia had not returned and we ordered tea.

  It was getting on for five o’clock, I think, when we first became vaguely anxious. Three and a half hours seemed a long time for an interview with the police and as Sylvia had intended lunching with us it was reasonable certain that she would get in touch with us as soon as she was free. It occurred to me that I might have received only a portion of her message and that something about meeting us later somewhere might not have reached me, so I went inside to the hall-porter’s desk and made him repeat it to me in person.

  I found that the message had been given to me just as she had given it to him and he was quite clear about what had happened. She had come in at about ten minutes past one and gone up to her room. At half-past a police officer had come in and enquired for her. She had come down in the lift a few minutes later and the two of them held a short conversation together within sight of the porter’s desk; after which she had given him the message to be telephoned to me and gone off with the bimbashi.

  There was nothing particularly queer about that: it was only the length of time she had been away which puzzled me somewhat and I decided to ring up and find out if she was still at Police Headquarters.

  After a little delay I managed to get on to Essex Pasha and to my surprise he knew nothing whatever about the matter. He said that he had certainly not sent for Sylvia and he knew of no reason why anyone else should have done so; but he promised to make inquiries at once and ring me back as quickly as he could.

  When he rang through again it was quite evident that he was as worried as I was.

  ‘Nobody here knows anything about this business,’ he said quickly. ‘You had better hang on where you are. I’m coming round at once.’

  A quarter of an hour later he was with us. Tall and distinguished-looking, he swept off his soft black hat with the flourish of an eighteenth-century courtier as I introduced him to Clarissa, but the gay twinkle in his blue eyes which had made him seem so friendly in the morning was no longer there. Quietly but with extraordinary speed and efficiency he took charge of the situation. Within two minutes of his arrival the manager had been fetched and we were upstairs in Sylvia’s room.

  The place was in chaos and looked as though a tornado had swept through it; cupboards and trunks had been broken open, the mattress dragged off the bed and ripped from end to end, the carpet rolled aside and half the floorboards pulled up. Her clothes and belongings were scattered in wild confusion everywhere.

  I knew at once that what I had been fearing for the last twenty minutes had happened. Sylvia had been lured away in order that O’Kieff’s people could ransack her room for the other half of the tablet. Probably they had hoped to secure it by some more subtle means until one of Zakri’s spies—perhaps even a police official in his pay—had told them that Essex Pasha had had a long interview with me that morning and then released me. The news that they would not be able to have me deported, as they had hoped, and that I was free to continue my fight against them had doubtless forced their hands and made them decide upon immediate action.

  ‘What were they hunting for?’ Essex Pasha asked me sharply.

  ‘The other half of that memorial tablet I told you about this morning,’ I said at once.

  ‘Well, they haven’t got it,’ Harry cut in. ‘Sylvia told me yesterday that it’s lying in the vaults of her bank.’

  ‘How about a translation of it?’ I asked. ‘I suppose she made one?’

  ‘Yes. But fortunately they haven’t got that either. She gave it to me to read last night, together with a rough translation which she did of the first half of the tablet in my room at he Semiramis after dinner. I’ve got them both in my pocket at the moment.’

  ‘But where have they taken her?’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s what matters.’

  Essex Pasha had already sent for the floor waiter and the chambermaid. His questions elicited the fact that two Egyptians who were not staying in the hotel had been seen coming down the corridor from Sylvia’s room at about half-past two. Their description was taken, and that of the bogus policeman, from the hall-porter downstairs.

  In the manager’s office Essex Pasha got on the telephone, passed the description of the three men and that of Sylvia to his people and ordered a general notification to be sent out to all stations. Then he sat back and said glumly:

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all we can do for the moment. But what puzzles me is why they should have troubled to kidnap her. They could easily had kept her under observation until she was safely out of the hotel for a few hours and have ransacked her room during her absence.’

  ‘I think I can tell you,’ I said miserably. ‘They must have realised it was only a fifty-fifty chance they would find the tablet here or a translation of it. They kidnapped her so that if their raid was unsuccessful they would be able to force her to sign a letter authorising them to collect the tablet from anyone to whom she had passed it for safe-keeping.’

  He gave me a sharp glance of approval and looked at the manager. ‘D’you know where Miss Shane banks?’

  ‘Yes, Excellency. Miss Shane has been staying with us for many months and her cheques are always drawn on the Anglo-Egyptian Bank.’

  ‘Get me through to the manager, will you? If he’s gone home have the call made to his private address.’

  For a few moments we stood about silent and anxious until the bank manager was located. Essex Pasha told him there was reason to believe that Sylvia Shane had fallen into wrong hands; crooks who might exert pressure upon her to sign certain documents; and that if anybody arrived at the bank on any sort of business in connection with her they were to be detained on some plausible excuse and Police Headquarters notified immediately.

  ‘Well, we’ve blocked them there,’ he said when he had finished. ‘But that doesn’t get us far. I’ll turn every man I’ve got on to the job; but the devil of it is that we haven’t got a single line to indicate where these thugs may have taken the poor girl.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and as I spoke I was half sick with fear, ‘but I may be able to tell you that too. Have you ever heard of a white-slaving joint down in Ismailia called the House of the Angels?’

  12

  White-slaved

  ‘The House of the Angels,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, I have heard of it. There have been vague references to it from time to time in some of my people’s reports, but it’s evidently a pseudonym for some other place and only referred to under that name by the inner ring. Are you certain it’s at Ismailia?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me all you know about it.’

  I related m
y conversation with Oonas and her offer to give me the run of the place when she believed that I was Lemming.

  ‘Why should you imagine they would take Sylvia there?’ he asked when I had finished.

  ‘Well,’ I hesitated. ‘It’s a beastly thought, but Sylvia’s good-looking, isn’t she? And the place is not an ordinary brothel but a depot through which they bring Asiatic beauties for the houses in the Mediterranean ports and ship white women to the East. It makes one sick even to think of it but, since white-slaving is part of their business, mustn’t one face the facts and assume that having taken the risk of kidnapping Sylvia, directly they’ve bullied her into signing the letter to the bank, instead of releasing her they’ll white-slave her as well?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m afraid that is so. I only asked you to see if you were reasoning on the same lines as myself.’

  ‘How simply frightful!’ Clarissa exclaimed. ‘We must stop them! We must! We must!’

  Essex Pasha took no notice of her. He was already on the telephone again asking the operator to get him on to Police Headquarters in Ismailia. As he hung up the receiver he glanced at his watch.

  ‘It’s now twenty-to-six,’ he said. ‘So they’ve had four hours’ clear start. There is a direct road to Ismailia but it’s a pretty poor one so it’s almost certain that they’d take the first-class road down to Suez and go north along the Canal bank from there. Suez is eighty miles and roughly a three-hour run. Ismailia is another fifty but the road, being in the Canal zone and kept up by the Company, is the best in Egypt so they’d cover that stretch easily in an hour and a half. At that rate they’re not due in till about seven so there’s just a chance that we might catch them on the open road.’

  When his call to Ismailia came through he gave quick instructions for police cars to be sent out on both the Canal road and the desert track with orders to search all cars approaching Ismailia from either direction. The Ismailia police had never heard of the House of the Angels but they promised to make every possible effort to locate it.

  ‘Is there nothing else we can do?’ I asked as he hung up the receiver.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn’t, yet awhile,’ he said slowly. ‘A general call will have gone out by now from Headquarters, so every policeman in Egypt will be on the look out for her; but we must wait until we get some reports in. Unless they told her some extraordinarily plausible story its hardly likely she would willingly let them drive her out of Cairo. The probability is that they ran the car into some cul-de-sac or courtyard in the city and gave her a shot of dope to keep her quiet. If they had wanted to get away quickly they would have left her lying in the back of the car as though she were asleep; in which case it’s almost certain that one of the men at the police barriers will have noticed her and be able to tell us by which road the car left the city. Or, again, since they would normally have to stop somewhere for petrol, a garage-hand may be able to tell us something when the police make their inquiries.

  ‘On the other hand, after having doped her, they may have thought it worth while to expend a little extra time in dressing her up in the black clothes of a native woman with a veil over her face and hair so as to prevent anyone recognising her. But even if they did that, we have the description of the car she left in and of the man she left with and, as there isn’t a great deal of motor-traffic on the roads outside the city, there’s still a good chance that the barrier police will be able to give us some information.

  ‘I only wish there were something else we could do, but this is a case where we just have to leave it for the police organisation to function; and although it may seem a poor consolation to you at the moment I can tell you that when the police-net is spread nation-wide like this, the odds are all in its favour.’

  ‘But we can’t just sit here like this doing nothing!’ Clarissa cried. ‘At least we can go down to Ismailia.’

  ‘We’ve no proof at all that they’re taking her there,’ I said. ‘It was only my idea.’

  ‘It’s a very logical one, though,’ said Harry. ‘God forbid that I should add to the gloom we’re all feeling, but having kidnapped her it’s a hundred-to-one against these people letting her go again. If they did she would be able to describe them, and the place to which she’d been taken, to the police afterwards. They wouldn’t dare risk that, so they’ll try to get her out of the way somehow. This white-slaving depot offers an excellent way of disposing of her and means that they’ll get a good round sum in hard cash for her as well. They’d never be such fools as to stick a knife in her with such an alternative ready to their hands.’

  ‘I quite agree with you,’ Essex Pasha nodded.

  ‘Then I’m going to Ismailia,’ declared Clarissa.

  ‘You can’t do more than the police can,’ I remarked.

  ‘No, but I can be on hand when the poor child’s rescued.’ replied Clarissa promptly. ‘And after such a frightful experience she’ll need another woman to look after her.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I admitted, and turned to Essex Pasha. ‘You’ve no objection, sir, I suppose, to our going down to the Canal?’

  ‘None at all. I think Mrs. Belville’s idea a very sound one. You had better go via Suez and I’ll telephone the police there that you’re on your way. If you go straight to Police Headquarters they’ll give you any news that may have come in while you are making the trip, and pass you on to the police in Ismailia.’

  I thanked him and asked the manager if he could get me a car with a really good driver.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Day,’ he said. ‘You shall have my own man who’s a first-class fellow. I’ll telephone for him to come round at once.’

  ‘It would be best if you sent him to Shepheard’s,’ I said, ‘as I’m going there right away to collect a toothbrush. Then I’ll pick up Mr. and Mrs. Belville from the Semiramis.’

  The manager accompanied us out on to the terrace and I found Amin and Mustapha there. Although it was barely half-an-hour since we had discovered Sylvia’s disappearance, news travels fast among the native servants and they had both arrived to offer their services. Poor Mustapha was in a frightful state. He adored his young mistress and was almost incoherent as he pleaded volubly to be allowed to get his hands on the rogues who had entrapped her. On learning that the car we were to have was a large Buick which would hold five beside the driver, we decided to let the two dragomen accompany us.

  We split up then—a very gloomy and unhappy party—our only consolation being that Essex Pasha himself had the matter in hand and we knew that he would do everything that was humanly possible to trace Sylvia. He drove off back to Police Headquarters while the Belvilles took a taxi to the Semiramis and the two dragomen accompanied me to Shepheard’s.

  Inside ten minutes I had thrust a few things into a small suitcase and was leaving Shepheard’s again. The Belvilles were already waiting for me at the Semiramis so we got off without delay and it was barely six when we passed the railway-station on our way out of Cairo.

  The road to Suez runs through Heliopolis, a less fashionable suburb of Cairo than Gezira or the district along the Mena road which is on the exactly opposite side of the city. A few moments after leaving the huge block of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel on our right we pulled up at the police barrier for the number of our car to be taken, as is the custom with every vehicle proceeding into the desert. The number is then telephoned through to the police at the next town so that if the car does not arrive within a certain time it is known to have broken down and assistance can be sent out to it. Having passed the barrier we roared away along the straight flat road in to the open plain.

  The country was as different from the fertile fields of the Delta as one could possibly imagine. Not a tree, not a house, not an animal nor even a blade of grass was to be seen in any direction; only the ribbon of road clearly marked on either side by large, cylindrical kerosene containers, looking rather like dust bins, which had been filled with sand and whitewashed so that by night a car’s headlights could pick them up clearly and ther
e was no danger of its running off the road.

  On either side of us stretched the empty, yellow plain, broken here and there by a distant line of hills or an occasional undulation. This Eastern desert is not a waste of sand such as the uninitiated traveller expects to see, but a waste of stone varying in colour from gold to dark brown. It was at one time a sea-bed and the darker patches are caused by great quantities of loose flints scattered over the windward side of every rise while such loose sand as there is gets blown from among them to form long streaks of golden-yellow on the lee of the hills or in the shallow valleys.

  It was Harry’s and Clarissa’s first experience of the desert and both agreed that in spite of its bareness it had a strange fascination of its own, filling one with a desire to leave the road and penetrate the waste to see what was on the far side of each low line of hills, although one knew perfectly well that the new prospect beyond them would be exactly the same and that one might continue mounting ridge after ridge for hundreds of miles without finding the slightest difference in the alternating patches of darkish flints and yellow, shaly sandstone.

  We were all too anxious about Sylvia to talk very much or display interest in any other topic, and after a while the desert scene grew monotonous. The road is well kept and we made good going but even so we were all fidgety with impatience to reach our destination.

  In the whole eighty miles, with the exception of police-posts, we passed only one human habitation. It was just half-way between Cairo and Suez to the left of the road and some distance from it. By that time the light was fading but out on a low range of hills we could see a great, rambling building like a fortified palace surrounded by high walls. Amin said that he thought it was an old Coptic monastery.

  Soon after, the sun set behind us, casting strange shadows over the broken plain; then darkness fell and we roared on into it eating up the miles, our headlights flashing upon the whitened kerosene tins but for which we should have had to proceed at a snail’s pace for fear of running off our course.