Sheiks and Adders

by Michael Innes

  ‘Chitfield is involved in a crisis?’ It seemed to Appleby that his hope was at least in some measure to be fulfilled. ‘Connected with oil?’

  ‘That’s what my brother seemed to say – and he has been around the Middle East a good deal himself, and knows what he’s talking about. Not my territory at all. The Red Sea’s bad enough. Ever been to Aden? Jane and I once went round it in a taxi. In the old days and on the way home, that was. P & O did coaling there, I expect. Ghastly dump – although it’s probably all skyscrapers and Rolls Royces now. Haven’t ever seen any of those little places on the Gulf – nor ever shall now, with Marxists taking over like mad.’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie shook his head in a sombre fashion – the picture of a legislator burdened by heavy care. ‘Trucial States, and all that – besides no end of places with newfangled names and hoary-old corruptions galore. And that’s where this Chitfield’s trouble lies. Two many oily eggs in one rotten basket, you might say. A lot of those chaps who’ve been buying up London and a good deal of England as well, you know, pretty well due to be turfed out on their ear. Produces a lot of coming and going in a hush-hush way.’

  ‘A shake-up among the sheiks, in fact.’ Appleby had listened with a good deal of attention to all these syntactically imperfect remarks.

  ‘Being gunned for, some of them, on our own doorstep, you might say. Bombs chucked at them as they go shopping in Bond Street. Shocking state of affairs.’

  ‘Isn’t it odd,’ Jane Birch-Blackie asked, ‘that so many people seem to have dressed up as Emirs and Arabs and so on this afternoon? It’s taking quite a chance, isn’t it?’

  ‘They lack imagination,’ Appleby said. He was startled by this unusual display of intelligence on the lady’s part. At the same time he felt it was desirable to move on, and he cast round for a suitable valedictory remark. ‘I look forward,’ he said, ‘to seeing William put up a really good show against those Boers.’

  ‘He’s going to have a capital force under his command.’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie had been gratified by this remark. ‘I’ve been to some trouble over it, as a matter of fact. Had to chat up that new OC at Sleep’s Hill. But he’s done us proud in the way of kit and equipment. A shade anachronistic, perhaps. But the kids aren’t going to look like Boy Scouts. Believe you me, you’ll take them for a platoon of Guards.’

  ‘Most gratifying,’ Appleby said. ‘Splendid fun. Goodbye.’ And he left the Birch-Blackies to go on their way.

  Richard Chitfield, as things now appeared, required more thinking about than Appleby had been inclined to suppose. He was at or near the centre of an obscure affair which was beginning to exhibit a thoroughly sinister appearance. It might be as well to sort all this out a little before tackling the man himself – and only the more so because a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police had no business whatever to be nosing round Drool Court in a suspicious – or at least suspecting – fashion. And Chitfield could keep at least for another quarter of an hour. Thus feeling that his present need was for seclusion, Appleby changed course, walked down a long formal garden which was historically quite at odds with the house, went through a gate into the park, and there established himself uncompanionably on a solitary seat beneath an enormous oak. He could still hear faintly the military band on the terrace; and yet more faintly there came to his ear a species of dismal yowling which may have emanated from the Basingstoke Druids as they limbered up to cope with the Golden Dawn. Listening to this for a moment, he realized why there had been something familiar lurking in that phrase. An occult society, active back in the Nineties, had called itself the Order of the Golden Dawn, and various poets of that period had been mixed up with it. But he couldn’t recall that it had anything druidical involved. The Basingstoke Druids must just have thought it sounded nice. They were demonstrably a dotty crowd.

  But this was by the way, and the present problem concerned sheiks, not druids. So just where did the sheik-business begin?

  Chronologically considered, it began with Tibby Fancroft, who had been forbidden to dress up as a desert lover. There was no direct evidence that this had much upset Tibby, but it had upset Cherry Chitfield a good deal. The occasion of her resentment had been entirely childish – but hadn’t there lurked in her, distinct from this, some other occasion of disquiet? It appeared that her father had the habit of making her at least fragmentary and sporadic confidences about his affairs, and it was almost as if she had suspected danger or at least mystery in the interdict imposed upon her lover in so arbitrary a way. It was hard to see any other explanation of her sudden wish – childish in itself, no doubt – to have an important policeman around Drool on the occasion of the fête.

  It was going to be dangerous to walk around got up as a sheik. At this conception Appleby had arrived already, but he now possessed a larger context within which to consider it. It was perfectly true, as Birch-Blackie had observed, that visitors (or emissaries) to England, alike from the Near East and the Middle East, occasionally carried, as it were, a substantial risk of assassination in their luggage. They were more vulnerable, less easily guarded, in this country than in their own. It could even be a matter of hostile sovereign governments having a go at each other in this way on English soil. And it was, of course, just that sort of hinterland, involving (or thought to involve) delicate diplomatic considerations, that would result in such seemingly absurd assignments as that imposed on Tommy Pride and his token force of two men.

  There was at least one real sheik at Drool. This, too, Appleby felt that he knew already. Somehow he hadn’t doubted for an instant that his second sheik had been both authentic and important; and he could now again quite clearly call up the image of that hawk-faced man with the stately carriage. Moreover this was the sheik whom he had briefly glimpsed again as present at that confidential confabulation in Richard Chitfield’s library in company with the half-dozen of grotesquely disguised persons. This alone set the stately sheik radically apart from the others.

  Disguise. Disguise within disguise. Wasn’t the real sheik himself to be thought of as disguised, although in a peculiar sense? All the other sheiks were in fact non-sheiks pretending to be authentic sheiks – whether in a blameless fancy-dress way or for reasons less innocent which remained to be determined. But wasn’t the real sheik involved in a situation that was considerably more complex? Wasn’t he pretending to be in the same boat as the others, supporting – all in the way of fun – a fictitious identity, although in fact he was doing nothing of the kind? He had come to the fête, that was to say, simply as an Englishman who had happened to dress himself up in an Arab fashion. And in this way he had ingeniously made himself into a kind of Invisible Man.

  Appleby found himself frowning over this proposition. It penetrated, he believed, well into the target area, but it wasn’t too well put. The elaborate exercise he was studying (for elaborate it most certainly was) had really been mounted to obviate the real sheik’s need to disguise himself. Put it that way, and the thing begins to come clear. The sheik is something very grand indeed; perhaps even a monarch. He is a haughty and courageous man, and he abates nothing of these qualities because he is also a threatened man as well. He is not at all minded to huddle into western clothes in order to elude the observation of his enemies while attending some meeting or conference of high political or financial importance. So what can one arrange? The answer is an improvised additional element in Richard Chitfield’s already-planned fancy dress fête at Drool Court.

  Still reposing (in a manner wholly appropriate to Robin Hood) beneath his majestic oak, Appleby assessed this odd sequence of propositions soberly. Perhaps one didn’t need to posit anything so sensational as an actual threat of terrorist assassination; perhaps nothing more than confidentiality, the avoidance of publicity essential in the sphere of high finance, was in question. Might not the fact that, with the exception of Chitfield himself, all the other men at that meeting had been heavily disguised have a logical place he
re? At some tentative stage of large-scale negotiation there might be conferring parties anxious to avoid precise identification for a time. If Chitfield was in danger of being in real trouble (as Birch-Blackie had supposed), and if the authentic sheik was indeed a ruler whose position at home was known to be insecure, there might be good reason why men cautiously considering whether to muck in with them might choose to be unrecognizable one to another.

  But what about all the other sheiks? Or, more precisely, what about the two distinct categories of other sheiks?

  Richard Chitfield appeared to have indulged some indistinct notion that there was safety in numbers – or safety, at least, for his own important and authentic sheik. So he had seen to it that there would be other sheiks on view. This would account for the Pring contingent. It seemed to imply his belief (which might be justified or not) that such terrorists as were involved would be of a singularly trigger-happy disposition, ready to jump to the conclusion that the first appropriately attired person encountered must be the one they were commissioned to attend to. On this view all these people were seriously at risk. And Chitfield had been concerned that his prospective son-in-law, Tibby Fancroft, should not be among them. A few Prings were another matter. If this had been how Richard Chitfield’s mind worked, he was a man quite as ruthless as tycoons of his kind are popularly supposed to be.

  And finally there was the other category of pseudo-sheiks: the three men (originally, presumably, in ordinary dress) who had hastily transferred themselves into a further batch of Arabian Nights characters at a cost of five pounds per head. For the moment, it had to be admitted, the rôle of these persons was entirely obscure. They might represent, so to speak, reinforcements either on one side or the other. But it was easiest to see them as an enemy within the gates of Drool. The odds were that Richard Chitfield’s elaborate manoeuvre was in danger of failure, as many elaborate manoeuvres turn out to be. The whereabouts of the all-important authentic sheik had become known to his adversaries. And they were here on the spot.

  11

  Appleby’s train of thought, as thus briefly summarized, might have entirely pleased a detective intelligence less experienced than his own. As far as it went, his picture of the mysterious affair at Drool hung together well enough. But it was no more than a hypothesis, and the problem now was to find some means of subjecting it to verification through experiment. The person to whom to apply this technique was certainly Richard Chitfield. To Chitfield Appleby must, as he had planned, introduce himself and he must then chat briefly in the most harmless way before suddenly springing so knowledgeable-seeming a question that the chap would be surprised into spilling any beans that he happened to be carrying round in his pocket: for example, the identity of the authentic sheik.

  Primitive guile of this sort was part of the policeman’s stock-in-trade, and it was remarkable how often it worked. On the present occasion, however, the investigation went ahead for a time along different lines. This was a result of the reappearance of Colonel Pride, who had spotted Appleby under his oak and was now hurrying towards him. From afar their meeting might have been judged a wholly Arcadian encounter of the homespun English order. Here were two jolly outlaws in Lincoln green planning a little deer-stealing or the like at the expense of an overweening local magnate.

  ‘Glad to spot you, John,’ Pride said. ‘They’ve taken the wraps off. Message just come through. The “over to you” sort of thing.’

  ‘Just who have taken the wraps off?’

  ‘Those leather-bottoms at the FO, of course. Ghastly life they seem to have. Never stand up, except to drink tomato-juice at cocktail-parties. My father was in that outfit, you know. But he warned me off the Diplomatic when I was quite a kid. Sensible of him. Shoved me into the Brigade instead, and there I was when the Führer’s bloody curtain went up. Fortunate thing. Do you know that the feminine of Führer means a bus conductress? Poor old Adolf never thought of that one.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Appleby conjectured that some state of obscure excitement was responsible for these random autobiographical excursions on Tommy Pride’s part. ‘And just what has the Foreign Office taken the wraps off?’

  ‘What’s cooking at Drool – or what they’ve been thinking may be cooking at Drool. It’s all about a fellow called an Emir. Now, what would you say an Emir is?’

  ‘My new neighbour, Professor McIlwraith, would tell you that it’s the same word as Admiral. But it can be a title of honour borne by the descendants of Mohammed, or it can mean simply a prince. Not quite a top-drawer prince, perhaps. I seem to recall Gibbon recording that the humble title of emir was no longer suitable to the Ottoman greatness.’

  ‘Is that so? Remarkable thing.’ Colonel Pride was accustomed to his friend Appleby sometimes exhibiting a professorial side himself. ‘Well, this chap, who’s called the Emir Afreet–’

  ‘Are you sure of that, Tommy? It sounds most improbable. An afreet is an evil demon or monster.’

  ‘Well, that’s what my man in the car-park took it down as on his radio blower affair. It’s not important. The point is that the chap’s here at this confounded jamboree.’

  ‘So he is, Tommy. And rather impressive, although not particularly demoniac.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ For a moment the Chief Constable had received this information without surprise. But quickly his features expressed a natural bewilderment. ‘You know about him already?’

  ‘Well, at least I’ve seen him. And I imagine your friends at the Foreign Office believe him to be under some sort of threat. Of assassination, say. Or perhaps merely of kidnapping. He’s rather rash, you see. Perhaps “intrepid” is the worthier word. Not at all disposed to hide himself behind a massive bodyguard, or even get himself into unobtrusive western-style togs. Particularly when he has a big deal on hand with fellows like Chitfield and his associates. I think they may be trying to rescue each other – Chitfield and the Emir – from some ticklish political and financial corner.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot more about this Arab than I do.’ The Chief Constable was staring at Appleby much as Dr Watson had been habituated to stare at a Sherlock Holmes in full deductive spate. ‘Perhaps you can tell me where to find him.’

  ‘I could have told you where to find him an hour ago. But I haven’t a clue as to where he is now. On his way back to London, perhaps.’

  ‘I damned well hope so. But I suppose we must look around. A fellow dressed up from the family wash-basket oughtn’t to be too difficult to spot.’

  ‘My dear Tommy, haven’t you noticed? One emir- or sheik-like character has recently retired from the field in the person of a certain Tibby Fancroft. But there is a minimum of eight others still enjoying the fun. Mind you, I could myself pick out the real one from quite a distance away. But the position holds possibilities of some confusion, all the same. And what are you meant to do about the Emir Afreet, anyway? Bundle him into his Rolls and tell the chauffeur to drive him back to town? It’s just conceivable that he might regard you as taking something of a liberty. And the FO wouldn’t care for that at all.’

  ‘Confound the Foreign Office – and the Home Office as well. I’m asked to keep things under observation, and act only in an emergency.’

  ‘I’ve heard that one before.’ It was obvious that Appleby didn’t think highly of it. ‘Are your two men armed, Tommy?’

  ‘Of course they’re not armed!’ The Chief Constable was scandalized. ‘Where do you think we are, my dear John: the streets of Chicago?’ Although there was nobody within a couple of hundred yards, he cautiously lowered his voice. ‘Although, as a matter of fact, I do carry a little toy affair myself.’

  ‘Well, why not? I don’t think I’d suspect you of being a trigger-happy type. But some of those pseudo-sheiks may be.’

  ‘What do you mean, John – pseudo-sheiks?’

  ‘It’s like this. As well as your Emir, there are at least seven
men dressed up as Arabs at this party. And I do mean dressed up. Not one of them could sit a camel, or would know how to enter a mosque. But they divide into two groups. Four of them are, I think, minor associates of Chitfield’s, and at least one of them is here dressed as he is at Chitfield’s direct suggestion.’

  ‘That’s uncommonly odd.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But remember how mediaeval kings would dress up half-a-dozen unfortunate fellows exactly like themselves – crown and all, no doubt – and shove them into the battle to bamboozle the enemy. It’s something like that. The other group is a trio – and all three of them have simply turned themselves into Arabs at short notice with the aid of stuff that can be hired near the main gate.’

  ‘Why ever should they do that? And is Chitfield at the bottom of this ploy too?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that Chitfield knows nothing about it. But your first question, Tommy, I can’t answer at all.’

  ‘I suppose it’s natural that you should preserve a scrap of ignorance here and there.’ The Chief Constable produced this sally with considerable satisfaction. ‘Is there anything else that it would be only kind to apprise me of?’

  ‘Only that you were quite right in suspecting a high-level hinterland to the whole affair. A ruler, or a government, in your Emir’s part of the world in danger of toppling, and Chitfield and his crowd likely to tumble with them. That kind of thing. Fishing in troubled waters – but with no shortage of oil to pour on them.’ Appleby paused expectantly on this witticism – which, however, the Chief Constable was too preoccupied to appreciate. ‘All, of course, comparatively small fry. Chitfield’s middle name isn’t exactly BP or Shell. But the affair is big enough to be of international concern.’