Redcap

by Philip McCutchan

  “Out!”

  The order was barked at Shaw, and a gun was .pushed into his back. He was prodded forward into the room as soon as he was clear of the car.

  Suddenly, as he came through the doorway, he was given a violent blow in the back which sent him staggering forwards to land in a heap at the farther wall. The door was banged to behind him, and he heard heavy bolts snick home.

  After that, silence; silence and darkness lit by a stray moonbeam coming, coldly silver, through a very tiny barred window set high up in one wall. A window which, even if he could reach it, would be far too small to squeeze through. The moon cast a long, intersected shadow on the opposite wall. Shaw went inch by inch over the rest of the place, but he could find nothing whatever that offered any hope of a way out; he might just as well save his strength for whatever lay ahead. After a time he sat down on a pile of smelly sacks in a corner. Still the brooding oppressive silence and the aloneness . . . until he heard the tiny mutterings and squeakings of rats, rats which ran and scampered about the floor, burrowed into the sacks upon which he sat. He lashed out at them with his fists, felt his knuckles plunge into fur, heard the shrill protests, felt the tear of sharp teeth at his ankles.

  He kicked out, got to his feet, horror gripping his heart. What in God’s name did they mean to do with him now— leave him here, food for the rats? But surely some one would take action at the Port Said end. Sir Donald Mackinnon would be wondering, and worrying too. And Judith. Laty-mer would surely get to hear, through the Consulate in Port Said, the Ambassador in Cairo. And yet, even so, what could Latymer or anyone else do? This was Egypt; a fat lot of notice they’d ever taken of British representations in the past. There was no special reason why they should change now. Besides, as an agent, Shaw couldn’t expect this country to pull him out of a hole once he got caught.

  And in the meantime REDCAP was without its officer-in-charge and Donovan’s girl was alone too. Andersson would no doubt be back aboard the New South Wales, Andersson who had led him so neatly into this trap by his carefully worded cable, Andersson who must have known he would follow him. That alone presupposed the man’s guilt, his real identity. Sick and giddy, in an agony of spirit, Shaw paced up and down that stinking, stuffy room, until he was physically and mentally exhausted; and then he fell on to the pile of sacks, in a huddle, went at last to sleep.

  He didn’t know how long he slept; but he awoke to find a very bright light shining into his eyes. As he blinked into it, it moved, and two men appeared suddenly and came forward and threw their weight on him, holding down his arms and chest. Two more men came from behind the light, each took one of his legs and held it fast to the ground. None of them spoke, but he heard their hard breathing, felt it on his face. Then another man appeared with something in his hand, knelt down beside Shaw. His jacket was ripped with a sharp knife, the sleeve was rolled back, ripped again until the whole sleeve hung in tatters from his shoulder. And then Shaw felt a needle drive into his flesh, knew a moment of almost unbearable agony as something was pumped into him. He cried out through clenched teeth, jerked and twisted his limbs, but the men, sweating and panting, held fast. The pain shot through him, seemed to flow into every crevice, every cell in his body. He was racked, tortured with it. As the needle was withdrawn a whisper of blood dripped from its end on to Shaw’s chest. The men still held him down; and then, after centuries of time as it seemed, the pain began to ebb slowly away, draining out of him through toes and finger-tips, leaving him weak but almost happy just because that agony had disappeared.

  Soon after his legs and arms were released.

  Oddly, he wasn’t conscious of any actual feeling as of men’s weight having lifted from his limbs. He only knew they’d let go of him because he heard them moving about and then, out of the corner of his eye, he could see them outlined in that bright light. And then they went away and the light went out; Shaw felt curiously numb and weak, but he tried to struggle up to a sitting position so as to ease the headache that had gripped him. He felt that if the blood could drain away he would feel less groggy, more able to concentrate his thoughts. But after a while he realized that he couldn’t move. Apart from that tearing headache, there was absolutely no feeling in his body at all. Even his eyes wouldn’t obey his will now, wouldn’t turn. He was inert, corpse-like. A feeling of horror, of utter panic, took hold of him for a moment, and then he forced his mind to remain quiet, composed and ready for whatever must happen next. For a long time nothing happened. The first faint dawn struggled through the barred window and lit on the wall, and he just lay there, absolutely still, not able even to blink, to move his lips. Every muscle seemed paralysed. And then, as the cell lightened a little more, the door opened and the sun came through. A man walked into his fixed line of vision, stood there looking down at him, seemed to be studying him intently. Then, as though far, far away, Shaw heard this man speak and, with his knowledge of the language, was able to follow what was said.

  “How did it happen?”

  A voice came from the doorway, outside Shaw’s vision. He identified it as the voice of one of the policemen: “The man was armed, and he resisted arrest after causing a disturbance, doctor. You can see the injuries for yourself, the injuries we were forced to inflict—the blood on the hair, the mouth. . .

  The doctor bent and Shaw heard him murmur: “A blow in the mouth, and on the head. . . .” He bent closer, down on one knee. Shaw tried desperately to speak, failed. The man pulled back an eyelid, felt for the heart, the pulse. There was nothing; Shaw had dried up, was suspended in a kind of cold storage.

  Shaw heard the man say, with a curious inflexion in his voice as though he knew what he was saying was a lie: “Yes, you are right. The man is dead.”

  He tried to cry out: I’m not, I’m not, I’m as alive as you are, as anxious to get back into the good fresh air, but I can’t move, I can’t speak. But I am not dead. No words came; he lay like the corpse he had been pronounced to be. Then once again he heard the doctor speak.

  The doctor said sardonically, “He is dead, but how? His injuries are not severe. What is all this, Hassan?”

  “It is a matter which I must not discuss, doctor. I can only tell you this: he is an important man, and his absence will cause much consternation in London, and aboard the liner, the New South Wales. It could be awkward. But if he can be shown to have caused a disturbance in Port Said, and to have been arrested, and then to have died from injuries received while resisting lawful arrest . . . why, then no questions will be asked, for inquiries will not be made too closely into the death of an Englishman if it is backed up by a doctor’s certificate. And if anything is raised by London, then our authorities will have an answer to give. That is the way we wish it to be. And Solli is not Port Said, doctor.”

  The doctor laughed. “And I am not the medical officer of the Port Said police! And you come to me because you know I will co-operate.”

  “Your fee is high enough, doctor.”

  “Oh, well, as to that . . .” Again the doctor laughed. “I will ask no more questions. Clearly this is no ordinary police matter, but I shall not ask for whom you work outside hours of duty, Hassan! I shall issue a certificate which will satisfy your superiors, and you need not worry.” He added, almost apologetically: “And in return, apart of course from my fee . . . ?”

  “Your past indiscretions will not be brought to light, doctor.”

  “That is good. Ah, my dear Hassan . . .”

  The voices moved away, out of earshot. The door banged to, swung for a moment on its hinges. A little later a bold rat moved stealthily, its nose vibrating, searching across Shaw’s mouth. He could see it as a huge mountain before his eyes, could even smell it, but he could not feel it. It walked up his face, over his hair. The tail drooped down, was dragged slowly across his unfeeling lips. The rat moved on, disappeared. Soon after, one of the policemen came back and looked down at Shaw. He said, “Yes, my friend, you live yet, though officially you are very dead. Your frien
ds will be informed accordingly in due course. And to-night you will go to your last resting-place . . . unless in the meantime you are prepared to give us certain information, which we shall ask of you when the drug wears off and you are able to speak again.”

  When a long time later he came through the drug his hands were bound tightly behind his back, his ankles were roped together. Men stood over him with rifles.

  They wanted to know just how much information about Lubin had leaked out to the West, and what were the countermeasures being put into effect by the British and other Governments, and exactly what Shaw’s orders had been.

  He said nothing.

  He was told that if he didn’t speak willingly then the truth would be forced out of him.

  He clenched his teeth, muttered: “Just try.”

  They kicked his body, they beat him with rifle-butts. But he kept silent. They picked him up, held him steady, and smashed blow after blow into his defenceless face, and still he bit down on torn lips and kept silent. And then, as daylight once again faded from that high-set, barred window the inquisition ended at last. One of the men, his face filled with hate and cruelty and the naked desire for simple revenge, said:

  “Yesterday you told me you had never heard of the oasis of Solli. Now you shall hear what it is.”

  “Go on, then.”

  The Egyptian said, “The oasis possesses something unique for this part of the world. You are going to die now, slowly. Because you have already been certified dead in the official manner, it is now necessary for us to give you proper public burial.” The thick, rubbery lips twitched, seemed to mull the words over in satisfaction. “What better place than Solli, where it is not too public, and where you will not last long enough for exhumation should our plans go astray? Now listen. Solli possesses a Tower of Silence, which you may perhaps have seen when we entered the village. You understand, Solli is the centre of a small area many of whose inhabitants are a race apart. They are Parsees, from India, and there are enough of them for an enlightened administration to allow them to follow their own religion and to practise their own burial rites. Do you understand?”

  Shaw’s eyes blazed and his bound fists bunched behind his back, but his mouth clamped tight. He understood well enough now.

  “You will speak, Commander Shaw?”

  He gritted his teeth. “No, you bastard. I won’t.”

  “Very well.”

  The man kicked him again, and then they moved towards him and held him down hard. One man went outside, came back in a minute or two. Shaw caught sight of the long, sharp needle, the big bottle of paralysing liquid. He set his teeth as the needle drove in and the terrible pain began again, set his whole body afire, worse even than before, as though he had been given a bigger dose. Within three minutes he was once more numbed from head to foot, unable to move a muscle, only his brain still living on, his brain and his revolving desperate thoughts. He knew well enough what the Tower of Silence meant; he hadn’t recognized that tall building yesterday simply because it was the very last thing he would have expected to find in Egypt. But he knew what they were, those tall towers of the silent dead where the only sounds were those of the vultures, whirring down from the sky on black, flapping wings to consume the corpses, leaving behind them nothing but piles of whitened bones; and he knew that he was to be eaten alive, the living flesh torn from him by the sharp, probing beaks of the birds of prey.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That evening Sir Donald Mackinnon had got the story, the very surprising and disturbing story, from the A. and P. Line’s agents in Port Said. The agents had been notified officially by the police authorities that the British Commander Shaw had become involved in a public disturbance of his own making; in consequence whereof he had been arrested, had resisted violently, drawing a gun on the police, and had received unavoidable injuries from which he had since died. The authorities, the agents’ representative told Sir Donald, had said that they could in no way hold themselves answerable for what had happened; and they had even intimated that they intended pressing their own Government to make representations to the United Kingdom Government through diplomatic channels, protesting at the incident and at the strong anti-Egyptian tendencies exhibited by a serving officer.

  Sir Donald’s face, when he heard all this, went dark with anger. He snapped, “It’s damn ridiculous! It’s just a lot of hokum! Shaw wasn’t the sort of man to do that. Besides . . .” He checked himself. He couldn’t say anything about the job Shaw was aboard to do. He raised his arms hopelessly, let them drop. He swung round on the agent. “Dammit, isn’t there anything we can do?”

  The agent, an Englishman, shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Captain. No more than we’ve already done from our end, that is. You know what Port Said’s like these days. If that’s the official line, they’ll stick to it whatever we say or do.” He added, “Anyway, there’s no reason to doubt that it’s true, you know. I don’t mean to suggest for one moment that this passenger actually started the incident in any way, but it’s just the sort of thing that does blow up. Spit at the British, start a riot—and then blame the innocent victim.” He shrugged. “You see what I mean? And then the police arrest him. And they’re never exactly gentle. I remember—”

  Sir Donald interrupted, demanded heatedly: “But isn’t there any way of checking, of finding some solid proof of all this?”

  “No, no further than has already been done.” The agent tapped the report, which lay on the Captain’s desk. ‘This is genuine all right, except probably as regards how the incident started. If it isn’t, well, we can’t crack it. And anyway, come to that—what else could have happened to the man? Frankly, I’m surprised there’s been quite so much flap—even the Embassy’s been more than ordinarily anxious.”

  Sir Donald sighed frustratedly. If only he was free to speak . . . he growled, “Damn and blast! You’re convinced he really is dead, aren’t you?”

  The reply was terse: “He’s been seen by a doctor and a certificate’s been issued. There’s no doubt about it at all.” The agent paused, then added: “By the way, I’ve had a cable from London. Your Chairman’s rather anxious for you to go through the canal, Sir Donald. Seems keen to get you through to Australia without any more delay.” He shrugged. “For some reason or other, he’s being extremely insistent about that. That’s the third cable I’ve had in under twenty-four hours, actually.”

  Sir Donald got up, strode up and down the cabin, hands behind his back. He said, “I’m not at all keen to go through the canal without knowing more about Shaw.”

  The agent said with finality, “We certainly aren’t going to hear any more, sir, except possibly much later on through diplomatic sources in London. I can assure you positively of that. We’ve done our very best.” He added meaningly, “And there’s still time to get you into the convoy leaving at midnight.”

  The Captain glared. “What you mean is, those are the orders from London?”

  “From the Chairman personally.”

  “Leaving a passenger behind?”

  The agent gave a tactful but forbearing cough. He said, “But Captain . . . it isn’t a passenger you’re leaving behind. It’s a body. In any case, the Line could hardly be expected to hold the ship indefinitely for one passenger even if we hadn’t had this report. The matter must be left to us—the shore-side people on the spot—to deal with now. As it is, London will do all the notifying of next-of-kin and so on, and they want you to land his effects at Aden for transit home in the next ship coming through, so as not to delay you further here.”

  Sir Donald threw up his arms helplessly. The one consolation was that Shaw’s own department was certainly in the picture by now and they would be doing all that was necessary behind the scenes. They hadn’t contacted him or told him to remain in Port Said, hadn’t given him any guidance at all. So in the meantime he could only obey his orders from the Line; it wasn’t up to him to approach the Embassy.

  A few hours later the Egyptian armed guar
d was withdrawn from the gangway and the accommodation-ladder was raised and stowed, the ‘snake’ pontoon was slacked away and hauled inshore. Once again the pilot boarded and Sir Donald Mackinnon climbed slowly up to his bridge. The passenger decks buzzed with rumours. Some minutes later the signal flashed to tell the New South Wales to take up her station for leading the convoy southwards for Suez. Sir Donald gave a quiet order to his officer-of-the-watch and the berthing telegraphs clanged over. Men on the fo’c’sle heaved in on the slip-wire, bringing it home from the ring of the buoy, and a moment later the Captain put his main engines dead slow astern and came away from his moorings.

  “Stop engines . . . port twenty . . . slow ahead together.”

  The New South Wales moved her vast bulk, headed for the canal entrance. Behind her, the second ship in the line began moving into station. As the blaze of Port Said’s lights slid slow and quiet from view along the liner’s side, the bos’n, hissing between his teeth and looking vicious, for he had heard about what had happened to one of the passengers —and a passenger who was a particularly decent bloke who’d taken the trouble to talk to him once or twice about his job— directed a fire-hose down on to the last of the bum-boats which, with lines out to the ship’s rails so that trade could be carried on to the very last moment, were being carried along with the vessel. Shrieks and wails came up, fists were brandished, oaths hurled to the heights. The steady stream of water flushed full force into the boats, and then the occupants cut their lines and drifted rapidly astern.

  It wasn’t only the bos’n, of course, who had heard by now about Shaw. Every one in the ship, as the liner steamed on into the canal, knew that a passenger was being left behind dead. And this, the second tragedy to happen within so short a time, cast a further blight over the great vessel, increased the feeling of uncertainty and tenseness, the feeling that now they could never be sure what might happen next. Judith was terribly upset. She’d got to like Esmonde Shaw so much in those few short days from Naples and now the ship felt strangely empty without him. Somehow she couldn’t believe he’d really gone, that there wasn’t some other explanation of all this; so certain had she felt that there was indeed much more behind it, in all the circumstances, that during the long day’s vigil she had spoken to the Captain, revealing her own part in what was going on. But the Captain, though he’d arranged for an unobtrusive watch to be placed on the girl, had been powerless to do anything further in a matter of this kind.