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A waiter interrupted us by bringing the first course. Over the onion soup I said, ‘Anyway, that’s where your brother is—somewhere in Algeria if he isn’t already in Niger or Chad or somewhere else as improbable.’
‘He must be brought back,’ she said. ‘Mr Stafford, I don’t have much money, but is it at all possible for your detective agency to look for him?’
‘I don’t run a detective agency,’ I said. ‘I run a security organization. Lots of people get the two confused. Frankly, I don’t see why you want him back. You’ve just heard of how he’s been deceiving you for years. I think you’re better off without him.’
‘He’s my brother,’ she said simply. ‘He’s the only family I have in the world.’
She looked so woebegone that I took pity on her. I suppose it was then the decision was made. Of course I hedged it about with ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ as a sop to my conscience should I renege, but the decision was made.
I said carefully, ‘There’s a possibility—just a possibility, mind you—that I may be going to North Africa in the near future. If I do, I’ll ask around to see if I can find him.’
She lit up as though I’d given her the key to the Bank of England. ‘That’s very good of you,’ she said warmly.
‘Don’t go overboard about it,’ I warned. ‘Even if I do find him your troubles aren’t over. Supposing he doesn’t want to come back—what am I supposed to do? Kidnap him? He’s a free agent, you know.’
‘If you find him send me a cable and I’ll fly out. If I can talk to Paul I can get him to come back.’
‘No doubt you can, but the first problem is to find him. But we have some things going for us. Firstly, there are large areas of the Sahara where he will not look for the aircraft.’ I paused and then said acidly, ‘Not if he has any sense, that is, which I beg leave to doubt’
‘Oh! Which areas?’
‘The inhabited bits—the Sahara is not all blasted wilderness. Then there’s the course Peter Billson intended to fly—that should give us a rough indication of where the plane is likely to be. Is there anyone who’d know such an odd item of information after forty years?’
She shook her head despondently, then said slowly, ‘There’s a man in the Aeronautical Section of the Science Museum—Paul used to talk to him a lot. He’s some sort of aeronautical historian, he has all sorts of details in his records. I don’t remember his name, though.’
‘I’ll check,’ I said. ‘The other point in our favour is that in a relatively empty land a stranger tends to stand out. If Paul is buzzing about remote areas in a Land-Rover he’ll leave a pretty well-defined trail.’
She smiled at me. ‘You’re making me feel better already.’
‘Don’t raise your hopes too high. When…if I go to North Africa I’ll send you an address where you can contact me.’
She nodded briefly and we got on with the meal.
I took her home quite early and then went back to the club to bump into Charlie Malleson who was just coming out. ‘I thought I’d missed you,’ he said. ‘I was just passing and I thought I’d pop in to see you.’
I glanced at my watch. ‘The bar’s still open. What about a drink?’
‘Fine.’
We took our drinks to an isolated table and Charlie said, ‘I rang you at home but no one was in, so I took a chance on finding you here.’ I merely nodded, and he cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘Is it true what I hear about you and Gloria?’
‘Depends what you’ve heard, but I can guess what it is. Bad news gets around fast. It’s true enough. Where did you hear it?’
‘Brinton was saying something yesterday. Gloria’s been talking to him.’
‘Getting her version in first, no doubt. She won’t impress Brinton.’
‘Well, I’m truly sorry it happened this way. Are you starting a divorce action?’
‘It’s in the hands of my solicitor now.’
‘I see,’ he said slowly. I don’t know what he saw and I didn’t really care. ‘How are you feeling otherwise?’ he asked. ‘You’re not long out of hospital.’
I looked at him over the edge of my glass. ‘Have you ever been beaten up, Charlie? Given a thorough going-over by experts?’
‘I can’t say that I have.’
‘It’s the most degrading thing that can happen to a man,’ I said flatly. ‘It isn’t so much what they do to the body; that can stand a lot of punishment. It’s the feeling of utter helplessness. You’re no longer your own man—you’re in the hands of others who can do with you what they like. And you ask me how I feel.’
‘You’re bitter about it, aren’t you, Max? You know, I didn’t expect that of you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you have the reputation of being a pretty cold fish, you know. You run your end of the business like a computer.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with being logical and acting logically,’ I said.
‘No.’ There was a pause before Charlie said, ‘I suppose the divorce will keep you in England.’
I drained my glass. ‘I don’t see why it should. I’m thinking of taking your advice to soak up some sun. I’ll be glad to get away from London for a while.’
Charlie looked pleased. ‘It’ll do you good; you’ll come back like a new man.’
‘How is Jack Ellis settling in?’
‘Very well. I’m glad you said what you did to him about the job; it’s cleared the air and makes things easier all round. How long do you expect to be away?’
‘I don’t really know. Hold the fort, double the profits and bank the proceeds. Expect me when you see me.’
We talked idly for a few more minutes and then Charlie took his leave. I had an obscure feeling that he had not ‘dropped by in passing’ but had come for a reason, to get some question answered. About the divorce? About my health? I went over the conversation and wondered if he had got his answer.
I had an uneasy night. I thought of myself as seen by others—Max Stafford, the cold fish. I hadn’t known Charlie had thought of me in that way. We had always been personal friends as well as getting on well with each other in the business. To get a flash of illumination on oneself through the eyes of another can sometimes come as a shock.
I slept and woke again after having bad dreams of vaguely impending doom. I lay with open eyes for a long time and then, finding sleep impossible, I turned on the bedside light and lit a cigarette.
I prided myself on thinking and acting logically, but where in hell was the logic of goose-chasing to Algiers? The sexual bounce, maybe, from Gloria to Alix Aarvik? The desire to be the parfit, gentil knight on a white charger going on a quest to impress the maiden? I rejected that. Alix Aarvik was a nice enough girl but there was certainly no sexual attraction. Maybe Max Stafford was a cold fish, after all.
What, then?
Maybe it was because I thought I was being manipulated. I thought of Andrew McGovern. He had tried to send Alix to Canada. Why? In the event he didn’t send her. Why? Was it because I had been a bit too quick and caught her and talked to her the day before she was supposed to leave? If the damage had been done there would be no reason to send her away. I had been beaten up immediately after I had seen her. If McGovern had been responsible for that I’d have to think up some new and novel punishment for him.
Was McGovern deliberately putting pressure on me through Brinton? Brinton, on the day of the board meeting, had said he was under pressure from McGovern. What sort of a hold could McGovern have over a shark like Brinton? And if McGovern was doing the squeezing, why was he doing it?
Then there was Paul Billson. Before he entered my life I had been moderately happy, but from the moment Hoyland rang me up to have his hand held there had been nothing but trouble. Everything seemed to revolve around Paul, a man obsessed.
Logic! If everything revolved around Paul Billson, maybe he was the person to talk to. Maybe going to Algiers wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.
I put out the light and slept.
Three days later I flew to Algiers.
ELEVEN (#ulink_c7344dc2-83fa-535f-a856-79c7054322f9)
Algiers is the only city I know where the main post office looks like a mosque and the chief mosque looks like a post office. Not that I spent much time in the mosque but I thought I had made a major error when I entered the post office for the first time to collect letters from poste restante. I gazed in wonder at that vast hushed hall with its fretted screens and arabesques and came to the conclusion that it was an Eastern attempt to emulate the reverential and cathedral-like atmosphere affected by the major British banks. I got to know the post office quite well.
Getting to know the whereabouts of Paul Billson was not as easy. Although my French was good, my Arabic was non-existent, which made it no easier to fight my way through the Byzantine complexities of Algerian bureaucracy, an amorphous structure obeying Parkinson’s Law to the nth degree.
The track of my wanderings over Algiers, if recorded on a map, would have resembled the meanderings of a demented spider. At the twentieth office where my passport was given the routine fifteen-minute inspection by a suspicion-haunted official for the twentieth time my patience was nearly at snapping point. The trouble was that I was not on my own ground and the Algerians worked to different rules.
My hotel was in Hamma, in the centre of town near the National Museum, and when I returned, early one evening, I was dispirited. After a week in Algiers I had got nowhere, and if I couldn’t track Billson in a city what hope would I have in the desert? It seemed that my cutting edge had blunted from lack of practice.
As I walked across the foyer to collect my room key I was accosted by a tall Arab wearing the ubiquitous djellaba. ‘M’sieur Stafford?’
‘Yes, I’m Stafford.’
Wordlessly he handed me an envelope inscribed with my surname and nothing else. I looked at him curiously as I opened it and he returned my gaze with unblinking brown eyes. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, unheaded and with but two typewritten lines:
I believe you are looking for Paul Billson.
Why don’t you come to see me?
There was a signature underneath but it was an indecipherable scrawl.
I glanced at the Arab. ‘Who sent this?’
He answered with a gesture towards the hotel entrance. ‘This way.’
I pondered for a moment and nodded, then followed him from the hotel where he opened the rear door of a big Mercedes. I sat down and he slammed the door smartly and got behind the wheel. As he started the engine I said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Bouzarea.’ After that he concentrated on his driving and refused to answer questions. I gave up, leaned back in cushioned luxury, and watched Algiers flow by.
The road to Bouzarea climbed steeply out of the city and I twisted to look through the back window and saw Algiers spread below with the Mediterranean beyond, darkening towards the east as the sun set. Already strings of lights were appearing in the streets.
I turned back as the car swung around a corner and pulled up against a long wall, blank except for a small door. The Arab got out and opened the car door and indicated the door in the wall which was already swinging open. I walked through into a large walled garden which appeared to be slightly smaller than Windsor Great Park, but not much. In the middle distance was a low-slung, flat-roofed house which rambled inconsequently over the better part of an acre. The place stank of money.
The door behind closed with the snap of a lock and I turned to confront another Arab, an old man with a seamed, walnut face. I didn’t understand what he said but the beckoning gesture was unmistakable, so I followed him towards the house.
He led me through the house and into an inner courtyard, upon which he vanished like a puff of smoke into some hidden recess. A woman lay upon a chaise-longue. ‘Stafford?’
‘Yes—Max Stafford.’
She was oldish, about sixty plus, I guessed, and was dressed in a style which might have been thought old-fashioned. Her hair was white and she could have been anyone’s old mother but for two things. The first was her face, which was tanned to the colour of brown shoe leather. There was a network of deep wrinkles about her eyes which betokened too much sun, and those eyes were a startling blue. The blue eyes and the white hair set against that face made a spectacular combination. The second thing was that she was smoking the biggest Havana cigar I’ve ever seen.
‘What’s your poison? Scotch? Rye? Gin? You name it.’ Her voice was definitely North American.
I smiled slowly. ‘I never take drinks from strangers.’
She laughed. ‘I’m Hesther Raulier. Sit down, Max Stafford, but before you do, pour yourself a drink. Save me getting up.’
There was an array of bottles on a portable bar so I went and poured myself a scotch and added water from a silver jug. As I sat in the wicker chair she said, ‘What are you doing in Algiers?’
She spoke English but when she said ‘Algiers’ it came out as ‘el Djeza’ir’. Then she was speaking Arabic. I said, ‘Looking for Paul Billson.’
‘Why?’
I sipped the scotch. ‘What business is it of yours?’
She offered me a gamine grin. ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me.’
I looked up at the sky. ‘Is it always as pleasant here in winter?’
She laid down her cigar carefully in a big ashtray. ‘So okay, Stafford; you’re a hard trader. But just tell me one thing. Are you here to hurt Paul?’
‘Why should I want to hurt him?’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said irritably. ‘Must you always answer a question with a question?’
‘Yes, I must,’ I said sharply. ‘Until you declare your interest.’
‘So, all right; let’s quit fencing.’ She swung her legs off the chaise-longue and stood up. Her build was stocky and she was a muscular old bird. ‘I was a friend of Paul’s father.’
That sounded promising, so I gave measure for measure. ‘His sister is worried about him.’
Her voice was sharp. ‘His sister? I didn’t know Peter Billson had a daughter.’
‘He didn’t. His widow remarried during the war to a Norwegian who was killed. Alix Aarvik is Paul’s half-sister.’
Hesther Raulier seemed lost in thought. After a while she said, ‘Poor Helen; she sure had a tough time.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘I knew them both.’ She went over to the bar and poured a hefty slug of neat rye whisky. She downed the lot in one swallow and shuddered a little. ‘Paul told me Helen had died but he said nothing about a sister.’
‘He wouldn’t.’
She swung around. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘He treated her pretty badly. People don’t talk about those to whom they’ve been unkind. I’ll tell you this much—Paul wasn’t much help to his mother in her last years.’ I picked up my glass again. ‘Why should you think I’d hurt Paul?’
She gave me a level stare. ‘I’ll have to know a lot more about you before I tell you that, Max Stafford.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘And I’ll need to know a lot more about you.’
She smiled faintly. ‘Seems we’re going to have us a real gabfest. You’d better stay to dinner.’
‘Thanks. But tell me something. Where is Paul now?’
‘Come with me,’ she said, and led me into the garden where she pointed to the south at a low range of hills just visible in the twilight. ‘See those? Those are the foothills of the Atlas. Paul Billson is way to hell and gone the other side.’
