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The woman in the room next to that occupied by Joan Sutcliffe stepped back from the balcony. There was a mirror in her hand.
She had gone out on the balcony originally to examine more closely a single hair that had had the audacity to spring up on her chin. She dealt with it with tweezers, then subjected her face to a minute scrutiny in the clear sunlight.
It was then, as she relaxed, that she saw something else. The angle at which she was holding her mirror was such that it reflected the mirror of the hanging wardrobe in the room next to hers and in that mirror she saw a man doing something very curious.
So curious and unexpected that she stood there motionless, watching. He could not see her from where he sat at the table, and she could only see him by means of the double reflection.
If he had turned his head behind him, he might have caught sight of her mirror in the wardrobe mirror, but he was too absorbed in what he was doing to look behind him…
Once, it was true, he did look up suddenly towards the window, but since there was nothing to see there, he lowered his head again.
The woman watched him while he finished what he was doing. After a moment’s pause he wrote a note which he propped up on the table. Then he moved out of her line of vision but she could just hear enough to realize that he was making a telephone call. She couldn’t catch what was said, but it sounded light-hearted—casual. Then she heard the door close.
The woman waited a few minutes. Then she opened her door. At the far end of the passage an Arab was flicking idly with a feather duster. He turned the corner out of sight.
The woman slipped quickly to the door of the next room. It was locked, but she had expected that. The hairpin she had with her and the blade of a small knife did the job quickly and expertly.
She went in, pushing the door to behind her. She picked up the note. The flap had only been stuck down lightly and opened easily. She read the note, frowning. There was no explanation there.
She sealed it up, put it back, and walked across the room.
There, with her hand outstretched, she was disturbed by voices through the window from the terrace below.
One was a voice that she knew to be the occupier of the room in which she was standing. A decided didactic voice, fully assured of itself.
She darted to the window.
Below on the terrace, Joan Sutcliffe, accompanied by her daughter Jennifer, a pale solid child of fifteen, was telling the world and a tall unhappy looking Englishman from the British Consulate just what she thought of the arrangements he had come to make.
‘But it’s absurd! I never heard such nonsense. Everything’s perfectly quiet here and everyone quite pleasant. I think it’s all a lot of panicky fuss.’
‘We hope so, Mrs Sutcliffe, we certainly hope so. But H.E. feels that the responsibility is such—’
Mrs Sutcliffe cut him short. She did not propose to consider the responsibility of ambassadors.
‘We’ve a lot of baggage, you know. We were going home by long sea—next Wednesday. The sea voyage will be good for Jennifer. The doctor said so. I really must absolutely decline to alter all my arrangements and be flown to England in this silly flurry.’
The unhappy looking man said encouragingly that Mrs Sutcliffe and her daughter could be flown, not to England, but to Aden and catch their boat there.
‘With our baggage?’
‘Yes, yes, that can be arranged. I’ve got a car waiting—a station wagon. We can load everything right away.’
‘Oh well.’ Mrs Sutcliffe capitulated. ‘I suppose we’d better pack.’
‘At once, if you don’t mind.’
The woman in the bedroom drew back hurriedly. She took a quick glance at the address on a luggage label on one of the suitcases. Then she slipped quickly out of the room and back into her own just as Mrs Sutcliffe turned the corner of the corridor.
The clerk from the office was running after her.
‘Your brother, the Squadron Leader, has been here, Mrs Sutcliffe. He went up to your room. But I think that he has left again. You must just have missed him.’
‘How tiresome,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the clerk and went on to Jennifer, ‘I suppose Bob’s fussing too. I can’t see any sign of disturbance myself in the streets. This door’s unlocked. How careless these people are.’
‘Perhaps it was Uncle Bob,’ said Jennifer.
‘I wish I hadn’t missed him…Oh, there’s a note.’ She tore it open.
‘At any rate Bob isn’t fussing,’ she said triumphantly. ‘He obviously doesn’t know a thing about all this. Diplomatic wind up, that’s all it is. How I hate trying to pack in the heat of the day. This room’s like an oven. Come on, Jennifer, get your things out of the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. We must just shove everything in anyhow. We can repack later.’
‘I’ve never been in a revolution,’ said Jennifer thoughtfully.
‘I don’t expect you’ll be in one this time,’ said her mother sharply. ‘It will be just as I say. Nothing will happen.’
Jennifer looked disappointed.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_3e70afc2-251c-57d6-8fa8-ad23172cfd62)
Introducing Mr Robinson (#ulink_3e70afc2-251c-57d6-8fa8-ad23172cfd62)
It was some six weeks later that a young man tapped discreetly on the door of a room in Bloomsbury and was told to come in.
It was a small room. Behind a desk sat a fat middle-aged man slumped in a chair. He was wearing a crumpled suit, the front of which was smothered in cigar ash. The windows were closed and the atmosphere was almost unbearable.
‘Well?’ said the fat man testily, and speaking with half-closed eyes. ‘What is it now, eh?’
It was said of Colonel Pikeaway that his eyes were always just closing in sleep, or just opening after sleep. It was also said that his name was not Pikeaway and that he was not a colonel. But some people will say anything!
‘Edmundson, from the F.O., is here sir.’
‘Oh,’ said Colonel Pikeaway.
He blinked, appeared to be going to sleep again and muttered:
‘Third secretary at our Embassy in Ramat at the time of the Revolution. Right?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘I suppose, then, I’d better see him,’ said Colonel Pikeaway without any marked relish. He pulled himself into a more upright position and brushed off a little of the ash from his paunch.
Mr Edmundson was a tall fair young man, very correctly dressed with manners to match, and a general air of quiet disapproval.
‘Colonel Pikeaway? I’m John Edmundson. They said you—er—might want to see me.’
‘Did they? Well, they should know,’ said Colonel Pikeaway. ‘Siddown,’ he added.
His eyes began to close again, but before they did so, he spoke:
‘You were in Ramat at the time of the Revolution?’
‘Yes, I was. A nasty business.’
‘I suppose it would be. You were a friend of Bob Rawlinson’s, weren’t you?’
‘I know him fairly well, yes.’
‘Wrong tense,’ said Colonel Pikeaway. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Yes, sir, I know. But I wasn’t sure—’ he paused.
‘You don’t have to take pains to be discreet here,’ said Colonel Pikeaway. ‘We know everything here. Or if we don’t, we pretend we do. Rawlinson flew Ali Yusuf out of Ramat on the day of the Revolution. Plane hasn’t been heard of since. Could have landed in some inaccessible place, or could have crashed. Wreckage of a plane has been found in the Arolez mountains. Two bodies. News will be released to the Press tomorrow. Right?’
Edmundson admitted that it was quite right.
‘We know all about things here,’ said Colonel Pikeaway. ‘That’s what we’re for. Plane flew into the mountain. Could have been weather conditions. Some reason to believe it was sabotage. Delayed action bomb. We haven’t got the full reports yet. The plane crashed in a pretty inaccessible place. There was a reward offered for finding it, but these things take a long time to filter through. Then we had to fly out experts to make an examination. All the red tape, of course. Applications to a foreign government, permission from ministers, palm greasing—to say nothing of the local peasantry appropriating anything that might come in useful.’
He paused and looked at Edmundson.
‘Very sad, the whole thing,’ said Edmundson. ‘Prince Ali Yusuf would have made an enlightened ruler, with democratic principles.’
‘That’s what probably did the poor chap in,’ said Colonel Pikeaway. ‘But we can’t waste time in telling sad stories of the deaths of kings. We’ve been asked to make certain—inquiries. By interested parties. Parties, that is, to whom Her Majesty’s Government is well disposed.’ He looked hard at the other. ‘Know what I mean?’
‘Well, I have heard something.’ Edmundson spoke reluctantly.
‘You’ve heard perhaps, that nothing of value was found on the bodies, or amongst the wreckage, or as far as is known, had been pinched by the locals. Though as to that, you can never tell with peasants. They can clam up as well as the Foreign Office itself. And what else have you heard?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘You haven’t heard that perhaps something of value ought to have been found? What did they send you to me for?’
‘They said you might want to ask me certain questions,’ said Edmundson primly.
‘If I ask you questions I shall expect answers,’ Colonel Pikeaway pointed out.
‘Naturally.’
‘Doesn’t seem natural to you, son. Did Bob Rawlinson say anything to you before he flew out of Ramat? He was in Ali’s confidence if anyone was. Come now, let’s have it. Did he say anything?’
‘As to what, sir?’
Colonel Pikeaway stared hard at him and scratched his ear.
‘Oh, all right,’ he grumbled. ‘Hush up this and don’t say that. Overdo it in my opinion! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you don’t know, and there it is.’
‘I think there was something—’ Edmundson spoke cautiously and with reluctance. ‘Something important that Bob might have wanted to tell me.’
‘Ah,’ said Colonel Pikeaway, with the air of a man who has at last pulled the cork out of a bottle. ‘Interesting. Let’s have what you know.’
‘It’s very little, sir. Bob and I had a kind of simple code. We’d cottoned on to the fact that all the telephones in Ramat were being tapped. Bob was in the way of hearing things at the Palace, and I sometimes had a bit of useful information to pass on to him. So if one of us rang the other up and mentioned a girl or girls, in a certain way, using the term “out of this world” for her, it meant something was up!’
‘Important information of some kind or other?’
‘Yes. Bob rang me up using those terms the day the whole show started. I was to meet him at our usual rendezvous—outside one of the banks. But rioting broke out in that particular quarter and the police closed the road. I couldn’t make contact with Bob or he with me. He flew Ali out the same afternoon.’
‘I see,’ said Pikeaway. ‘No idea where he was telephoning from?’
‘No. It might have been anywhere.’
‘Pity.’ He paused and then threw out casually:
‘Do you know Mrs Sutcliffe?’
‘You mean Bob Rawlinson’s sister? I met her out there, of course. She was there with a schoolgirl daughter. I don’t know her well.’
‘Were she and Bob Rawlinson very close?’
Edmundson considered.
‘No, I shouldn’t say so. She was a good deal older than he was, and rather much of the elder sister. And he didn’t much like his brother-in-law—always referred to him as a pompous ass.’
‘So he is! One of our prominent industrialists—and how pompous can they get! So you don’t think it likely that Bob Rawlinson would have confided an important secret to his sister?’
‘It’s difficult to say—but no, I shouldn’t think so.’
‘I shouldn’t either,’ said Colonel Pikeaway.
He sighed. ‘Well, there we are, Mrs Sutcliffe and her daughter are on their way home by the long sea route. Dock at Tilbury on the Eastern Queen tomorrow.’
He was silent for a moment or two, whilst his eyes made a thoughtful survey of the young man opposite him. Then, as though having come to a decision, he held out his hand and spoke briskly.
‘Very good of you to come.’
‘I’m only sorry I’ve been of such little use. You’re sure there’s nothing I can do?’
‘No. No. I’m afraid not.’
John Edmundson went out.
The discreet young man came back.
‘Thought I might have sent him to Tilbury to break the news to the sister,’ said Pikeaway. ‘Friend of her brother’s—all that. But I decided against it. Inelastic type. That’s the F.O. training. Not an opportunist. I’ll send round what’s his name.’
‘Derek?’
‘That’s right,’ Colonel Pikeaway nodded approval. ‘Getting to know what I mean quite well, ain’t you?’
‘I try my best, sir.’
