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Doom’s Caravan

Geoffrey Household

Pass out beneath, O Caravan, Doom’s Caravan, Death’s Caravan.

I had not told ye, fools, so much, save that I heard your singing-man.

JAMES ELROY FLECKER, “Gates of Damascus”

Chapter One

THE DESERTER

NO, LIKE YOU, I cannot claim ever to have caught a spy. Not officially anyway. And it depends on what you mean by caught. I could never tie the case up in a neat packet and pass it upstairs, for all the time there was at least one court martial hanging over me. You were in it too, though quite innocently. Do you remember sending me a signal about Abdullah el Bessam’s cushion and how he doted on it? Well, without that I should not be here now.

The Middle East was a closed world at the end of 1941, in which everyone employed on Intelligence duties knew something of everyone else. We had thrown the Italians out of Libya and Abyssinia. We had occupied Persia and put down the rebellion of Rashid Ali el Gailani in Iraq. Then we had fought the Vichy French in the Lebanon and Syria, sent their army and administrators back to France and handed over the government to the Free French. All those private wars gave us room to move, but we were still a besieged garrison in which it was vital to keep the enemy agent outside the walls.

Security—it’s the opposite of detective work. There the crime exists and a mass of detail leads you to the criminal. In Security one hardly ever starts with a crime; one goes on collecting objectless bits of information until they fall into a pattern. At least that was all which was expected of you and me—plus carrying out any dirty jobs for I (b)[*] which had to be kept secret, like the investigation of a friend and colleague.

Did you ever have to do that? Yes, fortunately rare but all in the day’s work. And our reports were often final for better or worse, though in this case, the case of Oliver Enwin, there was no sort of finality. The answer—the true answer—was never known to anyone but me, and that just by an accident of posting.

Before Enwin’s character began to obsess me I thought that he lacked any inner strength. He was good at his job, like so many of those expatriate civilians who had been picked up from obscure hotel rooms in Cairo or Alexandria and given purpose and identity by the Army. I was inclined to distrust them. It was a sign of conceit, of the ultra-conservative English opinion, still prevalent in the nineteen-thirties, that if you had to find a man for a responsible position without much evidence of his integrity, you had better choose one tempered by our deliberately imperial type of education. Shallow thinking. I myself had worked my passage out of that category many years before.

Oliver Enwin, according to his personal file, had come out to Egypt as a minor assistant on an archaeological dig which found nothing beyond a collection of pagan Arab statuettes—about as primitive to civilised Romans as to ourselves but no doubt of interest to the professional. He then joined the British Council: an organisation of semi-intellectual misfits which taught English Literature and Language in the half-world of the Middle East. It always seemed to me a waste of time and money. Again conceit. I doubt if it did much good to the boys and girls whose only ambition was to write English good enough for commercial clerkships, but the teachers obtained insight into the languages and traditions of their customers which soldiers and diplomatists could not.

Besides fluent Arabic, Enwin had French, Italian and enough Greek to chatter his way through lunch in the hideous and respectable homes of the small business men whose overfed children he introduced to the daffodils of Wordsworth and Shakespeare—to one an indecisive British Council sort of blossom and to the other the flower of courage. Aspects of himself though he would not have seen it. He was neutral, too, in appearance, for he belonged to that pre-Celtic Mediterranean race so common in the west of England, with dark, straight hair, brown eyes and a complexion like the most delicate leather—altogether a handsome young man of middle height, who had in him more of the dignity of the Arab than the animation of the Latin.

A rough sketch. It tells you more of the limitations of an amateur British officer than it does of Oliver Enwin. He could be anything to anyone. ‘Wet’ was an adjective I used to hear applied to him, but to me he was more like wet clay with a will moulding it—a very obscure will.

In 1939 he offered himself to the Army and was taken on as an interpreter and translator by Security Intelligence Middle East. There he showed impressive industry, working night and day at his Arabic until it became so good that he could switch without effort between the classical language of the desert and Egyptian. Military Intelligence was not going to waste such material. He was put into uniform, trained—so far as we had the time and facilities to train anybody in those early days of the fortress of the Middle East—and in 1941 was Assistant Defence Security Officer at Nazareth.

By now you may have forgotten what that post involved. The A.D.S.O. within his own district was the eyes and ears of Security. He had money to pay agents and a fairly free hand in choosing them. His advice was taken if he was a good man; if he was too good a man he ran some risk of character assassination. That was why no accusations against a Defence Security Officer were readily believed. You’ll agree that it’s hard to run a security organisation without assuming that your key men are above suspicion; otherwise there is little time to get on with the real business of putting the fear of death or internment into enemy agents.

The choice of men—since we had only the Middle East to draw on—was sometimes odd. An officer of outstanding honesty and conventional character hadn’t a hope against Arabs and Zionists at the top of their form, let alone the German consuls at Antioch and Alexandretta. One needed a man with cunning and languages and a devious mind. He had, of course, to be unbribable and unlikely to set up his girl friend as a trusted agent and pay her rent out of the secret funds; or, if he did do this—and it was not unheard of—he had to persuade his boss that the game was worth it. The perfect A.D.S.O. was a first-class crook with an immaculate sense of honour.

I liked Enwin. Besides meeting him at security conferences, I used now and then to call at his office, usually asking for information from his files. He was direct, though inclined to be patronising. Either he would give me what I wanted without humming and hawing, plus his own impression of the reality behind the verbiage of a security report, or he would warn me that I was trespassing on private property and had better call off my hounds forthwith and stop them yapping.

Now, what happened when a man such as Enwin went wrong? First, one didn’t believe it. The proverb that there is no smoke without flame has no validity for men who live in smoke. But suppose the flame simply could not be ignored? Who investigated?

Civil Police? Well, one would try to pick their brains and use their files without giving away the reason for such sudden curiosity. The Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police? God help us all, no! That steam roller would flatten all the evidence and produce it as paper—neat, unanswerable and almost certainly wrong. You could safely prosecute on it, but you could also be certain that the main half of the story was for ever hidden under the mud.

No, the man who descended into the pit with an inadequate torch and little secret briefing to tell him where to put his feet was the Field Security Officer—our lowly form of security life scattered about between the Nile and the Caspian at the beck and call of all Intelligence, military or civil. We had no axe to grind, no money to pay agents and could be sacrificed—decently and by way of promotion—if anything went wrong. On the other hand each of us commanded thirteen men with inquisitive minds, an assortment of languages and thirteen motorcycles.

So when Captain Oliver Enwin vanished without trace I was ordered by Jeremy Fanshawe, the chief of Military Intelligence in Palestine, to cover up the mess and find a clue to his whereabouts. I was to take over his office temporarily—accounts, lists of agents, private correspondence, everything.

I said that after such a humiliation he could never go back to Nazareth.

‘Why not? So far as the world is concerned you are taking over for a few days because he has been rushed to hospital.’

‘What with?’

‘Worms.’

I do not think Jeremy had given a thought to the disease. The single syllable exploded from him like a laugh. That was typical. Nothing was to be taken too seriously except work. His manner always suggested that the officers of Defence Security and Field Security were members of a very exclusive club and a law to ourselves. Spy-catching, intrigue-busting—well, a gentleman would not choose such a profession, but we should all be back in civilised London after ten years or so, if we were lucky, and meanwhile should look on the frequently comic side of our activities.

I have no doubt that I said that I was utterly incapable of spotting a hole in anybody’s books.

‘I don’t think that’s the trouble, but do your best.’

‘I’ve got a corporal who used to be an accountant. Can I take him with me?’

‘If he can keep his mouth shut, yes.’

‘What about the keys of the safe?’

‘That’s utterly damnable. He left them with Boutagy.’

Boutagy was Enwin’s civilian clerk. He was a Lebanese, therefore probably corrupt; recommended by the police, therefore likely to report to them matters which were not their business; a Christian, so quite certain to weigh the scales against any Moslem. I could understand Jeremy’s horror. To leave the keys of the safe with Boutagy seemed to him a worse crime than vanishing.

He was quite wrong. Boutagy was my own limited kind of man, and I admired him and laughed at him. He was honest as the day, fatherly towards Enwin, and he had that curious devotion to the British which one used to find along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. God knows where it came from. Generations of traders whose word was as good as their bond? Consuls who dared to stand up to Turkish pashas? It’s gone now. The tourists have seen to that. But then it still existed. To Boutagy and his like we were the ethical nation of the world and our honesty of purpose was unquestionable, however tortuous its day-to-day expression. The French were nowhere. The Americans were missionaries. It often seemed to me that Boutagy was the unthinking Victorian patriot, and Enwin the more typical Levantine.

So I was reasonably certain that even persuasion by the Gestapo could not have made Boutagy open that safe when he only held the keys in trust. I also thought it likely that he knew all the secrets it contained already. But I didn’t say so. Boutagy was outside the club, though earning his living within it like a waiter.

‘What am I to look for?’

‘Go through the lot and take as long as you like.’

‘He’ll never speak to me again.’

‘If there’s anything wrong, he won’t have to. If there’s nothing wrong, he would rather it was you than anyone else.’

He added that I was an amoral nihilist, always finding excuses.

‘Is there any investigation going on which could tempt somebody to remove him?’

‘Not so far as I know, but one can’t rule it out. The case might not have got to the stage when it was worth reporting.’

That was true enough. Even my own insignificant office files were full of plots, libellous rumours and beautiful spies, none of which had I any intention of reporting unless or until I had further confirmation. But meanwhile one of these stories might prove to be deadly accurate and known to be in my possession.

‘And if I turn up dirt?’

‘We’ll keep it in the family. If a man is unfit for defence security he can go and censor Arab correspondence or something.’

‘Always assuming that he is not a security risk himself.’

‘Not a trace of fascism, communism, Zionism, T. E. Lawrence or anything else! He’s not a homosexual. He drinks about half as much as you do. Unless his file is hopelessly wrong somewhere, Oliver is fighting the war with a simple heart and very unsimple gifts.’

‘He came out to Egypt two and a half years ago. Is that enough for a man to think and speak in Arabic as well as Oliver?’

‘I suppose it’s due to his affection for them—and very hard work of course.’

I replied that I spoke several European languages and, going by my own experience, I did not think he could master a Semitic speech and its dialects in the time.

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That his file is hopelessly wrong somewhere. Out here we have to accept so much of what a man says about himself. One can’t cable M.I.5 for a report on every clerk.’

‘He’s not working for any kind of enemy.’

‘Can I take that for granted?’

‘You can take nothing for granted.’

I was accustomed to ruthless searches through the privacies of the suspect; but Oliver Enwin was a close colleague equal to me in rank, far superior in responsibilities. I did not feel up to the job of tearing apart all his intimate and official life. I could never forget that we were all cut off from home with no chance of returning till the war was won or lost. Most of us felt the solidarity of exiles and always tried to see ourselves in the other fellow’s place at courts martial and other festivals of public stoning. What haunted me was a premonition that I would not be able to see myself in his place at all. Put it this way! You don’t mind turning over a stone when you know what is likely to be underneath; but in a hot alien land you shrink from disturbing some fantastic and innocent form of life, to be squashed in brutal panic or picked up with unreasoning disgust.

My orders were to drive straight to Nazareth. I paid no attention to them and called first at my section. I had a good excuse: that I did not want to telephone from Enwin’s office and arouse excited speculation. But the truth was that I always gave my first loyalty to my little command. The cheerful presence of my chaps—those of them who were not out in the hills or down at the ports—made the billet the only home I had. I returned to it exactly as a business man will find time to call on his wife before taking an urgent and unexpected trip.

I handed over current affairs to Sergeant-Major Limpsfield. He was our professional adviser and nursemaid, without any special gifts for Security—beyond unbreakable discretion—appointed for his familiarity with the paper work of the Army and his lovable character. Quality of leadership is the correct term. Lovable is not a military word.

He had been a gamekeeper till his employer went bust in the Depression. Then, insistent on an outdoor life, he had enlisted in the Greys. When their horses were at long last taken away, he applied to join Field Security rather than submit to a future of nuts, bolts and the racket of engines. His choice was a tribute to our propaganda which made the service appear more romantic than it was. So what he got was an office job, compensated by swift promotion from Corporal of Horse to Sergeant-Major.

I told Limpsfield that I was taking the section truck, that I did not want it known where I was and that he should say I was up at Headquarters on a job for Colonel Fanshawe.

‘Better not take the truck, sir. There’s only room for one car in Captain Enwin’s garage, and no unit anywhere near which can look after ours.’

Nanny was right as usual. If a vehicle was not locked up or under guard, a party of small boys, provided with spanners by Arab motor dealers, shot out of the alleys like rats and stole every movable part within ten minutes.

‘There’s the spare motorcycle. I’ll see that it’s in order straightaway.’

‘You leave it alone! Last time you got at the throttle and it wouldn’t do more than forty.’

‘That is more than enough on these roads, sir.’

‘And get Corporal Zappa in from the frontier and tell him to report to me at Captain Enwin’s office. He was an accountant, wasn’t he?’

‘Well, yes—of a sort.’

He gave me his sidelong, pheasant-eyed look which suggested that I might ask further questions if I wished, but I let it go. There was no time for a chat and, anyway, Limpsfield disapproved of Zappa whereas I liked him.

I reached Nazareth just after sunset. The smells of Arab cooking, always more appealing in the dusk than the heat of midday, drifted through the white streets of the Latin Quarter and spiced the dust which just stirred on the evening breeze. The Security Office, once the home of some quiet Italian carver of images interned for the duration of the war, inevitably but probably unjustly, was in a lane which ran parallel to the main street. It was not at first sight a place for secrets since one had only to idle at the corner to see all the comings and goings. But that did not matter. There is no possible privacy in a small Arab town; wherever you put your centre of mysteries, it takes less than five minutes for the news of any interesting visitor to reach the principal café. Secrecy lies in the astonishing collection of rumours and speculation which conceal truth more efficiently than silence. I have never been able to decide whether Arabs believe anything or nothing. The fact is that they do not give common sense enough time to operate.

Boutagy opened the heavy wooden door, and I wheeled the motorcycle into a wide passage between the two lower rooms. He told me that he was glad to see me and not someone else, which pleased me though I was well aware that he would have had an equally polite greeting for any officer who arrived to take responsibility off his shoulders. I replied that it was unnecessary to send anyone at all since his loyalty was so well known. Compliments completed, he said that I must be thirsty after my long ride and he would fetch the whisky from Captain Enwin’s flat upstairs. Whisky. The nectar of empire. I should have allowed him to make the proper gesture. But I felt far from imperial and reminded him that Oliver always had a bottle of white wine lowered into the tiled well in the courtyard.

I sat down in the silent, empty office, wide open to some first impression of it which might later be useful. There was nothing. A blank. It was in perfect order—chairs, desk, blotter, typewriter, pencils all where they should be, and nothing in the waste-paper basket. Model for an A.D.S.O.’s office. Architect: Oliver Enwin. Across the passage was Boutagy’s room, once the shop. His red tarboosh, the emblem of his Christianity, rested on top of a filing cabinet. Below it were two grey army blankets, tidily folded, showing that Duty had compelled him to sleep the previous night on the office floor. Duty. Boutagy was more fulfilled by his constancy as a watchdog than alarmed by the responsibility.

He was a curious looking fellow, for his face and his hair were both light brown. He reminded me of an albino, simply because the expected human contrast of complexion and hair was absent. He was about forty, but looked that evening years older. The lines of his round face, always deep, were slits full of bristles and worry, due more to affection for Oliver than the situation. Boutagy was his Limpsfield in a far lonelier job than mine.

Over the wine I listened to his story. When Boutagy arrived at the office, Oliver had already gone. There was nothing surprising in that, except that he always let Boutagy know when he would be back—hours or sometimes days. At 8 p.m., official closing time, Boutagy went upstairs to his flat in case he had come back unnoticed and was feeling ill. The flat was locked. Yet Oliver could not have intended any long journey since his car was still in the garage.

Boutagy went out to see a cousin of his who ran a small restaurant and acted as a very useful unpaid agent; he might know where Oliver was, having served him lunch or a coffee during the day. Sure enough the cousin had seen him early that morning. He handed Boutagy a sealed envelope with a message from Captain Enwin that he was to take it back to the office and open it.

Boutagy did so and found the key of the flat. He went in with an unreasoning premonition that Oliver had committed suicide—though he could hardly have done so and locked the door on the outside. Bang in the middle of the breakfast table was another envelope addressed to him, containing the keys of filing cabinet and safe, the number of the combination and a short note. He took it from an inside pocket and gave it to me on his open palm as miserably as if it were an order for our immediate execution.

My Dear Boutagy,

I shall not be coming back. Here are the keys which you must keep on your person until you hand them over to the officer whom Colonel Fanshawe will send to relieve you. Telephone him at Headquarters in the morning to say that I have gone.

Very sensibly Boutagy had tried to telephone immediately. Jeremy was out. Boutagy refused to leave any message with the Duty Officer beyond saying that Captain Enwin wanted to be called urgently first thing in the morning. Instinct or training had familiarised him with our custom of keeping all scandal in the family.

So Oliver, judging precisely what Boutagy would do, had given himself at least twenty-four hours to get clear. His disappearance was clearly deliberate. It might have been forced by blackmail, threats or embezzlement, but all seemed extraordinarily improbable.

I asked Boutagy what he knew of current investigations. Nothing special was going on, he said, and they had been passing through a quiet period. Captain Enwin had taken advantage of the lull to spend a lot of his time outside the office. On what business? Boutagy had no idea. He was less conversant with his employer’s secrets than I had thought.

Had Captain Enwin looked worried? Not exactly, but for some days he had been unusually silent.

‘And I will tell you this between ourselves,’ Boutagy added. ‘When I came into his office one afternoon last week I thought he had been weeping.’

Nothing remarkable in that for an Arab, nor for those of us who had been away long enough to suffer losses by death or adultery. But Boutagy’s tone was one of disbelief in his own observation. For him a British officer did not weep. His tears were turned to ice by duty or dried up by the daily grind of geniality.

‘Any private letters that day?’

He did not know. He was exasperating. He had conceived his role as one of seeing nothing—an easier task than seeing everything and keeping quiet about it. If the morning mail came into his hands, he seemed to have handed it to Oliver as a little solid package, resisting all curiosity.

‘Anyone who would have killed him?’

‘Ah, yes!’ said Boutagy. ‘At least four!’

I didn’t believe it for a moment. My knowledge of Arabs was never extensive, but the one quality I was sure of was their romanticism. Boutagy was creating an illusion of danger just as you do in those books of yours. You first persuade yourself, and then your public. In real life a modest man of good mental health has difficulty in believing that he himself or any of his friends might be worth assassination.

I asked for the names and looked them up. One was a Kurdish agent, sacked for inventing reports. He ground his teeth and twisted his moustaches in Oliver’s office, possibly threatened assault and certainly threatened to sell all his secrets. As he didn’t know any, he could do no harm. He had then gone to Syria to offer his services to the French Deuxième Bureau and had been kicked out—literally. The French never had our patience. They made unnecessary enemies, but saved time.

Two of the others were violent characters but safely in gaol. They were not security risks at all. Oliver had passed on information which came his way and invited civil police to prove it more formally and take action.

The fourth was pure comedy—a great, black-bearded, greasy, Greek priest who had been making advances to the soldiery. I knew all about him, for at Oliver’s request I had unleashed one of my corporals on to him. He became a bosom friend of his reverence—honi soit qui mol y pense—and reported that the suspicious activities were purely homosexual and that the sinister black-beard did not know a tank from a farm cart.

I went out with Boutagy and had a late meal. Food and wine produced no more information from him. Worry had reduced this affectionate, faithful dog of a man to imperial suet pudding. He was incapable of saying anything except what could have happened? and saying it rather too loud. I let him come to the comforting conclusion that this was a straight case for the Palestine Police and that loss of memory or temporary insanity must be responsible.

Alone in Oliver’s flat I carried out a desultory search for clues. My only discovery was that a lot of paper had been burned in the iron stove and the ashes crushed—all his private correspondence presumably, since there were no letters in the drawers or lying about. Like the office, his flat gave the impression of being prepared by a house agent for the next tenant.

There were dozens of books neatly ranged on flat surfaces. His Majesty’s furnishing did not run to a book-case. The poetry and fashionable novels of the nineteen-thirties were well represented, along with some literary criticism. Quite half his reading was Arabic. I was surprised to find nothing at all on archaeology and made a note of it. There could be a hundred explanations—heavy books, for example, left with some Egyptian friend—but I wanted to know what explanation was right. In the absence of any concrete evidence I felt that his library could be as revealing as his accounts.

Corporal Zappa turned up soon after breakfast. Since a lie, if it is to be convincing and easily remembered, should be as near the truth as possible, I told him to say that he had been working on accounts with Captain Enwin and me.

Zappa was plain, urban English in type, but actually of Anglo-Italian parentage. He spoke his father’s language with elegance and his mother’s with a strong Birmingham accent. His contempt for human nature was so marked that I suspected the Zappas must have been politicians or members of the Mafia. However, it was a useful quality on frontier control. For him everyone was guilty until proved innocent.

‘By the way, what kind of accountant were you?’ I asked.

‘A Turf Accountant.’

‘A bookie?’

‘I’d have had a branch office of my own this year.’

‘No wonder you think we’re all crooks.’

‘Nothing honest but horses, sir, and that’s only because we bring ’em up to beat hell out of the others.’

All the section must have been well aware of his former profession, but I was not. I suppose they knew I would consider bookmaking disreputable, in which they were right, and be prejudiced against Zappa where they were wrong. The section had three loyalties: to the job, to each other and to me. The last two were nearly but not quite the same until I was in serious trouble.

The office accounts were straightforward, and I had no need of Zappa. Cash in hand was in the safe with a rubber band round the notes and an unnecessary label stating the amount—further evidence that Oliver’s disappearance was planned. Assuming that ‘Habib’, ‘BX’ and ‘43’ really existed, all was in order. Fanshawe would know which agents the code names represented and what sums Oliver had been authorised to pay them.

His bank statements for the last two years were in the drawer of his desk upstairs along with the usual advices from the Pay Department. I had a feeling that he had not deliberately left them but had just shoved them back in the drawer after checking his position. Our resentment of the Pay’s mistakes and obtuseness produced the Freudian effect of forgetting all about their exasperating correspondence.

‘Every time Captain Enwin was credited with some back pay he drew a cheque for twenty pounds exactly,’ Zappa remarked. ‘What for?’

For me no column of figures can be made to tell a story; but when Zappa pointed out the dates it was obvious that three times Oliver had taken out twenty pounds over and above his normal cash drawings. This happened whenever he received a lump sum which was long overdue or had been disputed.

What for? A trivial question but fair. The drawings were out of the pattern of his regular living expenses and suggested that he might be paying back a loan or, just possibly, paying some unauthorised agent himself and hoping to get a refund from Fanshawe at a later date.

The only other discovery of interest was that a claim for eighty-eight pounds had been accepted and paid into his bank three days before he disappeared. He had drawn this out, plus his small balance, showing that he had waited for the money to come in. That seemed to rule out suicide—a possibility which had worried me ever since I found that his .38 revolver was missing. All other army property and his uniforms had been pointedly left behind.

It was the end of my amateur investigation, though I stayed in the office another two days supervising the removal of documents and hoping for more evidence. I didn’t get it. Oliver’s motive seemed to be in those papers, burned and so carefully crushed. Jeremy Fanshawe, when he read my report, was good enough to say that at least I had made something out of blank nothing. Perhaps he was being ironical, for I never wrote a report with less facts in it. His own enquiries had produced little more—only that this was not the first time that Oliver’s behaviour had been inexplicable. He was in line for a fellowship in oriental languages at Cambridge, but had cleared out before even taking his degree, giving no reasons to anyone. When I asked Jeremy what he proposed to say to the next of kin, he answered that he wasn’t going to say anything and that Oliver was bound to turn up some time.

Bound to turn up some time. It begged the question. His crime was desertion, forgivable among fighting troops under unbearable strain, but not to a trusted officer living in a comfortable flat and keeping office hours. And he wasn’t bound to turn up. I had talked to an Australian deserter who made himself so popular and useful in a remote Christian Arab village that he managed to live there for three months before news of him came to us. He had not even a common language with his kindly hosts.

A retirement of that sort would be child’s play for Oliver, able to pass himself off as a traveller from any Arab land; but he would never stand the boredom of it. He was essentially urban—not at all the type to find in the simplicities of desert and village relief from the complications of the west. He enjoyed complications so long as they were those of his Arabs. I said that I could well imagine him setting himself up as a letter-writer in the Aleppo bazaars; but Jeremy wouldn’t have it. Not even Oliver, he replied, could slip through the strict security network of the towns.

I kept on trying to arrive at a private solution based on what I knew of him. It wasn’t much. I had never spent a whole day or a gay night with him. I granted him industry, loyalty and a sympathetic understanding of all peoples east of a line from Istanbul to Alexandria, but I did not know what fire was in his belly. What, for example, were his problems of sex? What religious beliefs or instincts had he? And what about the cursory judgment that he was ‘wet’? One could not just reject the opinion of fools as meaningless. In the context of their way of thinking they had spotted a weakness.

That led me off into consideration of the difference between Oliver and myself. We ought to have appeared similar types to a narrow-minded soldier. I knew and loved the other half of the warring world, west of that line from Istanbul to Alexandria, and I liked to think of myself as more European than British. Whether I was or wasn’t an amoral nihilist, as Jeremy said, I went my own way, sometimes disconcertingly. Yet I knew damned well that I would never be described as wet.

Probably that was because I could play the heavy military man with the best of them. Then why was it that Oliver Enwin could not? Perhaps he showed too often that he thought discipline unimportant. To me it was an essential quality of the society—the near communist society—of the Army. To him it was rubbish under foot, obstructing his close and continuous study of Arab culture.

Shallow, too vague analysis. It did leave me, however, with a strong sense of the Something Else in Oliver and a near certainty that it was so essential to him that it had prevailed over duty and disgrace. My most imaginative theory was that he had made some extraordinary archaeological discovery, Islamic or classical, which demanded his immediate attention and was far more important to him than Security. So far as his character was concerned, I was on the right lines. But the motive would not do. There was nothing to prevent him asking for a week’s leave and getting it—or more if he could arouse Jeremy’s easy sympathy.

This at last brought home the unpleasant fact that Oliver could not under any circumstances tell the Something Else to Jeremy, though one could tell him any mortal thing and be sure of a casual, cordial understanding. The possibilities, I had to admit, were sinister. I still could not believe in treasonable activities, but I felt a lot more ruthless towards him than when searching for pitiable scraps of truth in that abandoned office.

[*] The branch of the General Staff responsible for counter-espionage.

Chapter Two

KNIGHT ERRANT

SOON AFTERWARDS, IN JANUARY 1942, my section and I were moved up to Ninth Army and posted to Tripoli. The Enwin case ceased to be any business of mine and I was left to imagine the messages passing between the bare trestle tables of the I (b) staff all over the Middle East. We would have to assume that, however unlikely, any secrets which Oliver kept in his office or his head could be known to rebellious Arabs and Zionists or the enemy or the lot.

The Nazareth office was closed. Nothing was ever suggested against Boutagy, but he was not taken on elsewhere. That much I knew because he wrote to me asking if I could find him a job in the Lebanon. He did not complain. God, no! He understood, like any honest inhabitant of that coast, that he was nothing but a louse squashed between Bey and Pasha. I badly needed a reliable interpreter, for none of us spoke more than soldier’s Arabic. So I asked for and got him. Approval was prompt, which indicated that consciences were evil and I had come to the rescue.

I had nothing much to do in Tripoli beyond giving security lectures to Australians and watching for complications which might be too subtle for Military Police to handle. The section was in a comfortable billet tucked away behind the avenue to the port and I myself lived at the Grand Orient Hotel—which was very far from grand but sufficed, as any hotel will where the French have been cursing long enough at the unfortunate manager and his staff. I was the only British officer in the place—a mysterious and usually cheerful ornament—for it had been put out of bounds to troops on the grounds, I suspect, that if Australians wanted to drink they must go and do it somewhere less respectable.

Meanwhile my colleagues between Palestine and the Turkish frontier were having the time of their lives as the listening posts of Ninth Army. Apart from the Australian Corps, it was not an Army at all and consisted of odds and sods scattered over the immensities of Syria. Since the Free French who governed the country—officially—were short of administrators and inexperienced, trouble could flare up anywhere. Our most important task was to give ample forewarning of it.

I had the job which was the dullest of all; but one never knows where the boring routine of military security will lead. Sometimes you think you see the tip of a tail sticking out of a crack. If you are not too disillusioned by that time, you take a closer look at it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is not a tail at all. But it can happen that there is a rat on the other end.

The least likely person to restore my sense of being some use to somebody was Lance-Corporal Holloway. He had been sent up to me as a replacement and I ought to have sent him back again; but I didn’t. We could afford to carry a passenger who had been a cavalryman in the Indian Army. He was good for morale when we had to live hard. He could make a party go. He could be trusted to sober up any of his mates before Limpsfield or I had a chance to be professionally shocked. He was an accomplished thief. His person was the smartest in the section and so was his motorcycle, though it lacked a velvet nose with which to show grateful affection.

Holloway was a good man to send out to camps and canteens where he could mix with the simple soldiery. If a summary of the morale of British troops in my area was required by I (b), I could provide it by tarting up one of Holloway’s illiterate reports. But he could not get on with the Australians; so I used to send him off into the mountains to get rid of him. He often came back with some choice bit of scandal about Lebanese or French which had nothing to do with Security but could be revealing.

One morning in February Holloway sidled into my office, saluted smartly and announced:

‘Got a bit of news for you, sir! Bit of stuff up in the hills above Sir. English and lives with her mother. Just a marvellous bibi they say she is!’

‘What the devil are they doing up there all alone?’

‘Nobody knows. You ought to run up and interrogate her, sir.’

I replied that I appreciated his kindly thoughts for my welfare, but why hadn’t he shown a bit of enterprise himself?

‘Not my style. Reserved for officers.’

‘What’s their name? I’ll find out about them.’

‘Dunno, sir. But it sounded like Rumson-Bollocks,’ he answered, his expression detaching itself from such vulgarity.

Holloway was running true to form—a little pimping for his commanding officer and a little news. I knew well that he described anything under sixty and in recognisable female form as a marvellous bibi, so my personal interest was small. But duty required that I should find out more about these two unlikely Englishwomen. If they were making friends among the busy little detachments of British troops up in the hills, they could know a lot more than I did of the defence line which was being prospected from Tripoli to Baalbek and the tracks which would lead to strong points and lateral communications.

Since it was the French who were responsible for the policing of the country, I called up Captain Magnat, my opposite number in the Deuxième Bureau, to ask if he had ever heard of Holloway’s two females. Magnat tolerated me, though he was convinced that the chief object of Field Security was to raise a revolt in the Lebanon, using it as an excuse to throw out the French and take over the country. The result of this paranoia was that if you asked him the simplest question he spent half the night analysing your possible motives and chose the worst.

However, the French are a lovable people. In the meanest of them is a hidden angel, and that’s more than one can say of any other nation. Magnat, in spite of his suspicions, could not help being a loyal ally at our humble day-to-day level. He said that the secrecy of his dossiers was inviolable, but that he would consent to talk privately about these ladies on condition that I would come and share the revolting dinner which he was compelled to prepare for himself in the pigsty where he was billeted.

The pigsty was a shed at the back of his office, furnished with a camp bed, some empty ammunition boxes and a wood stove. He was a lonely man, unpopular in the French officers’ mess. There were only five of them in it. Four were ardent catholics, politically conservative. Magnat was a staunch, left-wing, republican atheist.

As well as an exquisite omelet and a steamed grey mullet straight out of the sea, he gave me a tour d’horizon, which none of our own people could have equalled for clarity, starting with a certain Blaise d’Aulnoy—a colonial administrator out of the top drawer who had been ten years in Beirut after distinguished service in Morocco.

D’Aulnoy was loyal to Vichy, from absolute conviction not just deference to the legal government. He belonged to the odd breed of European fascist which thought that Hitler could be Charlemagne all over again. If we had given the Free French a free hand, Magnat said, d’Aulnoy would have spent the war in the cell of a fortress. As it was, we allowed him to remain in luxury at the St. Georges Hotel until he was repatriated by the last boat. It was in Beirut that he had met these women, whose name turned out to be Ronson-Bolbec.

Shortly before the war d’Aulnoy had bought an inaccessible valley above the village of Sir either for retirement or holidays. He had invited the Ronson-Bolbecs to live in his house as long as they liked and look after it for him. Magnat remarked that it appeared to be one of those chivalrous gestures to which the beau monde is prone if it has enough money.

But naturally there remained a question mark, so the Deuxième Bureau had put an enquiry through to our people. They got back a four-line reply that Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec was a colonel’s widow of unimpeachable background and loyalty who should not be bothered unnecessarily. D’Aulnoy and the late Colonel Ronson-Bolbec had been close friends ever since Ronson-Bolbec had been attached to Pétain’s staff in 1918.

That was not good enough for Magnat. He cleaned his képi, polished his boots, borrowed the best horse in the gendarmerie stables and paid a formal call.

‘It is unbelievable,’ he said. ‘There is a war on, and they choose to retire to a place one can only reach by horse or on foot.’

‘What was your impression?’

‘Très snob and desperately indiscreet. A cousin in your Foreign Office. Another cousin in your War Office—the Military Secretary’s department which, it appears, decides promotions. If you want to be a general, cultivate her!’

‘So no security angle at all?’

‘Well, I noticed that Madame had Vichy sympathies—in the sense that she is convinced the Free French do not know how to behave. And to think that I shone like a damned cadet from St. Cyr! Perhaps she is employed by your Secret Service?’

I could not guarantee, I replied, that she wasn’t, but it seemed unlikely in view of the character he had sketched.

‘And what did you make of the daughter?’

‘Pretty as a dream, painfully virginal and struck me as an imbecile. You have by chance read Hamlet? I could see her playing Ophelia in a crown of daisies.’

He opened up a second bottle and himself with it. He had dragged up from Egypt as much gossip as a village postmistress. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec had exhibited her daughter all round Aldershot and was trying Cairo for a son-in-law when war caught them there. Nothing doing! Dozens of proposals, of course, but not up to her standard. Her ambition, Magnat explained ironically, was to spend the rest of her summers on the terrace of an English château watching the deer and having her glass filled by the butler, in return for which she offered one guaranteed virgin of impeccable beauty and breeding—with doctor’s certificate if required.

I said that I thought that kind of thing had gone out in the nineteen-twenties.

‘In your indulgent circles, it is more than probable. But how many colonel’s widows have you met? And they are worse in France!’

His vivid portrait made sense up to a point, but I could understand no more than Magnat the isolation of this mother and daughter in a sensitive area. Why not choose Beirut or its lovely mountain suburbs? The sons of high finance and the aristocracy were probably rare at Ninth Army Headquarters, but there might well be officers on leave with the requisite qualifications.

However, it was obvious that any Field Security officer who made the same suspicious enquiries as the French would receive the same snub from Cairo. So I decided to imitate Magnat, dress in Field Service uniform instead of battledress and see for myself.

I took our spare motorcycle, for I do not ride if I can help it. The retreat of these enigmatic females was a mere sixteen miles east of Tripoli. The first eleven miles, as far as the village of Sir, belonged more or less to the twentieth century. The remaining five were only fit for four-legged animals and I should have thought that the track had been worn out of the stony hillside by their hooves if it had not been for a made ford across a stream which surged down from the snows of Qurnat es Sauda.

My own mount pitched and plunged up to the top of the ridge with no damage but a bent foot-rest. A hundred feet below me was a high valley, narrow and sheltered, with the early green of wheat just showing. On the opposite slope was a hamlet of Moslem Arabs and under my eyes the red roof of a low, whitewashed house with young poplars around three sides and a neat orchard on the fourth. D’Aulnoy had certainly chosen a paradise. Presumably he would have made a road to it if the peace of the Lebanon had lasted.

It stood to reason that the small estate—just over a square mile at a guess—was self-sufficient. If d’Aulnoy had the devotion of the few inhabitants, which could be counted on since he had brought prosperity into the hungry lives of mountain peasants, the Ronson-Bolbecs were likely to have a good, plain table and to be well served. They were back in the feudal system with all mod. cons. as well.

I shook off some of the dust and prepared for my formal social call. A steep path of hard-packed gravel ran down to the valley, branching at the bottom to connect house, village and fields. The front door, double, wide and country-made from cedar, emphatically proclaimed the residence of an important effendi. As soon as I put the bike on its stand, a manservant came round the corner of the house to greet me, wearing dark blue Turkish trousers with high boots and a blue-and-gold waistcoat hanging open over his shirt. He spoke serviceable French.

I asked ceremoniously if I might have the honour of calling on Madame, if she was at home. That was for the lady’s benefit in case she was within earshot summing up the visitor from behind a curtain. In the silence of the valley the motorcycle would have given ample warning of my arrival.

I was ushered into the living room—white walls, arches, cedar timbers, an open fireplace, all showing North African rather than Lebanese influence. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec advanced on me with the practised cordiality of an army wife. She was dressed in casual, well-worn tweeds more fitted for February in England. Not that there was all that difference up in the valley. I was glad of the fire.

She was a solid, sandy-coloured woman in her middle forties and not bad-looking. The only exaggerated fleshiness was her bosom, hauled up to formidable prominence. When we shook hands there seemed to be only a foot of space between us. A sub-conscious, sexual offering perhaps. I am sure she did not realise the full extent of the protuberance and launched it at strangers as a gesture of hospitality.

I introduced myself and apologised for my visit. I said that one of the villagers at Sir had told me that an Englishwoman lived over the ridge and another told me that I couldn’t get a motorcycle up the track. I did not believe either of them but accepted the challenge.

She was amused at this, and my first impression was favourable.

‘Where are you stationed?’ she asked.

‘Tripoli.’

‘Attached to the Australians?’

She seemed to be aware that there were no British troops in Tripoli. Nothing surprising in that. But it did show that she was well informed in her isolation.

‘Yes. A sort of liaison job.’

There were a lot more personal and pointed questions which one could not resent. She was obviously playing the motherly colonel’s wife putting the possibly awkward officer at his ease. When she found out that I was not married—it was no business of hers that I once had been—she said:

‘The older men are so gallant to have joined up. They had more to sacrifice than mere boys. I am sure you did?’

I replied untruthfully that my export business carried on without me and that I had not sacrificed anything. I felt I should produce the illusion of a prosperous background.

She went to the door and called musically:

‘Valerie darling!’

A pretty name it seemed to me thirty years ago. My opinion has been widely shared. Is there any suburb without a beauty parlour called Valerie? And it does not matter what stale, fat perfumes drift through the door. At the sight of the name I cross the road out of range and still smell the hillside herbs of Lebanon.

Valerie Ronson-Bolbec did not keep us waiting. Magnat’s and Holloway’s reports were understatements. She was about nineteen or twenty with darkish blonde hair falling a little below the shoulder. At any rate it was longer than was fashionable then and somehow gave the impression that she had finished school but not yet come out. She had a low, serene forehead over large, grey eyes and a perfectly oval face. I think she was the most lovely girl I ever set eyes on, of middle height, long-legged, the breasts delicate but both definitely present, sir, and correct—all this neatly outlined by a white jumper and skirt with a loose belt of local embroidery.

She was just the dream of the simple, sex-hungry soldiery, and when I had got over the first dazed impact I was astonished that my reaction was not surrender. But there was a self-controlled calm about the girl—no merry eyes, no immediate warmth, little play of feature. If I had been the local pasha a hundred years earlier I would have bought her like a shot as a collector’s item and kept her to look at until the mixture exploded spontaneously.

Valerie was encouraged to mix us a drink. She then asked me why I was reconnoitring that part of the hill country on a motorcycle. This was even more direct than mother’s questions, so I at once accepted the invitation to be indiscreet.

‘Just a survey. Our defence line against an attack from the Caucasus may run through here.’

It did not of course. The valley was miles to the north of our proposed forward positions. Their reaction was agitated and seemed sincere.

‘Oh God! Then we may have to move.’

‘It’s not all that certain, but I am sure Cairo would look after you.’

‘My cousin thinks India would be better for us,’ said Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec. ‘He’s a friend of Winston’s, you know, and asked his advice.’

If true, that would give an enemy agent something to think about! I wondered whether Churchill was impressed by Rommel’s entry into our private war with the Italians or whether he believed that the Russians were finished and that nothing could stop the German armies roaring on from the Donetz basin to the Caucasus.

‘This is such a lovely spot,’ I said. ‘Nobody would want to leave it. But you must be very lonely.’

‘My daughter and I have had so much of the social round,’ she answered.

I ignored the suggestion of royal garden parties in the rain, and supposed old friends came up to see them.

‘Oh, you are all much too busy! We have to depend on local society.’

Local? There wasn’t any.

‘Do they come by mule or parachute?’

She laughed and again I felt that there was a genuine woman somewhere in spite of her affectations.

‘A horse can make it from Sir in less than an hour,’ she said.

‘Is that how you got here?’

‘Of course. Dear Blaise d’Aulnoy borrowed some horses from the Army of the Orient just before the last of them embarked.’

I noticed that she talked of the Army of the Orient rather than the Vichy troops as the rest of us called them.

‘The Intelligence Corps must be so romantic,’ Valerie remarked, looking up from concentration on a finger nail which had recently been chewed and recognising my badges.

‘Not a bit. When we haven’t got a very definite job and they don’t know what to put us in, they choose the Intelligence Corps.’

‘That’s just what Oliver said,’ she exclaimed.

‘Poor Oliver!’ Ma added with a painfully arch smile. ‘A Captain Enwin. Perhaps you knew him?’

I replied cautiously that I believed I had met him in Cairo.

‘Do you know what he is doing now?’

‘Something in Palestine, I think.’

‘Yes, he was. But he wrote to us that he had been suddenly posted home, and since then we have never heard a word from him.’

I asked if he was a friend of the family.

‘Dear me, no!’ she answered, implying that Oliver Enwin was a nobody. ‘But he was very taken with my daughter, and we couldn’t help seeing rather a lot of him.’

‘In England?’

‘In Cairo just before the war. He followed us out there. So touching, but of course quite hopeless.’

Soon afterwards I left, telling Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec that if there was anything she needed from Tripoli I should be delighted to send it up by one of my men or bring it myself. She answered without any pretence of hesitation that she would like some gin. She would! It was in very short supply and I should have to sacrifice my own ration to get her any.

Valerie came out with me and showed interest in the motorcycle, drooping her hair over the handlebars.

‘Would you like a ride?’

‘Not in this dress,’ she replied. ‘I wanted to say something to you. There is a bridle path from here to Hermel. No boulders. Usable by tracked vehicles.’

She was obviously repeating someone else’s words.

‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t mention it,’ I said.

‘She doesn’t know. Mummy can’t keep her mouth shut.’

‘Well, this time she could have opened it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered vaguely. ‘But I was asked to tell a British officer and nobody else. So I have.’

‘Who asked you?’

‘Just one of our visitors.’

I let it go at that. She gave the impression that conversation was really not worth the trouble. Since her only companion was her too expansive mother, it was not surprising.

The return journey to Sir was all absorbing and put paid to my only pair of formal trousers. Once down, I dropped into the village café to think and to recover from bruises and a grazed backside. One solid fact was plain. Oliver’s file was wrong in stating that he had come out to Egypt as an archaeologist. He had taken any old job which would provide him with a meal ticket and had no special interest in archaeology as the lack of books had indicated. My other conclusion was less justified. Valerie was more touched by his devotion than her mother—what girl wouldn’t be?—and the ashes in the stove at Nazareth were possibly her letters.

I doubted if the Ronson-Bolbecs had anything to do with his disappearance. He sounded an affectionate and occasionally useful dog which followed pathetically where it was not wanted and perhaps gave up its gin too. That mother and daughter knew him was not unnatural. He had moved around a lot in Cairo, though outside the ultra-regimental circles of the colonel’s widow.

The only security angle seemed to be the correspondence of this lonely couple. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec’s letters to and from her distinguished relatives would make fascinating reading for an enemy agent if intercepted. So I referred again to Magnat to see if he knew how their mail was handled.

‘Does your organisation never tell you anything,’ he asked.

‘Not if they can help it. My duties, as you know, are to prevent the French raising a revolt among Australians.’

‘I am working on that now. Their mail comes and goes by the diplomatic bag to Beirut. It is correctly handed to the Deuxième Bureau for forwarding to Tripoli where Ahmed, the majordomo, collects it from me. Their outgoing mail in reverse.’

‘Ahmed could read the lot on the way up or down.’

‘If he carried a kettle to steam them open. Don’t worry! Ahmed is devoted to us and absolutely reliable.’

That was that; and I should have had no further interest if the bridle path to Hermel had not intrigued me, for it was not marked on the French maps or our own. Once at Hermel you could go on by car to Horns, Hama and Aleppo, or south to Damascus. D’Aulnoy’s valley was not just a cul de sac above our coastal plain, but could be considered as a finger of the Fertile Crescent of Syria pointing towards Tripoli and the sea.

The short cut, which saved seventy miles, had nothing to do with Security; but I (a)—the honest soldiers who collected operational intelligence—would be glad to hear of it. We often bagged some game for I (a) in the course of keeping poachers out of their preserves. So I decided to explore.

I took Sergeant-Major Limpsfield along as a companion, for I liked to give him a day in open country whenever I possibly could. He was a son of the soil all through—a tall, angular countryman with a very long bird-like neck and a swelling below his right underlip where the recoil of the gun had just touched it year after year. His employer should have insisted that he fit a longer stock. The best one can say for financial depressions is that they tend to reduce that species of shit which notices nothing.

We started early for Homs and then rode down the valley of the Orontes on the Baalbek road as far as the turning to Hermel, where we arrived about midday—a hundred miles altogether taken at sergeant-major’s easy pace. Hermel was the end of everything which could be called a road. Several rough tracks led westwards into the mountains, but according to the police none of them went far. There was no communication between Sir and Hermel except all the way round by Homs. They said that no doubt there were paths, and if we had the luck to run into a goat-herd somewhere on the top he could possibly guide us; but we should have to go on foot and leave our motorcycles in Hermel.

All this stood to reason and was confirmed by the map. The main massif of Qurnat es Sauda, rising to six thousand feet, lay between Hermel and Tripoli. But the information passed on by Valerie was clear and definite, and I was determined to find that bridle path. Limpsfield, I well knew, considered it one of the obstinate bees which the skipper occasionally got in his bonnet, but was all for exploration. The winter sun shone for him and the office could run itself.

We followed the best of the tracks until it petered out, and then scrambled up on foot to a ridge which promised a good view of the outlying hills. Away to our left was Qurnat es Sauda with a little snow on top and deep drifts in the gullies. North, across two valleys, was a kink in the hillside; where it passed out of sight round a shoulder, the steep slope looked as if it had been cut away. If the kink was a serious path, it ran north-west and avoided the high tops. Trial and error suggested that this possible route could be reached from the Hermel road, a few miles south of the town, where a rough track led into a shallow, hidden valley past a ruined farmhouse.

We now stood a good chance of being benighted in the middle of nowhere if we went on, so I proposed that we should try it another day. But the usually cautious Limpsfield, perhaps longing for remembered nights on the icy wolds of Lincolnshire, pointed out that we carried four gallons of petrol and our greatcoats. If we ran back again to Hermel we could buy some food and bottles of beer and then, why not, sir?

Beer was in Hermel but nothing much else except bread and eggs. However eggs would do, since Limpsfield, like an old soldier, was carrying his mess tin. After some three miles of indecisive paths through rolling, sparsely cultivated country we began to climb steadily over fairly easy turf and arrived at the little cliff which we had seen. The hillside had indeed been cut away, and under the low sun the yellow rock showed chisel marks. I dug into the turf with a tyre lever and sure enough found paving. We were on a very ancient road a yard and a half wide, perhaps Roman, perhaps built by Phoenicians to extract the cedars of Lebanon in days when they covered the whole range. Whoever reported that it was fit for tracked vehicles did not know much about their width.

The road followed the contours along the northern slopes of Qurnat es Sauda. Though no boulders were sticking up through the earth, plenty had fallen down from above. There was also a bog where snow had only recently melted. Here the tracks of a horse, going up, showed plainly. The rider seemed to have found little difficulty, but wheels could only be pushed across, and it took two of us on each machine to do that.

I was not surprised that this ancient route was unknown or forgotten. On the lower slopes it ran through dense scrub and could only be detected by someone who was actually on it. Even so we sometimes lost the line and had to turn back on our tracks. Higher up there were no hair-pin bends to give it away from a distance. Its original builders had no objection to a slope of one in four.

When the light began to fade we had covered little more than half the distance to Sir and had come down a thousand feet into a barren valley. The road—what there was of it—followed the foot of a low cliff, and down the slope to our right was a stream bordered by willow and oleander. The crests ahead of us looked formidable, so we decided to leave them for the morning and bivouac where we were.

The cliff curved round to the left and became a rocky slope. Beyond was an obvious ford and then a stretch of flat plain, featureless except for a low hillock covered with shrubs and a few dwarf pines not far from the probable course of the road. The most inviting place to spend the night was a ravine we had passed a little way back where overhanging rocks gave some shelter. There we made ourselves as comfortable as we could and boiled our eggs on a fire of dead brushwood—the wretched stuff which blazes up and dies down quickly. Finding the cold too bitter for sleep, we kept watch and watch, one of us staying awake to feed the fire.

When Limpsfield woke me at two it was pouring with rain and muddy rivulets were wriggling down the hillside. It occurred to me that we had better cross the ford at once, for those mountain streams become impassable in half an hour. Limpsfield did not think much of the move, for he had nursed a good solid blaze. I reminded him of the mud slide behind us. If that started to shift in the rain—and it surely would—we could only get out by walking.

So we climbed down to our bikes, wheeled them across the now angry ford and on to the hillock. In the dark we could only find miserable shelter between rock and tree roots, improved a bit by our capes and a ground sheet. There we squatted for the rest of the night, listening to the roar of the torrent which had spread far out from its banks of the previous evening.

By dawn the rain had stopped. While we were stretching ourselves and eating the last of the damp bread, Limpsfield’s sharp sight spotted a horseman coming down from the ridge ahead of us. Unless he had started from some equally remote retreat, it was likely that he came under the head of Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec’s ‘local society’ and that he was Valerie’s informant. I told Limpsfield that I wanted to take a closer look at him without being seen, so we pushed our bikes down behind dripping thorn and waited.

It was some time before he came abreast of us, for he was taking it easy with nine miles to go to the Hermel road and presumably some distance afterwards. He was mounted on a sturdy horse which looked as if it could carry him anywhere especially as he was of light build. Limpsfield quietly corrected me when I called it a brown horse. He said it was a roan with a large star of some fifteen and a half hands.

The rider was well dressed in jodhpurs and a heavy riding cloak. He carried slung on his back a rifle in a waterproof casing—proof that he did not expect to meet anyone on the track, for the carrying of arms was a penal offence. The thin hawk features could be those of a Jew or a pure desert Arab, but I did not think he was either. Possibly a Circassian from Transjordan. He was in his late thirties and of self-confident, distinguished appearance.

He was a hardy fellow, too. He took that icy ford without hesitation, his feet up on his horse’s withers. His reaction then was instant and puzzling. He swung his horse round to be under cover of the steep slope and was off in a second. He buried a piece of paper which looked very like an envelope, but at that distance one could not be sure. After tethering his mount to a root he took the rifle off his back and started a fast and efficient stalk from rock to rock, sometimes crouching, sometimes crawling. At last we realised what he had seen to disturb him. It was the thin plume of smoke from our dying fire in the ravine.

He paid no attention at all to the far bank of the stream and the hillock where we were very inadequately hidden, reckoning perhaps that if anyone had been waiting for him there he would be dead already. His whole interest was in reaching a point from which he could look down on the fire. Evidently he was familiar with the lie of the land and knew exactly where it was likely to be.

When he found the ravine empty he returned to his horse with no precautions, dug up whatever he had buried and trotted on briskly out of sight. So that he would not hear the noise of the motorcycles we gave him plenty of time to cross the top of the pass and go down the other side.

The track up to and over the tumble of ridges was far better than expected and always hard under the turf or gravel. On the barren top, about four thousand feet up, the original paving showed clearly. The golden coast and the wine-dark sea—dawn and evening often justify Homer’s adjective—were in full view from Tripoli to the Island of Ruad. Somewhere below us, among the foothills still very sparsely inhabited, was d’Aulnoy’s valley.

After two more ridges we had a momentary view of it. Then our track led us along the reverse slope, getting more and more overgrown until we reached a small clearing where hoof marks and a fresh patch of horse dung showed that the rider had indeed left the Ronson-Bolbecs that morning. The path he had followed, roughly levelled by pick and shovel, climbed up from the Arab hamlet and appeared—to a casual eye—to end for good at the village rubbish dump on the far side of the clearing.

I had hoped to go down for breakfast to the house, if Ma did not object to sergeant-majors; but I was now all against it, feeling that it might embarrass one or both of the women who would realise that we must have met their visitor. I also considered that it might be unwise to show ourselves if that temporarily buried envelope had anything to do with our line of business. My objection was only instinctive but strong enough for me to say to Limpsfield that we would have to turn back to Hermel.

He was naturally reluctant. He said that the chap on the horse must know somebody had been around and that he could not miss our tracks when he came to the mud. I was sure, however, that the mud slide was the last place he would find them after all that rain and that they would be washed out everywhere and indiscernible to anyone but a skilled tracker actually searching for tyre marks.

‘I don’t want to look as if I were keeping tab on visitors to the valley,’ I said.

‘Is that what we’re doing?’

‘It wasn’t, but it is now.’

‘Well, sir, unless your Romans were bloody barmy our road must go on to somewhere. And to judge from what you say about the track from this d’Aulnoy’s place to Sir it didn’t go down there.’

Not a sound argument, but it suggested a better one. If the road was originally aimed at Sir, it would not have skirted d’Aulnoy’s valley on the south but would have run several miles to the north over fairly level high ground. So it might go on directly to Tripoli. We tried it, trusting to the line where it ought to be and finding occasional traces of it.

Above the lower end of the valley we saw a solitary figure appear from the myrtles and cross our path. We called and waved to him in the hope that he spoke some French and could tell us about the goat paths, but he vanished. He was wearing a light-coloured kaftan and head-cloth which implied that he was a Moslem of some substance from the Syrian plain; the usual dress of the mountain villagers could be Turkish or European or a mixture but was generally black. We passed the sheltered spot where he had been squatting. A shallow bed of ashes showed that he had collected and lit a fire to warm himself after the rain stopped. All I could tell about him was that he was not a pious Moslem, for he had left an empty bottle of Lebanese brandy. Whoever he was, he had more experience of February nights than we.

We were now practised at finding the line of the road. If there were no boulders, that was it—however many bushes might be growing on it. On the last slope, where agriculture began, it disappeared altogether, built over, terraced over, ploughed up; there was only a maze of little paths, navigable but usually leading round three sides of a rectangle. When at last we were down in the coastal plain we tried to line up fences, roofs, wells, anything in the damned huddle of Lebanese subsistence agriculture, to give us the point where we had entered the labyrinth. It was no good. We stopped for coffee in a reed hut which was the communal café, but neither the proprietor nor the odd dozen of bystanders fingering our bikes knew anything of a possible road to the east. Just as at Hermel, they said that there were goat-paths and nothing else.

So the final stretch of our route was unknown and unused; anyone who wished to avoid observation and road controls by taking the short cut to Hermel passed through d’Aulnoy’s valley. That was the business of the Lebanese Gendarmerie. All that was of interest from the Security angle was the lonely rider’s connection with the Ronson-Bolbecs. It seemed highly likely that he was Valerie’s informant. A possible motive for his journey across the watershed was that he had fallen heavily for her and kept clear of the normal route by Sir in order to avoid comment.

But questions remained. Why avoid Hermel? Clearly he did, since the inhabitants knew nothing of the road. And why tell Valerie about it and not her mother? Valerie’s excuse was that Mummy couldn’t keep her mouth shut. What did that matter if he wanted the information to get out?

The always reliable Boutagy was the right man to report to me about that ‘local society’. He lived in the billet as one of the section and was thoroughly popular in spite of being ten years older than most of them. He was prepared to interpret for them anywhere at any time, to get special prices for them in back-street bars and eating-houses and to introduce them to respectable Lebanese families where they could get the feeling of the country. We dressed him in battle-dress, of which he was very proud.

I told him to pick up a Beirut taxi with a driver who would not know his face and spend a night in Sir as a prosperous business man on a visit. A corn buyer, perhaps? No, he thought, a search for distant relatives among the few Christian families would be more in keeping; if he looked well-heeled everyone would be eager to invent a claim to kinship and to talk about the district.

He spent two days there, drawing on my wretched little expense account for hardly more than the taxi. His report put the Ronson-Bolbecs in a more prosaic day-to-day setting. Ahmed, the majordomo, rode down to Tripoli about once a fortnight to draw money to pay wages, and acted as postman. The inhabitants of the valley seldom bothered to make the journey.

Two horses, a chestnut and a grey, had been left by d’Aulnoy at Sir for the use of visitors; these were all well known except for two strangers, one of whom was notably fat and strapped a large cushion over his saddle. The Englishwomen, it was said, were not very free with their money, but friendly and polite. Madame doctored anyone who needed attention and had been specially helpful in a nasty case of miscarriage. That was a new aspect of her. Evidently she had the efficiency of an army wife, trained in First Aid and able to cope with accidents in the wild.

Boutagy had pretty well established that the lonely rider never visited Sir, but there might be another path to the valley which avoided the village. So I rather too casually made use of Holloway who knew the foothills behind Tripoli better than any of us.

‘Those two Englishwomen you told me about…’ I began.

‘Any luck, sir?’

‘The young lady is for brigadiers and above.’

I don’t think we called it the top brass then. A useful phrase.

‘Bit steep for them, that climb.’

‘Yes. I wish I could lay my hands on a mule.’

‘I can do that for you, sir, but you’ll have to return it.’

‘It’s for you.’

‘Oh, me! Been ’alf over the ’Imalayas on a mule.’

‘Everest included?’

‘You mustn’t believe all you hear, sir.’

It was impossible to score off Holloway. He always made me wish I was a real soldier and had half a dozen of him in my platoon.

I explained the simple job I had for him: to wander about the goat tracks and find out if there was any reasonable route to d’Aulnoy’s valley without passing through Sir. If there was, who used it and why?

‘Trouble is, they don’t understand my Arabic round ’ere.’

‘Nor mine. But I don’t want you to ask questions. Use your eyes.’

‘Looking for the watch you dropped?’

Not a bad suggestion, but it would confine him to one part of the hills.

‘You are making a count of grasshoppers for Locust Control. Ours not to reason why. Take some bottles of coloured water and papers of tooth powder. Mix one with the other, drop it on the grasshopper and write the result in a notebook. Wear a General Service cap badge. When can you get the mule?’

‘Any time. Off of an Indian Mule Company. They thinks very ’ighly of me, sir.’

I heard no more of Holloway till two evenings later when the billet behind my office resounded with the stamping of boots and blasts of indignant language.

‘Bloody great grasshoppers all over the blankets, sir,’ Limpsfield reported. ‘And Lance-Corporal Holloway has the nerve to tell me it’s on your orders. I’ve a mind to put him on a charge.’

‘Send him in, sergeant-major.’

Limpsfield marched him in, left-right, left-right, to show his feelings. Two grasshoppers followed, hopping nearly in step. They were three inches long with jaws to match. One dived into the waste-paper basket for its supper; the other jumped the length of the office and landed on my head. Holloway reached for it and flung it out of the window

‘No tact, sir,’ he said. ‘And such a lovely green they are.’

‘But why the hell did you bring them home?’

‘Put ’em in my pack. Thought they’d be all right, but they ate their way out.’

Holloway had covered miles of stony hillside on his mule. He had seen no one but Moslem peasants working scraps of land and occasional shepherds. None of the goat paths led to d’Aulnoy’s valley. It was only possible to scramble down on foot—or hands and knees, more likely.

On the first day he had stopped at intervals to fiddle with his powder and bottles, but got tired of it when he could find no one to take an interest in him. During the second day he amused himself by collecting grasshoppers whenever he saw an outsize specimen. After returning the mule, he was walking back to Tripoli when a wog offered him a lift. A wog in army language was any kind of Arab, poor or well-dressed, Christian or Moslem. I never could see how they distinguished a Lebanese from, say, a Greek or a Jew.

This one was well-dressed in dark European clothes with muddy, yellow socks. He had observed Holloway on the hillside—which suggested that he had also followed him back to the Mule Company—and wanted to know what he was doing. Holloway replied that he was collecting grasshoppers and opened his knapsack to prove it. Years of undetected crime in the Indian Army had taught him the value of a good cover story, so he let himself go.

‘Test for top secret gas, sir. Teach the troops to keep an eye on the grass’oppers. If they turns brown, scarper like ’ell! If they stays green, all clear! I couldn’t turn ’em loose in the street in case he was watching, so I had to bring ’em back.’

Limpsfield and I asked simultaneously whether the wog had driven him all the way to the billet.

‘No, sir. Made him drop me at the Australian Military Police, and went in there.’

‘Car number?’

‘Grey Peugeot, 1461.’

I was sure that the questioning was innocent. Yes, what a lot of your time and mine was wasted by the persistent and amiable curiosity of the Levantine! But I’ll anticipate my story a little and tell you now that Yellow Socks was the real goods, the object of our existence, the enemy agent. As a result of Holloway’s guileless face and power of invention, it’s more than probable that in some Berlin laboratory a research chemist was at once assigned to the job of finding out what gas turned grasshoppers brown.

On my next visit to Ninth Army Headquarters I dropped into the I (a) office and told them about the hard track from Hermel to Sir. They said my information would have been invaluable but didn’t matter now, and doubtless I knew why. I did. The Australians were leaving for home. We had not and never would have the troops to defend the Tripoli-Baalbek line. We were going to stand on the Palestine frontier, and God only knew whether we should be facing north or south.

Tight security was more essential than ever, and I was still vaguely worried about the Ronson-Bolbecs’ mail. Ma was certain to go in for voluminous correspondence, let alone Valerie’s letters to and from old admirers. With this in mind I made my routine call on I (b) and mentioned the ladies and the possibilities of leaks. My bosses were not impressed. They admitted that the Deuxième Bureau very probably read the mail, but who cared if they did? Better them than anyone else.

‘Look here!’ they said to me. ‘This pair seem to be Cairo’s blue-eyed girls. If you think they are a security risk, go and talk to Brigadier Paunce about them. He knows them better than anybody.’

Having gone so far, I couldn’t get out of it. All I knew of Paunce was that he was a paper soldier whose clerks were never at rest. Physical training. Care of transport. Indignant surprise that officers were doing something in contravention of General Orders which all of them had been doing since 1939. As Security never dove-tailed neatly into rules and regulations he considered us a nuisance—with little justification since most of us were models of correctitude in order to remain unnoticed.

He looked at me wearily over his ginger moustache as if he was always removing members of the Intelligence Corps which the cat would bring in, and asked me to state my business shortly. I replied that it was long and perhaps delicate, but he did not ask me to sit down. Under the circumstances I could only clear my throat and open the ball.

He went very red in the face. Professional fury, I thought at the time. Afterwards I realised that it was embarrassment and that he was corresponding with one of the two himself. Limpsfield said he was a bachelor with a private income and that the Warrant Officers of the Greys had thrown a party when he left the regiment for the staff.

‘I can quite understand your interest in Miss Ronson-Bolbec,’ he said. ‘But I will not have you reading her letters under the pretence of Security.’

I tried to calculate what would happen if I threw the ash tray at him and somehow managed to refrain.

‘No, sir. May I say it was her mother’s correspondence which I feared might be of interest to enemy agents.’

‘That has already been taken care of in high places. I have noticed that Field Security is often inclined to exceed its powers.’

‘I am sorry about that, sir.’

‘You’re not the Gestapo, you know. I suppose you’ll tell me next that you have the power to tinker with my correspondence?’

‘No, sir. I could merely recommend to I (b) that it should be done, giving my reasons.’

He lost his temper at that and told me to get out. The only satisfaction I had was to put my head into the I (b) office before leaving and tell them what I thought of them. They were most unsympathetic. They asked me what the hell I imagined the French were for if not to hold the hot potatoes.

And that wasn’t the end of it either. Paunce slammed in a letter to Cairo saying that I had threatened to have his private letters read. My commandant managed to squash that nonsense and wrote to me privately that if I was genuinely worried about Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec the right game was to use my undoubted charm and keep on good terms with her until she gave herself away.

So, you see, I was now out on my own in a world which had no interest in my obstinate and misplaced curiosity. Even you, as an old hand, may think I was off my loaf bothering about a mother and daughter who could be vouched for by half the regular army and had every right to be where they were. But one would have expected the place to be full of young officers fluttering round the honey-pot, or at least somebody sitting in the hay and writing a sonnet, whereas the only fascinating visitor was a pro-British Circassian smuggler who thought his life might be in danger.

I decided to take my commandant’s always wise advice and call again on the Ronson-Bolbecs. The two bottles of gin which I brought with me survived the journey. Ma insisted on paying for them, but had unfortunately no change. Nor had Valerie. Wasn’t it silly of them? They always ran right out of money just before Ahmed went down to the bank.

My undoubted charm must have been working overtime, for after quarter of an hour Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec strolled out to the orchard with me where we sat on a white bench in the spring sun and pretended we were in England or Kashmir or somewhere. Ahmed reinforced the illusion with a silver tray on which were ice, fresh orange juice and the gin.

I told her more of my duties: that I was entirely concerned with troops, not civilians, but that I could not help feeling responsible for two lonely and enchanting women in my district and that I was worried about their unprotected position up there in the wilds.

‘The first time I met you, you mentioned local society,’ I said. ‘Who exactly did you mean?’

‘Oh, people do come to see us, you know.’

‘Well, for your sake I want a check on them, so do be an angel and correct my not-very-secret files. There are Captain Magnat and our flashy, young gendarme, Lieutenant Khalid. Then Sheikh Anton from Zghorta and our dear old Captain of the Port. Both are very kind and can be useful friends if you have patience with them. And of course the Headman of Sir, eager to know what he can do for you and only interested in what you can do for him. Anyone else?’

‘I really don’t know,’ she said impatiently, annoyed with me because her visitors were so few and so very ordinary. ‘There were Fatty and Socks.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Two old friends of dear Blaise. One was from Iraq and very large. He was quite laid up by the ride and complained to Socks that he would never do it again. And Socks was a Syrian. He wore yellow socks with black shoes. Have you noticed that when it’s cold they never know how to dress? Anything goes. It was just the same in India.’

I did not mention my rider, but I did ask if the only horses which came up were the chestnut and grey stabled in the village.

‘I don’t know. Ahmed might. Shall we ask him?’

I said quickly that it didn’t matter and got her talking about old days in India. She patted my hand and told me how much I would have enjoyed myself. She was sure that any good regiment would have jumped at me.

Her mood seemed promising, so I told her, as if it were half a joke, that she was likely to get me fired from my job.

‘Good heavens! Why is that?’

‘Because I have been making impertinent enquiries about you. I can’t see why you two should be living up here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Imagine that it’s a cottage in the Welsh mountains!’

‘But why isn’t it?’

‘That is not your business. Brigadier Paunce at Ninth Army knows us very well.’

I refused to be Paunced at, and replied that a woman of her taste couldn’t possibly endure him for more than ten minutes.

‘One forgives a lot to old friends,’ she said. ‘When I first knew him he was a shy boy of twenty.’

Touching, but he should not have gone into the regular army. These very shy men put on a mask of ferocity to protect themselves which becomes a habit.

‘So you’re staying here indefinitely?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you want us to?’

‘I was thinking of the next man and what I should tell him. I might be posted anywhere next week.’

‘Oh, I do hope not!’

‘Valerie must be bored to tears,’ I said, trying again.

‘She is a very sensible girl who knows she must have patience.’

It was no good. I had got more than I expected out of her, but nothing personal. So I said good-bye to the abstracted Valerie and returned to Tripoli. On my way back I made enquiries at Sir about Fatty and Socks. I was told that when they collected the two horses they claimed to be acting for d’Aulnoy and riding up to the valley and back just to see that his tenants lacked for nothing. They were in a hurry and had given no exact names—which was credible since Fatty had a decisive air of authority.

After Holloway’s first encounter with Yellow Socks I had asked Lieutenant Khalid, who commanded the local detachment of the Lebanese Gendarmerie, to make enquiries about the man. Khalid, always fulsomely helpful, came along with the information that grey Peugeot 1461 belonged to a respectable insurance broker of Aleppo. I was content with that. But now that Yellow Socks had turned up twice I wrote to my Aleppo colleague for confirmation of Khalid’s report.

His reply was puzzling. The insurance broker did indeed own a grey Peugeot, but its number was 1491, not 1461. 1461 had belonged to a French doctor and had not been re-issued.

Holloway was dead certain that he had not made a mistake and showed me his notebook. He had even written down the Arabic numerals as well as the French. Whether he was wrong or not, it was curious that Khalid should have omitted to tell me that 1461 did not exist. It looked as if he had deliberately muddled the numbers to discourage further enquiries.

That was enough to open a file on Lieutenant Khalid, though so far the only note in it was: who is Yellow Socks, and why is Khalid protecting him? Both questions would have remained unanswered if Limpsfield, one evening, had not suddenly remarked:

‘By the way, sir, ever seen a horse box in the Lebanon?’

We were having a leisurely drink in my office—Field Security in my section, and yours too if I remember, was a partnership not a bloody barracks—and he was telling me of some Lincolnshire farmer who used to shoot from horseback because gout wouldn’t let him put foot to the ground.

‘Beirut racecourse, but nowhere else. Why?’

‘That roan with a star is in Khalid’s stables.’

Lieutenant Khalid was a passionate horseman, whose team had twice won the dressage event in happier days at Beirut. He was a devotee of cavalry regiments, British and French, and had heard of the Greys. So Limpsfield had a standing invitation to look over the gendarmerie stables and to ride whenever he could find the time. Since he spoke nothing but English he used to take Boutagy along to interpret for him.

‘What’s it got to do with a horse box?’

‘That rider we saw. He would never have ridden the roan back to Tripoli over a hundred miles of road through Homs. So if he hadn’t a horse box he must have returned by the Hermel track.’

‘Did you ask any questions?’

‘No. I told him I had come across a horse very like it at Sir, just to see what he would answer. He said there were no riding horses at Sir except the two left by d’Aulnoy.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well, sir, I didn’t want him to think it was the roan I was interested in, so I asked him how often his patrols visited Sir. “When I feel like it,” he answered. Or that was what Boutagy said.’

No harm had been done, except that Khalid sounded sulky—perhaps because he assumed we were keeping a check on visitors to the valley and interfering with the business of the Gendarmerie, perhaps from a bad conscience.

So more facts and queries went into his file:

1. Khalid knows the mysterious rider of the roan and either lends him the horse or stables it for him.

2. Therefore he also knows of the Hermel track. Any connection between the track and Yellow Socks?

3. Does Khalid also know the fat Iraqi who visited the Ronson-Bolbecs?

4. This Iraqi should not be hard to identify and may give key to whole set-up. Section to note his description and try to trace.
I called up Magnat and asked him how far Khalid could be trusted, on the excuse that he often turned up at Australian camps and had contacts with their Military Police.

‘As far as you can see him, dear colleague. He is efficient. Nothing is known against him. And I warn you that if you start monkeying with his loyalty to France he will tell me about it. But one never knows with these Lebanese. It is certain that he has some private rackets. The salaries of Police and Gendarmerie are what they were before the war, and the cost of living has doubled.’

That made immediate sense. The hawk-nosed rider on the roan was deep in some mildly criminal activity with Khalid and Yellow Socks—smuggling gold or hashish probably. He did not want the existence of his route to be public knowledge but was well-disposed to the British and prepared to do what he could to help the defence of his country. There were holes in my theory, but it would do for the moment.

It was time to take the Ronson-Bolbecs out to lunch and pretend more interest in Valerie than I felt. I wanted to get her alone and find out who her hawk-nosed friend was, if she knew, and what game he was playing. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec made it easier than I expected. I was not in the château class, but I think she was impressed by that fictitious export business with enough capital to run itself during my absence. I had also mentioned that the firm had Influence and could always get shipping space to America. At any rate she said that poor, dear Val was getting so moody and it would cheer her up if I took her out. She herself would come another day, and then we could have a lovely tête à tête.

I waited at Sir for Valerie with the section truck. She and Ahmed, as escort, came down on sturdy mounts from the valley, though not so good as the chestnut and grey which provided transport up from Sir. D’Aulnoy’s horses, as one would expect, were far superior to the usual undersized runts of the peasants—when they had any at all.

She seemed to me absorbed by herself. No sort of ease between us. Embarrassing silences which both of us broke simultaneously with some inane remark about a passing donkey or the weather. El Mina, the port of Tripoli, made her a bit more lively though there was nothing much to see there except caiques discharging grain, a detachment of Australians loading warlike stores into trucks and Corporal Zappa on port control trying not to look startled at the piece his skipper had got hold of.

I had a favourite waterside bar at El Mina. The proprietor had worked in Paris and could put on an outstanding French-Arab meal if I gave him notice. Valerie was a little reluctant to settle down in the private room, which contained a vulgar and inviting red velvet couch. At least it would have been inviting if one of the springs had not come through the cover. I pointed out that if we sat in the bar or on the street she would have to endure the stares of Australians and the boldest would certainly slap me on the back as an old acquaintance and ask us both to have a drink with him. As it was, she had only to scream and the whole damn lot would come rushing in to the rescue.

She answered that at least they would be taking an interest in her. Fifteen-love for Mummy’s darling Val. I told myself to remember duty. Oh, no! Not to cool relations down, but to warm them up. I am by nature the world’s worst actor. I can only play a part—and then, if I say so myself, highly convincingly—after reminding myself that it is in the cause of I (b), His Majesty and Land of Hope and Glory.

So she had no more cause for complaint, and what with the grub and the white wine the atmosphere became reasonably gallant. When we got to the coffee and had hunted down on the bar shelves a dust-gathering bottle of her favourite sticky liqueur, I mentioned that I had been on the road she told me about and wanted to ask her about her informant—so far as she felt at liberty to give me a hint.

‘Yes, I thought that was coming,’ she said.

‘I saw him, you know, quite close to.’

Her face returned to its usual lack of any expression.

‘A hawk-nosed chap on a roan half Arab. He was riding up from your place.’

‘No, not from us.’

‘Where from then?’

‘I don’t know. That wasn’t the man who told me to pass on the message.’

‘You’re sure you have never seen him? Slight build. Very oriental, rather distinguished features.’

‘I might have done. I don’t know. I wish I’d spoken to an ordinary British officer who wouldn’t ask questions.’

She had told the truth all right; she did not know the rider. But why did she now want to leave it open and why the agitation?

‘I won’t ask any more, Valerie,’ I said. ‘It isn’t important. But your chap should look out for the man I described. He’s armed and dangerous.’

‘Oh, thank you!’

Three such simple little words, yet opening up more than you would ever get with rubber truncheons.

‘Surely he doesn’t travel that road alone?’

‘Yes. Always.’

‘I wonder if you could tell me how he is dressed, so that I can see no one interferes with him.’

‘As a Syrian. The white thing they wear.’

As a Syrian. Then he wasn’t. French? English?

‘Shall I warn him?’ she asked.

‘No, leave it to me. I think I know who it must be.’

Secret visits to Valerie. Warm affection between them. Passing on information of interest, yet disguising himself as an Arab and impressing it on her that she must not give away his name. Identity a wild guess, but very probable. Presumably he had persuaded her that he was employed on some very secret mission.

‘Will you ask him a question for me?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘His people want to know if Noah 3 has left Mount Ararat.’

She repeated this nonsense precisely and seriously.

‘When could you let me know the answer? It’s very urgent.’

‘Come up and see us on Wednesday.’

I hated myself for trapping foolish virgins and possibly bringing old friends to court martial and disgrace. But you’ll agree that I could have no mercy. If this Syrian was Oliver Enwin, he had to be arrested at once. I could not remotely guess what his relations were with the rider and Khalid; but something more than any racket of the gendarmerie was at stake.

I drove Valerie back to Sir and handed her over to Ahmed. It was an easier journey than the first. I was treated as a friend of the family, God help me! She even turned round in the saddle and blew me half a kiss. That last sticky liqueur, no doubt.

Back at the office, I looked at my diary. It was a Tuesday night that Limpsfield and I had been on the Hermel track. She was going to speak with her informant on Tuesday. If they had regular meetings, that Arab who had lit his fire above the valley in the small hours of Wednesday morning could very well have been Valerie’s Syrian who wasn’t one. When did they see each other, day or night? Well, it looked as if the visitor had been waiting for daylight to go on his way and he was not far from the valley. Another indication that meetings were after dark was the fact that Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec did not know of his existence.

The unpleasant job had to be carried out discreetly by my own section. I could not expect help. With a very strong case I might have been allowed the support of the Beirut section, but I had not got a strong case. I knew what I (b) would say: arsing about with his Ronson-Bolbecs again and showing off to that girl by pretending that the missing A.D.S.O. Nazareth runs drugs with a bandit. Proof: a pair of yellow socks, a horse box and a crooked gendarme. Crap!

It seemed very unlikely that Valerie’s boy-friend would stage a Romeo act under the windows of the house. Even if she somehow managed to fix her mother, Ahmed and the servants would be bound to know. I did not feel equal to forecasting what the girl would do after she had said good-night to Mummy and shut her door, but I could make a fair guess at what she would not. She would not go tripping and cursing among the reed fences and water channels of the valley, and she would not scramble up the hillside and get tied up in the dark among thorns and ticks. She would stick to d’Aulnoy’s gravelled approach road and the meeting place could well be at the top of the ridge above the house. Her Syrian could easily make his way there if he had reconnoitred a route in daylight, sliding down into the valley at its uninhabited end and avoiding the hamlet.

I took Limpsfield, Holloway, Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Flowers. The last two were silent, reliable fellows who were not at their best in towns and ports, but could be sent out alone on detachment to a village of cannibals and come back with a signed menu. We rode through Sir in the dusk, where I told the Headman that we were going up to dine with the Englishwomen and should be back late. We left our machines at the ford and walked the rest of the way.

I posted Limpsfield and Holloway at the bottom of the gravelled road with orders not to show themselves, to detain quietly any Arab who was not obviously a local peasant and to let any woman pass. Wilson and Flowers were at the far end of the valley and ordered to listen out for anyone crossing the cultivated land and starting to climb the hillside. I myself very quietly took position on the crest of the ridge. If nothing whatever happened—which was almost always the case in security checks at night—they were all to report to me at one-thirty.

It was a warm night for February, and the moon was up at eleven. The faint candles and lamps in the hamlet were nearly all out at ten. I could not see the lights in the house which was heavily curtained, but the air was so still that I distinctly heard a servant locking up. I was standing against and half under some tall, evergreen shrub where I could not possibly be detected unless somebody touched me. The moonlit stretch of made road was clear enough to spot any moving figure, but I could not see over the ridge towards Sir.

The rendez-vous was down that slope, well-chosen. No human being was there in miles of empty hills to see male and female. But low voices carried far between the stars and the dark, friendly earth—though it was not, strictly speaking, human speech which I heard. I crept nearer very cautiously. I would rather have been anywhere else, but I had to find out whether Oliver Enwin was one of the pair and, if he was, to remain near enough to detain him when he left.

They were in a little dip between grey rocks. Valerie must have approached it from the north, or she would have heard us. I could not tell at that time how she dealt with Mother and Ahmed. A plea of headache? One of her moods? How does your cat get out?

It took me a most unwilling, unavoidable minute or two to be sure that it was indeed Oliver Enwin, for he had grown a neat, black beard. I need not go in to what I was compelled to watch. I’m telling you facts you don’t know. Copulation does not, I hope, come under that head, and detailed description is unnecessary except for the incompetent or the incapable. So far as I can see, there must be the devil of a lot of them about, all demanding a ringside commentary, stroke by stroke. Wonk! The champion’s down—slowly slowly, but he’s definitely down. And now, while we wait for the next round, let me introduce you lucky public to our luscious stewed eels from the foam-sparkling shores of Aphrodite’s island!

Well, all that’s relevant is that—in my snap judgment—she had not been long at the game and was in the first, fine, careless rapture. It was now understandable how she managed to endure the boredom of life up there in the valley. That poor girl’s virginity had been set up as a monstrous idol quite long enough, and to go on listening to Mummy saying her prayers to it must have been exasperating. I’m not surprised that she was moody.

I watched her take the road down the hill. As she passed me, she threw her arms wide in a sudden, winged gesture which might have meant freedom or despairing impatience or simply reaching to drag the image of her lover from the nothing of the night. Oliver remained where he was, huddled in his kaftan, perfectly still, his head nearly on his knees, a grey block of memory and misery without a shape or a future. He did not even see or hear me till I was standing over him.

I told him that it was all up and that I was sorry. He looked at me for a moment in which, I suppose, he saw the whole chain of circumstance as a framed, complete picture. He seemed to accept the position and simply replied:

‘Oh, it’s you. Yes, she told me about you.’

‘She never gave you away. I played a dirty trick on her.’

‘I wondered who the hell you thought I was. Noah Number 3! It sounded just like M.I.6 sneaking into a security office for a bit of help and not telling us enough. How long have you been here?’

‘I moved away. I’m afraid the beard delayed me.’

‘This will break her to pieces.’

‘It might be some time before she knows the worst. And I shan’t talk.’

‘What did Palestine think when I vanished?’

‘They weren’t betting on anything.’

‘And you?’

‘The same. Do you want to tell me?’

‘Yes, badly. But you won’t believe it.’

‘Try it on the dog, and see if it stands up.’

‘You haven’t got a drink, I suppose?’

I offered my flask with the left hand, keeping my right side away from him. Wet they called him. But I was taking no risk of a snatch at my holster.

‘Thank you. I’ll start with Nazareth.’

‘It was going on before that?’

‘What you’d call disloyalty? No, not before that. I meant…just try living in Nazareth! It gets you down, even if you aren’t really a believing Christian. I’m not. But anywhere else it wouldn’t have been such a ghastly crisis of conscience.’

To a security man the facts of his story were simple enough, but his complex reaction was incredible. To a plain, honest soldier I think it might be the other way round. The facts would appear fantastic, and Enwin’s reaction to them not only possible but likely.

It all began with a bit of top secret information from Baghdad. An Iraqi, called Youssef Mokaddem, who had been heavily implicated in Rashid Ali’s rebellion of the previous summer and was known to have worked with the Germans, had been identified by one of our security agents, had tried to shoot it out and was killed. That did not suit our policy at all, which was one of mild internment and conciliation all round. And so, as this happened in the dusk of the bare hills east of Mosul and there were no witnesses, his body was discreetly disposed of that same night.

Oliver was then playing around with one of those futile investigations which can never lead anywhere useful unless you have a local agent whose cover and iron nerve are both unbreakable. So he decided to take the identity of Mokaddem, providing himself with papers to prove it. He was twice run in by the Palestine Police outside Safad; but Youssef Mokaddem naturally did not appear on any Black List, and he was not detained. It never occurred to anyone that he was the A.D.S.O. Nazareth with a false toothbrush moustache. How should it? As likely as being the Commander-in-Chief!

What he had started almost as a hobby developed beyond all expectations. The enemy was reorganising the routes from Turkey to Egypt which had been put out of action by the defeat of the Vichy French. He found himself on the edge of local cells which were prepared to hide any accredited German agent and pass him on.

The bogus Youssef Mokaddem managed to get the trust and affection of a Sheikh of the Bedouin in Lower Galilee—Oliver refused to tell me his name—who hated us like hell. That was rare among the Bedouin. They generally liked the British and tolerated the Jews. But this pious old aristocrat had lost a son and a brother in the Arab rebellion of 1936 and looked forward to the arrival of German armoured divisions who would at last hand out what we deserved. He had the charm, the courtesy and the deep, simple faith in God of the old-fashioned Arab, as well as the cunning of a clever man faced by the onrush of a civilisation he could not understand. He knew of the reputation of Youssef Mokaddem, but it took days of exclamatory talk before he would trust the stranger—backing away, coming forward, threatening, boasting like some magnificent male animal being gradually tamed. What finally got him eating out of the hand was a forged letter from Rashid Ali, who was safely in Rome. Then he demanded that Oliver should take with him the solemn oath of blood brotherhood that neither would ever betray the other.

That was it. A pair of fighting men, both devout Moslems—Oliver could easily play that one—were united in the same cause. The supposed Youssef Mokaddem was guided to the carefully hidden cache of weapons. He expected to find a dozen old British Army rifles. He was shown a small arsenal of first-class French and German arms and told that he could take his pick for himself and his men whenever a general rising was ordered. And, far more important, he was invited to meet a real German passing under the cover name of Hadji. They did not particularly like the Germans, Oliver said, but the result of the Blitzkrieg, smashing in days the French and British, meant that they were admired as superhuman Tamerlanes.

Oliver went back to his office to write out a full report for Jeremy Fanshawe, ready to be taken up next day to Jerusalem. When he was half way through, he found that he could not betray his sheikh. The oath he had taken absolutely prohibited it.

I said that I couldn’t see it was binding at all, that it was all part of the web of deception.

‘But it’s a point of honour,’ he answered. ‘Can you or can’t you trust the solemn word of another human being. Unless you can, there isn’t any society at all.’

Remembering his remark about Nazareth, I objected that honour was a pagan virtue and that Christ had never said a word about it.

‘The duty to God.’

‘What about the duty to Caesar?’

‘That’s why I bolted, you see.’

‘You could have kept quiet, burned the file and done nothing.’

‘I did burn the file. But I couldn’t bear myself. Everything had to go. Valerie had to go.’

The key to his behaviour was that the blazing fool had never reported what was going on. Instead of keeping Jeremy informed week by week, he had the irresponsible ambition of handing in his report, complete and all tied up, with nothing left for I (b) to do but carry out the arrests.

What he told me was that he did not want a word to reach the Palestine Police. The office staff of the police was necessarily composed of Jews and Arabs with divided loyalties, and the leaks were quite appalling. That may have counted. But what he really dreamed of was rapid promotion and a decoration to impress Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec. I didn’t ask him to admit it.

Resignation might have helped to dispel his intolerable sense of guilt. But one can’t resign in wartime. He might have got near it if he had had some tough, regimental colonel as a boss whom he could beg for God’s sake to let him out of counter-espionage—the kind who would ask few questions, hesitating to intrude on his privacy. Jeremy, however, was not that type. He would dig into Oliver like a tender-hearted bishop into an errant priest, infinitely sympathetic and praising his work. And in the end he would have had Oliver in tears confessing that he had let an enemy agent go free because he couldn’t break a ridiculous Moslem oath given to an old traitor who had probably broken his own word just as often as a feudal baron.

Whether he confessed or whether he didn’t, he could not face himself and the rest of us. So he took the hardest way out and became a deserter. I suppose for him it was the easiest. I can give you a parallel—a much loved company commander with all the military virtues. He borrowed from the mess fund and could not pay the money back. When there was an Inquiry he too bolted without a hope of getting away, just like a rabbit. Oliver at least knew he had a chance.

I repeat his story as if I knew then and there, in that solitude of rock and thorn, that it was true. I did not. I reserved judgment. The narrative was disjointed and full of holes, and he kept bringing in Nazareth which could have been an easy cloak for treachery. So I pressed my questions. When and how had he changed from A.D.S.O. to Youssef Mokaddem and back again? How had he assured that he was never followed?

He answered the lot with convincing details. He had changed into Arab clothes in a hidden den on the slopes of Mount Tabor and put over them the gown of a Franciscan monk, the Franciscans being the guardians of many of the holy places and free to move around on unaccountable holy business. He then dropped and concealed the gown before approaching the Bedouin tents. His return to his Nazareth office followed the same process in reverse.

‘How do you earn your living?’

‘Money-changer in Damascus.’

‘Capital?’

‘I had about fifty quid left. That’s quite a lot for a money-changer in a back street. One only needs a table and chair.’

‘And the Ronson-Bolbecs?’

‘I knew they were here. That woman telephoned me when they arrived at Haifa and saved herself a taxi on to Beirut. I drove them up, made them comfortable in a cheap hotel and found d’Aulnoy for them. I knew nothing about the swine then, God help me!’

I let that pass as natural disgust with a very able Frenchman, obstinately on the wrong side, and continued trying to make sense out of his position.

‘You come over from Damascus on foot?’

‘Bus and foot. Every fortnight. I didn’t know exactly where d’Aulnoy’s place was and had to explore. That’s how I found the hard track.’

‘And told Valerie you were working under cover?’

‘Yes. There I was, brave, alone, in need. It did the trick. After four years just living for her, and I win on a lie! I’m utterly ashamed of that, too.’

He had a type of mouth which always appeals to me: wide with fairly full lips which set in a firm, straight line when at rest, but were vulnerable at the corners. Those corners now were sensitive and just perceptibly quivering, like the leech of a sail when you hold a boat too close-hauled and gamble that you won’t have to go about. Remember that he was only in his middle twenties! His impudent daring and his conscience both belonged to youth. I shouldn’t have pitied him so deeply if he had been my own age.

‘It’s so unfair to her,’ he went on. ‘I only wanted to see that she was all right. That woman staked all she had on entertaining. Kept a bloody salon on nothing a year! I used to help them a bit out of my pay.’

‘Twenty pounds from time to time.’

‘How did you know?’

‘You’ve just told me. Hasn’t she any pride?’

‘Not of that sort.’

‘Would she take money from a gang of drug smugglers?’

‘Probably.’

‘Or from enemy agents?’

‘Never! It’s unthinkable. Everyone will tell you that.’

‘They have. At length.’

‘What will happen to me?’ he asked—I think with Valerie’s future in mind more than his own.

‘Well, if I were on the court martial it would be psychiatric treatment for the rest of the war. But one never knows.’

‘Could you fix it so that I surrender to Jeremy?’

‘No. You must go through the usual channels.’

‘Very military!’

‘Routine is the price of freedom, Oliver—which has never occurred to you.’

‘Well, get on with it! I might try to escape. Draw your gun!’

‘You can’t possibly reach your own under that kaftan. I am wondering how I know who you are. You’re just another wog.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word.’

‘Just another wog would be an acceptable excuse, Oliver, if some fool ever asks me why I did not recognise you.’

‘You can’t do that. I won’t allow it.’

‘I need a reliable Arab agent urgently. But in my humble position I am not allowed one.’

‘I will not spy on Valerie’s mother.’

‘Given her your word of honour too?’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘Well, put it this way! You are trying to keep the pair of them out of trouble and at the same time working for me. As a money-changer who are you?’

‘Just Youssef Mokaddem, born in Iraq. It’s not an uncommon name.’

‘Could you go back to being the dead Youssef Mokaddem?’

‘Easily. My sheikh will vouch for me if he has to, and Rashid Ali’s letter will stand up. I studied his style and writing very carefully. But if I meet anyone in Damascus who knew him well I shall have to disappear quick.’

‘How can we see each other? I’m not used to handling agents of your calibre.’

‘I’ll fix that.’

There was just time to tell him the points of special interest to me: I wanted to know whether Khalid and the rider of the roan were working for the enemy or themselves. I needed more information on the identity and political sympathies of visitors to the valley who were not known locally, such as Yellow Socks and the fat Iraqi. Lastly a big question mark over Ahmed, which he approved.

‘One has to remember that French Security continually makes the same mistake,’ he said. ‘Arabs and especially North Africans give stubborn love and loyalty to a man. But when the man goes it doesn’t follow that they will give the same loyalty to a government.’

It was now nearly one-thirty. I told him to wait where he was until my men came in and we had gone. His way back to the Hermel track was much as I suspected—along the ridge, across the end of the valley and then up the rocks to the point where Limpsfield and I had seen him. He had the luck of the devil. If he had come to meet Valerie half an hour later than he did, Wilson and Flowers would have bagged him.

Field Security recovered their motorcycles at the ford, roared through Sir and went home to the billet, having had a romantic night in the hills with no apparent result. When at last I was alone in my room and had time to take a look at myself, I began to realise what I had tied round my neck. I had at least the excuse that it was not our duty to arrest deserters whom we might find useful where they were. I had emphasised this in lectures to the troops as an example of the difference between ourselves and the Military Police. All the same my action was nothing but an irresponsible impulse. What might pass with some obscure, half-crazy private was unthinkable in dealing with a trusted security officer. I was as unmilitary as Oliver.

Or was I? His utter folly was to sacrifice everything for honour, and nothing could be more military than that. The word, I have been told, is obsolete. Honour between man and man? Just homosexualism. Between man and woman? Outdated. In business? An absurd convention. And yet, you know, the conception is still around among youth, though I am not sure of their name for it. What they dislike is the idea of a binding contract with society; the spoken contract between one individual and another is perfectly familiar to them. And I shall go on calling the force behind it Honour. Probably those half-educated sociologists have some vast jargon term ending in -ism, but two stern syllables which go back to the Roman Republic are good enough for you and me.

It was unwise to tell the Headman of Sir that my four men and I were on our way to dine with the Ronson-Bolbecs. But think of a better excuse if you can. I had to tell him something. What I had not reckoned with was Ahmed, who of course heard of the mysterious operation and knew very well that we had never come down to the valley at all. He took the trouble to find out what in fact we had been doing and discovered that the five motorcycles had climbed up as far as the ford but could not trace where we had then gone on foot.

So on his next visit to Tripoli he made a show of being distrusted by the British who were spying on him in spite of his loyal service to the French and the two ladies. Magnat came round to see me and asked if I would kindly let him know why Field Security conducted police operations which were the sole responsibility of the French.

I replied that I was on private business and that I had taken four of my men as far as the ford as a bodyguard.

‘You do not believe then that the Lebanon is at peace?’

‘Mon ami, since a little child I have been afraid of the dark.’

‘You are continuing your folly of considering these abominable Ronson-Bolbecs as spies for the Boches?’

‘My interests are not wholly confined to Security.’

‘The little Valerie or her mother?’

‘A study of the superb literature of France has taught me that one should always begin with the mother.’

‘But I hear that lunch at El Mina was profitable.’

‘It is true that she entered the restaurant sad and came out smiling. But I suggest that your agents should not waste your time by presenting town gossip as exclusive news.’

A gallant officer really could not continue such very personal questions, however sure that the perfide Albion was at it again. So he asked me to tell him frankly if I had anything definite against Ahmed.

‘Nothing whatever. I give you my word that I never saw him the whole evening. Presumably he was in the house.’

‘It is curious that he should be so worried, and you can give no explanation.’

‘I should guess that he is robbing his absent master and has a guilty conscience.’

‘That is what he would not do—more than the ten per cent which is customary,’ Magnat answered positively. ‘He is proud of his trust.’

About a week after this interview Boutagy, looking important and secretive, came into my office and told me that there was a chap hanging about the street—a Moslem small farmer by the look of him—who wished to speak to me in private. Boutagy instructed him to go round the corner and wait under the poplars in a dusty, open-air café. If my lordship chose to come, my lordship would.

‘He has a little French,’ Boutagy said, ‘so you will not need me. But I will sit at a distance.’

His offer was not due to any fears of my safety, but to give me face. A big man did not see just anybody unattended.

He pointed the fellow out to me and then took a chair at the other end of the garden. Arabs, Christians as well as Moslems, can do with such dignity absolutely nothing.

The stranger was so nondescript and typical a villager that I doubted if I should ever recognise him again. He wasted no time. Cutting his greetings down to French standard, he said he had a message for me. A lady whom I knew well wished to meet me at five o’clock the following evening. She and her mother were going to ride from Sir to Ehden. She would arrange to be alone at the second bend of the path which led up from Ehden to the place where soldiers were building a fort.

I asked him where he came from. The valley of M. d’Aulnoy, he said. So I thanked him and gave him some money over his conventional refusal to take it.

If Valerie had been showing an interest in me, as common gossip assumed, the story would have been fairly convincing. Since she seldom left the valley I should have wondered how she knew of this mountain path and perhaps assumed that in early days the Ronson-Bolbecs had been invited to a meal by one of the officers at the defence works. As it was, the sender had to be Oliver Enwin. I was impressed by the cunning with which he had covered his tracks; these A.D.S.O.’s, I thought, really know their stuff. His choice was excellent for a quiet and uninterrupted meeting, with a floor of soft pine needles under the trees.

I knew the place well. The Australians had started work on a defensive box—a complicated hedgehog which had got little further than the foundations. There was now a detachment of British sappers on top of the hill, too small to complete the work but large enough to give an impression of industry. Two roads led up to their camp, one a raw, rough route for army trucks, the other a wide forest path now deserted but much used in summer when the wealthy Lebanese Maronites came up to their mountain villas at Ehden.

I always liked to have a good reason for being where duty hadn’t taken me, so I started up the hill at four and dropped in to see the captain in charge of the two platoons of sappers. I found him cursing the ignorance of Ninth Army staff which had set them to work without sufficient men or equipment. He had no suspicion at all that he and his men were camouflage and only expected to look busy. He told me that Lieutenant Khalid had been hanging round the camp a few days earlier, as usual the best of greasy, good fellows. Khalid had offered to put on a real Lebanese dinner for him, and the captain asked me if I saw any objection. I told him of course to go ahead and enjoy himself and to be careful with the araq.

At quarter to five I started down the forest path, perhaps taking more pleasure in my cornering than Limpsfield would have approved. I had just rounded the last of the hair-pin bends above the rendezvous when I came on Khalid riding up the right of the path and pulled up for a chat. I am not sure whether he was moving or standing still. It was all so fast. There was room for us both, and as I skidded to a stop just short of him he swung his horse off the path on the uphill side as if I had frightened it. The next thing I knew was that the hind hooves had landed on the petrol tank and steering column, just missing my leg, and the bike and I were rolling down the slope until we came up against a pine tree. I cannot have been knocked out for more than a second or two, for my next impression was of Khalid scrambling down to me carrying a considerable chunk of wood.

In my dazed condition I remember thinking that Oliver Enwin had decided to get rid of me and used Khalid. I was resigned to my fate and I would never have remembered my .45 at all if my hip had not been bruised by it. I was lying on right hand and holster so that I could draw the revolver with a fair imitation of a dying convulsion. When Khalid lifted up his pine log and put his intention beyond doubt I let him have it. The bullet took him on the breast bone and lifted him clean up in the air. I had been told the .45 would do that, but I didn’t really believe it.

You will remember that in base areas the only casualties we ever had were due to motorcycle accidents. Every section had a man in hospital two or three times a year and some of them died. I won’t say that Arab drivers found it exciting to kill a man in uniform, but one can safely put it that they made no special effort not to knock him off his bike. So this accident was fully in keeping with army statistics; and Khalid, who had conducted the procès verbal of several similar fatalities, was well aware of it. A fine mess I was in, wide open to the accusation that in a fit of temper after a traffic accident I had murdered a respectable and friendly policeman.

Self-defence? Well, in all my war I never heard that anybody thought a Field Security Officer important enough to assassinate him. Melodrama simply did not enter our lives, and officers who persuaded themselves that it did seldom stayed long. I had no proof of any kind for the court martial. Neither Boutagy nor Limpsfield knew what message I had received, though I am sure they would have perjured themselves in my favour. Even so, if asked whether I thought it likely that this restricted sweetie would be riding above Ehden with slap and tickle in her innocent mind, I could only reply that I thought the message was from Enwin and make matters worse.

Yes, the prosecutor would be on velvet. Why should Lieutenant Khalid want to kill you? He was put up to it by Enwin who may or may not be a money-changer in Damascus and knew I had recognised him. Why didn’t you arrest him? Well…er…Where did you meet him? Mucking around the Ronson-Bolbecs. Cheers from Brigadier Paunce. You ran into this unfortunate officer going round a corner too fast in the dusk? I stopped in time and he made his horse kick me. And then the horse drew your gun with its teeth, I suppose?

How comforting to be in the Gestapo and able to shoot civilians without being tried for it!

When I had disentangled myself and discovered that everything was sore but nothing broken, I reconsidered my hazy accusation of Oliver. I could not accept it. He was the last person on earth to kill anyone for his personal advantage. In that case the message purporting to be from Valerie was not his at all. Magnat, Khalid, Ahmed—all of them had reason to suspect that I was after Valerie, and in the Levant to suspect is, ten minutes later, to be sure. God only knew who had plotted my removal, but his staff work, in spite of a false appreciation, was efficient.

I had a look at Khalid. He was very dead and I hoped there could be no more blood in him. There was of course. There always is. But I had to get rid of the body. Oliver’s story of the burying of Youssef Mokaddem on the Mosul hills put that into my mind, though I had no discreet helpers and no spade or pickaxe. I dared not leave him. The smashed motorcycle was evidence against me, let alone the bullet from my gun; and it could be in the interest of the unknown to give a hint to the Military Police. Why didn’t I cut the bullet out? What, in that mess! You would have to be a surgeon, not a poor, shaken security officer trembling with undeserved remorse at taking a hitherto friendly life.

I reckoned that nobody official would have been told where Khalid was. If all had gone well and I had been lying with a smashed liver and the bike half on top of me, he could confidently report the accident with tears running down his moustache; but if something unforeseen were to happen, he would not wish his presence on the spot to be known. So it was unlikely that there would be any immediate search for him in the right place.

Meanwhile at least I had his horse to carry the body, but where? Up a tree for the kites? Down a hole if I could find one? Under a mound of pine needles? It was then that I had an inspiration. I understand that it is a commonplace now, but I didn’t pass on the technique. Like so many British inventors I never attempted to develop the commercial side.

It was less than an hour since I had watched those busy sappers completing the excavation for foundations on the reverse slope of the hill and then knocking off for the day. It was a pick-and-shovel job except at one point where a massive boulder had to be removed from the line. They had blasted this out, thrown back the fragments, filled up and smoothed over ready for pouring concrete in the morning. I dared not interfere with their shallow trench, but this pit could, I hoped, be reconstructed.

I plugged the hole in Khalid, dragged him up the slope and slung him across his horse. It ought to have run in panic from its rider’s murderer; instead, it searched my holster for sugar. An insensitive beast. Or perhaps it was trained to stand under any circumstances, as well as to the highest French standard of dressage. The manoeuvre which sent me flying was, I think, what they call a capriole.

If I had not been desperate and too muzzy to be capable of prolonged thought, I should never have followed up my inspiration. You know how one gets away, when partly sloshed, with the most astounding follies which one would not have the guts or the luck to carry out sober. The sappers had sentries out on their tented camp, but not on the outlying bits of fortification. So far, so good. I wandered round looking for a shovel. There wasn’t one. That well disciplined unit had returned all tools to the quartermaster’s store.

I remember that I lay down and sobbed at that point. Hopelessly I went to work with my hands, and then found the job not at all impossible and even quick. Under the covering of earth the shattered pieces of rock were easy to lift out. I say, easy. But I could not have lifted any of the stones a few hours later when the muscles of back and shoulders had set solid. I was quite unable to make a neat grave. I did manage a rough hole into which Khalid could be fitted knees to chin, in neolithic style. I covered him up, smoothed back the earth and scattered the extra stones among the pile of spoil.

Then this docile horse and I went back, down to the scene of the crime where I kicked pine needles over the blood and left it to the busy ants. The wheels of the bike still turned, so I was able to guide it through the trees to the lower zigzag of the path and free-wheel down to the road, hiding it behind a decaying shed. The last job was to walk back up the two twists of that damned hill for the damned horse, for I was nearly out on my feet and had no other way of getting clear.

I set out on its back for the nearest camp to the west where I knew there were still a few Australians of 7th Division packing up. They never asked too many questions, taking what was offered to them and treating it kindly. Having telephoned Limpsfield that I had been in a nasty smash and that he was to run out to the rescue in the truck, I had another stroke of terrified genius. I told the provost sergeant, who was looking after me and worried at my condition, that we spy-catchers of the Intelligence Corps sometimes found ourselves in possession of property without an owner and that I had a horse standing in the woods if he had an empty lorry to put it in. Dogs, spare engines, comforts for the troops, tools and tyres—those dear Australians were always ready to collect them if they were not nailed down and just as generous in handing them out; they also had a remarkable gift for covering imports and exports by correct army forms. I warned him that the saddlery had better be dropped into the Mediterranean while his convoy was rolling down to Egypt, but the horse could safely be sold to a riding school or shipped to Australia.

When Limpsfield and Flowers came out to fetch me, I accounted for the few patches of blood on my uniform by saying that I had pitched on my face and it was all from my nose; but I did not attempt to explain why the provost sergeant heaved two vast crates of beer into our truck and why the mark on the petrol tank of my bike was, according to Limpsfield, so very like a horse’s hoof. On arrival at the hotel I borrowed his greatcoat to cover the blood stains, collapsed into my room and spent the next two days groaning in bed.

The town was buzzing with the news of Lieutenant Khalid’s disappearance when I returned to my office chair. General opinion was that he had ridden over to Turkey when some crime of his could no longer be concealed. Apparently there had been plenty of them, ranging from rape to blackmail. While he was alive nobody had mentioned anything of the sort, but as soon as a distinguished, sporting policeman is no more in command of admiring toughs it is possible to tell the truth and double the libels.

It was not long afterwards that Oliver’s first attempt to contact me came through very unromantically by telephone. Why the devil I should have thought he would have to choose a more complicated method I cannot imagine, for there was no bugging of calls between civil and military exchanges without good reason. I must have been suffering from what we called the British Secret Service complex. He spoke in French, reminded me—in case I did not recognise his voice—that since it was Wednesday he had private business in my district and arranged to meet me at a point on the Besharra road at two o’clock. He was never a man to bother about interfering with anyone’s lunch.

As soon as I saw him looking pious and contemplative by a wayside Moslem shrine I got out of the truck and told my driver to come back in a couple of hours. When he was out of sight and the road was empty, I disappeared into the thick cover of young, green pines where Oliver joined me. He reported that he had seen no movement between Hermel and Sir and that he was sure from discreet enquiries in Damascus and Baalbek that the track was unknown. He had no line at all on my supposed Circassian, Fatty or Yellow Socks.

I then told him of Khalid’s attempt on me. I did not say that I had killed him. I would not have trusted or embarrassed anyone with a detailed description. I merely emphasised that Khalid had disappeared for good and that I hoped neither he nor his horse would ever be heard of again.

‘A horse,’ he said, ‘seems rather large.’

‘On the contrary. That was the easiest.’

‘You realise that if it ever came out…’

‘The Foreign Legion, I think. I was never any good at changing money.’

He ignored that—beyond observing that in our trade violence was cruel and unnecessary. He asked what Khalid had against me.

‘Nothing. Somebody thinks I know something which I don’t.’

‘If you did, you would have already reported it, so it is not worth removing you. What’s left? Your very unsound methods. Your soldierly expedition which bagged me. Leading questions about horses and car numbers. All alarming and indicating that you had nothing certain but soon would have, and had better meet with an accident.’

‘Another one on the way, you think?’

‘No. They are up in the air. They can’t guess what happened to Khalid. He might have lost his nerve and bolted. And it must begin to look possible that your interest the whole time was in Valerie and nothing else. Leave it to me!’

I was very content to do so, for I was helpless and out on my own—a literal outlaw with a couple of courts martial hanging over my head on one side and a threat of assassination on the other. At least I managed to keep a sense of proportion about the latter. As Oliver said, it was most risky for them—if it was a ‘them’—to try it again after the mysterious failure of the first attempt. For all they knew I had the full co-operation of I (b) and was stretching my claws and grinning.

While we waited for the truck to return, Oliver remarked:

‘By the way, is it true that we are expecting four armoured divisions at El Mina?’

‘You heard that in Damascus?’

‘No, last night. From Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec via Valerie.’

I believe you knew my Corporal Davila—a man with all the fertile imagination and silky charm of a Sephardic Jew. M.I.6 stole him from us in the end and made him a major; I hope he worked out some tricks of their trade which had the Gestapo screaming with nerves and frustration. Well, I (b) ordered us to start a rumour that reinforcements were arriving to take the place of the Australians. We did not think their suggestions very convincing, so Davila invented a beauty: that special cranes and a floating jetty were being installed at El Mina for the disembarkation of four armoured divisions. Since the Navy happened to be repairing a fleet of barges, dredging alongside the quay and putting down lines for a big crane to run on, there was good evidence to back up the story.

Davila’s idea was approved enthusiastically, and it was only three days since he and Zappa had let it leak—after allowing the master of a very dubious Ruad caique to soak them in araq.

‘Who has she been talking to since the day before yesterday?’

‘I’ll find out. Why?’

‘She got the information very quickly.’

‘It’s true then?’

I did not answer him directly. There was a difference between secrets which were mine to give away and those which were the property of the Army.

‘You know they never tell Field Security anything,’ I replied. ‘Supposing it’s a fact, did she get it in a letter from Cairo or from Ahmed or where?’

‘I shall be passing their house again tonight,’ he said, as if it were just round the corner in Acacia Avenue with some handy laurels at the bottom of the garden, ‘so I can let you know at once. Business telegram. No takers means no visitors. If I put in any name, I’ll make it easy for you to guess what I mean. But it will all have to be in Arabic.’

I told him that was all right, since I had Boutagy as interpreter. He was distressed to hear that Boutagy had been eased out of Nazareth and thanked me warmly for taking him on.

‘A dear fellow!’ he exclaimed. ‘But I always found him so comic. The British Raj, and all that!’

Driving back to Tripoli I considered his remark. I always suspected that Oliver had no passionate respect for his country. It did not matter. Nobody could feel hatred for Hitler with such white heat as a good internationalist. Yet he did not care in the least whether or not I was an old-fashioned patriot serving the Empire in the old-fashioned way. One could understand how it was that he was called ‘wet’ by men who were not altogether fools.

His wire reached me on the Friday. Roughly translated, it ran:

NO TAKERS PALESTINE POUNDS YOUR PRICE STOP AHMED NOT IN THE MARKET THIS WEEK.

So there were no visitors to the valley, and Ahmed had not been down to Tripoli. There was no alternative left but to put Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec through the hoops and find out how the planted rumour had reached her. Cairo and Brigadier Paunce could post me to sanitary engineering in Madagascar if they liked, but this was my duty and I was damned well going to see where it led. It wasn’t my duty? Well, certainly I could have sent a report upstairs and let the brass do the dirty work. But you’ll agree that His Majesty was graciously paying us to indulge our curiosity.

I was now growing accustomed to the rally drive up from Sir and actually dared to entrust a bunch of lilies to the back of the bike. The section, those of them who were in, kept stern, straight faces at this further evidence of the skipper’s romance—all except Holloway who remarked mournfully:

‘We do ’ope it’s not a close relation, sir.’

Ahmed greeted me with a most cordial and extensive Arab salutation. I imagined a new, profound respect, which was natural enough if he knew of Khalid’s attempt on me. Mashallah, what an example to all the Faithful—a murderer who could vanish his victims!

Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec joined the act, and metaphorically let loose a flight of cooing pigeons from the deep dovecot of her bosom. They had not seen me for so long. How like me to bring both flowers and more gin! And what a lovely lunch I had given little Valerie! I replied that I was delighted she had come round to tolerating me.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have kept looking at her in the way you did,’ Ma said.

‘What way?’

‘As if you were out shopping and trying to choose between a joint of beef or mutton.’

A devastating revelation! There was no possible comeback except to ask her if she expected me to go any further.

‘At least you might seem to want to.’

‘Is she out?’

‘She’s collecting those lovely little irises from the hillside.’

And no doubt prospecting for an easier route when scrambling up on Tuesday nights.

It was warm spring at last with all the wide windows of the house open and the scent of the orchard blossom drifting through the rooms—a most unpromising set for relentless interrogation. One feels so much more on top of the poor devils across a desk, or in a cell where four blank walls exclude humanity and close in upon the importance of some wretched fact.

I need not have worried how I was to begin. She jumped straight at it. There were going to be gallant officers—heaps of them drawn from the wood of smart cavalry regiments and now bottled into tanks. Tea parties! Châteaux galore!

‘I hear there are four armoured divisions on the way,’ she said. ‘What fun we shall all have!’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘In a letter from Cairo. Last week.’

‘Was it Captain Magnat or Ahmed who brought up the post?’

‘Ahmed, of course. He always does.’

‘When?’

She gave me a date before the rumour had even been started. So I became official, for even she must realise that her fictitious Cairo correspondent had committed an outrageous breach of Security.

‘I have to ask who wrote the letter.’

‘You must not behave like a policeman,’ she said patronisingly. ‘In India I knew several officers in the secret service, and they were all gentlemen.’

‘I am not in any secret service and not a gentleman this afternoon. I am a security officer with the right and duty to bully you.’

‘I shall complain about you to London. I won’t have you interfering.’

‘The name of your correspondent, please.’

‘You won’t get it.’

‘Then I shall ask for all your mail to be censored.’

‘Oh, please, no!’ she cried. ‘Not again! Not from you!’

That was an eye-opener. Clearly it was not wholly a privilege that her correspondence with her distinguished relatives went through the diplomatic bag. She had already been warned, and probably made a fuss which was exasperating for everyone; so some tactful colonel on the staff of the Director of Military Intelligence had ensured security by routing all her mail through the bag.

‘I had better tell you that I am already in touch with Cairo about you.’

‘What did they say?’

‘The report was private and not very favourable.’

‘Oh, God! How did they describe us? That bloody woman and her daughter?’

I have seldom been so shocked. I could not tell you why. The change in her voice, perhaps. I was used to her smooth, superior, slightly artificial tone, and then this hot spurt of shame burst out from the bottom of her.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that at some time she had been listening at a door and heard an opinion—very possibly a consensus of opinion—which she did not expect. I would not be surprised if it had a lot to do with their sudden, approved departure for the Lebanon.

For the moment I kept on the ice the vital question of who told her the rumour. I liked to let confessions come out as they chose. Amateur stuff, of course; but after the war I found that the real professionals in London did the same. No beatings-up, racks or needles. Just the nice, friendly atmosphere of the psychiatrist’s consulting-room—though one might go so far as hanging a few depressing chromium-plated instruments on the wall.

‘Blaise d’Aulnoy understood,’ she said.

‘But you can’t sit out the whole war here.’

‘You told us that already. How long will it go on?’

‘I don’t see any end. Why on earth don’t you go home?’

‘That’s the second time you’ve asked me. No money, you beast! That’s the answer.’

It stuck out a mile as the truth, and for the moment I found myself on her side. She seemed to have expected contempt. At any rate she was so surprised at my reaction that she burst into floods of tears. Owing to her cinematic anatomy it was difficult to give her a shoulder to cry on, but I did my best. I shouldn’t like you to think that the collapse was all due to the ‘undoubted charm’. I had mixed her three drinks and I had not economised with the gin.

I did not ask her why she had not taken a job in Cairo, for I could answer that question myself. Secretary at some British Government commercial agency? But it was certain she could not type. Running a canteen for the troops or similar welfare activity? But those were not paid jobs. Helping in the Embassy? Not on your life, with her indiscretions! And it was unthinkable that a colonel’s widow who knew everyone should work in vulgar trade for a Greek or a wog.

Yes, I could see her trouble. The Army had no authority to pay her passage home; it was not until Rommel was outside Alexandria that we began to evacuate women. As for her cousins in the corridors of power who could certainly get her a passage and fork out the money, they turned, I suspect, a blind eye, relieved that she was out of cadging distance and among dear, old friends who would look after her.

‘It was all for Valerie,’ she sobbed.

I was aware that, very likely, she was mopping away with a monogrammed handkerchief in order to keep me off that mythical Cairo correspondent. But so often a woman’s tears are more tragically genuine than she herself knows.

However, pity for her personally was not going to stop me. While her mind was occupied by the mess she had made of her finances and the sneers of former friends, I edged towards the probable explanation of where she heard the rumour.

‘You’ll be all right here for a long time,’ I assured her. ‘And I hear you are doing a lot of good in the village.’

‘I wish I could talk to them more.’

‘Does Valerie go with you?’

‘No. She doesn’t like the smells. But she takes an interest. She arranged with Ahmed that he and I should go over and talk to the women every Tuesday night.’

‘What about?’

‘The usual missionary stuff. Baby care and first aid and so on. I’d like to be more intimate, but I can’t with Ahmed there. Blaise d’Aulnoy asked me to look after them. That was part of the bargain.’

‘And to entertain his friends?’

‘Well, to be nice to them. He knew I couldn’t do much.’

‘And they go back to Sir the same day like Fatty and Socks?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Brigadier Paunce, too?’

‘Reggie Paunce? What’s he got to do with it?’

‘An old friend who is used to sleeping rough but wouldn’t come to the house for Valerie’s sake?’

‘You do have a dirty mind! I never heard such nonsense.’

‘Your informant must have been someone in the know.’

‘But it’s only a rumour.’

‘Unfortunately it is true and top secret.’

‘Well, go ahead and tackle Reggie Paunce and see what happens to you!’

‘Not before I have had all your village women interrogated by Captain Magnat.’

‘They wouldn’t tell him a thing about it.’

At last! There’s nothing like following up a good, red herring and taking the suspect along with you.

‘About what?’

‘But it’s so unimportant,’ she complained, seeing that she had been caught out and dropping a few more tears to ease our mutual embarrassment.

‘Then why not let me into the secret?’

‘It’s just that I promised. He’s very pro-British and working for us. He said that friends of Blaise were bound to be suspected and that I shouldn’t mention he was there.’

‘Well, is that all?’ I exclaimed with a pretence of relief. ‘I may know him. What’s his name?’

‘Moustofi Khan.’

‘How many times have you seen him in the village?’

‘Twice.’

‘Does he speak English or French?’

‘With me? English—beautifully. Such a charming man and full of compliments! He reminds me of an Afghan Emir who was so proud to be free of our house in Peshawar.’

‘Is he Afghan?’

‘Persian, I think. Ahmed just said he was an old friend keeping an eye on us all.’

‘I hope he brought along some money.’

‘Not from Blaise. From Moslem Charities—to buy two sewing machines for the village whenever I had time to find them.’

She was not a woman to waste good cash on sewing machines if told that there was no hurry. So the transaction smelt detestably like a delicate bribe: a first payment which could later be repeated on other excuses until she was in his power and unable to extricate herself. I do not know to this day whether he asked her to find out if the rumour was true. And I’d rather not know.

‘What does he look like?’

‘Dark. Straight hair. He reminds me of a greyhound or a bird or something. I know. A hawk!’

I nursed her back into her more comfortable role of condescending colonel’s widow, found myself now calling her dear Biddy and persuaded her that if only she had trusted me from the start there never would have been any awkwardness at all. I think she was not sorry there had been, for I was now a friend to whom she could talk without pretence. The first sign of humility I ever saw in her was when she asked:

‘What am I to do if I meet Moustofi Khan again?’

‘Nothing. Carry on as usual! And you need never tell him that I made you break your promise.’

There was always the possibility that Moustofi Khan did work for us. Perfect liaison between the spy-catchers and the spy-masters must have existed somewhere in the Middle East, but obviously names and descriptions could not be divulged much below the level of the Director of Military Intelligence. When I made a casual verbal enquiry, Ninth Army could only tell me that Moustofi Khan had huge estates in Persia and a country house of great beauty off the Homs-Baalbek road. He was permitted to travel freely between the lot. I (b) was pretty sure that he was not directly employed by us—too big a man—but he was well known to the Legation in Teheran and had been helpful in small matters.

I did not explain the true reason for my enquiry. Ronson-Bolbecs were taboo, and I had no intention of supplying a lead to points of weakness in the concrete of field works. But I was interested by those journeys between estates when nobody could know for certain where Moustofi Khan was, and I noticed how conveniently near to the Hermel track was the house by the Homs-Baalbek road.

Chapter Three

SECRET AGENT

OUR RUMOUR WAS QUICKLY overtaken by reality. The Ninth Australian and the New Zealand Divisions came up from Egypt by the normal and less expensive route of the coast road—a force quite sufficient to deliver the enemy and their friends from minor temptations. Liaison with the divisional intelligence staffs also delivered me for some weeks from wasting time on the Ronson-Bolbecs.

No more was heard of Yellow Socks, but the fat Iraqi—the other visitor to the valley who claimed to be a friend of Blaise d’Aulnoy—was identified by a stroke of luck. One could equally call it the natural effect of our efficient witch’s coven of thirteen, always out and about after significant trifles.

It was Sergeant Wilson who came home with the name. He had been a clerk on the Stock Exchange, so I had given him a roving commission to keep an eye on the cornering of wheat—a popular method of getting rich quick in a country where the poor would have been on the verge of starvation if not for the supplies poured in by Ninth Army. He reported that a merchant at El Mina had borrowed a large sum from a fat Baghdad banker who had been in Tripoli for a couple of days in February. His name was Abdullah el Bessam. Dates fitted. Description fitted.

You had the Baghdad section and it was then that you came into the story. Instead of putting my enquiry through the proper channels I sent you a signal direct as one friend to another. You won’t remember it, but your reply was typical and illuminating. It went something like this:

NOTHING KNOWN AGAINST ABDULLAH EL BESSAM BUT WOULD GLADLY IMPALE HIM MARKETPLACE FOR DELECTATION POPULACE STOP AGE 51 GROSSLY FAT WEALTHY AND MAKING MORE OUT OF WAR STOP NOTED HOMOSEXUAL AND DESERVEDLY SUFFERS FROM PILES STOP CAN BE IDENTIFIED BY ANTIQUE CUSHION CLAIMS IT BELONGED CALIPH ISLAM STOP DESPATCH FOURTEEN LEBANESE SLAVEGIRLS CIF BAGHDAD SECONDHAND WILL DO.

Yes, you may well ask what happened to Abdullah el Bessam. But time passes, and we with it. He’d be dead by now in any case.

In the same week that I received your reply Captain Magnat called at my office. My guilty conscience had compelled me to avoid him since the disappearance of Khalid, for it was his duty to conduct the investigation and I was none too sure how innocently I could meet his eyes. However, Magnat’s business had nothing to do with the gendarmerie. He merely wanted to know if I could arrange for a traveller to Turkey to lose his baggage for half an hour when taking the Taurus Express from Tripoli. That was well within my powers and I was happy to oblige.

It occurred to me that I had not used him enough. I did not mention Moustofi Khan’s name, but I asked if the Deuxième Bureau had any information about d’Aulnoy’s social life and friends.

‘I have so often had to remind you, my dear captain, that our files are secret.’

‘I know. How about dining with me tomorrow?’

‘I shall be delighted as always. But it would be on false pretences. How the devil do you suppose there could be anything of interest about a prominent and trusted administrator?’

‘Well, there ought to be something. Suppose he was your boss and wanted to sack you for being an anti-clerical, revolutionary socialist, what little hint would make him change his mind?’

‘You have the most extraordinary ideas of French colonial administration.’

‘It is efficient at all levels.’

‘Thank you. Very probably d’Aulnoy would not want it widely known that he was given to unnatural practices.’

‘Exclusively?’

‘By no means. An all-round amateur.’

‘The remoteness of his house was to ensure discretion, you think?’

‘Unlikely. Up there in the valley all his visitors would be known to the people of Sir. A house in town with a back door would be better.’

I said that in my experience hedonists who appreciated the charms of both sexes usually had very good taste.

‘You are right. For d’Aulnoy, it was said, nothing over sixteen. There were never any complaints. He paid generously and had marked delicacy for a pro-Boche.’

That gave me a picture of the man which house and valley confirmed. It did not sound as if a gross Baghdadi in his fifties was likely to appeal to him, except perhaps as a companion for orgies. But mutual sympathy in a harsh world might have led to close financial relationships. That would do for the moment.

We were now well into April—the point at which, as I look back on it, my necessarily private investigation began to be complicated by problems of sex. They should have no part in war’s simplicities. In my experience the average man—always assuming reasonable leave and a friendly whore-house—consciously enjoys his freedom from the exactions of women. Slave girls, you wrote in your signal. Very typical! Even if there had been lots of emancipated female students in Baghdad University, as there probably are today, you and your thirteen lecherous scoundrels would have chosen something less demanding.

Valerie turned up at the billet, having ridden in from Sir alone. She was adjusting herself to her environment with growing confidence ever since her pet deserter had taken to long walks. For some time I had seen nothing of him, but he had evidently told her that I was in their secret and could be trusted.

She looked delightful in a green tweed coat and jodhpurs—a breath of long-legged fresh air from the shires or, perhaps, the North West Frontier. Limpsfield showed her in with such military panache as was possible when interrupted in taking a typing lesson from Boutagy, and then went down to cuddle the horse—or at least to see that nobody stole its tail while it was hitched to the section truck.

‘What have you done with Ahmed?’ I asked.

‘I simply told him that I would call for the mail myself and did not require him. Have I ruined your reputation?’

‘Done it nothing but good.’

‘Oliver told me to give you a message. Tel Ayub. On the shore. Tomorrow. Same time.’

‘It’s not Wednesday.’

‘I think he has given up whatever he was doing.’

‘The hell he has! What else did he tell you?’

‘I am supposed to be in love with you.’

‘Nobody will believe it. You are too glorious.’

‘Well, I’ll play on one condition. I want him in Tripoli.’

‘But he is not under my command.’

‘He says he is. Don’t you find him easy to work with?’

I said that I should find it easier if he wasn’t so damned arrogant. She got near to admitting that quality in him; she even admired it.

‘You don’t understand him,’ she said. ‘He was left on his own when he was ten. His father was well off but went bust—and committed suicide, I think, though Oliver has never said it in so many words. He never speaks of his mother either. I believe she had cleared out before the tragedy. Then an uncle got him into one of the charity grammar schools.’

She sounded for a moment like Biddy and I replied coldly that as often as not the officers I really respected came from the old-fashioned grammar schools.

‘I didn’t mean it that way. You should have known I didn’t. I meant that Oliver has always had to go on telling himself what he is worth. He could have been a don at Cambridge and then chucked it all up to follow me.’

The picture of Oliver as an incisive, determined, young don made sense at last. I thought it a pity that the determination had been concentrated on Valerie rather than his career. But his was not the common case of a raw intellectual swept off his feet by some cheap, sexy bitch. He had recognised physical perfection and collected character when he saw them and nothing less would ever do.

‘You don’t propose to call on him in Tripoli?’

‘Everyone will think it very natural if I call on you,’ she said demurely.

The duplicity of it! I had enough troubles and there lacked only this, as the French say. The more I learned of that girl, the plainer it was that a simple-minded security officer would have to strip off a lot more veils before he even arrived at the ostrich feathers. If Oliver did come to Tripoli and was caught, the only hope I could see for my future was to use her to muddle the court martial.

‘What is your mother going to say?’

‘She believes in the export business.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You can be very convincing when you want to be. Your real interest is in Blaise d’Aulnoy, isn’t it?’

‘Partly. I’ve never asked you where you first met him.’

‘In Paris, in 1938. Mummy took me there for a month.’

‘The best hotel, I suppose?’

‘No. An old-fashioned one in the Faubourg St. Germain.’

She missed the irony. I had forgotten that she was not aware of all I had discovered about her mother. She knew of course how poor they were at the moment, but at that time, four long years past, she probably did not appreciate how relentlessly Biddy was gambling in futures.

‘How old were you then?’

‘Nearly sixteen.’

I cleared off the subject at once and reserved judgment. Biddy never hesitated to exploit her daughter’s amazing loveliness, but she was not as infamous as that. I could imagine her plotting a brilliant marriage a year or so later on d’Aulnoy’s next leave and the connoisseur’s pretended and exulting interest. Seventeen and middle forties? Well, but such an old friend, my dear, with money and no limits to his career.

‘Lunch?’

‘I can’t. I’ve been told to look at sewing machines and come straight back. Can one buy them on credit?’

‘I doubt it. Everything is three times its normal price and for cash.’

‘Thank God for that!’

The next day I ran out to Tel Ayub and down a path to the sea, there deserted and melancholy. Oliver was looking much scruffier with a shortened and untidy beard—more like the edge of the desert come to town than a freshly-laundered money-changer. We sat down between tall rushes and the sand where no one was in sight but fishermen half a mile away hauling in a seine.

I asked him, perhaps impatiently, why the devil Valerie had to pretend to be having an affair with me.

‘An added insurance policy for your safety.’

‘Any opinions on what I am insuring against?’

‘Yes and no. But play your hand as I tell you. Field Security always suffers from militarism and conceit. You used to be very co-operative.’

‘You seem to think you are still an A.D.S.O.’

‘No. I am only trying to help an ex-colleague.’

‘In the intervals of rutting on the hillside like a bloody stag.’

‘Has it never occurred to you that the best agents have a satisfactory sex life?’

He added that he was taking time off from the one-man bank and living rough.

‘All right for money?’

‘Yes. I have been changing forged fivers at a considerable discount. So far as I know, they are circulated by the German consul at Alexandretta.’

‘But that’s a crime! You can’t!’

‘You ordered me to be the dead Youssef Mokaddem again. So I let it be known that I was. As a notorious pro-German I’ve found out plenty, but no connection with Khalid’s attempt on you or the Hermel track. Now, let’s have your report!’

My report! Ex-colleague! Which of us in God’s name was on the run?

I did not mention Moustofi Khan, for Oliver had refused to spy on Biddy and I was now quite confident that I could handle her myself; but I asked him if the name Abdullah el Bessam meant anything to him.

‘Yes, of course. He has connections with the East Indies, and so possibly with Japan. Why?’

‘He is the fat Iraqi who called on the Ronson-Bolbecs.’

‘It could be that I am paying out certain sums of cash for Abdullah el Bessam. I believe I am.’

‘What for?’

‘I have only heard hints. Just possibly arms buying, subversion, rebellion.’

One hears it said so often that the Arabs were all pro-British during the war. They were not. The crowned heads were, for they depended on us to keep their thrones for them; and the mass of the people, like the silent majority anywhere, preferred the status quo to alarums and excursions. But you’ll remember, as I do, the squadron of the Transjordan Frontier Force which refused to march against Rashid Ali and how the whole crack regiment had to be pulled out as untrustworthy. Yes, there were always potential leaders watching and waiting for their chance. One accepted their drive for complete independence, but it seemed odd that there should be so many conspirators who preferred the Germans to the French and British. They had three adequate reasons. Germans had never held authority in the Moslem world; their armies appeared to be the lords of the future; above all, they could be trusted to deal with the Jews.

Oliver thought as I did—let alone Ninth Army—that any general rising was highly improbable so long as we had troops to spare. On the other hand no one could prophesy what might happen if we were defeated in the desert. I told him that it was his obvious duty to return to Damascus at once and confirm or dismiss his vague suspicions.

‘I will. But is it quite clear that I am working for you and nobody else?’

That was obvious, so I let the remark pass without taking a closer look at it.

‘What’s my payment?’ he asked.

‘Freedom from arrest.’

‘Is that all?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Tripoli when I come back.’

A deliberate shake-down with Valerie prompting her hero of the Secret Service! I wasn’t having any. I told him flatly that I was prepared to keep my mouth shut so long as he was useful but that I would not connive at settling him in Tripoli as Youssef Mokaddem or under any other name. He was quite unimpressed.

‘We can easily fix it between us,’ he said.

I returned to my section thankful for their companionship and sanity. The position was getting beyond me—a nightmare in which I was smothered by responsibilities I had no right to take. I was merely the gun dog of I (b), allowed to point at game and then get to hell out of the way of the line. That’s what I longed to do: to write a report and gratefully receive a biscuit and a pat. But a fine pat in the ribs from the end of a boot it was going to be for failing to retrieve Captain Enwin, eating a gendarme and burying the carcase.

The sensible half of me was seriously considering how I could get posted to some theatre of war so remote that high-powered interrogation would not be worth the trouble, while the obstinate remainder, still committed to the investigation though blackmailed by its own secret agent, was talking very much against its will to Corporal Davila.

‘If a Moslem suspect turned up in Tripoli to look for a job, where would he stay?’

He gave me the names of three likely doss-houses and assured me that every one was regularly visited by the police. A dubious stranger would at once be reported to Captain Magnat, and he, Davila, who had excellent contacts in the police, would be informed unofficially.

‘Any loop-hole in that?’

‘Of course if we could fix his papers…’

‘I have no intention of fixing anybody’s papers, Corporal Davila.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I thought by your tone of voice…’

‘Do you all know exactly what I want from my tone of voice?’

‘Well, we’ve been together quite a while and can’t help noticing when you are worried.’

‘I am. This chap should be able to move around on his own business, day or night.’

‘Better be selling something then. Could he pass as an Egyptian?’

‘Easily.’

‘I hear that Alexandrian business men are looking for accommodation. Funk more than summer holidays. Suppose your agent was an enterprising one-man travel bureau?’

Davila! I wonder what he is doing now. Retired and writing his memoirs, I should think. I can’t claim to have trained him. He came to me ready-made.

I told him to look into it at leisure and reminded him, quite unnecessarily, not to gossip with his mates.

My equanimity was restored by a period of quiet, respectable Field Security. Biddy Ronson-Bolbec came down at last for that tête à tête but had no news. I listened to her memories of the late colonel who had obviously kept her in order and been adored in return. That led her to the happy state of matrimony and how sweet Valerie could be when she chose. I could see how it was that Biddy, once established in the valley, had to stay put whether she liked it or not. Her horse was not up to her weight for the return journey, and I had to run her back in the truck to Sir—where she managed to borrow a fiver off me.

The memory of Khalid was fading and I had no real faith in Oliver’s tentative deductions from his money-changing. Even if he raked up something worth passing on, no one would pay any attention to my report when I could not disclose the source of information. I hoped—though rather ashamed of it—that he had found Damascus too hot to hold him and moved on to Turkey or the devil. But no such luck! My uncontrollable Arab agent came smartly to life with a message that I would find him in the ruins of Byblos. He never chose the same rendezvous twice.

He was wandering through the Phoenician city with the proper uncomprehending stare of the Arab for whom history begins with Mohammed. The place was desolate, its ancient quays just visible through that smooth and disillusioned sea. I imagine that today there would be a twisting worm of tourists, blinkered by their dark glasses and listening to an inaccurate guide while a decrepit baggage camel belches in the car park waiting for some fezzed fool to sit on its back and be photographed. For God’s sake, don’t these people slung with cameras have any trustworthy store of memories behind their eyes?

But in those days you would find nobody in Byblos beyond a British soldier or two who had left the immemorial coast road from curiosity, and perhaps a Lebanese giggling in the hope of money over some proud stone phallus aspiring to the unknown. So we two were perfectly in keeping.

Oliver was evasive. He would not give me any direct reply on the activities of Abdullah el Bessam, merely muddling me with a lecture on Exchange Control and transfers of cash. So I changed the subject and asked him, without bringing in Biddy at all, what he knew of a Persian named Moustofi Khan.

‘He has provided magnificent shooting over his mountain estates for the Headquarters staff in Persia,’ Oliver replied ironically. ‘So of course he is considered pro-British.’

‘Isn’t he?’

‘The bazaars don’t think so. I have been told mysteriously that he and I have much in common.’

He explained that Moustofi Khan, being a Persian heretic, could never be widely trusted by Arabs; he would, however, be a natural leader of Persian tribes in any rising; they loathed the Russians, tsarist or communist, and were on the German side.

‘A generous, impulsive fellow, it’s said. Nobody ever starves on Moustofi’s estates. But murder and bribery are all in the day’s work. Why do you want to know?’

‘Because I have identified him as the rider on the Hermel track, and he has been seen in d’Aulnoy’s village.’

‘Then he’s a likely man to have paid Khalid to assassinate you. But don’t jump to conclusions! All I have discovered about Khalid is that he was a Vichy agent in a small way and spying on Magnat. What do you know of the village?’

‘Nothing. It’s tiny. I’ve never been right into it.’

‘So it’s time you were. And as you won’t catch on to what is under your nose, you must take me with you. That’s the next move. I don’t see how d’Aulnoy’s village can be of any interest, but I must rule it out once and for all.’

‘But if you are seen in my presence…’

‘I am going to come with you openly as a hearty naval officer.’

‘Why not as Winston Churchill?’

‘Because I dislike him. I have two other good reasons. Nobody outside the Admiralty ever connects Jolly Jack Tars with security. And they are allowed beards whereas the military are not.’

I protested that this was wild, irresponsible rashness; he replied that it was only impudence which was usually successful. I warned him that Biddy would write to London and Cairo that dear Captain Enwin had called on them and was now in the Navy; he assured me that Valerie would see that she didn’t and that his name would mean nothing to her correspondents anyway, since the Enwin case was sure to be Top Secret.

‘Where are you supposed to have come from?’

‘Beirut. I shall change on the way back to Tripoli. Now, what about your current girl friend? Does she visit the office?’

‘Among Field Security officers my chastity is unique.’

‘Nonsense! Jeremy asked me for a report on your Jewish mistress. By the time I had it you had changed to a Christian Arab.’

‘Evidence of my complete neutrality in the troubles of the Holy Land.’

‘I find it disgusting. What have you got now? For the sake of my safety I must know.’

I told him that it was no business of his. In fact the transaction was quite my most discreet. The hotel laundress was a Druse. Her daughter, she told me, was leading an infidel life among Alaouites. I saw no reason why she should not lead a more godly one with an agnostic, always assuming that she pass inspection and medical examination. She was primitively charming and smelt like a musk-scented pussy-cat. As she could attend the hotel any afternoon, ostensibly to assist her mother, our arrangement was never public knowledge and my shirts were immaculately ironed.

‘Your safety depends entirely on yourself,’ I said. ‘And you must drop any idea of staying in Tripoli after visiting Sir and the village.’

He insisted that he would not be recognised and that even a trained detective could not abstract a face from its conditions.

‘Memory gives you what you ought to have seen, not what you really saw,’ he went on. ‘Say, you have a drink with a bus conductor and a month later some bearded farmer shows you his pigs. You will never spot the two as the same man unless you already have reason to suspect they might be. Voice is the only danger. And the difference between English and Arabic takes care of that.’

Well, there it was. I badly needed his experienced eye in that village, and I had no way of stopping him coming to Tripoli beyond handing him over. So I weakly told him of Davila’s idea. He thought it excellent but decided not to be an Egyptian because an Egyptian travel agent would wear European clothes.

‘I’ll be from Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘which allows me to wear the headcloth and emphasises the difference between a quiet, courteous Arab and the coarse European I am going to be in d’Aulnoy’s village.’

‘And what have you cast me as?’

‘Just be yourself and natural! You don’t understand Arabs, but at least you don’t offend them.’

All very brilliant! But these clever operators are inclined to ignore the small problems on which everything depends. It was the hell of a business to lay my hands on a naval officer’s uniform of the right size. Zappa, Davila and Holloway were all on the job and only produced a Chief Petty Officer’s cap which Holloway said he ‘found’. Eventually I had to run down to Beirut and tell lies to my colleague about amateur theatricals at the hospital. He borrowed for me the winter uniform of a lieutenant. The Navy had already changed into whites, but nobody was going to know that in d’Aulnoy’s valley.

Oliver had worked out the rest very well. I picked him up one morning on the Sir road in a patch of scrub just about large enough for him to change unseen. He emerged from the bushes as a neat, naval lieutenant with a more squarely cut beard than the slightly satanic point which he had worn as Youssef Mokaddem. Both hair and beard were light brown. He used to muck about with dyes and rinses like a teenager on her first factory job.

After leaving the truck in the personal care of the Mukhtar of Sir, we took the two horses and walked them up that stony track and down into the valley, cantering the last two hundred yards out of bravado as befitted two hearty officers coming to see a pretty girl and her mother. Oliver was in high spirits. For one afternoon he could have a sense of freedom, of being back in his world—if, that is, it ever was his world. As for me, I was privately and professionally curious what the female reactions would be. Neither of us could warn them.

Valerie was the first to appear. After staring at Oliver for half a second, she gave him a cousinly little kiss and shouted for Mummy to look who’s here. Without that I don’t think Biddy would have recognised him under hair of unfamiliar colour. She held out both hands and received him as a prodigal slave.

‘But I thought you were in England!’

‘Yes, they posted me home when my job was finished and said I could do what I liked. So I joined the Navy.’

Oliver was always stronger on Levantine customs than those of the armed forces. What he had just said was inconceivable in peace and damned unlikely even in war. I could see that Biddy was puzzled.

‘A specialist appointment,’ I added. ‘He is training naval officers for liaison with Arabs and Turks. Very necessary.’

She gave me a supercilious, humorous glance which I think meant that we disapproved of officers who were schoolmasters instead of handling lethal weapons. But she was satisfied.

‘My ship is only in Beirut for twenty-four hours,’ Oliver said, ‘but I had to see you.’

The first essential was to get Biddy alone for a moment and impress it on her that she was not to ask Oliver to interpret for her and not to indicate in any way that he understood Arabic.

‘Oh, I see!’ she replied coldly.

‘No, you don’t. It has nothing to do with you, Moustofi Khan or d’Aulnoy. I want Oliver to listen to the villagers and find out what they think of the Turks.’

What does it matter what they think up here?’

‘My dear, you have always been part of the Army, so you will understand. You remember that I told you our defence line runs through here. Well, this sector might be held by the Turks.’

It was surprising how that atrocious lie restored her self-respect. I saw for the first time—I was stupid not to have seen it before—that if I appealed to her army background I could have a useful ally, though always unreliable.

I had brought up some bottles with me, and Biddy and I had a carefree party. Oliver pretended naval geniality. Valerie was bubbling with amusement but remembered to pay more attention to me than to Oliver. Ahmed must have been quite satisfied that I was her lover and that my naval friend was as casual and guileless as he appeared.

After lunch Oliver exclaimed at the charm of the Ronson-Bolbec estate and demanded loudly to be shown all over it. So we wandered along the main paths, led by Ahmed, while Oliver pestered him with inane agricultural questions and even asked why the villagers did not keep pigs. When we were near the group of houses he proposed that we should all go and say how-do-you-do to the natives who had been so kind to Madame.

The hamlet was built on rising ground close under the ridge. It was the usual cluster of flat-roofed, stone houses with the ground floors occupied by stores and animals, and the living quarters over. D’Aulnoy had repaired the more tumble-down houses with new stone and built a small community barn. A spring on the hillside was channelled into two stone tanks, one for watering the animals and one for washing. The overflow ran down the earth street along a deep, cobbled drain.

Chairs and a table were laid out for us under a mulberry tree, while the principal citizen, named Yasser, showed us over his house which was at the top of the village and separated from the steep hillside only by a small stockyard. He exclaimed his devotion to Madame and her daughter. As we drank our coffee, conventional conversation went back and forth with the customary bunch of men standing around and acting as chorus.

Lieutenant Enwin R.N. played the hearty seaman to perfection, back-slapping, making jokes about what they all missed by not using alcohol, using the vilest soldiers’ Arabic and managing to insult two of the villagers with the utmost good will. Ahmed translated for him from French to Arabic with a fixed smile and was not, I felt, at all sorry that a European was showing himself such a barbarian. No one could ever connect this square-bearded buffoon with a quiet, Jerusalem Arab. Oliver had proved his point to my satisfaction.

For Biddy’s sake I put a question through Ahmed about the Turks. I could have betted on the reply I would get. By God, the Turks were much better governors than the French! But the people they really liked and hoped would stay for ever were the British. To the same question Magnat would have got a reply the other way round.

When we were back at the house after a tedious couple of hours I felt that the hamlet was too small and too open for any clandestine activities. D’Aulnoy’s tenants were just the same as any other Moslem fellahin: to the foreign eye a people entirely composed of good manners and pious exclamations, incapable of any determination.

We said good-bye and mounted our horses in the late afternoon since we needed daylight for Oliver’s final transformation. On our way down to Sir I asked him if he had got anything at all by listening.

‘Nothing. You are obsessed by your mystery tour. I’ve used that track often enough and I have never seen a soul on it.’

‘You only used it in daylight.’

‘Security is about people,’ he lectured, ‘not warpaths in the bush. Tripoli is the key. It was always a hotbed of sedition.’

‘Wasn’t Yasser loosing off greetings unnecessarily loudly?’

‘Yasser was only shouting at a foreigner to make his language easier to understand. I have noticed that British soldiers do the same.’

After returning the horses we stopped again at the patch of scrub on the Tripoli road. He emerged from the bushes with a red-chequered headcloth, a vile little toothbrush moustache like Hitler’s and stubble in place of the beard: a humble and respectable small trader. I put his naval uniform in the truck and left him by the roadside with a shabby suitcase in his hand to beg a lift into Tripoli or walk.

For most of the next week I was away from my section on escort duty. I had run in a couple of Roumanians who had arrived on the Island of Ruad by caique, presumably from neutral or enemy territory. Immediate orders came through from Ninth Army that I was to release the master of the caique from gaol and escort the Roumanians straight to Cairo. A comfortable staff car was provided.

Those occasional jobs for M.I.6—the genuine, copper-bottomed, British Secret Service—gave us a sense of importance, since we could pass any military control point or frontier post without question whereas they—without a lot of palaver—could not. And I’ll say this for them. They had a pleasant habit of handing out a wad of notes for expenses and never asking for the change. So I enjoyed a civilised night out in Cairo and covered the five hundred miles back to Tripoli in two easy stages.

I dropped into my office in the evening to see that all was well and found a letter on my desk addressed to me in block capitals. Limpsfield told me that it had been handed to him in the street the previous night by some petty Moslem clerk.

‘I’ve got a feeling that he used to be a shopkeeper in Acre,’ Limpsfield said, ‘but it was dark already and I couldn’t be sure.’

Evidently the matter was urgent, for Oliver must have been very reluctant to approach one of my section, however self-confident he was. But he had got away with it. Limpsfield’s memory could go no further than a vague connection with Palestine, though he had seen the A.D.S.O. Nazareth at least twice.

The note was hastily scribbled in pencil on a piece of wrapping paper and enclosed in a re-used envelope with a gummed label.

You will see Tissaphernes in your hotel. Am warning you so that you don’t show recognition.

Just like him to assume that everyone remembered their classics! Who was Tissaphernes? After sweating blood to return myself to the age of fourteen, I vaguely recalled some revoltingly treacherous Persian noble who always went one better than the Greeks. Moustofi Khan, of course.

The warning was invaluable. I flatter myself that I can always act, given time. But Oliver knew as well as I did that if I walked into the dining room and saw Moustofi Khan there some movement of eyes or mouth, easily perceptible by any sensitive oriental who was waiting for it, would give away the fact that I knew him.

I went to my room and cleaned up, turning on lights with morbid curiosity and trying to remember all the tricks I had once been taught for persuading explosives to explode—in which they show more reluctance than most people expect. It then occurred to me that he would hardly choose a hotel for an attempt on my life when there were so many discreeter possibilities. It seemed likely that he merely wanted to inspect me at close quarters or talk to me.

So I entered the dining room more cheerfully, and there was Moustofi Khan sitting three tables away, with only two others occupied. I let my eyes sweep over him without interest and gave him a nod as I sat down—as if I had decided rather late that my manners were too British. He returned a casual smile and continued his meal.

He had that quality which the young describe as charisma and the rest of us, for the last two or three hundred years, have contentedly known as charm. Definitely an individual with his own standards. Steady eyes, but not questioning. A line of civilised irony about the thin lips. He carried an aura of decision about with him so that he appeared taller than he really was. The falcon comparison was good. It seems a big bird till it is on your fist.

If he wanted to make my acquaintance he was doing nothing at all about it. He could afford not to. It must have been his experience that most human beings, unless utterly self-centred or inhibited, felt and showed curiosity about him. When our eyes met for the third or fourth time I spread out my hands in a gesture of welcome and indicated the chair opposite my own. He at once rose and came over. I don’t know enough to say whether his manners were his own or whether all upper-class Persians have the same gift of ease. We might have been dining alone in our club—two members who did not happen to have met before. An Arab would have made an altogether over-courteous, over-exclamatory fuss.

We introduced ourselves and I remarked that I had heard his name mentioned up at Ninth Army. Yes, he said, he had occasionally been of use to the staff on the state of roads and so forth. We found a few acquaintances in common, including Brigadier Paunce. Moustofi Khan was charitable in his judgment.

‘He would die gallantly but so expensively,’ he said. ‘I am sure General Wilson is wise to cage him in an office.’

I asked him where he had learned his faultless English.

‘At Portsmouth. You won’t, I fear, be aware that there is a Persian navy. As a boy I thought I would make my career in it. But it seldom put to sea. So I returned to the life of the idle rich.’

‘Politics don’t interest you?’

‘Not as they are.’

He could not have put it more politely. With half his country occupied by the British and the other half by the Russians, there was not much for a politician to do except obey.

‘The people will forgive us?’

‘Might is right. We are used to it. And often enough the might was ours in the last 2,500 years. But at this point in our history we are not a warlike people, only a proud people.’

He was giving me plenty to think about—more especially that he had taken the trouble to be on good terms with dear Reggie Paunce as an insurance policy against unforeseen complications with the Ronson-Bolbecs.

I asked him if he would join me in a brandy.

‘Not here,’ he replied. ‘In private of course I drink. You must visit my house at Libwe and taste the white wines of Shiraz. Come whenever you wish.’

He explained his presence in Tripoli, casually offering the answers to questions which the security officer had not asked. He told me that he had been in Latakia—to get a special tobacco from his favourite curer—and that his car had broken down on the way back. So there he was in the hotel.

‘Tripoli is a town where I have no friends,’ he said, as if he normally travelled from the house of one wealthy Syrian to another. No doubt he did.

‘I hope you will not feel that in future.’

‘You are most kind. I shall not.’

‘Will your car be ready tomorrow?’

‘Not for several days. One can get no spares.’

All true. I checked the story afterwards. But most civilian cars, leaping from pothole to pothole along surfaces pulverised by the movement of divisions, could easily be persuaded to break down at any convenient time and place.

‘I have to go down to Baalbek tomorrow,’ I said, taking the plunge. ‘If you don’t mind the front seat of a fifteen hundred-weight truck, it would be no trouble to drop you at Libwe.’

He accepted with every appearance of gratitude and told me that I must arrange my business so that I could lunch with him. I went up to bed saying to myself that I had really been and gone and done it now. All the same I had the feel of Moustofi Khan. He was a man who would not hesitate to kill or discredit me if it suited his purpose. Meanwhile he was curious about me as I about him, and possibly had hopes of using me. But the initiative was mine, for I had taken him by surprise without time for any elaborate preparations.

I chose Lance-Corporal Gunn to ride in the back of the truck as escort. He had no languages, but had been a policeman in civil life—at Stratford-on-Avon of all places—and was a sound, reliable fellow who carried the English Midlands about with him along with some wisps of the imagination still floating over the streets of his birthplace. A likely man for Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, I should say; but he may have fetched up running a village store and Post Office. It’s sad that one can never know what happened to them all.

I decided to wear civilian clothes for lunch with Moustofi Khan. My motives were obscure and intuitive. I had a feeling that at some time I might want to be inconspicuous. I had also observed that when we wished to impress a public with our mysterious powers which didn’t exist it was helpful to emphasise the difference between ourselves and the orthodox mass of military. Moustofi Khan would be reminded that the chain of command behind sports jacket and flannel trousers was not quite the same as behind the uniform and the Reggie Paunces.

He did not comment when I picked him up and we drove in easy conversation through Homs and along the Baalbek road to Libwe. Passing the place on previous occasions I had hardly noticed it—just another large Arab village with rather more trees than usual. Moustofi Khan made me look beyond the dusty canyon of houses to the fertile plain, where the streams gathered from Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon on their way to the Orontes. He told me that Zenobia had built an aqueduct to carry the water from Libwe to her desert capital of Palmyra. He always gave me the impression that, for him, Islam was a mere incident in the continuity of the Middle East.

He had managed to corner as many water rights as Zenobia. His gardens were a paradise of cypresses, fruit and roses, which recalled Andalusia. The house itself, of brown brick, appeared too cubical and forbidding—an aspect which vanished as soon as one was inside, for the rooms looked inwards on to two connecting patios, tiled, flowered and fountained. There was a good deal of floor-washing and dusting going on, which bore witness to the fact—confirmed by the surprise of the servants—that master was not expected home that morning. In spite of this, lunch appeared very quickly in less than half an hour.

The variety of small and delicate courses which his silent servants placed in front of me was unending and—with the exception of a single roast snipe—selected to show off that exquisite white wine of Shiraz. It was a pity that I had to concentrate on self-control: first, to keep in mind that I was the guest of a probable enemy agent; second, to be so genial that I could not be suspected of knowing it.

Over the coffee he asked me if I had met the Ronson-Bolbecs. I replied that indeed I had, trying to smirk like a successful lover who wasn’t talking.

‘I went up once to see how they were getting on,’ he said. ‘What a lovely girl she must be to European eyes!’

An attempt at covering himself in case I had heard of his presence in the valley. I could not be dead certain that he had never gone up through Sir.

‘Only to European eyes?’

‘Those fair Madonnas—well, we can see their beauty. But for ourselves we prefer more pronounced features with more brilliant eyes. And of course her breasts are too small and her thighs too thin.’

I spotted it in time. I have never drunk Shiraz since, but it appears to act like twin carburettors in pepping up the intelligence. If a British officer and gentleman were even half in love with Valerie, he would not discuss with strange Persians intimate details of her physique. At least Reggie Paunce wouldn’t. I’m none too sure of myself.

‘Possibly,’ I replied with a coolness straight from provincial drama of the eighteen-nineties, and pointedly changed the subject.

‘Did you know this Blaise d’Aulnoy who let them the valley?’

‘Very well. A man with an outstandingly creative mind—quite wasted on all the detail of administration. That was why he refused to join the Free French.’

I will not pretend that I could analyse that remark at the time; but I did remember that Magnat had accused d’Aulnoy of dreaming of the Empire of Charlemagne. Bored by administration? D’Aulnoy, more likely, had decided that the war was lost and that the only future for a creative Arabist was with Hitler and Pétain.

‘I have never been able to understand where French responsibilities begin and end,’ Moustofi Khan said.

I explained to him that there was no secret about it. The Free French governed Syria and the Lebanon, and the British were an allied army on their territory.

‘Start a riot in Tripoli, and the Deuxième Bureau would deal with it,’ I said. ‘Start putting Mickey Finns in the troops’ beer, and I should.’

A gross simplification, of course. But I wanted to play down the role of our own security organisation—or at any rate my own minor part.

‘Not much excitement in that, I suppose?’

‘No more than for a policeman at home.’

‘What control have you over the gendarmerie?’

As he had introduced the subject, I dared not be too silent.

‘None. That’s a French responsibility, and they must treat the Lebanese officers as equals. We had a very good man in Tripoli—a Lieutenant Khalid. It’s said he has bolted to Turkey or somewhere. I hear he had a case of rape hanging over him.’

Moustofi Khan shrugged his shoulders and insisted that all supposed loyal servants were crooks who hardly bothered to cover up corruption.

‘You and the French are more discreet,’ he added.

‘You are thinking of business majors in Beirut with contracts to hand out?’

‘Everywhere. You must have had offers yourself.’

‘I’m not important enough. Just a policeman, as I told you.’

‘Aren’t they asked to keep their eyes shut occasionally? Not of course on anything vital to the war effort!’

That was interesting. In England I should have taken it as just conversation; but I had now been long enough in the Middle East. The invitation seemed worth following up. I replied cheerfully that at the moment my captain’s pay was quite enough to live on, but if I found myself with another mouth to feed temptation might not be easily resisted.

‘No promotion likely to come your way?’

‘If I spoke Arabic, perhaps.’

‘What do you speak?’

‘Just French.’

And just an impulsive lie! To add the European languages which I did speak would have made me sound a better qualified security officer than I wished him to think.

He changed the subject. I forget how. He became a little patronising, as if an intelligent man such as I should understand the backgrounds and aspirations of the countries into which war had thrown me. He poured out history over me. He was not content, like the rest of us, to accept the past as ending at our feet; he saw the present as a mere point on a straight line stretching from past to future. Darius and Alexander, the Arab Caliphs and the Ottoman Empire—he lectured to me on the lot. It was our business, he said, if we had any dynamic imagination at all, to recreate the unity of the Middle East.

‘And then go?’ I asked.

‘Then be absorbed like the Crusaders.’

He undoubtedly meant me to take all this as after-lunch fantasy with strong, pro-British leanings. So I might have, if I had not suspected that his sympathies were on the other side. What I was getting were Moustofi Khan’s hopes of the Germans—for nobody else had time for dynamic imagination—and if their armies did manage to cross the Nile or the Caucasus his dreams could be near reality. One could not then set any limits to Hitler’s luck, and it was natural enough that an able and ambitious man like Moustofi Khan should see himself as Gauleiter east of the Tigris and look forward to the eventual absorption of the conquerors.

Our complicated duel had faded out. There was nothing else in our conversation worth repeating. I turned down his offer of a quiet siesta, saying that I had to be in Baalbek by five o’clock. So I climbed into my truck with Lance-Corporal Gunn driving, and relaxed thankfully into a lump of brainless digestion, alert, like any other animal, only to the road behind. As soon as I was sure that we were not followed we pulled into a lane where I had half an hour’s sleep. After splashing my face in an irrigation channel I felt as good as new. Another testimonial to Shiraz.

Gunn had enjoyed his lunch as much as I, but with iced Lager. I asked him what were his impressions of our host’s estate and employees, and got a reply which revealed a lot more than the woolly ambitions of Moustofi the Great.

‘Holloway’s famous car, sir. I wanted to have a look at the roses. Used to take care of the gardens of a pair of police cottages,’ he added apologetically. ‘And so the wog gardener chap showed me all round. When we were in the courtyard at the back of the house I saw a grey Peugeot, number 1461.’

‘Did he know that you saw it?’

‘Shouldn’t think so, sir. We were in a sort of potting shed and I spotted it through the window when somebody opened and closed the garage door on the other side of the yard.’

That was the first real evidence proving that Moustofi Khan and Yellow Socks were connected. It could mean that Yellow Socks had been in the house at the same time as myself, or that the car had been stowed away in Moustofi Khan’s garage until a new, safe number could be arranged—possibly difficult without the help of an influential police officer like Khalid.

Now, what would you say marked the Field Security characters in the Middle East? A certain sophistication? The possession of general, cosmopolitan knowledge which worried us into asking questions instead of accepting facts? I was at that time only a reckless liability to my section and my superior officers, but the dutiful worry remained. No cook could have prepared in less than half an hour such a lunch as Moustofi Khan had given me. And why should I have been served one snipe instead of the usual two—a mere mouthful not even justifying a change of wine to red?

Then for whom had the meal really been prepared? Two persons already in the house? There was plenty of room for them behind the succession of doors which rambled round the patios. The many small dishes also suggested that there had not been quite enough solid food to go round.

So I chose to guess that a lunch for two had been cooked for Yellow Socks and some important companion and that Moustofi Khan and I, arriving unexpectedly, had shared it with them. That was why I got a single snipe. My reasoning was hardly worthy of the name—no sort of criminal evidence at all. But when there is no crime it is permissible to play about with a hunch until it is either proved wrong or too damned dangerous to follow up.

I decided to follow up this one, taking reasonable precautions for my health. I told Gunn that before returning through Libwe we would wait where we were long enough to have completed the journey to Baalbek and back. If no one was on our tail after Libwe we would take the road to Hermel. He was to drop me out quickly wherever I directed him to stop, and he should then return to Tripoli and tell the sergeant-major to pick me up next day between eleven and twelve at the same spot.

Just before we arrived at the path which Limpsfield and I had followed I slipped out of the truck into the fairly adequate cover of a low growing fig tree. Gunn went on until he could turn. I had to take the risk that someone might see him going back to the Homs road without me, but the chance of this was slight. I could guess enough of Moustofi Khan’s tactics. He and any other clandestine travellers used the Hermel-Sir track at night, sliding in and out at dawn or dusk when they would pass, if seen at all, as casual riders exercising their horses. It stood to reason that there could be no permanent guard at this end of the track. If there were, it would inevitably be known in Hermel.

I must admit that I doubted the validity of all these wide assumptions when the truck had passed me on its way back and I was left alone by the roadside. There was much more greenery than when we had discovered the track, but a man could be seen a long way off.

That cut both ways. I too could see anyone before he could recognise me, and then vanish into knee-high cover until the coast was clear. So I elected not to wait for dusk and to put my trust in the melancholy emptiness around me. The ruined farmhouse was about a mile away and hidden from the Hermel road by a low ridge. I avoided the path in case I walked slap into some interested stranger where it curved at the foot of the higher ground, and made my way across country to the ridge. On top of it were the remains of a stone wall from which I could look down on the farmhouse without showing more than my head.

Limpsfield and I had of course ridden past the ruin without a thought. Now, in the light of later knowledge, I could appreciate what an admirable assembly point it was for entering or leaving the track; anyone could wait there undisturbed until told that it was safe to move on. The house was by no means so dilapidated as it looked. The roof had fallen in and little was left of the living quarters except a tumble of partition walls, but the lower storey of stables and storehouses was intact, surrounded by four good walls of solid stone with a stout door in the arched entrance.

There was no sign of life, so I walked down and opened the door. The interior, lit only by slit windows high up in the wall, was at first very dark; but when my eyes had grown accustomed I found plenty of signs of recent occupation. The floor of earth and dung turned to dust showed hoof marks. There were fresh horse droppings, fresh hay in a manger and footprints—one set being neat, small and very probably made by Moustofi Khan. A competent policeman could have filled his notebook with a mass of revealing detail, but that was beyond me. I was content to find the signs of traffic and of two heavy cases which had been set down in the dust. I knew they were heavy because it had taken a man at each end to lift them.

It was now dusk and time to leave, for there was nowhere to hide inside that extensive, barn-like substructure. The arches still holding up the floor of the former living quarters offered corners of shadow, but not enough when one could not know where torch or lantern was likely to be. I shut the door behind me and looked for a safe place, not far away, from which to keep watch. On one side of the house was the ridge, which I didn’t like; it was such an obvious post for a sentry who could command the Hermel road in daylight, and in the dark at least spot movement on the path. On the other side was a gentle slope where the cultivated land had gone back to thorn, fig and sage. There I lay down, quite close to the track and some fifty yards from the farmhouse.

As the light faded away, so did the edge of my confidence. All the same, I stuck to my opinion that if Moustofi Khan had guests there was a good chance that they were bound for d’Aulnoy’s valley. If you had asked me why not tomorrow or the day after or any day—more likely since Moustofi Khan was not expected home—I could only have answered that they were waiting for him to come home, so why not tonight? The fact remained that I was on the spot and another night I wouldn’t be, so that even if the odds were four to one against me they were worth accepting.

At any rate I thought so up to midnight. After that I wondered what the hell a respectable Field Security officer was up to, pretending to be Robin Hood and subjecting himself to a foodless night in the open. The emptiness was silent, except for the stars singing, the scufflings of rats or some other small nocturnal beasts and the howl of jackals higher up the track. A deer on the ridge opposite made me jump into life and listen eagerly until I was sure what was cantering. That was proof that I should be woken up by the approach of horses, so I seriously tried to go to sleep. Quite hopeless. Ants crawled up my trousers, and when I did doze off for a moment I woke up with a start deciding that the ants were scorpions. There was nothing for it but to stroll back and forth on the path. I was cold, since I had dressed for the sun of early summer, and I had lost all faith in my impulsive deductions from inadequate knowledge of Persian menus.

About two in the morning I did at last hear horses. I popped back into my hole among the bushes and hugged my patch of sandy soil, now shivering more from excitement than cold. I became more aware of stern reality: that I had put myself in a position where anyone still wanting to get rid of me could manage it for the price of admission and without any awkward consequences. I wished that I had the illusory comfort of my .45, but one cannot carry a heavy army revolver when lunching with a distinguished friend in plain clothes.

Three horses stopped at the farmhouse. I could see no more than moving blocks of darkness, but had the impression that one of the riders was pointing out the advantages of its position. Another of them must have shown curiosity, for the beam of a flashlight picked out the door and all three led their horses into the house.

God knows I don’t look for trouble! I shy away from the embarrassment of being caught eavesdropping, let alone stumbling over fallen rubble with bullets kicking up the dust behind. It did seem futile, however, to continue to lie on my belly scratching at mere ants when a quick dash would take me to one of the slits at the side of the house.

I made no noticeable noise and finished up flat against the wall with the bottom of a lancet close to my ear. Inside the house all three were speaking German. That was my first close contact with the enemy—a feeling not unlike that of a boy when he discovers that all his information about the erogenous zones of the female has proved delightfully correct. In the base areas one began to think after a while that Germans only existed in newspapers.

I could see the light wavering about inside; when it was turned away from me I stood on tiptoe and looked in. I was astonished to see a patrol of the gendarmerie wearing hats and cloaks. But of course! Deserted though the hills were, travellers on the Hermel track must occasionally have been noticed by herdsmen who would take their presence as natural and avoid them from a sense of guilt or nomad shyness if the outline of the riders was that of the gendarmerie. When Limpsfield and I were watching Moustofi Khan it had never occurred to either of us that his horseman’s cloak was a regulation issue, for neither of us had seen the gendarmerie on night patrol and were only familiar with the daytime uniform. Presumably Moustofi Khan had carried the képi in his saddlebag to be put on at need.

The three were moving about inside the house, so I could not hear all they said. Moustofi Khan’s companions were both German. One of them was addressed as Colonel. To judge by his accent and style he was a professional soldier of good family. The other was more cosmopolitan—by which I mean that his German was correct but spoken in a harsh, rather monotonous voice which suggested that he had used other languages as often as his own. Moustofi Khan called him by his nom de guerre: Hadji. That was the name of the agent whom Oliver’s sheikh intended him to meet. I kept on trying to get a glimpse of him, bobbing up and down like a twittering jack-in-the-box. When they lit a lantern and at last I had a clear view, I found that he answered very well to Holloway’s description of Yellow Socks.

It was only disjointed stuff that I overheard. The Colonel asked how safe it was to use the farmhouse but did not say for what. Moustofi Khan answered that he wouldn’t recommend it except in an emergency; fellahin and herdsmen sometimes took shelter there, especially in winter.

‘And this lunch guest of yours knows nothing about it?’ Hadji asked.

‘No. He has only once been in the village. It’s the daughter he is after.’

I could not hear the next question and only scraps of the reply. I think that they were telling Hadji just what I had often said to Oliver: that he was too self-confident. German or British, these chaps tended to be intoxicated by their own cleverness. Grasshoppers were mentioned. Moustofi Khan reminded him that anyone coming up to d’Aulnoy’s valley through Sir drew attention to himself, that Magnat naturally kept a check on visitors and that Ahmed could not always head him off.

‘You are sure the security police were looking for me that night?’ Hadji asked.

‘Unless he thought the girl had a lover,’ Moustofi Khan replied.

Fascinating to get a glimpse of the other side of the hill! That I was after Valerie’s secret lover was correct. That I had any useful report on Yellow Socks was quite wrong.

The Colonel said contemptuously that I sounded to him like typical Gestapo, and started further discussion. From what I could piece together it looked as if Ahmed and Khalid had arranged the attempt on my life and that Moustofi Khan had been away and unable to stop what he considered a bit of unthinking, hysterical Arab violence. Khalid had believed me to be hot on the trail of Yellow Socks. The valley and the Hermel track did not enter into it at all.

The most disagreeable remark I heard was from Hadji:

‘But he was ill for two days after Khalid disappeared.’

Moustofi Khan dismissed that one.

‘Nothing in it. Diarrhoea. I asked at the hotel.’

So my dear little laundress had passed the word round. She had nothing to go on but what I told her and the fact that she had seen me faint on my way back from the lavatory. It was she who hauled me back to bed. Luckily all my bruises were under pyjamas.

They were still discussing Khalid as they tightened their girths and prepared to be on their way. They must have argued out the pros and cons several times before, but I suppose the fact that they had shared their lunch with a security officer started it up again. It was the complete disappearance of the horse which reassured them. The accusation of attempted rape was true. Lieutenant Khalid had spent a packet in bribes to keep it quiet, and even so was in continual danger of blackmail and a blood feud. It was damned folly, the Colonel said, and added a few remarks about women in time of war—typically Teutonic but I fear I agreed with him. I gathered that if Khalid had not already been with the Prophet in Paradise he would go there quickly as soon as this gang caught up with him.

My curiosity had kept me pinned to the slit window until it was too late to cross the path into cover. I was also concentrating intensely to make sense of discontinuous talk and had not noticed that a bright half moon had risen behind me, white-washing the grey stones of the farmhouse. I tiptoed back a few paces and stepped into an enamelled piss-pot which fortunately dissolved into flakes of rust with little noise. But Moustofi Khan heard it, ran round the corner of the house and shot a beam from his torch along the wall and up to the ridge. By that time I was lying down in the shadowed angle at the base of the building behind a thistle which at least broke my outline. If the beam had been a foot lower there would have been another field for ever England around those parts.

They rode away and my world withdrew very thankfully into silence. As there was no more point in staying where I was, I took advantage of the moonlight to return to the fig tree where Gunn had left me by the side of the road. It made an excellent leafy den with dry earth underneath and no ants. There I slept on and off for eight hours, and soon after eleven saw my truck coming up the road with Limpsfield driving, and four chaps and the section tommy-gun in the back. Gunn must have romanticised both our lunch and as much as he knew of my intentions.

Oliver’s presence with me in the village had inhibited my knack of brooding over my surroundings and listening to whatever they had to say. His dictum that security meant people was not half so impressive when one remembered that he had little eye for country. Nothing suspicious? But where could a stranger possibly stay in a tiny village which was frequently visited by Biddy Ronson-Bolbec and might be inspected at any moment by Magnat or me or, say, liaison officers siting a Turkish camp? They would never have dared to leave it entirely to Khalid to give sufficient warning.

The next day I visited Magnat as soon as his office was open and asked him if he knew where d’Aulnoy had got his stone for building and repairs. On the spot, Magnat said. There were outcrops of stone everywhere. Perhaps I had noticed them while motorcycling over the hills in the dark?

I had indeed; but I had not noticed any quarry or any cut surface showing unweathered stone. The quarry could not be out in the wilds; it had to be very near or alongside one of the estate roads, all of which I knew.

I told you, I think, that I had thought Yasser’s greetings unnecessarily loud when he ushered us into his house. Well, his voice was meant to carry and to warn. There had to be accommodation for as many as three strangers; in that wide open, primitive hamlet there was none. The quarry had to be visible; it was not. So where was it? The answer stuck out a mile, with none of my usual conjectures about it. It was covered over, of course, by stout timbers with either one of the tanks on top or a good thickness of earth, and only to be discovered by interrogation of the villagers which would have to be ruthless to overcome their devoted fidelity to d’Aulnoy.

My guess was that d’Aulnoy had disguised his quarry during the two months between the suppression of Rashid Ali’s revolt and the surrender of the Vichy troops. That meant that he had prepared it beforehand as a secret base for pro-German activities or possibly a safe hiding-place for enemy agents on the run. The evidence ought to justify a well-planned raid on the village, and I could keep Oliver Enwin and Khalid right out of my report.

There were still snags, however. I had not actually seen this quarry room, though I was sure of it. And it might be empty and innocent, for I could not give a date when Hadji and the Colonel were certain to be there. It should be possible with Biddy’s aid to bag Moustofi Khan, but if he was alone he was certain to have a first-class story: for example, that he had long suspected the hide-out and that, if it hadn’t been for the clumsiness of Field Security, he would have had a German agent on toast the following week. Then there was Ahmed, Magnat’s blue-eyed boy, who could be trusted to rehearse the villagers in a common story.

I may have been wrong. I (b) might have taken my word and acted like lightning. Jeremy Fanshawe knew very well that I did not see spies under my bed and he would probably have gone ahead on my say-so. But Ninth Army were prejudiced. Was it likely that enemy agents would operate under the eyes of a distinguished army widow with a lot of bloody cousins busy losing the war in Whitehall? And as for her angelic daughter with her thighs apparently frosted together by the ice of memsahibs, wasn’t she just the perfect motive for a half-baked security officer to pretend he was a romantic fellow catching villains on her doorstep? The more I considered d’Aulnoy’s selection of them as wartime tenants, the more I saw how effective his inspiration was.

Yes, the package was not yet firmly tied up, as you or any former security officer must admit. But I had the man to do it: Youssef Mokaddem. He need never mention his old Galilee sheikh and could sum up, all the same, the essential links between Hadji, the Colonel, Moustofi Khan, Abdullah el Bessam and the whole enemy ring. I only knew the ultimate objective: to accept German control of the Middle East, which would be inexperienced enough to give full scope to the ambitions of men like Moustofi Khan.

But what was the good of all that? I was little better than a Baptist preacher who screams that there’s a communist plot every time his local market runs out of onions. The preacher might unexpectedly be right, as I was, but an Intelligence Staff needs detailed proof before demanding a company of infantry for a brutal knock-about turn with Lebanese peasants who had to be kept sweet and docile at any reasonable cost.

There was no easy way of getting hold of Youssef Mokaddem except through Valerie. I have already mentioned his exasperating habit of assuming that his superior knowledge entitled him to give orders. If he did not get in touch with me, I had not the remotest idea where he was or under what name he was pretending to flog funk-holes to Egyptians.

So, after talking to Magnat, I left at once for the Ronson-Bolbecs. I could not waste an hour if there were to be any chance of netting Hitler’s men of business while they were still in the valley. I had to let Biddy fool away time chatting about dear Oliver. She said that she was surprised at the change in his appearance and character since he joined the Navy; that he seemed more certain of himself and that she hoped he would find a nice English girl in Malta. Typical! I doubt if at that time there was any marriage market in Malta. But she still could not get hold of the fact that a desperate war was in progress.

After all that, she left me alone with Valerie, showing signs of the interested mother. I think she so liked the prospect of a son-in-law who could be her father confessor that she tended to forget I was too old for Valerie and unlikely to inherit a deer park.

We strolled to a quiet corner under the apple trees, where the enigmatic little bitch had the impertinence to ask me:

‘Aren’t you going to propose this time?’

‘My interests are strictly dishonourable,’ I said. ‘But as your mother cannot possibly see us and we are in full view of Ahmed’s pantry window I suggest you give me a passionate kiss.’

Her back view while doing so must have been delicious and convincing. On the active front she stuck her tongue out at me and had to take what was coming to her.

‘Now, listen, my girl! Where’s that man of yours?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I do not know. When I last saw him he was about to teach camel-drivers to dance the hornpipe.’

‘But he’s living just behind your men. We can sometimes hear what they think of you,’ she giggled.

There was a disreputable pension in the street behind the billet, separated from our yard by some outbuildings and a wall. We naturally kept a very close eye on the reformed Metuali whore who ran the place, and she reported to us all her visitors and their business in exchange for guaranteed freedom from police blackmail and a small subvention of ration jam and cans of beef. I could not see how the devil Oliver had established himself there.

‘You have—er—called on him?’ I asked, absurdly embarrassed by my own question.

It was the effect of those pure and exquisite eyes in the oval face. Even after all that enthusiasm on the hillside I still had difficulty in visualising Valerie Ronson-Bolbec being tumbled on an old iron bed in a back street of Tripoli. A fair Madonna, Moustofi Khan had called her. But the Madonna didn’t give a damn how much I knew. She was in a daze of being pleased with herself, and that was that.

‘Only twice,’ she answered demurely.

‘And there is supposed to be a back way into the billet?’

‘Yes. That’s why Oliver chose it.’

Marvellous! Whichever of Ahmed’s minor agents kept an eye on her movements—and I could bet there was one—must have thought discipline in a Field Security billet even looser than it was and assumed that I had a camp bed in the office, telling Boutagy and Limpsfield to run away and play whenever my popsy climbed over the wall. Perfectly in keeping with local expectations and for any Levantine police officer all in the day’s work! I don’t know about the Gestapo.

‘Where did you leave your horse?’

‘In Captain Magnat’s yard, while I went shopping.’

Since she was picking up the mail, that was reasonable enough; but two or three hours was a lot of time to spend in the almost empty shops of Tripoli, and Magnat might think so, too.

After saying good-bye to Biddy—kissing her hand regretfully, as much as to say that her daughter and I were still just friends and not satisfactorily good ones—I rode back to Tripoli in a state of suppressed fury and told the Sergeant-Major to send me in Davila just as soon as he crossed the threshold. I then sat down to write my weekly reports to Ninth Army: rumours, Ruad caiques, taxi-drivers, port security, liaison with the French, grain shortages and other stock items.

When Davila returned in the evening, I asked him whether he did or did not have any control whatever over that pestilential, bug-ridden pension behind the billet.

‘Complete, sir. She’s most co-operative.’

‘Then what the hell is a broken down, Palestinian travel agent doing there without my knowledge?’

‘Well, sir, he asked me if there would be any objection to him knocking on her door, and as I knew she had a room free…’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Well, sir, we haven’t seen you for the last week.’

‘And stop saying “well, sir” so bloody often! How did he make himself known to you and where did you meet him?’

‘Hanging around outside Police Headquarters. He knew exactly what orders you had given me and told me to get on with it.’

‘But you don’t speak Arabic and I don’t think he’d like to be heard speaking English.’

‘He started in pidgin French, and we finally got together in Greek.’

Just like Oliver! Making himself even more of a mystery than he was! Anyway it disgusted me that the language of Sophocles and Plato should be the daily chatter of black marketeers from Smyrna to Cairo. I must have snapped something of the sort at Davila because I remember him replying that we carried on our own dirty business in the divine speech of Racine and Flaubert.

That restored my equanimity. We never knew what would come out of our Field Security sergeants. At that early period in the war you might easily find yourself commanding a Fellow of All Souls or a junior partner in Rothschilds.

‘And I am afraid I have some distressing news for you, sir. It is quite certain. Perhaps you would prefer to hear it from the sergeant-major?’

‘If you mean that Miss Ronson-Bolbec has been down to see him, I’m well aware of it and not distressed at all. Does anyone know besides you and Limpsfield?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, keep it that way! And it might be a good idea to leave some sort of ladder under our side of the wall where it could be noticed by the curious. What name is he using?’

‘Youssef Mokaddem.’

‘He is to meet me where we last saw each other at eleven a.m. tomorrow. You can shove that message into Chinese or Choctaw so long as the old girl gives it to him tonight.’

Oliver kept me waiting. When he arrived, he pointed out that buses were unreliable and I should remember it when making appointments. I was in no mood to accept his estimate of his own importance. I told him that he was risking his cover for the sake of a bed to make love on and that it was nonsense to say he was protecting me. Ahmed and Moustofi Khan were already convinced that my only interest in d’Aulnoy’s valley was Valerie. He could be suspected, I said, of choosing that pension just to be in close touch with me.

‘I could be—if there were anything to connect me with the Damascus money-changer. But there is not.’

‘Boutagy may recognise you.’

‘I shall be careful that he never sees me face to face. In any case he will believe anything I choose to tell him.’

It looked as if my secret agent had turned sour on me, so I became as polite as if he were really an Arab living on his nerves and deserving a bit more danger money. I thanked him for his timely note and gave him the whole story of my lunch with Moustofi Khan and the night before last outside the farmhouse.

‘So your Yellow Socks is Hadji!’

‘What do you know of him—beyond what your sheikh said?’

‘He is the link with German Intelligence. Speaks faultless Arabic and English and can pass anywhere. Just look at the lovely, authentic touch of those socks!’

‘How does he get here?’

‘Directly from Turkey, I should think. At one time the enemy ring passed him on through Persia to Mosul. But now you’ve got their chief agents on the run.’

The ‘you’ instead of ‘we’ sounded odd. I supposed that it had become a mental discipline to disassociate himself from the British. One unguarded ‘we’ in the wrong company could have been the end of him.

‘Any line on the Colonel?’

He was silent for a moment, and then burst out impatiently:

‘Don’t you realise what you have found? It’s the headquarters. And your colonel is the military adviser to the command in Syria.’

‘Who’s the commander?’

‘Almost certainly Rashid Ali, waiting in Italy. He would be quite incompetent without a first-class soldier at his side.’

‘And Moustofi Khan?’

‘Commander east of the Tigris—or at any rate in the Persian mountains.’

‘You are sure of all this?’

‘Yes. With what you have added, all my bits and pieces fall into place. Abdullah el Bessam is—what shall we say?—Financial Secretary. Hadji at present is Director of Military Intelligence. But every army is the same. They’ll put in some ignorant soldier as his boss when the fighting starts.’

I asked him how he had managed to penetrate the organisation as far as he had.

‘Because, in your ridiculous military terms, I as Youssef Mokaddem was Deputy Assistant Paymaster in Damascus. I know the names of the small fry and they have talked to me. The chain of command—I knew some of that too, except for the tops. And there’s still one missing: the political chief above Rashid Ali and Moustofi Khan. The Mufti of Jerusalem, perhaps, but it’s a dam’ fool choice.’

‘Can you give me the lot on paper?’

‘I will not. Youssef Mokaddem is now dead for good. I had to help you. I told you I was working for you and no one else. But now it’s finished. Finished!’

I still did not quite understand. I reminded him that I was a plain Field Security officer who could not possibly expose the organisation without expert evidence. I could report the probable presence of two Germans, and that was all.

‘No! I don’t approve of any of you. I have now to send these men to their death. I won’t! I have been alone long enough to know my own mind. I renounce violence absolutely.’

‘Why the hell did you join the Army in the first place?’

‘I made a mistake.’

God, what a mess! But the complexities of Oliver Enwin were at last plain to me. In following Valerie to Cairo he had shown nothing more than the determined persistence of a tomcat. Yes, I know that’s a hard judgment, but let’s leave it to the poets to measure the spiritual content of such devotion. On the outbreak of war what else could he do but make a choice which Valerie and her mother would approve, throwing himself into counter-espionage with all his obstinacy and his unique gift for languages and intrigue?

So far, not very original. But then, after Nazareth, he could no longer accept the obligations of war. I hesitate to call him a pacifist. There is no clear-cut name for the man who refuses to kill his fellow human beings just because he is ordered to do so by his government and is willing to use unlimited violence when ordered by himself.

Take me, for example. What made me join the Army, foaming at the mouth, at the time of Munich? Utter hatred of Hitler who was destroying the peaceful Europe I so loved, and shamelessly exhibiting himself as a man without shame or sense by his treatment of the Jews. And what about all the pacifists of my generation who fought like devils for the Spanish Republic? Oh, I grant you the religious pacifist who will resist nothing, however evil, by force! But Oliver was not one of those. By and large his engine was of conventional design, but he preferred, intellectually, to let it run in neutral.

I did not attempt to explain him to himself. What could I get but angry denials?

‘You believe that these people are justified in plotting to stab us in the back?’ I asked.

‘I have no opinion. They are patriots—as I’m not and you are.’

‘But you would be welcomed back. You’re safe at last. Come down with me today to Cairo or wherever you like!’

‘No! I follow my conscience. It’s not so hard as the first time.’

I told him that I, too, must follow my conscience. If he did nothing with the information he had, he made himself an enemy agent and I should put him under arrest.’

‘And you’ll stand the consequences?’

‘Willingly. I shall explain frankly that I felt sympathy for you, but that now there is no question what my duty is.’

‘You propose to put me on the back of your motor bike?’

As usual he had gone to the heart of the matter. The one place you cannot put an unwilling prisoner is the back of a motor bike. I could only march him down the road with a gun—which he knew I wouldn’t use—stuck against his ribs. This I would have done if there had been the slightest chance of a British or French military vehicle passing along the road to Sir. The alternative was to knock him out and tie him up to a tree while I fetched the truck; but I hadn’t any rope. So there we stood, alone in a patch of scrub, a security officer and a traitor, and the security officer could not think of one damn thing to do about it.

I showed my helplessness by trying again to argue with him. The leaders, I said, were only collaborating with the enemy for their own advantage. What was their long term object?

‘Unity and independence of all Moslem lands.’

‘We have offered it, so far as it’s in our power.’

‘But they no longer believe you can win, or that you would keep your word if you did.’

‘They prefer to believe Hitler?’

‘They are fascinated by him. For the fanatic he is the enemy of the Jews. For the simple he has lots of those oily instruments of death which you all love, and better ones. And what is wrong with Moustofi Khan’s ambition for a federated Islam?’

‘What’s wrong is that they would be worse off under Gauleiter Moustofi with German advisers than under the Arab kings with British advisers. And how about Palestine?’

‘The Jews will be protected as they were under the Turks.’

True or false? It’s what all the pro-Arabs said. Zionism was never one of Oliver’s personal enthusiasms as it was mine—so far as duty to my country permitted.

The difference between us was too great for argument, and it was no good ranting like a recruiting officer. So I started on Valerie, threatening to tell her the truth.

‘She would not believe you. And she wouldn’t care much. Not now.’

His blasted complacence infuriated me. I had no right to shoot to kill, but I realised that I had no longer any objection to seeing him out of action and moaning with pain.

‘If you make a move, Oliver, I shall put a bullet through your hand,’ I said. ‘That will fix you. You can’t earn any sort of living. You will have to go to hospital and there will be a Military Policeman by your bedside.’

Very plausible. He was not sure I wouldn’t. I was not sure myself. The good, old excuse of trying to escape would wash.

I made him take off his coat and clasp hands behind head as I ran over his body. I confiscated all his papers in the name of Youssef Mokaddem together with his wallet. He had a serviceable mixture of money in it: Palestine pounds, Lebanese and Syrian piastres, Iraqi dinars.

‘If you steal that from me, I may have to get money where I can,’ he said. ‘And I prefer to accept no favours from either side.’

I gave it back. Disgraceful weakness. But I believed what he asserted and it seemed to me that he could only be tempted over the edge if he were starving. I wanted him to have time to think—or told myself so. I was obsessed and disarmed by this man who had been a friend and a colleague.

Then I warned him that I was going straight back to clear out his room at the pension and that if I ever saw him again I should arrest him as the deserter, Captain Oliver Enwin.

I roared back to Tripoli trying to understand how and why he had won, and what he had reckoned I would do after such a confession. I came to the conclusion that he didn’t care. My report had thrown him into the same state of chewing his own tail as when he had run from Nazareth. He had to declare himself, to stand up and be counted, and he refused to do so. Meanwhile his streak of cunning and his knowledge of my character had made him reasonably sure that he could again put off decision.

Together with Davila I searched his room. At any rate there was no doubt whose side the old girl who ran the place was on. She had chosen Davila Bey’s protection and she stuck to it. She tip-toed about in her greasy carpet slippers and made sure that none of her pensioners saw us come in or go out.

The bare room held no personal possessions at all beyond soap, razor and tooth-brush in a sponge bag and Oliver’s shabby suit-case containing everything he was not wearing: clean shirt, extra pair of trousers, a gaudy pull-over, a spare head-cloth, a tie and some badly printed business cards of the one-man travel agency. What a life, self-sufficient and dispossessed like that of a wandering dervish! It was no wonder that his dialogue with himself in that pitiable room had ended in renunciation of all except Valerie. Apart from his dealings with me, he had no male companions but traitors and the poor.

We cut the suit-case apart in the hope of finding papers. There was nothing. It was certain that he had a cache somewhere with his money-changer’s clothes and perhaps a file of names and contacts which he could not afford to forget. I thought at first that I had no chance of finding it, for it might be in Damascus or buried at Byblos or Tel Ayub. But of course not! Why go to such trouble when he had a safe deposit with which his close connection was unknown. I was prepared to bet that his few really important possessions were with Valerie.

So off again to Biddy and her dear daughter, cursing d’Aulnoy for not having run a telephone line up to his villa though I would not have dared to use it if he had. You know how one dashes for results to the exclusion of all else when possessed by an imperative—fine for money-making whizz-kids but not for the business of exposing enemy agents or launching your own into the fog. It’s essential to go slowly—so slowly that your hunches will stand up to being expressed on paper, step by step and paragraph by paragraph. Yet I refused to waste a minute. I was reaching a state of excitability which would have justified any distrust felt by I (b). My one-track mind could not even think of a good excuse for the visit—nothing better than telling Biddy that it was about time for another tête à tête in Tripoli.

I caught Valerie dressed for riding and on the point of going down to the pension for a late and energetic siesta. Since her pretext had been a pretended call on me, she was not pleased. She was short with her mother and stamped round the house on unnecessary tasks. I was stuck with Biddy, who told me at great length that I must not pay too much attention to the moods of young girls, implying that it would be all right on the night. Then I was cornered by Ahmed who wanted me to back up the application of some relative of his for work in an army camp. All hollow as hell. He was just indulging in the fruitless Arab habit of interminable talk in order to weigh the other person up. Among themselves it may work. I don’t know.

I had to capture Valerie on the run before I could get a word in to tell her that I had a disappointment for her. Oliver had been suddenly called away for an indefinite period and had asked me to break it gently to her and to collect a bag or parcel or something.

‘I’ll fetch it,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I should have guessed you came with a message from him.’

The girl deserved so much more from life than she seemed likely to get. She could still be courteous when hit hard. That surprised me as much as the sense of humour which I had only recently discovered in her. I accused myself of being merciless to my pair of lovers—though God knows they were lucky to be in the power of an amoral nihilist always according to Jeremy, finding excuses.

She returned in ten minutes with a bag—one of those old-fashioned things with the handle at the top. I had the impression that she had been crying, but could not be sure. She must have had a lot of practice in concealing tears.

‘When did Oliver give it to you?’

‘When he decided to stay in Tripoli. He gave me the ticket and asked me to pick up a bag from the consigne at the station.’

Back at the office I broke open the lock of the bag. There was not much in it: his Syrian clothes, a photograph of Valerie taken long ago in Aldershot, a Damascus telephone directory and what looked like sheets of accounts in Arabic. I called in Boutagy, hoping that at last I had some documentary evidence. He disappointed me at once. The sheets ruled in red and blue were not accounts at all, he said; they were poetry, written in an ultra-decorative script with which he had some trouble. He could not place the writer or his date, but told me it was good stuff. Some phrases of his stolid and halting translation sounded vaguely familiar, and I felt pretty certain that they contained a code to be read in conjunction with the telephone book.

This directory, in Arabic and French, was more interesting—filthy, covered with smudges and dirty finger marks, and looking as if it had been pinched from a telephone box in a slum. I came to the conclusion that some of the smudges could be deliberate, knowing Oliver’s methods, and were some kind of reminder. If so, not even a practised code-breaker could make much of the markings. The whole object of a code is to communicate with somebody else, whereas Oliver was communicating with himself.

Still frustrated. Shouldn’t I have taken the whole story up to I (b) as it was? Well, it was far from coherent, and I could no longer leave out of it Khalid and my failure to hand over Oliver Enwin. So to compensate for my crimes it had to be twice as convincing as any other report. Khalid, you say, could be explained. Oh, could he? In a country at peace I know no one licensed to kill except surgeons.

With all the proper channels closed to me, my next move was foolish, angry, impatient and against all security rules. Suspects must not be scared until one is ready to pounce. But I couldn’t pounce, so when I had an opportunity to scare—just for a few hours—I decided to take it and see what would happen.

This situation developed from plain bread-and-butter military security. Some ten days later a tall, Indian Army captain rode into our yard, looked round for somebody to hold his seventeen-hand charger and handed it over to Zappa who was plain terrified. I doubt if he had ever been nearer to a horse than the paddock rails.

Captain Johns, commanding the 64th Indian Mule Company, strode jingling into my office, saluted it and sat down. In spite of Biddy’s opinion that I would have been a credit to any smart mess in India, I am sure that no one would even have passed me the marmalade after a month. But I must admit their officers were often very fierce and gallant to look at.

‘About that chap of yours, Holloway, who borrowed a mule off my company,’ he began.

‘I hope you got it back.’

‘Yes, in splendid condition. He has made friends with my Havildars—always in and out of their mess talking the most bloody awful Urdu I ever heard. I just wanted to say that you needn’t bother.’

‘Bother about what?’

‘Loyalty and all that. It’s your job, isn’t it? So I thought I’d tell you that if any of these Free India agitators turned up in the camp, my men would let me know at once and I should be down here the same morning.’

I said that I was sure of it and that Holloway was not hanging round his camp on my orders. He was homesick for India.

‘I’ve never seen an Englishman handle a tulwar as he can,’ Johns said.

The tulwar was a short, broad-bladed sabre. His sergeants carried the weapon more as a badge of rank, I think, than for carving up the enemy or clearing paths. You could call it a machete and not be far wrong.

‘He split a willow wand from a galloping mule, and then he dam’ near did it again on a motorcycle.’

‘We have a lot of strange skills,’ I replied, putting out a bit of propaganda for Field Security.

I gave the captain a drink and said how gratified I was that he knew all about our functions and was ready to bring along any security problem even if it was only Lance-Corporal Holloway. He told me about his pleasant camp under the pines near Zghorta, but complained of the lack of good training country. The paths and roads were too easy, he said. On the other hand if the company marched out into the blue, it fetched up in cultivated fields or against a cliff.

I got out the map with certainty that I was going to start some excitement and a juvenile delinquent’s indifference as to what it might be.

‘Follow along the foothills to Sir,’ I advised him, ‘and take the only mountain track there is. You can’t miss it. It leads you up to a dead end in a remote little valley with plenty of water. Camp for the night, and then back.’

‘It sounds just what the doctor ordered,’ he said. ‘Had I better let the Frogs or the Gendarmes know?’

‘I’ll do that for you, if you’ll send someone down to tell me what time your company will reach Sir. By the way, an English colonel’s widow and her daughter live in the big house. If you have some gin and your cook can turn out an edible meal, I think they’d love an invitation to the mess.’

‘My cook was my father’s,’ he said, ‘and there’s buckets of gin. Why don’t you join us up there?’

I promised to do so if I could, but my plans were far from social. If the unexpected arrival of troops flushed any game out of that village, it should break uphill and Limpsfield and I would be there to receive it.

The prospect of female society at the end of the march always sends horse and foot plunging urgently into cans of saddle soap and leather polish. Only two days later Johns sent down a magnificent, bearded Punjabi to tell me they would start next morning and be coming down into my valley about sunset.

I had a long talk with Limpsfield and put him in the picture—all of it except Enwin and Khalid. I proposed that when the line of mules coming up from Sir appeared on the skyline above d’Aulnoy’s house we should be in position on the other side of the valley, looking down on the village from the rubbish dump. It was difficult, however, to get there secretly. We could not go up through Sir, nor could we take the track from Hermel in case it was guarded. The only possibility was to reach the high ground by way of that maze of paths and small holdings through which Limpsfield and I had ridden down.

‘We’ll get the truck to take us as far as the little café,’ I said, ‘and pretend to be out for a day’s quail shooting. You carry my twelve-bore and I’ll carry the gun case with our tommy gun in it. We walk uphill till we’re on the top and then wander back and forth until the houses below look much as we remember them. It may take us an hour or more to spot the track, but it shouldn’t be impossible. Anything wrong with that?’

‘Yes, sir. Quail are out of season.’

‘Make it venison for the mess, then! There must be deer because I heard one. And I suggest we take Holloway with us—following respectfully behind with the cartridges and a game bag.’

‘He has his faults. But a good man in a scrap.’

‘I doubt if there will be one, but I want Hadji and the Colonel alive or dead.’

‘Very good, sir. I’ll take the hand-cuffs.’

I had forgotten that we had any—a left-over from days when Field Security was considered a branch of the Military Police.

It was a glorious summer day and we passed briskly through the fields, exchanging salutations in soldier’s Arabic with everyone we met—in fact overdoing cordiality for we had trouble in declining offers of gun-bearers and dogs. There was nothing for it but to stop for a coffee with the French-speaking café proprietor and explain to him the principles of deer-stalking. He was dead certain that we would not find any for miles, but saw the point about dogs and camp-followers.

As soon as we were over the crest we started to cast right and left, seldom agreeing on the exact view which had met our eyes when the terraces, the stone walls and the coastal plain first came into sight; but sticking to our rule of ignoring the growth of scrub and exploring any line where there were no boulders we eventually found the track. It was much easier to follow on foot than on motorcycles and nearly as fast.

We had fourteen miles to cover, carrying some food and our rolled greatcoats for the night—a mere stroll for infantry but harder for sweating security men out of condition who never walked if they could help it. An hour before sunset we cautiously approached the clearing above the village. I posted Holloway and Limpsfield in the scrub on each side of it, and myself crawled forward until I could command the group of houses and the path.

The scene below me was innocent enough: men beginning to drift in from the fields, smoke eddying up, women taking down their washing as the red sun lost heat in the off-shore clouds. There was some coming and going between the water and the mulberry under which we had sat, but I could not distinguish individuals.

The site of the former quarry was obvious when one looked down on it. It was under that flat yard adjoining Yasser’s house, right up against the hillside, where a few cows and donkeys stood on the trampled earth. A nice touch was an olive tree in the centre which must have been planted in a trough or perhaps a hollow shaft which also served to support the beams. The construction of a strong, weight-bearing platform was a familiar technique for the fellahin. It was common enough to see a donkey, two fat grandmothers, furniture and a rich growth of grass on the flat roof of an Arab house.

At that height I heard the mule company a minute or two before the villagers. Then the file snaked over the opposite ridge still unnoticed. The khaki puggarees, the brown faces, the mountain-coloured mules under their packs looked like a narrow mud-slide as they started down to the valley. A very professional unit. There was not so much as a bright buckle to shine in the last of the sun.

The village erupted like an ant-heap carrying off eggs into darkness. In a moment everyone was indoors except for a small knot of men, the soldier ants, agitatedly discussing what in the world had arrived and with what intentions. On the drive in front of the Ronson-Bolbec’s house three blocks of colour appeared—a bulky lump of blue as Biddy ran out to see what the excitement was, a slender streak of white for Valerie and red and black for Ahmed.

The company right-wheeled away from the house, and fell out on both sides of the estate road. Captain Johns, followed by a mounted orderly with a pennon, trotted up to the house, evidently to ask if there were any objection to his company bivouacking where it was. He then returned to his men and mules, all dissolving in the last of the dusk to dark lines, spotted by faint lights and a good red glow from the field kitchen.

And still the village was silent, and still nobody bolted up the path into our arms. A cavalry trumpet call, which I did not recognise, sent its forlorn, silver wail ricochetting round the bowl of the valley. Good old Khyber Pass stuff, right down to Captain Johns’ sabre. But real enough. I hear that in Italy the forward troops would often have run out of ammunition without the mule companies.

It looked as if I had drawn a blank. Either the village held no strangers at the moment, or Yasser was confident that the troops would not discover anything out of the ordinary, at any rate before morning. We three cheered ourselves up with a bottle of Lebanese araq which I had brought—made from the grape not the palm and as good rough alcohol as one can expect—and set about a picnic prepared by my hotel. I never believed in army rations on occasions when my men were in any sense my guests.

I kept watch all night sitting right on the edge of the path, for it was too dark to see any distance. I told Holloway and Limpsfield to turn in. I could not allow either of them to take the responsibility of firing on a fugitive. I did not at all like it myself. The consequence of bumping off Moustofi Khan without any watertight evidence against him did not bear thinking of. I very much wished that I was down at Captain Johns’ mess tent—or whatever hole in the ground was serving that purpose—boozing his gin with Biddy and Valerie.

Dawn simply confirmed the impression of absolute innocence. All the men of the village had strolled over to talk to the Punjabis and watch the fun. So we breakfasted on bully beef and water and marched back over those weary fourteen miles. I could not explain to Holloway what we had been up to, but I did let him know for the sake of morale—of which he had twice as much as the rest of us anyway—that he had started it all off with his Yellow Socks.

There was, however, one consequence of our fruitless expedition which was out of pattern. Not a word did I hear from Magnat. I expected that Ahmed would have gone running down to him to ask why the valley was under suspicion again and what a company of ferocious Indians was doing there. If that in fact had happened, I was going to tell Magnat that Johns had very properly asked me to give him notice of the route march, but that it was carried out before I had an opportunity.

Yet nothing whatever was mentioned. That was a puzzler. The sudden arrival of the mule company was news, even if Ahmed had satisfied himself next day that the troops had never had any intention of throwing a cordon round the village. Men coming into Tripoli from Sir must have talked about it, but not as an event of special interest. It looked as if Ahmed must have played down the incident, passing the word round to those who had a guilty conscience that they were not to show any sign of it.

Johns came in to thank me, saying that they had all enjoyed the operation but that the track up from Sir was far too easy for them. He had the same opinion of the Ronson-Bolbecs as everyone else. Ma had talked about India and asked more indiscreet questions, he said, than twenty German spies at the top of their form. Valerie he described as too well brought up, with no life in her. He told me about his wife. The only effect which the delectable Valerie had on him was to bring up memories of his own love. He had not seen her for two years. I suppose he had to wait another four, since his company would have been sent to Burma, not England and Normandy. Even the Crusaders could have their ladies shipped out as soon as the castle hall was habitable.

But private loneliness is irrelevant. I’m talking of my own problem. And that was military loneliness. Isolation from all those proper channels which I used to swear by and from all those pleasant colleagues ready to take responsibility off one’s shoulders was becoming intolerable. It was that blazing idiot, Oliver Enwin, who had kept me going for the last months. Now that I was alone, I saw more clearly that I could not run a private war and that I was ignoring my principle that discipline meant freedom. A sense of duty which overruled discipline was as irresponsible as Oliver’s sense of honour. And how far was it a sense of duty, not private panic at the consequences of carrying on to the point of no return?

That tête-à-tête with Biddy Ronson-Bolbec was the next unavoidable task on the programme. I met her at Sir and took her down to the El Mina bar. She appreciated the cooking even more than her daughter, but there was no gaiety. Loneliness again. Valerie had hardly been on speaking terms with her since the mule company marched away. She did not know why—perhaps because the jolly military environment had made Valerie feel cut off from her world. But there it was. The girl should be thankful that they could relax and eat. I was so wise and Valerie trusted me. Wouldn’t I spend a whole day with them and find out what the matter was?

I had to go. Another day away from the office for no obvious purpose. My absences were becoming too frequent, and I was never at the other end of the telephone when required. I (b) approved of Field Security officers who got out and about instead of sitting in an office and creating paper. But, they had implied, there were limits.

On my arrival Ahmed was cordial as usual. He knew that I was responsible for the appearance of the mule company, since Biddy had passed on to him what Johns said to her when he first rode up to the house; so I made no secret of it and told Ahmed that the company had found the track from Sir too easy for them. Did he know of another? He could not resist suggesting the path up from Ehden, to which I replied that I did not know it and would send Captain Johns to have a look. Honours even.

Valerie was nowhere, but turned up for a drink before lunch. Her appearance shocked me. She was drawn, pale and big-eyed—looking in fact much like the dolly ideal of today. I asked her what she thought of Captain Johns. She replied that at least he was a nice, normal Englishman.

The ‘at least’ made me wonder whether I myself was in the dog-house for some unknown reason, and not her mother at all. But Biddy jumped in. She said it was a pity Johns commanded nothing better than a native mule company. Considering that his family had served in India for two generations, one would have expected a crack regiment, would one not?

‘I hate that snobbish attitude!’ Valerie exclaimed.

‘The best people are always looked after.’

‘The best people stink!’

‘But so easy to talk to, Val. One doesn’t have to make an effort.’

‘Did you have to make any effort with Johns? You were tucking into his gin all right.’

‘One had to accept hospitality graciously.’

‘One has to accept nothing. One has to try to give.’

‘I gave quite enough in Cairo, and for you.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Spending every cent we had just to show off!’

The conversation continued on these lines for some minutes more while I confined myself to making soothing noises. Clearly Valerie was flaming angry with her mother, not with me at all. Both of them seemed to be following that frequent pattern of a row between two women in which the true cause of battle is never mentioned, any old ammunition being dredged up from the mud of ancient resentments and fired off to poison rather than kill.

Lunch was even worse to endure. I kept throwing scraps of talk into the silence which Biddy did her pitiful best to pick up. She retired afterwards on the plea of a headache, probably genuine. Valerie, regardless of manners, also tried to escape, but I would not let her. I reminded her that we were supposed to be in love. She answered that she was sick to death of that nonsense.

‘Suppose my life depended on it being believed?’

‘Oliver never mentioned…’

‘Of course he didn’t! The arrangement in Tripoli was very convenient for you both. But think! Why should I have been so obliging?’

She accepted that. After all, Oliver’s various movements and identities had made it plain that he was the very flower of the British Secret Service.

‘Who has it got to be believed by?’

‘I’m not going to tell you that. You would never give it away deliberately, but you might be up against very clever men.’

‘How much is my mother in with them?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Don’t be too sure!’

Another scrap of poison or did she know something which I did not? It seemed best for the moment to give my frank opinion.

‘I am as sure as I can be of anything. Biddy is indiscreet and a menace. But she would willingly die for her country—especially if there were a few generals looking on.’

‘Beast!’

‘O.K., I am! But that shows you don’t really doubt her.’

‘There’s always money. She might not enquire too closely where it came from.’

‘I’m here to look after that. Is it anything to do with sewing machines which is bothering you?’

‘Sewing machines? No! I just thought she was going to buy some on credit and never pay.’

‘Well then, what?’

‘It’s such a private thing between me and her. But after what you just told me about Oliver being in danger…’

I had said that it was I who was in danger. But the slip was very forgivable.

‘I hated her for taking this place,’ she went on. ‘She had no right to. But you ought to know. Blaise d’Aulnoy was here.’

‘When?’

‘When we came back from eating curry with Johns.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw him. He was dressed as an Arab, but I never forget his face. Mummy and I went up to bed, and then I went out again. I have a way—the cedar branch close to my window. If I jump I can catch a branch. It only swings—quite silently.’

Demanding suicidal courage the first time, I should have thought. But, as I said before, how does your cat get out?

‘You were meeting Oliver?’

‘No, only thinking about him. I like to have him alone to myself, outside. He doesn’t belong in here. And I was standing under the tree when I saw Ahmed letting in Blaise d’Aulnoy by the back door. The light was full on his face when Ahmed opened the door. How long has this been going on? I can’t bear it. How long has she…?’

‘Never till that night,’ I interrupted quite confidently. ‘Anyone else with them?’

‘No. Just d’Aulnoy and that Ahmed.’

‘Your mother hadn’t the least idea that he was in the valley.’

‘She must have done. She’s often over in the village.’

‘He was very carefully hidden. Ahmed brought him over here because he was afraid the mule company was going to take the village apart. D’Aulnoy risks being shot if I can lay my hands on him.’

‘He deserves it!’

‘Paris?’

‘Did Oliver tell you?’

‘No. He has never talked about you.’

‘Then how do you know what happened?’

‘I don’t know what happened. But little bits of information—one learns in my trade to put them together. Like a fortune teller. All is guesswork, and it can stay at that.’

But she wouldn’t let it stay at that. After all, she trusted me as an older man, a close friend of Oliver and—more than she dreamed, God knows!—guardian angel to them both.

‘He was like an uncle. I can’t explain. It was natural for him to kiss me and put me to bed. I was so very young for my age. Oh, you won’t understand. He was so gentle and it was all a joke and like being tickled. And then I was horrified. It was revolting. All your male bodies—they made me sick ever afterwards till Oliver.’

‘How far was Biddy in this?’

‘Well, she left us alone long enough. And if she didn’t know what he was, she should have done. I never told her. I couldn’t.’

A very ladylike description. I found it hard to put myself in her place. It might have been easier if I had been a pretty adolescent instead of a spotty little horror. She must have been as naïve a fifteen as she claimed, but also, I should say, a rather over-sensuous and mischievous little girl. However, what’s wrong with those merry qualities? One hardly expects a charming and favourite uncle to be thoroughly, quietly practised in seducing the too innocent whatever their nationality or upbringing.

The essentials now were that d’Aulnoy should never know he had been seen and that his presence should be kept secret from Biddy. Quite apart from her inability to keep her mouth shut, it would take time to make her understand that a dear friend of her husband was working for the enemy. So I told Valerie that she had to be under orders, as my agent and Oliver’s. Would she accept that position?

‘Of course. What do you want me to do?’

The calm oval of her face became more animated than I had ever seen it. In her monotonous life I think it meant a lot to her to be urgently needed by the outside world.

‘Don’t say a word to your mother! Think up some convincing reason why you should have been angry with her since that night! Does she really believe I am a possible husband for you?’

‘She wouldn’t mind. Just because she likes you.’

‘What did she say to Johns about me?’

‘Most attractive man. So unaffected. Such a devoted friend. Any woman would be lucky to get you. Blah, blah!’

‘Could you have thought that she was after me herself?’

‘She’s ten years older than you!’

‘What’s that among friends? A damned sight more peaceful than being married to a little squit like you!’

‘You are very rude. Remember I’m in love with you!’

‘But would she wear it?’

‘She might. After all it’s pretty flattering that I should think she might grab you from me.’

‘Well then, first order: go upstairs and throw your arms round Mummy and say you’re a silly little girl!’

‘Sometimes you make me sick.’

‘Do it out of the window and mind the cedar! Second order: give me the best description you can of Blaise d’Aulnoy!’

‘Grey hair, thin but very carefully groomed. Your height or a little shorter. Good figure. You’d put him at about thirty if you saw him from the back. Narrow nose. Brown eyes. Full mouth with a sort of dirty, smooth smile at the corners. Very distinguished and courteous. All these people here loved him. You might.’

In time of peace, perhaps. But then I might have liked Goering if I had ever met him.

‘When is Oliver coming back?’ she begged me. ‘Tell me the truth!’

‘I can’t because I don’t know where he is. It might be a day or two. It might be months.’

I felt such pity for the girl. Both sexes had to bear absence, uncertainty, misery; but at the end there would be reunion if death didn’t get there first. For her, as I saw it, there was going to be neither. A chat under the eyes of a warder, trying hard not to waste precious time in reproaches. That was all.

I went up to say good-bye to Biddy and played the hearty. I said that Valerie—ha! ha!—had made a very natural mistake. She would explain. I’d fixed everything. Then I bolted for the faithful motor bike and home. I was far too cowardly to tackle such a delicate question myself. I knew very well that Biddy would drop a well-spaced tear or two on my shoulder. Besides that, she was in bed—always an incalculable situation in which to hand out comfort.

The presence of d’Aulnoy made my case very nearly complete. I could never be sure that he was in the valley at any given time, but simultaneous raids on the village and on Libwe should produce a bag of some sort. Yet still I could not ask for Moustofi Khan to be arrested just because he was leading a movement for the unity and independence of the Middle East. The only person who had all the details was Oliver. I felt it might be worth while to let him know that d’Aulnoy had been in his own house, though I had learned the hard way never to bet on Oliver’s reactions.

An impossible job, you’ll say, to find one individual Arab, now nameless, in the entire Middle East. Well, that’s what I thought too, and I wasted far too much time fluttering over the telephone and shooting off motor bikes on improbable trips. But at last common sense took over and reminded me that I knew so much about him that I could eliminate most of the gorgeous orient and set down my flying carpet in one or two very likely landing grounds. I took it as axiomatic that he was telling the truth when he said that he was bowing out and would have nothing more to do with either side.

I could exclude, therefore, a lengthy stay in the tents of his Galilee sheikh. Anywhere else in Palestine? Far too great a risk of being recognised as Captain Enwin. He had not had time to grow a convincing beard and if he tried to buy a false one he would at once be reported as a suspicious character.

An agricultural labourer anywhere? Well, he could be that and be lost for ever after bribing the headman of some village to supply him with identity papers. But that wasn’t Oliver. He would not be at home in the part. He was a creature of the towns and the back streets.

Aleppo or Damascus? Too big a risk of being recognised as Youssef Mokaddem and drawn in again. Not Baghdad or anywhere in Iraq. Too far from Valerie. Certainly not Tripoli. That left only Beirut—a sensitive spot where the Sûreté Générale, the Deuxième Bureau and I (b) in its various manifestations were always on the look-out for strangers without papers. So he would never choose it unless he could find a hole in the very efficient security of two nations. To live and to work he had to have an identity, and he couldn’t without stealing an official card and forging stamps. I could hear him describe such drastic action as clumsy.

I thought back over all his recent history and remembered the Franciscan gown. It had not been in his office or flat; so it was quite likely to be in whatever cache he had hidden it after he finally shook off the dust of Nazareth as Youssef Mokaddem. Would he have had an identity card in the pocket—if Franciscans had pockets? But of course he would. Suppose he had been held by police while they made enquiries at his real or fictitious monastery?

I have made it all sound easier than it was—though naturally I needed a bottle to aid imagination, half the night and a lot of paper on which to list possibilities and cross them off. As I have said, I knew his past and his insolent self-confidence so well that no Sherlock Holmes deductions in a void were necessary.

My opposite number in Beirut was one of the best of us, on the easiest terms with his section and sharing my principle of never running to superior officers on any delicate matter which we could fix ourselves. I called him up to ask if he had any report of an unobtrusive Franciscan strolling round Beirut.

‘No. But there’s a chap in Tyre, if that’s any good,’ he said. ‘In view of all the troop movements on the road, my detachment there gave him a good going over.’

‘What’s he doing in Tyre?’

‘Trying to get at the true site of the conversion of St. Paul by tracing his route from Jerusalem. His community have an idée fixe that Paul went up to Damascus by the coast road. It seems to me a long way round when he could have gone by Quneitra and Deraa. But the Brother thinks he would have called on the Jewish colonies at the ports; he says they used to provide capital for the dyeing industry.’

‘It sounds as if you had been talking to him.’

‘I have. I thought I’d check up on him myself. Very interesting chap, but I wish he’d shave more often.’

‘Papers in order?’

‘Yes. Name: Brother Aloysius. Nationality: Irish. Documents: a high-class bit of bumf all over crosses, issued by his Father Superior and countersigned by the A.D.S.O. Nazareth.’

‘That’s the man. I’d like to talk to him, too.’

‘I thought your present interests were amateur dramatics.’

‘No longer. Ninth Army want to know how Tyre held out for thirteen years against Nebuchadnezzar.’

‘Try tomorrow about midday. My sergeant will line him up for you.’

‘Tell him not to mention to Brother Aloysius that he is expecting anyone.’

‘O.K. But for God’s sake don’t involve me with the Catholic Church! The Greek Orthodox is howling for my blood already.’

No reasons demanded. No lies told. What a good club ours was in those prehistoric times!

Next day I took the truck and drove down to Tyre. Passing slowly through the little town I couldn’t see any Franciscan; so I went on another three miles, and there they were—a Field Security sergeant and a monk examining the Phoenician cisterns at Ras el Ain. Cleverly done. No doubt the sergeant had found him thereabouts and stayed with him rather than invent some stale excuse for taking him back to Tyre.

I jumped out of the truck, hailed him as Brother Aloysius and asked how the Father Superior was. For the first time I saw Oliver completely off balance. He was pale and I could see his legs trembling under his gown.

He climbed into the front seat without a word, having signed a blessing to the sergeant. I don’t know enough about the ordination of Franciscans to say if he had the right to do so, but it was an impressive gesture. As one courtesy deserves another, the sergeant saluted us both—separately.

‘Underrating Field Security again, Oliver,’ I said.

‘Stop playing the fool and tell me what you’re going to do to me!’

‘I’m going to give you some lunch, and you can enjoy it in peace. I’m not arresting you and I’m not proposing any bargain. Word of Honour, your standard.’

I drove him down to the old Turkish khan, where the inn buildings lined the coast road on one side, and a shaded terrace on the other. Between the two was a high wooden arch under which half the troops in the Middle East must have passed in their time but, being in convoy, could not stop. There was never anyone on the terrace except Lebanese, or occasional military travelling at their own speed who had called in for a beer and a sandwich at so inviting a spot.

We chose some fresh fish and pigeons from the refrigerator, and as soon as he had put down a small tumbler of wine and recovered his poise I opened up. Nothing was to be gained by keeping him waiting.

‘I understand Valerie told you all about Blaise d’Aulnoy,’ I said.

‘How the hell do you know?’

‘A rumour confirmed at first hand and now by a reliable secondary source. Blaise d’Aulnoy is or was in the quarry room and has called at the house.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Lower your voice, Oliver!’

A corporal of the Welch Fusiliers, thirty feet away, was shocked. He probably had a poor opinion of papists, but did expect a decent piety.

‘I’ll wring that bugger’s neck if I can lay my hands on him. Why haven’t you run him in?’

‘Magnat’s business, I think.’

‘It’s yours! Sitting up there, fiddling with hotel control and polishing your motorcycles! I can’t eat. Take it away!’

I ate his fish as well as my own lest the inn-keeper and his herb-scented grill be slighted. Meanwhile Oliver was crumbling his bread and unconsciously refilling his glass. I reckoned that by the time the pigeons came up he would be eating them without noticing it.

‘Your accounts might be a help.’

‘What accounts?’

‘In the bag which Valerie collected.’

‘Oh, God!’ he exclaimed impatiently. ‘Those were my translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into kasidahs. I hadn’t any other paper. Why can’t any of you people read the language of the country?’

‘Well, the telephone directory, then.’

‘Names and amounts, yes. To get the name you need three consecutive letters on a marked page. You then go over to an adjoining page and read up it till you spot the three or four figures which give the sum. Clever of you to spot that some of the smudges are artificial! But it’s difficult even for me to remember what they mean.’

‘Can you reproduce the list?’

‘I thought they were all as mad as bloody hatters,’ he said, ignoring my question.

I pointed out that Moustofi Khan was not a man to take action without cool calculation of his chances. He could not yet bank on a Russian collapse; so the enemy must have promised closer support.

‘Of course they have! Rashid Ali’s revolt in Iraq was sparked off too soon. The position is far more favourable now. So far as I know, the game is to land at Tripoli and Latakia with air cover from Crete and the Dodecanese, capture Aleppo and strike the three hundred and fifty miles straight across the desert to the Kirkuk oil-fields. If its line of communications goes, the force forms a self-sufficient box in Persia until relieved from the north. Meanwhile we are desperately short of oil and Rommel closes the pincers.’

‘Their left flank is wide open to the Turks.’

‘Turkish neutrality is assured if they don’t cross the frontier. But success depends on a simultaneous rising—Syria, Iraq, the Persian tribes and the Moslems of Palestine.’

Even if the rising was far from general, it would ensure our defeat in the Western Desert. I asked him why he called them mad.

‘Because I had no faith in Arab organisation without a European commander. And he had to be here on the spot, not pub-crawling in Rome and Berlin like Rashid Ali. No one fitted the bill. But d’Aulnoy does. He has the gift. He was trained by Lyautey in Morocco. If only I had known! Whatever that man does is evil. One hasn’t to think any more.’

My gambling on Oliver’s character had paid off. Instead of a flower child I had a renaissance Italian on my hands. And how absurd! What earthly difference did a bit of slap and tickle four years earlier make to his relations with Valerie now? But those four wasted years, that pursuit of her to Egypt, that exasperating friendship which for so long—as far as I know—stopped short of even a kiss, the inexplicable blank wall of her emotions, all rankled and all were due to d’Aulnoy.

I think his description of d’Aulnoy as evil had little to do with objective truth. But since he believed it, the rest followed. His sympathy for the Arab cause and his duty to his country were no longer so agonisingly balanced. Take myself as an example. Between the wars any practical move towards that Empire of Charlemagne would have had my enthusiastic support as a good European, even if it was against my country’s interests. But never, if Hitler tried to recreate it! To me he was the personification of evil. Anything he proposed was worth resisting.

I still avoided any open assumption that Oliver was on my side. It might have annoyed him so much that he would have refused all co-operation and strolled up the valley to bump off d’Aulnoy single-handed when he couldn’t handle any fire-arm well enough to hit a haystack. So I played for time, and asked him what he was wearing under his gown.

‘As you saw me last.’

‘Where do you put your shoes and socks while you flap about in those sandals?’

‘Socks in my pocket. You must buy me some shoes.’

That sounded very hopeful, as if he were ready to be used and sure that I would use him.

‘What were your plans?’

‘I hadn’t decided. Just hanging around here and in the hills until my beard grew. A Franciscan can’t go very far from the Holy Land. He stops looking a natural part of the scenery.’

‘After the pigeon what will you have?’

‘Paklava and some cheese, if I may.’

He was hungry all right. Lack of appetite is a luxury which deserters on the run simply cannot afford. Transport and respectable lodging must have left little of his various currencies.

When I had him relaxed over coffee and brandy and even seen a smile, I risked an essential question.

‘Is all this really urgent, Oliver? Have you any idea when the balloon goes up?’

‘When we are engaged to the last battalion in Egypt and have nothing serious left up here. Withdrawal of Ninth Australian Division might do it.’

I did not tell him that in another week not only the Australians but the New Zealand Division too, mile after mile of them, would be rumbling under the arch of the khan where we sat, bound for the Western Desert. I was not even allowed to let my section into that secret, and I was much less sure of Oliver.

I said as casually as possible that I wondered how long I (b) would take to act on our report.

‘That depends on what Ninth Army thinks of our joint reputation. You have broken every rule in the book and I am a deserter.’

‘Somebody must understand you. I did.’

‘Nobody will have the chance. Here’s a world without sense or mercy or honour. I won’t give way to it. I won’t betray my brother. He could only be one of three in Galilee, and they will know at once which. I can never say why I disappeared.’

‘Then we must leave it out. In your experience, how long before I (b) believed us and took action?’

‘Weeks. Check and recheck Moustofi Khan. They won’t get much there. Check the names I give them in Syria and the Lebanon. Run in anyone who can be bribed to talk about Abdullah el Bessam. As for d’Aulnoy, Valerie’s evidence must be taken seriously, but check through the Free French underground whether he is or is not in France.’

‘Why not raid first?’

‘And miss the two top enemy agents? Blazing idiocy! They must be sure first—and that will take some doing without alarming the whole bunch—and then set the trap and then that company of infantry you’re always talking about. There isn’t time for it all. If I were d’Aulnoy, I’d give the signal as soon as Tobruk falls—your precious, prestige bastion!’

He sat there with, for the first time, the proper calm of a Franciscan considering the likely movements of St. Paul. He was staring at the brown, dead fields, just harvested, which lay between us and the sea, and I followed his eyes. The contrast was more violent than any meeting of sky and earth, as if a painter had slashed a first streak of blue across the sepia of a preliminary sketch.

‘There seems no way out,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go into the village myself.’

‘Don’t do anything rash!’

‘That’s the damn silliest remark I ever heard.’

Well, of course it was. But in moments of intense surprise one’s remarks are seldom intelligent. I asked him if he still had his service revolver.

‘I threw it away months ago. What’s the good of it? Somebody else can do that bit.’

His plan was to get a letter from his blood brother to Hadji. Armed with that and his testimonial from Rashid Ali, he would go in by the Hermel track and sit quietly in the village until somebody questioned him. After that he would play it by ear.

‘How could you know of the track?’ I asked.

‘Rashid Ali told me. If they want to confirm that, a courier will have to cross the frontier into Turkey and send a wire to Rome—which will take time. They daren’t use a transmitter yet. The risk of our people detecting it would be too great.’

‘Suppose you run into someone who knew the dead Mokaddem?’

‘He never left Iraq, and nobody in Damascus knew him by sight. The danger is Abdullah el Bessam who knew him well. But there’s another side to that. El Bessam has no doubt that his sub-agent in Damascus is the original article and would say so if asked.’

I decided to drive him over the frontier into Palestine then and there. To give a friendly friar a lift in broad daylight could not arouse comment or curiosity.

‘And I will come down tomorrow with your papers and Rashid Ali’s letter.’

‘Bring the telephone book, too,’ he said. ‘That’s additional proof of my bona fides.’

I drove straight through the frontier post of Ras Naqura, saluted by the Field Security corporal on duty. My conscience on such occasions always protested. The more I abused trust, the less I got used to it. Then, following Oliver’s directions, I turned east into Galilee and dropped him on the gentle slope of the Mount of the Beatitudes where a friar would find no one to question his presence so long as he kept out of sight of his brethren.

So back the hundred and sixty miles to Tripoli, where I arrived tired and desperate and convinced that Oliver was right when he insisted that the outbreak of rebellion was only days away, and that there was no chance of I (b) acting in time on the information of a deserter and a security officer proved irresponsible. We would have had a much better chance of a hearing if he had really been a traitor whom I had caught and interrogated.

A marvellous position I had landed myself in, one little step after another straight into the mud, and each of them inevitable! What I did now or did not do could swing the balance between disaster in the Middle East and holding on. Yet I had no allies beyond a mother and daughter who could not be trusted, a section which could not be used and an agent who might turn up any moment as a Major in the Salvation Army and tell me that at last he had seen the light.

Well, there it was. In the morning I dealt aimlessly with routine business, resenting the waste of time, and told Limpsfield that again I was taking the truck and should be away till midnight. He asked me to let him tell the section more of what he knew, saying that they were hopelessly puzzled by my activities—my infatuation with Sir and Hermel, my faked love affair, my absences. Normally, if there were an air of excitement in the office, the men had some very general idea what it was about. Yet no secret mail or signals were going in and out, no staff cars from Ninth Army were in the yard, no long telephone conversations followed by immediate orders. I said that the section would know soon enough, and that meanwhile there should always be a sentry at the entrance to the billet.

About five I was back at the scene of the Sermon on the Mount, waiting for Oliver and trying to find in the Beatitudes some hope for soldiers. Blessed are the peace-makers, perhaps—but only on condition that their self-sacrifice does bring peace. And when has that been more than temporary? My feeling of being unfit for Christian society—how well at that moment I understood Oliver and Nazareth!—was interrupted by his arrival. The Franciscan gown suited him. A fake for the body, but an emblem of his character.

He took his papers, the telephone book and a pair of shoes, and told me that he had already called on his blood brother at dawn and obtained from him a letter confirming their relationship and his loyalty. That allowed us to save valuable time; if I took the road by Quneitra and Damascus I could drop him off only twenty-two miles from Hermel. He approved and at once stripped off his gown, saying that he was rested and could be on the Hermel track next morning. So again we crossed the frontier, this time not so easily. I had to whisper that the scruffy Arab alongside me was under arrest.

It was impossible to arrange any sure method of communication, for it was certain that he could never go near the Ronson-Bolbecs and probable that if he was not executed as an impostor he would at least be under guard. Neither of us could suggest anything. When we said good-bye he gave me the address of an uncle in England, his next-of-kin; if I had the chance, perhaps I would write to him and do the best I could. Remembering Jeremy Fanshawe, I assured him that he would have been reported missing without any details.

Chapter Four

IBRAHIM EL AMR

DURING THE NEXT FEW days my impatience was intolerable. There was nothing useful I could do. I knew myself well enough to be sure that if I went up to the Ronson-Bolbecs I should not be able to resist visiting the village—a piece of utter folly which might have incalculable consequences for Oliver. Meanwhile the divisions were moving south and Ninth Army had become an empty bluff, at the mercy of the Moslem world. The staff were confident that they had little to fear, for there was no outward sign of serious unrest.

On June 22nd we had the news of the fall of Tobruk. I went round to see Magnat—more to get his appreciation of the effect on civilian morale than anything else, but with a wild hope that I might be able to pass on some of my worries to the French. To my disgust and amazement I found him anti-me and anti-British.

‘Mademoiselle Ronson-Bolbec twice called on you when you were not there,’ he began.

‘Dear colleague, nobody regretted it more than I, but I remind you there is no telephone to the valley.’

‘So one would think you would arrange your appointments well in advance.’

‘Alas, man proposes but Ninth Army disposes.’

‘She remained, however, two hours.’

‘Poor child! And no one could tell her.’

‘And you are not aware that she came to see a certain Youssef Mokaddem, describing himself as a travel agent, who never registered his address with the police?’

I have no doubt that my face went either red or white and that I looked about as guilty as any poor, wretched Arab about to be beaten up.

‘Have you mentioned that to Ahmed?’

‘To Ahmed? No! Why should I? Would it be too much to ask what game you are playing?’

‘Just cover,’ I answered feebly. ‘I can’t put her to bed in the billet.’

‘You have also shown a remarkable lack of curiosity about the fate of Lieutenant Khalid.’

‘Not my business.’

He told me that Khalid’s saddle had recently been found on the shore between Acre and Ras Naqura just over the Palestine frontier. It was heavily blood-stained, but had been under water too long for any useful deductions to be made.

‘Is that widely known?’

‘Not widely. Police and Gendarmerie know.’

‘Well, tell me how I can help.’

‘Last February a party of Australians camped there. On the previous night they had been in Khalid’s district, near Ehden. Could there have been a quarrel?’

‘You suggest they just shoved his body in a truck and took it with them?’

‘Or could he have been kidnapped?’

‘By whom?’

‘Listen, my dear captain! I do not want to waste my time if your service ordered it.’

‘If they did, they never told me. But why on earth should anyone want to kidnap Khalid?’

‘I have a sense of smell. You leave Mademoiselle Ronson-Bolbec alone with your agent. You ride up to the valley with your men in the middle of the night. I have reason to believe it was you who loosed on to them a train of mules. And your chief who planned all this could have wished Khalid out of the way.’

I told him that he had created a marvellous fantasy, that I had quite innocently recommended Sir to the mule company and that my own interest in the valley was due to a chap with yellow socks who had been asking too many questions. He had called on the Ronson-Bolbecs and I was worried that he might be in secret communication with Madame.

‘That was when you chose to believe that Madame was an enemy agent?’

‘It was.’

He then turned on me in a cold fury. I cannot imagine what additional scraps of information he had which formed the joints and dovetails between one suspicious incident and another. I put it down to the inevitable inferiority complex of the Free French. Not quite fairly. You and I have at some time made fools of ourselves in the same way by imagining plots. It goes to show how very careful I (b) must be in accepting reports from amateurs.

‘Is it necessary to treat me as a child? It is so obvious that the Ronson-Bolbecs are in your Secret Service. They were sent here by your Headquarters. You pretend this affair with Mademoiselle. You all use this travel agent, Youssef Mokaddem. I thank God for the simple loyalty of such a man as Ahmed.’

I asked him what information of value the Ronson-Bolbecs could possibly bring in.

‘You put them there to watch for the return of d’Aulnoy. My agent in the valley and my control at Sir are not good enough for you. Yet if you had only the courtesy to ask my service they could have told you that up to a month ago d’Aulnoy was in Rome with Rashid Ali el Gailani, and a reliable report states that he is now in Strasbourg. I am compelled to tell you that I refuse all co-operation in future. No one regrets the necessity more than I.’

I nearly blurted out that d’Aulnoy was not in Strasbourg. Far from it. I wonder whether he would have laughed at me, or raided and found nothing but the empty quarry room.

Two more days of indecision went by, and then Zappa came up from the port with a curious story. He had been passing through the complex of old Arab warehouses behind the waterfront—a street chequered with dark vaults and cellar entrances, all black in the blazing sunlight. A voice from one of the obscure arches said to him clearly and quickly in good English:

‘Snap check naval stores tonight.’

He only caught a glimpse of the back view of the speaker slipping away among crates and barrels, and thought it best not to follow.

The naval stores were on the south side of the harbour, guarded by Arab ghaffirs on whom Zappa occasionally descended to see that they were alert and that the gate was locked. There was nothing in all the piles of maritime junk to tempt a petty thief, but the stuff was invaluable to caiques laid up for repair. The message might be a tip-off by some enemy of a thieving captain, but one would not have expected perfect English or the security term ‘snap check’.

So I decided to accompany Zappa myself. We marched smartly along the water front, surprised one ghaffir in a café and the other sleeping peacefully at his post. Then we had a stroll round the stores, finding nothing suspicious, and settled down under cover above the watersteps. After half an hour a boat drifted silently alongside with an Arab in a dark kaftan at the oars. He called my name quietly and I slipped down the steps, telling Zappa to wait for me at my favourite bar.

‘That came off splendidly,’ Oliver whispered. ‘I was afraid you might just send one of your men.’

He pushed the boat along the harbour wall until we were hidden by the black, slimy skeleton of a derelict caique and could talk more freely.

‘Are you watched?’

‘Spy or bodyguard—whichever you like. At any rate it’s the hell of a job to get rid of him. But we’re clear now.’

He explained that he had tried to think of an excuse which would get me down to the port on some business so obvious that I would not be followed.

‘You have been accepted?’

‘I am Hadji’s man in Tripoli. The command here is just a bunch of toughs who can’t get anything out of a wireless receiver but dance music from Beirut and Cairo.’

He told me that of course he had been arrested on arrival in the village and interrogated at length before Hadji would allow him into the headquarters.

‘I knew so much that they had to use me or kill me,’ he said. ‘They have chosen the first for the time being. It was the telephone directory which clinched it. Hadji was tickled pink by the way I had covered up my clients’ names.’

I warned him that Magnat was on the look-out for Youssef Mokaddem. He laughed and said he knew it, that Magnat’s organisation was honeycombed by informers and that taking a room next door to the security office was considered a great joke. If he walked into trouble with me or the police, he had a Muscat passport in the name of Ibrahim el Amr—excellently faked, though he didn’t think much of the visas.

He reported that d’Aulnoy was always in the village. His face was too well known and he dared not move out. Moustofi Khan and the Colonel were away—but, he thought, no further than Libwe.

‘By God, I’d like to blow the whole place up and send d’Aulnoy to lead guerrillas in hell if they’d have him!’ he exclaimed. ‘But it would kill too many innocents. Or wouldn’t it? I don’t suppose you know.’

‘Not necessarily. That would depend on the charges and how they were placed.’

‘Do you know anything about explosives?’

‘I did a commando course in 1939. Can you get back to the valley?’

‘No. At this point movement is only allowed to column leaders. I can’t escape at all. When I get back to my people I shall have to curse my bodyguard for losing me.’

I cannot say that any detailed plan was then going through my head, but I did see possibilities. I asked him if he had heard anything at all about Lieutenant Khalid.

‘No, except for one mention which showed that Hadji was worried.’

‘What would happen if they learned that Khalid was being interrogated in Cairo?’

‘Only a quick move, I should think. With only a day or two to go, they could safely set up their headquarters and transmitter at Libwe. I doubt if Khalid knew more than the track and d’Aulnoy’s headquarters, and that there were contacts with enemy agents.’

‘They have a store of explosives in the village?’

‘Not so far as I know. I’ve got some down here. They want to blow the Ras Shaqqa tunnel and close the coast road.’

‘What have you got?’

‘I don’t know. The usual stuff,’ he replied with the faint contempt which always came into his voice when arms were mentioned.

‘Can I get at it?’

‘If you go at night—easily. It’s well hidden, so there is no need of a guard.’

He told me that the cache was in the market gardens to the left of the avenue which ran from Tripoli to El Mina. The best way in was through a gate near the tram-stop; it was chained and padlocked, but a ramshackle job of upright palings which could be lifted off its hinges. I was to stick to the path for about eighty yards, then turn left to a well and follow the pipe to a cistern. Beyond it I would see a disused threshing-floor with a revolving post in the middle for tethering the biblical ox or ass which walked round and round treading out the corn. Lift out post and socket in one piece, and there underneath I should find the explosives.

‘What about shining a light?’

‘Be careful. But there is seldom anyone in the gardens at night. The place is supposed to be haunted.’

‘Can I bring in any kind of transport through the gate?’

‘No. You had better take Boutagy and a donkey, both of you dressed as fellahin. He’ll talk you out of trouble, if possible. But it’s all pointless. How on earth are you going to get into the village with a load of explosives?’

I said I didn’t intend to, and that my plans were still too fluid to be defined in words. That was true. There could really be no picture until my collection of visual images had gone into the cutting room.

Oliver pushed the boat back along the wall without a splash and landed me at the steps. It seemed unlikely that I would see him again. When the rebellion broke, there was small chance of any way out for him. He would be put against a wall by one side or the other. My own fate would be that of the few troops in the town. No surrender or run like hell, according to the circumstances.

Early next morning I called Limpsfield and Boutagy into the office and told them that I had reliable information of the whereabouts of a stock of explosives collected by saboteurs for future use.

‘Well, sir, that would be a feather in our cap!’ Limpsfield exclaimed, delighted to find the section back in honest business.

‘It would, sergeant-major. But I want them myself. And with Boutagy’s help I’m going to try to bring some back to the billet.’

Limpsfield’s ‘yessir’ was the least enthusiastic I ever heard. But Boutagy put on his face for Danger and squared his chin. You never saw such a ham actor as Boutagy defending the Empire. But he wasn’t. At bottom he was a Christian Arab warrior, single-minded as his ancestors.

I gave him some money and asked him to visit a market on the outskirts and bring back two second-hand peasant outfits—lice to be avoided but eggs permissible as we should not wear them long. He was also to hire a donkey for a day and stable it somewhere quiet and not too far off where we could pick it up at midnight. Ropes and stout sacks for panniers would be required as well.

I then went down to El Mina by the tram. Standing on the platform I could see more of the market gardens beyond the wall than I had ever noticed from truck or motorcycle. There was no doubt which gate Oliver meant, and there was a possible cistern to the left of it. But I had envisaged fairly open cultivated land. It was nothing of the sort. There were bamboo hedges, closely planted fruit trees and irrigation channels; so that it was going to be difficult at night to tell a path from a dried up onion bed.

Boutagy and I left soon after eleven, lying down under ground sheets in the back of the truck to avoid any curious eyes. Limpsfield dropped us off in the yard of some Christian friend of Boutagy’s, who he swore was as reliable as himself. We then drove the donkey, which seemed a willing beast—very different from a Moslem donkey, Boutagy assured me—down into the broad avenue and on. We never could get the road entirely to ourselves, but passers-by were few. However, there was nothing odd in a couple of fellahin coming down from the hills to be early at El Mina market. We were spoken to twice. Once I did not have to enter the short conversation; on the other occasion I made mooing noises and pointed to my mouth, keeping my tongue well down.

Access to the gardens was easy enough. Boutagy shuffled on with the donkey while I waited till no one was in sight, lifted the gate off its hinges and slipped through. When I heard the little hooves trotting back I opened the gate, and he was inside without a break in the rhythm of the footfalls.

Eighty yards straight on, and we came to the turning to the left—a well-worn track with a rush hedge on one side. There seemed no room for doubt, but the blasted thing ended at an irrigation channel. Back again, then two paths which weren’t, and a purposeful turning to the left at well over a hundred and twenty yards from the gate. Oliver’s judgment of distance showed that he had never shot or played golf. This was certainly the lane which he meant, but he had never mentioned the number of obscure openings leading off it. The main track curved away to some considerable building. The building turned out to be the boundary wall.

There was no way of following the wall back to the gate, so we retraced our steps, took a fix on the Pole Star and started an obstacle race on a course more or less at right angles to the wall. I have never felt more frustrated and incompetent. That garden was haunted all right—by the spirit of a mirror-imaged, one-eyed lunatic who had put on his baggy breeches back to front. After at least an hour of defying him I tripped over a pipe and fell full length into the mud where it had been leaking. The pipe led us to a cistern about where it ought to be.

There Boutagy and the donkey remained while I cast around for the threshing-floor, fell over the pipe again and told it what I thought of it far too loudly. However, the ground this time was stony, and it occurred to what intelligence I had left that the pipe might not be the same. It did not lead back to any obvious well, but it had a path alongside well worn by hooves. For want of anything better we followed it and came to a second cistern. The starlight showed a vague open space nearby; in the middle of this was a threshing-floor with a pole in the centre of the circle. The pole was set into a round section of tree trunk which was loose in his socket.

We lifted it out. Underneath was a small, circular, brick chamber, just high enough to stand up in. It did not hold anything like sufficient explosive to blow the Ras Shaqqa tunnel. They must have had another cache somewhere else or drawn recently on this lot, leaving a clear space—which was all to the good since I could examine what there was at leisure. Most of it had been stolen from Australian sappers and some from naval stores, so that all the stock was marked in English.

I broke open cases of gelignite and handed eighty one-pound sticks up to Boutagy, followed by two boxes of electric detonators, two reels of flex and an exploder. The exploder clarified my mind remarkably. I saw that I was going to need two of them—one which I hoped to use at a safe distance and another which would be on the spot in case I had no chance of escaping. I reminded myself that I wouldn’t know a thing. All the same a hundred years hence, as my Nanny used to say.

By the time we had stowed this little lot in the sacks and roped them on each side of the donkey—except for the boxes of detonators which I carried in my loose breeches—it was light enough to see paths and distinguish what was wall and what was bamboo. A fine old mess we had made of somebody’s allotment. One just had to hope that the owners of plots knew nothing of the additions to the threshing-floor and that Oliver’s guerrillas would not need more explosives from store in the course of the next two days.

The first tram clattered past. We put back pole and socket and made for the gate, Boutagy prodding that amiable donkey into a brisk trot. It was no good waiting. We had to go out confidently and at once as if we owned the place. There were people on the other side of the avenue, but they paid no attention to us and our rush-covered load. I could even replace the gate on its hinges.

We were now, to the eyes of the passers-by, peasants from the coast bound for Tripoli market with vegetables, but we cut our journey as short as possible, for anything could happen—a policeman finding fault with us and demanding a small bribe or some impatient buyer lifting the rushes to see what we had for sale. So we turned straight into the yard of the billet with Boutagy singing out the Arabic for Early Melons. If we were seen, it did not greatly matter; it would be assumed that the far from secret agents of Security had been engaged on something as futile and mysterious as usual.

When we carried our cargo into my office I was astonished to notice the extreme respect with which the section regarded it. To convince them that they were unlikely to be blown up in their beds—or rather their straw palliasses on the hard floor—I put on gloves, made a little model of a donkey from the plastic and put a match to it. A spectacular shoot of flame, of course, but nothing more. I had seen it done by my instructor—rather to my alarm since he was far from sober at the time.

My plan, as I am sure you must have guessed, was to lay enough charges in that derelict farmhouse to blow the place to bits along with everyone in it. Thanks to Magnat, I could make it probable that several of the leaders would be there at the same time. But when I could not possibly know.

My men were not trained scouts who could watch the farmhouse night after night. They needed water, rations and transport, and more patience than could be expected of them; their presence was sure to be detected. I could have posted a couple of reliable fellows high up on the Hermel track, but two insoluble problems remained. They could not tell me who were in the party—I did not want to waste good gelignite on half a dozen of the rank and file—and they could not get news of any movement back in time for me to reach the farmhouse by way of Homs. Walkie-talkies were rare at that period of the war. I had never heard of them and could not have laid my hands on one if I had.

Another alternative was to watch the Hermel track myself and to follow up on foot any movement out of the valley. I didn’t think much of that. The German colonel would surely post a rearguard or sentries, and my chance of getting through them to the farmhouse was slim. There was absolutely nothing for it but to accompany the party myself. I thought I saw a way to do it, though at some risk to Biddy’s life as well as my own.

The sooner the charges were laid, the better; so I loaded the sacks on to the truck that evening, together with pick, spade, rake and broom. Then I called the whole section together informally and told them that I might be sacked and court-martialled for exceeding my powers. Any of them whom I required to help me would receive his orders in writing, which he should carefully preserve for his own protection, and he was at perfect liberty to refuse to obey. Wilson, the senior sergeant, replied for the lot. He was far too complimentary and probably insubordinate. Limpsfield, speaking for himself, said he wasn’t a bloody cashier who wanted a ‘Sign, please’, and that he looked forward to finishing the job which we both had started.

The sergeant-major, Holloway, Gunn and I started early so that we could work through the heat of the day when it was unlikely that anyone would be about on those baked foothills shimmering in the sun. When we arrived at the fig tree we quickly deposited our cargo under its cover, and I sent Gunn off with orders to come back in four hours if the coast was clear. I went on ahead to reconnoitre the farmhouse and, finding it deserted, signalled from the high ground that the two should come on with the load. Limpsfield worked with me while Holloway lay down on top of the ridge to give us warning of any approach from either side.

The first task was to find a site for the exploder, near enough to the farmhouse to be reached if anyone had the chance, far enough away to avoid—failing bad luck—the fallout of stone and timber. Since I could not dig a channel for the wire across the Hermel track, I chose a slight fold in the ground, on the same side as the house and about seventy yards up the valley, full of the dead stalks of some vegetation which had flourished in spring. To the casual eye in half light it would appear a fairly open and level patch of nothing, but in fact the fold was deep enough to hold a man. Limpsfield lay down in it with stalks pushed into the netting of his steel helmet and I could not see him in broad daylight. That settled, we scraped out a shallow channel for the wire and led it into the farmhouse by a crack in the west wall.

I had started to dig holes for the charges when Holloway came dashing down from the ridge to tell us that there were three horsemen cutting across the open country from the direction of the Homs-Baalbek road. Evidently we were not the only ones to take advantage of the emptiness of the country in the midday heat. We cleared out hastily with our tools and materials and took refuge in the bushes on the other side of the track. Five minutes later they passed us without stopping at the farmhouse. It was unlikely that they would have spotted my holes, quickly and loosely covered in, but the half-empty drum of wire below the crack in the wall was only obscured by an armful of hay.

One of the riders I knew, for I had seen him in d’Aulnoy’s village. No doubt he was acting as guide. The other two were well-dressed Syrians, probably from the north, both men in their late thirties with an air of authority about them.

‘Gathering of the clans, sir?’ Limpsfield asked when they had passed.

‘Or headquarters conference for brigade commanders up.’

It occurred to me that if the two were the local leaders they looked, they could not get back to their commands for at least a day and a half. Not much to go on, but a slight indication that we still had time.

I returned to my holes and pressed the charges up against the footings of the four arches holding up the top storey—which itself contained several tons of material, collapsed or in place. We dug channels in the dusty earth a good foot deep so that no weight on top could break the wire, and I then connected and inserted the detonators. By the time we had gone over the ground with rake and broom there was not a sign of the wrath to come. It was a good professional job, checked and rechecked, and I could only hope that I had made no stupid mistake. I had nearly made one beauty already. Taking Limpsfield back to the exploder to make quite sure again that he knew how to press down the handle, I forgot to disconnect it till the last second.

The second emergency exploder was under a pile of brick and rubble close to the door. I rebuilt this so that a weary officer sitting down on the pile could pass his wrist between two bricks and, very reluctantly, press down. In the circumstances no timing device or booby trap was of any value at all, and the less I complicated the wiring, the better.

I doubted whether I could or should involve my section in this operation. However, before we left I settled with Limpsfield the positions for his men if any means ever turned up of getting them there at the right time. He himself was to lie up in cover by the external exploder. Holloway would be posted in the ant-ridden scrub a little above the farmhouse on the other side of the track, and Wilson and Flowers higher up the valley, well tucked away but within call. Boutagy, who might very well be needed, was to remain with them but, as a non-combatant, must stay right out of any action.

Home again with a clear conscience. The rest I had to leave in the hands of the God of Battles whom I could reasonably expect to show some interest in this operation so near to the familiar ground of the Promised Land. One could not know at the time that the General Staff upstairs were proposing to postpone Armageddon in favour of Stalingrad and El Alamein.

Then I took my courage in both hands and called Magnat, who always worked late in his office. Why courage? Well, because this, to my way of thinking, was the point of no return. Any damn fool could wire a farmhouse and wait for a goat to tread on the handle of the exploder ten years hence.

I told Magnat that I was desolated to find after discreet enquiries that he had been perfectly right and that Khalid was in the hands of Security Intelligence Middle East. He had been in a Cairo hospital for four months recovering from a head wound and coma, and was now fit for interrogation which, I understood, had just begun. Magnat’s inquiry could therefore be closed, and, so far as we were concerned, we didn’t care if he told his men that we had got Khalid. To make my information sound even more authentic I said that I had been asked to present the apologies of Security Intelligence and that an officer would call on him with a full report of the interrogation.

He congratulated me on my honesty and the inter-allied loyalty of my service. It was the only occasion, I think, when such congratulations were not deserved.

Then I made out Limpsfield’s orders. When I had finished a first draft I rewrote it, for in trying to visualise the picture up in the valley and the picture down in the billet it occurred to me that there was after all a remote chance that Limpsfield could know when the farmhouse was likely to be occupied. If there were a move out of the valley, every horse in the place would be needed for transport of staff, papers, arms, the transmitter and anything else which should not be left behind in the quarry room. This meant that the two horses permanently stabled at Sir would be brought up to the valley.

I called in the invaluable Davila and asked him if he could imagine any secret, sure way of communication with Sir. He thought it could be managed. One of his regular informants was a clerk in police headquarters, a Greek Orthodox Christian and therefore very unlikely to be mixed up in Moslem plots. The clerk had mentioned that a member of his clan was one of the few Christians in Sir. Boutagy confirmed this. He had met the man on his visit to Sir which Oliver called clumsy—as it was.

We then worked out one of the typical and complicated scenarios of the Levant. A boy friend of Valerie’s wished to go up and see her but could not ride a motorcycle. I, as her well-known and accepted lover, did not want him there but could not say so. I therefore thought up the trick of arranging for him to visit Sir when there were no horses available to take him on to the valley. If that should happen, this Christian in Sir was to telephone his clansman, the clerk, who would pass on the news to Davila. It would be best if he did not mention horses. I left it to Davila to arrange some simple code word.

So far as I remember, my final orders to Limpsfield went something like this:

1. At 14.00 hrs. I shall leave Tripoli for an indefinite stay with Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec.

2. If I fail to return within four days, Sergeant-Major Limpsfield will proceed to I (b), Ninth Army, and will deliver in person my written report which will explain my reasons for independent action.

3. If reliable evidence is received that no horses remain at Sir, Sergeant-Major Limpsfield, Sergeant Wilson, Corporal Flowers, Lance-Corporal Holloway and Mr. Boutagy will leave immediately by motorcycle. The detachment will enter the Hermel road after dark. No lights will be shown.

4. Having ensured that the farmhouse is not occupied, the detachment will proceed on foot and take position as ordered. Motorcycles will be wheeled to any point where they can be conveniently and thoroughly concealed.

5. It is anticipated that a mounted party will come down the track and that some or all will enter the farmhouse, probably before dawn. No action will be taken.

6. If any of the detachment are discovered or about to be discovered, the enemy must be silenced in the most convenient manner without the use of fire-arms. On no account must any warning be allowed to reach the others.

7. Whenever the party show signs of leaving the farmhouse, Sergeant-Major Limpsfield will blow it up, whether or not I am inside.

8. If I am not available to take command, the detachment will return by way of the Hermel track and report to I (b), Ninth Army.

9. If the operation fails and a general rising takes place, it is possible that Miss Ronson-Bolbec will call on the section for advice. She will remain with you and accompany you. Should you be forced to surrender, she is to get in touch immediately with a certain Ibrahim el Amr whom she will easily find on enquiry at El Mina.

That was all remarkably military by our Field Security standards and enough, I hoped, to clear Limpsfield and his detachment from any charge of murdering civilians. In any case I thought it most unlikely they could ever turn up on the spot, or be more than witnesses if they did.

My next move was far too complex and unwarlike to explain to them, so at fourteen hundred hours precisely I obeyed my own orders and sailed out of the yard, leaving a very worried sergeant-major behind.

I found Biddy in a gentle and nostalgic mood, having tea in the shade and pretending that the patch of gravel was a lawn in England. She was being served by a housemaid. When I asked where Ahmed was, she said that he had recently been very busy with the estate and that he had gone down to Tripoli to make some purchases. That was a most hopeful sign and I took it as a good omen; he was bound to hear the news of Khalid’s kidnapping. Indeed he might have heard it already and called on Magnat to confirm that it was more than a rumour. So I asked her whether anyone had ridden up from Sir that morning. Yes, she said, a gendarme—just before Ahmed’s departure.

After some casual conversation—easy enough since I had not seen her for some time—I asked her:

‘Biddy, how are you fixed for money in these days?’

‘Pretty desperate. But we eat.’

‘If d’Aulnoy were here, would you ask him for some?’

‘Of course. Just a loan.’

‘Where is Valerie?’

‘Mooning about somewhere. Why?’

‘Because I don’t want to be interrupted in what I have to say to you. Do you at all realise that if you took money from d’Aulnoy you could be suspected of being an enemy agent?’

‘Me! But he’s an old friend. It’s ridiculous!’

‘You have already taken money from Moustofi Khan.’

‘For sewing machines.’

‘One always arranges an innocent reason for payments.’

I let that sink in, giving her time to remember all the undercurrents of my previous interrogation, and then told her that d’Aulnoy and Moustofi Khan were both in the village and that sometimes two German officers were with them.

‘But what for?’ she asked.

A mere exclamation in face of the utterly unexpected. She believed me all right. She was searching around in her mind for the implications and a way out of them.

I explained that the village was the temporary headquarters for a rebellion which could break out even while we were talking and I let her have the general details of the enemy plan. I did not mention the Hermel track and the quarry room. If she were to give away that I knew of their existence, it was the end of me.

You’ll think I was mad to trust her, but it was a gamble which had to be taken and not at all an outside chance. Remember that Biddy had spent her life in circles of unquestioning obedience and loyalty. Military and imperialistic we should now call them. Though she saw her own character in convenient and delicate shades of grey, she saw war in black and white. Exactly the opposite to Oliver Enwin.

‘Blaise—he has even talked to Hitler, you think?’

‘I am sure he has.’

‘Elite!’ she exclaimed bitterly and, when I looked puzzled, added: ‘He was always talking about that.’

‘You mean he has found his élite in the wrong place?’

‘He always did. I suppose you want us to get out of here at once.’

‘Not yet. I have a way for you to serve your country, if you will.’

I handed out a packet of rousing stuff—that the fate of our besieged army was in the balance and so on. It was necessary. One had to strip away all her petty evasions so that she could feel the sincerity of her patriotism. I expect she remembered, too, those contemptuous staff officers in Cairo who described her as a bloody woman, and how they would have to change their opinion of her. And why not, damn it!

‘What must I do?’

‘Go over to the village now and take with you one of the servants who speaks some French and can interpret. Ask to see d’Aulnoy. You will be told that he is not there, but don’t take no for an answer. Say that he’s an old friend and you know that he is there and it’s quite absurd that you shouldn’t see him.’

‘But what will happen?’

‘I don’t know. Someone is bound to ask you why you believe that d’Aulnoy is there. You will answer that you recognised him when he took refuge in the house on the night that the mule company was here.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. Ahmed pushed him through the back door. You will then be asked whom you have told. Answer that you have told only the security officer.’

‘Wouldn’t I have told Val?’

‘No, I don’t think you would. And d’Aulnoy will understand that.’

‘What has she said to you?’

‘Only that she loathed the man. Something to do with Paris. I didn’t press her. You will be asked when you told me. Answer: this afternoon. Where is he now? Answer: at the house. The next question will be: what did he say or what was his reaction? Now, remember this very carefully! He said that d’Aulnoy was a very rich man and that he wasn’t doing any harm to anyone by having a look at his estate. But Captain Magnat would shoot him if he knew. And what’s it worth to keep quiet?’

‘They’ll never believe it of you!’

‘Yes, they will. Moustofi Khan has already hinted that he would like to bribe me. I am only known as an unimportant officer out in the blue. I could do with a few thousand quid to keep my mouth shut.’

‘But he might give it to you.’

‘At any rate he won’t refuse outright. We shall both be taken back to the village and kept there. I shall be preserved on the ice until they can decide what to do with me. And nothing at all will happen to you. You have been a close friend of Blaise d’Aulnoy for years, and he’s in a position to see that his orders are obeyed.’

I took her through the questions and answers again, impressing it on her that she was to be perfectly natural and never try to act. She was to remember that dear Blaise ought to be in his own house, not the dirty village. And if he had a bit of money handy to keep the place running she could do with it.

‘But I should use it for that if he gave it to me,’ she protested.

Even now she couldn’t keep a note of hopefulness out of her voice.

‘Of course you would. And you are shocked that an officer whom you have always considered a gentleman should dream of blackmail.’

‘Won’t he think I am going to split with you?’

That was exactly what he would think, but I hotly denied the possibility and turned to the question of Valerie, saying that she must not come down from her room while we were being removed.

‘But whatever I tell her she always does the opposite,’ Biddy complained.

‘Then tell her that you particularly want her to be here because an intimate friend of d’Aulnoy’s is coming.’

She was worried, of course, about what Valerie would make of it all and whether she would be safe alone. I assured her that Valerie would be perfectly safe, though confined to the premises for a few days, and that Biddy herself would be returned to the house as soon as there was no more need of secrecy. I honestly thought I was telling the truth, give or take a few minor alarms.

‘But will you be returned?’ she asked.

‘If you forget about war and behave with d’Aulnoy just as you always have, I shall be. In these countries one doesn’t bump a man off because he is corrupt. One thinks of ways of using him.’

Valerie was away a long time ‘mooning’. She could not even have heard the motorcycle. That would have brought her charging down to the house—not to see me, but in the hope that I brought news of Oliver.

When she joined us and was told that the friend was expected, she exploded, practically accusing her mother of trading with the enemy and asking if she could never realise that the Vichy French were on the wrong side. Then she stopped short, realising that I was saying nothing and that there might be more in the proposed visit than met the eye. But, consciously or unconsciously, she behaved according to the predicted pattern and stormed up to her room.

Biddy went off, rather pale and too self-consciously gallant, accompanied by the French-speaking maid. When she had left, I went up to see Valerie. I reminded her that she had promised to obey orders and told her that she must expect to be left alone for a time.

‘Using Mummy as cover instead of me?’ she asked.

‘More or less, yes. There is no risk. But stay in your room and don’t see us off! You have to remember just one thing. You never had that glimpse of d’Aulnoy. If you are asked whether Biddy saw him, you are to reply: “how could she? He’s in France.”’

She enquired hopefully what sentence d’Aulnoy would get.

‘Enough to make you sorry for him, so forget it! Your mother and I might be away several days. Give us a reasonable time and then go down to my section in Tripoli provided the town is quiet. If you get mixed up in any serious trouble, ask in El Mina for Ibrahim el Amr. Ibrahim is Oliver. But never, never allow yourself to remember it! He is just an Arab merchant who is unaccountably chivalrous to you.’

‘You mean I can see him?’ she exclaimed, ignoring completely all the dangerous circumstances at which I had hinted.

‘Only in case of real, desperate necessity.’

I waited in the garden, trying to enjoy the barren innocence of the valley, all grey and straw-coloured in the heat. When I first saw it at the end of the rains, innocence was not a term I would have used. I never think of the green of England as innocent; it hides and softens too much. But that valley under the June sun—well, if you had put a match to one end, the fan of flame would have reached the other.

After an hour the maid came back alone. I asked her whom her mistress was talking to.

‘I do not know, Monsieur le Capitaine,’ she replied.

But she did. There was a sparkle in her gentle eyes which had not been there before. D’Aulnoy with all his faults was greatly loved. If he hadn’t been loved, when one comes to think of it, the faults might not have had such very favourable soil in which to grow.

Another hour or more passed very slowly. I tried to keep up my spirits by reminding myself that there were many thousands of Europeans, that very evening, waiting resignedly to launch or receive attack. It didn’t help much. I would far rather have trusted rifle and grenade than a brain which was already having difficulty in remembering exactly what I had said to everyone concerned.

At last I saw Biddy returning from the village with Moustofi Khan and Yasser. Yasser had a rifle under his arm. Another good sign, however one took it. It implied either that they were certain I should not report him for carrying arms, or that it no longer mattered whether I did or not. It might also mean that I was never going to make any more reports to anybody, but that would be an improbably stupid solution at this stage.

Moustofi Khan greeted me casually, almost affectionately, and I responded by saying how sorry I was that I had not yet had an opportunity of thanking him for that admirable lunch. He was kind enough to hope that it would be the first of many. He then asked Biddy if she would leave us alone a little while. She moved away and sat down at the open french window of the living room, with Yasser standing an unobtrusive guard over her. If Valerie had turned up, I suppose he would have tried to prevent them talking to each other. Fortunately she stayed in her room, distaste reinforcing my orders.

‘What do you know of d’Aulnoy?’ Moustofi Khan asked.

‘As much as you and Magnat have told me. It seems a great pity that so able a man did not declare for de Gaulle.’

‘How do you know he has been back?’

‘Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec told me so this afternoon.’

‘What does Miss Valerie know?’

‘Absolutely nothing, I am sure. She dislikes d’Aulnoy for personal reasons. I don’t know what they are. But probably it makes sense to him.’

‘Have you told her of your—er—little game?’

He was a disconcerting interrogator. The prominent, brown eyes, hooded by long lashes and heavy lids, the air of accommodating aristocracy, both called to mind the historic Aryan tribes which were his base of power. And then out would come Portsmouth, a part in which he was not so sure of himself.

‘No bloody fear! She has high principles.’

‘You intend to marry her?’

‘I can’t afford to. But the kind of dowry I’m thinking of might help.’

‘Her mother is in this with you?’

A nasty question. I could not know what Biddy had said. So I hedged.

‘You know what she is—mercenary as they come. But she doesn’t like admitting it.’

‘Do your men know where you are?’

‘Of course. I had a week’s leave due to me, and I told them I should be spending it with the Ronson-Bolbecs.’

‘Leave? At this time?’

‘Why not? I have little to do now that there are so few troops left.’

‘And you thought it would take a few days to get the money?’

I still break out in a cold sweat when I think how nearly I answered ‘yes’. It would have shown that I had made plans earlier and that Biddy had not told me that very afternoon of d’Aulnoy’s presence.

‘I haven’t had time to work it out. D’Aulnoy must be able to lay his hands on enough local currency and he’ll want from me some sort of guarantee that I won’t talk.’

‘I can only think of one. You’re a brave man.’

‘Only a poor one. Look at it this way! D’Aulnoy can slip out as he came in, and nobody is any the wiser. It’s not worth his while to make a security officer disappear and start a high-powered enquiry.’

He seemed to agree with that. He said that if I were patient for a few days no doubt we should be able to arrive at some solution.

‘Are you surprised to find me with him?’ he asked.

‘I am. But after all you are an old friend of his.’

‘I could report you for this,’ he said—a brilliant improvisation, implying friends in high places.

‘Oh, I should admit it at once and say I was trying to trap d’Aulnoy. That sort of thing often happens when one branch of Intelligence does not know enough of what another is doing.’

Only too true in all armies, and equally disastrous in peacetime organisations. But Moustofi Khan was taken aback. I think he understood straight operational Intelligence very well, but did not realise the number of secret departments and their duties. He promptly laid off both Portsmouth and oriental affability and ordered Biddy and myself to accompany him to the village.

‘Rooms will be prepared for you in Yasser’s house. Take your motorcycle, too!’

‘If you allow me to ride it. I’m not going to push it all the way.’

‘I will attend to that.’

He asked for my belt and revolver, which I had to surrender, and walked between Biddy and me. Biddy was far the best of the three at making conversation. She slipped easily into her usual manner, saying how lovely it was to see dear Blaise looking so well and pumping Moustofi Khan as to how long he had known him. She might have been taking us along to introduce us to an old friend whom she was sure we would like. It was a brilliant performance, made possible by the perfection of the casting. She was just being herself.

In the village was no sign at all of exceptional activity. It was hard to believe that the thirty or forty men and women knew of the existence of the quarry room and d’Aulnoy’s mysterious visitors. They were as loyal to him as any Lebanese clan to its chief.

Most politely, with exclamations of welcome as if we were guests, we were led up the outside stairs of Yasser’s house to clean, white-washed rooms, and the doors locked. At any rate mine was. I think Biddy received more consideration and apologies, though she was not free to come and go. Furniture was of the simplest: a bed, a chair and table, a washbasin and an old-fashioned commode. The window looked out on to the single street, the yard over the quarry room being out of sight.

I saw my motorcycle being wheeled over and put away in the ground floor granary. The military part of me—busy keeping the personal part away from depression—was absurdly worried about what story it could produce to explain the loss if the machine disappeared. Was the cost of cycle, motor, one, stopped from my pay or was it a court martial offence like the loss of a rifle?

When the hot, still dusk came down, Ahmed cantered up the street. He looked agitated, as well he might be. After handing over his horse to a bystander with a peremptory air which I had naturally never seen in him before, he immediately entered Yasser’s ground floor. He did not come out again, so he must have gone into the quarry room.

One of the villagers unlocked my room with a cordial smile, brought me my haversack which had been strapped to the back of the bike and warm water to wash. He removed the pot from the commode—to which I had contributed rather more than one usually would when sitting still in the peace of the countryside—and then served me a simple meal and lit the oil lamp. After eating I turned it low and remained by the window, looking out on the streaks of faint light from the shutters across the street and listening to the murmur of Arabic, its sharp gutturals suddenly leaping out of the flow. I had reached the point of wondering whether sleep would be possible when the door was opened. Hadji came in, turned up the lamp and ordered me to sit on the bed while he took the chair. He spoke in English with a slight accent which was more Middle Eastern than German.

‘You are Monsieur d’Aulnoy?’ I asked.

‘A friend of his.’

‘We can discuss business?’

‘Later perhaps. I want from you the full story of Khalid.’

‘That is easy—up to the point where he was taken away.’

I told him how I had received a message purporting to be from Miss Ronson-Bolbec, which I had never for a moment believed. Her morals were impeccable, though they would not seem so to an Arab. I therefore telephoned Beirut for a guard to be concealed under the trees close to the place of the rendezvous.

‘To whom did you telephone?’

‘The Defence Security Officer.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He is responsible to Security Intelligence Middle East at Cairo.’

‘And you are responsible to him?’

‘No. To the Ninth Army. But the staff would be unable to provide protection in a hurry.’

Absolute nonsense! I was intent on drawing his attention to Cairo. And the enemy agent always thinks he has important information when he hears the names of departments. They are secret of course, but it makes little difference what particular combination of letters gives the order to shoot him.

‘Why did you not use your own men for a guard?’

‘Because they could not have got to the spot without being noticed. But the Defence Security Officer has his Arab agents everywhere. I have none.’

I stuck to the truth: that I had stopped to talk to Khalid, never dreaming that he had anything against me. After he had made his horse wheel and kick, four men came at him out of the trees. Khalid attempted to put up a fight but was beaten down and his head laid open with a length of lead pipe. I myself was badly bruised but not seriously hurt. Khalid and his horse were quickly removed, and that was all I knew. The affair had been kept quiet in order not to disturb the French.

‘Then why apologise to the French?’

‘Because the Deuxième Bureau had reason to suspect what had happened, and apology was easier than denial. But what has this regrettable incident to do with Monsieur d’Aulnoy?’

‘Don’t pretend to be an imbecile! Your blackmail is hardly likely to succeed if your people in Cairo already know that d’Aulnoy is here.’

‘How could they? Or was he here at that time?’

‘I am asking the questions. Why do you think Khalid attacked you?’

I repeated what Oliver had first said: that it could not be for anything I knew, but because Khalid feared I was about to find something out. Possibly it was to do with a fellow we called Yellow Socks who was behaving suspiciously and seemed to be protected by the gendarmerie.

That touched him on the raw, and his response for once was typically German.

‘If you try to escape, you will be shot.’

‘Why should I try? I see no harm in d’Aulnoy returning. After all, this is the home he planned for himself. And I shall not report his presence if he makes it worth my while.’

‘How do you know he is not an enemy agent?’

‘I know he is—strictly speaking. But I can never consider France as an enemy. That goes for most of us.’

Hadji was on much surer ground when he brought up the mule company. He could not shake my story that their appearance was entirely accidental, for the Indians had never looked like searching the village. But the incident smelt. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I pointed out that I had no reason to order up troops and certainly not the power; I believed that not even Ninth Army would invade an innocent village without authority from Cairo. More nonsense, but it brought in Cairo again.

Soon afterwards he left me in peace. My statement at any rate agreed with what Ahmed must have reported and with the scrappy bits of conversation I had overheard while outside the farmhouse. What, to my mind, was damned unlikely was Khalid’s long period in hospital before he could be interrogated. But Hadji never questioned it. After all, neither Magnat nor I had any obvious motive for making it up.

Towards midnight I heard Biddy return to her room, accompanied by someone whose voice and cultured French accent had to be those of d’Aulnoy. He sounded considerate but absolutely tired of her. You know the sort of voice—at the limit of human charity and saved from rudeness only by half-humorous disdain. All well so far. If only she continued to keep silent about the facts I had been compelled to tell her of enemy plans and the urgency of action, there was nothing else she could give away.

I slept fitfully through the night, calmed by the splash of water from the tanks. The sun had just risen and the village was throwing black oblongs of shadow across the dust when Ahmed himself came in—not for any menial purposes but to remove the lamp. He looked at me with concentrated hatred which he made no attempt to conceal, and spat out a derisive Bon jour, mon petit! I suppose he resented the subservience he had patiently shown as majordomo. Besides that, he must have been sore with the tongue-lashing received from d’Aulnoy and Hadji for thinking up with Khalid their impulsive and disastrous plot. If it had not been for that, the peace of the valley need never have been disturbed till the orders for the rising went out. He added the insult of showing me my revolver in my own belt round his waist.

The life of the village began. From my window I could see a few men working on the strips of garden along the irrigation channels. Then movement on the top of the ridge caught my eye—a bobbing head on the skyline and a very distant horseman threading his way westwards through the scrub. I was wildly cheered to see that they had put out scouts to give warning of any approach from the plain of Tripoli. Resistance could not be their intention. You don’t defend a secret headquarters when there is a chance of being surrounded; you get the hell out in plenty of time.

The morning wore on. Coffee and flat Lebanese bread were brought to me. About eleven Moustofi Khan called, looking as if he had not had much sleep. All the same he was friendly and asked me if I needed anything. I said I hoped M. d’Aulnoy would soon be able to find the time to talk to me. He replied that Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec had already opened negotiations. Marvellous woman! I could safely bet that she had found some warmth remaining in d’Aulnoy and had at once begun to play for her own hand. That made my story all the more plausible.

Soon after Moustofi Khan left, I heard thuds and bumping down below. As nothing was being carried in from the street which I overlooked, it was certain that the quarry room was being emptied. My very optimistic deduction from the glimpse of two scouts turned out to be true, and I was as elated as if my whole plan were successful instead of merely beginning as it should. That mood did not last long. Now that the move-out was a reality, my assumption that the party would spare a horse for me seemed unwarranted. I had always reckoned that if they intended I should disappear the farmhouse was a more convenient spot for the job than the village, where both the inhabitants and Biddy must suspect what had happened. But did it matter what they suspected?

So when Ahmed came to fetch me and said no more than ‘Outside!’ I had trouble in keeping a stiff and military upper lip. After prison loneliness, the thoughts of any imaginative man are bound to play over the greater loneliness of death. He took me down the stairs and round the corner of the house into the ground floor which was littered with cases and bags ready for roping on to the packhorses. The transmitter was there, lashed to a pallet with shafts so that it could be carried by two horses in single file. It was not large, designed for a range of only a few hundred miles, and powered by a treadle generator.

The entrance to the quarry room was ingeniously simple. No trap doors or hollow flooring or sliding panels. In Yasser’s ground floor four stalls for dairy cows or horses had been excavated, each with a ramp leading down to it. On a raid of the place I should never have spotted anything wrong. If I had asked myself why a farmer should want to dig out the surface rock, loose though it was, rather than build up partition walls with stone and mortar, I should have assumed it was due to some traditional Arab method of building derived from King Solomon’s stables or the pits which are essential for male camels to mount the females.

The back of each stall, at the deep end, was of timber—a reasonable choice for the easy attachment of mangers, rings and hooks and arousing no suspicion. One of these backs, indistinguishable from the others, swung open as a gate. And there you were in the quarry room.

I had visualised something very much larger. It was less than half the size of the little yard above, its walls lined with cupboards and working surfaces all of rough, local joinery. One ventilating shaft must somehow have been concealed by the olive tree; another was a wide conduit leading to the bank of the stream, which one would have taken for a yard drain. There was no luxury of any sort. In fact it was a stark headquarters bunker, possibly imitated from the Maginot Line. There were six bunks in two tiers along the far wall, a long table down the middle of the room, an arms rack full of weapons and enough hard chairs for a conference. Everything else had been removed for packing.

Nobody was in the bunker except Biddy. The purpose of the confrontation was obvious to any security man; our talk would be overheard—more probably by a direct listener than any bugging devices, which were rare in those days. Before she could open her mouth to say more than hello, I rushed over to her as if delighted that she was alive. I remember how she stood disturbed, lonely, large and to a sculptor possibly beautiful. It was easy to throw my arms round my only ally.

I kissed her warmly and whispered in her ear:

‘Quarrel with me!’

She at once pushed me away with every appearance of annoyance.

‘What have you let me in for?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know. I thought d’Aulnoy had a little flat in one of the houses.’

‘But you should have known! What is he doing?’

I said it looked as if he expected some of his Vichy friends to join him, and I supposed there was some kind of plot against the Free French administration.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘They just took me down.’

‘That’ll teach you to suggest getting money out of him.’

‘I didn’t suggest it. You did! I only thought that he might help me.’

‘A lot of help you’re going to get now!’

‘Don’t be so sure!’

‘And do me out of my cut, if you can. Is that it?’

‘I shall never speak to you again,’ she said with splendid, mem-sahib calm.

‘I doubt if you will. Thanks to you I’ll get shot.’

And I turned my back on her and settled down to a week-old Beirut newspaper.

It was now that I saw d’Aulnoy for the first time. He came in with the two Syrians who had ridden up three nights earlier. He looked me over, nodded coldly, had a reassuring word for Biddy and continued a conversation in Arabic. When his companions had chosen a couple of Lugers from the arms rack all three went out, taking Biddy with them.

Valerie’s description of him was very good, but for me he could never have held any sort of magnetism. He was altogether too like some War Office brigadier from the Guards, by which I mean that one could guess he was smooth, efficient, humane, and that he would look majestically commanding in the statue which—if he succeeded—would undoubtedly be erected to his memory in the Place Merj at Damascus. It was perhaps unfair to judge him in the middle of a serious emergency, but one missed any suggestion of joviality. Presumably his little boys and girls saw a more playful side to his character.

I was left to read my newspaper, a zombie of no importance perhaps condemned already but in any case so finally a prisoner that it no longer mattered what I saw. Hadji, Moustofi Khan and the Colonel drifted in and poured themselves drinks from a well-stocked cupboard bar. The Colonel had the decency to offer one to me; for him I seemed to be a prisoner-of-war, to be treated correctly even if I had put myself outside the pale by near treachery to my country for the sake of a bribe. Occasionally he broke off their conversation in German and courteously addressed a word to me in school English. Moustofi Khan must have mentioned that I spoke no other language but French.

They were simply three officers talking, as it were, in the ante-room of the mess, so that their conversation was at first of little interest. The Colonel regretted cheerfully that a horse could not be spared to move the bottles, and Moustofi Khan assured him that he would find plenty at Libwe. I gathered that after their D day, which was very close, Rear Headquarters would be at Libwe anyway, the quarry room with its impossible communications being abandoned. Then my ears started to work overtime at the mention of Youssef Mokaddem. Hadji said that Abdullah el Bessam was checking up on him and would meet them at the farmhouse to make his report.

‘I thought he wouldn’t let the money out of his sight,’ Moustofi Khan said.

‘He hasn’t. He went by car to Tripoli today and took it with him. He should be back at Libwe this evening.’

‘All those paymasters are the same,’ the Colonel remarked. ‘They put a corporal’s guard on five marks and want a receipt for it. What is Abdullah going to do when a guerrilla captain can’t write?’

I could only pray that Abdullah had been too nervous among armed and dangerous strangers to accuse Oliver then and there of being an impostor; but as soon as Hadji had Abdullah’s report he would instantly bring in Youssef Mokaddem for further questioning and eventual liquidation. He would have a few words to say to the dear blood brother in Galilee as well. As for my own position, I was bound to be under fresh suspicion just when I needed to escape attention as a nuisance of no importance.

I was left alone again while the rest of them, I think, were eating under the mulberry tree in the cool of the evening. I poured myself another glass from the cupboard—perhaps an offence for a prisoner-of-war but permissible to a condemned man—and was then myself served something to eat by a villager. At last Ahmed and two other fellows came in to remove the arms and poked me outside at the end of a rifle barrel.

The caravan was assembled in the village street. I looked anxiously at the horses, wishing I had Limpsfield’s eye. I fancied that the chestnut and the grey from Sir were there, but could only recognise for certain the roan with the white star. The baggage train was quite small, most of the load—like that of any other headquarters—consisting of paper and office equipment. We started off up the hill with Moustofi Khan and one of his servants leading the procession; then came the two Syrians, d’Aulnoy, Biddy, Hadji and the Colonel. Last were Ahmed and myself. I was very glad that the baggage was behind us so that Ahmed could not drop back and stage a regrettable accident.

Their night journeys had always puzzled me, for it was hard enough in daylight not to stray off the Hermel track. Damned if they weren’t using cat’s eyes! The little glass reflectors could not be spotted among all those stones and pebbles, and they were not continuous. They had only been laid down in places where one would hesitate. Moustofi Khan of course knew the track inside out, but even he occasionally flashed a torch and picked up the point of light. I was not surprised that I had never noticed them. I did remember an occasional glitter which I had put down to quartz reflecting the sun.

There was no moon. Starlight in the clear mountain air was enough to distinguish blocks of black or grey a hundred yards ahead. I shivered sometimes when we rounded a spur and met an unexpected breath of breeze, for I was dressed only in shirt and shorts with a regulation khaki sweater. This delighted Ahmed, who told me that I might well be afraid since he personally intended to cut my throat. All the same, I enjoyed that night caravan in a resigned sort of peace. One way or the other I was going to my death, for I knew that I was capable of sitting down on the pile of rubble and pressing the plunger. I had been through it already in imagination. The certainty itself comforted me. You’ll understand that if you think back over your life and remember how, at rare intervals, you have been forced down to the rock bottom of your personality—down to the deep conviction that I am I and this is what I shall do. It’s what all these youngsters in their early twenties look for and miss and fuss about. They are not very likely to experience it before their thirties. It was never a matter, anyway, which bothered our generation or else we weren’t so articulate about it.

Well, as I say, the stillness of the night, the clink and smell of the horses, the murmur of the German voices ahead of me all combined into the kind of tranquilliser which the nurse shoves into you when you arrive in a panic at the hospital. I had no ill feeling for the enemy. Why should I? One was as gallant as Oliver and more determined. The other was a professional fighting man with the smell of victory in his nostrils. His extensive patch of anarchy between Nile and Caucasus was likely to be the last straw for the besieged British, and he could expect the highest of decorations if he survived. I thought he would rather not have received it at the hands of Hitler—probably romanticising him merely because he had offered me a drink.

We were now crossing the flat valley bottom, past the hillock from which Limpsfield and I had first set eyes on Moustofi Khan. At the ford there was only a trickle of water: just enough to scintillate white wherever ledges changed the course of the stream. Then for long miles we skirted the flank of Qurnat es Sauda and came to that engineered corner which led me to the track; and so down hill into the silent hollow where the farmhouse lay. There was no sign of Limpsfield and his detachment. Orders were to stay hidden and quiet, but I was sure they were not there.

It was around four a.m. On the flat ground outside the farmhouse a small party was waiting for us. Two Arabs with rifles slung were standing by the heads of four horses, two of them saddled for riding. The loads of the other two had been taken off the pack saddles and deposited on the ground: four small trunks of iron-bound leather. On one of them was sitting Abdullah el Bessam with his famous cushion under him. I believe a car had dropped him somewhere near the fig tree and he had then walked to the farm behind his trunks, infirmities making the back of a horse too painful.

Among that collection of leaders he appeared incongruously dressed except for his headcloth—as a business man who, let’s say, had taken out his wife, children and servants for a formal picnic and allowed himself to wear a suit of alpaca too light for the office. He could have used a packhorse girth for a belt, and the slope of his waistcoat from navel to chest was about equal to that of a volcano. On top of the lot sat a yellow, moon face with a perpetual smile.

This falsely jolly Chinese god of a man must have been invaluable to the movement for the ingenuity with which he circumvented the British banks, the Exchange Control and the Department of Economic Warfare, but I gathered that the Colonel found him merely comic.

‘I told you!’ he said to Hadji. ‘He wouldn’t leave it at Libwe. And then he sits on it hoping for another ten per cent before he pulls the plug! What’s the game now?’

‘Wait and talk.’

The party was too numerous for the usual routine of riding off in ones and twos unsuspected. I had visualised a much more compact body, not this uncertain separating and coalescing in the darkness as if nothing were yet settled. Our baggage horses were led into the building still loaded. Then two paraffin pressure lamps were lit and carried in. The white light glared through the entrance, and the Colonel ordered the doors to be shut. He was taking no chances. So far as I could tell from the points of flashlights and the moving black solids of men and horses he posted a sentry on the ridge and sent off three horsemen into the night to give warning of any stranger approaching from the direction of the Homs-Baalbek road. Meanwhile Hadji, Abdullah and d’Aulnoy were all talking together, and I heard the name of Youssef Mokaddem repeated.

Biddy and I had been ordered to dismount and were standing by the side of the track, opposite the farmhouse and on the edge of the scrub from which I had kept watch on it, with Ahmed guarding us. D’Aulnoy broke off his conversation with Abdullah el Bessam and came over to us. He told Biddy that she must have patience and need not be afraid; she was to stay where she was for the time being. He then turned to me and warned me that Ahmed had orders to shoot to kill if I tried to escape. I replied that I had no intention of trying and asked if we could not be allowed into the house where it would be easier to keep an eye on us without Ahmed continually waving my revolver under our noses.

‘You will remain here,’ he said, ‘until we need your help.’

‘Well, if I can carry a few things in for you…’

‘It is not that kind of help which I meant.’

I knew damn well he didn’t. It was obvious that they already suspected some kind of connection between Youssef Mokaddem and me. I wondered if other eyes but those of simple fellahin had observed the jolly naval officer. Any resemblance between him and that eager rebel, Youssef Mokaddem, had passed unnoticed as Oliver said it would. But now that Mokaddem was proved a fraud, memory could be running back and forth between cells and at least asking questions.

Some kind of interrogation within the farmhouse suited me very well so long as I had a chance to reach that pile of rubble. They were continually opening and shutting the doors. One reason was to talk to Abdullah el Bessam who remained seated on a trunk. He may have been reluctant to leave the cash in sole charge of his escort or, more likely, he was comfortable and disliked to heave up his bulk unnecessarily. Any way, one does not need the Pay at an operational conference.

If I had only been a more experienced soldier I might have foreseen the danger of orders which were too precise. God only knew whether Limpsfield was there, but, if he was, he could not be sure how to act or when. All these comings and goings, shadowy in darkness or momentarily exposed by the light from the door, were too fluid and indecisive. I had told him to push the plunger if the party showed signs of leaving. What I meant was that horses and guards might well be outside, but I had not said so. The position which I had foreseen, when all the leaders were inside the house, was in fact realised once or twice, except for Abdullah. Limpsfield could not know it, however. And, worst of all, no signal had been arranged from him to me or me to him, for I had never envisaged being left outside in the open. I thought of shouting to him to fire, but if he wasn’t there at all I should only arouse suspicion for nothing and be shot by Ahmed.

One of the mounted guards came trotting back and opened the door. Hadji and the Colonel came to talk to him in the doorway. He then led his horse in, and the two came out. That seemed to my impatience a perfectly clear sign of leaving the farmhouse and I waited for it to disintegrate. When nothing happened I was convinced that my detachment had never arrived. But again the movements had been indecisive—one in, two out.

Hadji and the Colonel took a couple of turns up and down the track. I had the impression that they were exasperated by the way deliberations were going. I heard the Colonel say:

‘…if Rashid Ali crosses the frontier tonight.’

‘He’d be safer here than in Damascus,’ Hadji replied.

‘But the fools want to turn this into his command post. That must be at Tripoli or fifty miles to the east. They can’t see it.’

‘It’s a safe spot for the transmitter if we open up this evening.’

‘Well, if it will make them happy.’

The transmitter and generator were still on their pallet between the horses. The Colonel ordered them to be led into the farmhouse, and followed himself. Hadji then turned to talk to the impassive Abdullah.

They were speaking Arabic, but near enough for me to see their gestures. It looked as if Hadji was insisting on Abdullah’s presence inside—more discussion of Youssef Mokaddem?—and Abdullah was unwilling to move. Finally Hadji made him get up, waving down his objections and physically urging him towards the door. He pointed to one of his own armed horsemen from the village as much as to say that Abdullah’s escort could not load the trunks and ride off with them even if it ever entered their heads.

The door of the farmhouse shut behind them. Abdullah’s cushion remained on top of one of the trunks. So far as I could see in the passing light of torches it was covered by a very rare Bokhara of yellow and blue of such fine weave as to be indestructible, and was indeed precious. Abdullah had made a half turn to go back and fetch it, but Hadji was not standing any more nonsense.

‘What’s in the trunks, do you think?’ Biddy asked.

‘Pay.’

‘How much?’

‘Enough cash to provide pocket money and supplies for a considerable body until one of the cities is in their hands. Cheques wouldn’t be much good.’

‘One can’t say it belongs to anybody.’

‘I shouldn’t try. Three rifles plus Ahmed.’

‘Fatty might at least lend me his cushion,’ she said. ‘This ground is so hard and I did give him tea once.’

God bless her, she had opened up a faint possibility! Three guards outside. Everyone else inside. I warned her to look as if we were talking about the weather and told her that there were two points from which I could blow up the farmhouse and that I must reach one of them.

‘Blaise, too?’

‘The trunks would just be blasted into the bushes. And they belong to nobody, as you said.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Walk down and sit on Abdullah’s cushion. Remember they are just a lot of natives, and you don’t see why you shouldn’t. The two guards will push you away. They may even try to lift you off. Sing out for Ahmed and say you’ll tell d’Aulnoy that they are insulting you.’

‘What happens then?’

‘Ahmed will go over to you, taking me along with him. People may come out of the house to see what the trouble is. That might give me a chance to dash in and blow it up. Or, if my men are here, they could do it. Either way you will be too near the door to have much chance of escaping.’

‘But you will be killed!’

‘So will they. That is war.’

‘If I take the chance, could I tell my husband it was a gallant act?’

That staggered me. If Ahmed had been watching my face, he could never have believed we were talking about the weather. It was a side of her which I had never had reason to suspect. What the hell does one know of the religious simplicities of one’s acquaintances?

‘I suppose there’s nothing braver.’

‘But I shouldn’t feel—well, quite honest.’

‘Biddy, we all have at least two motives for whatever we do.’

‘He’ll be so annoyed that I blew his pension.’

‘Won’t it be a very peculiar heaven if he gives a damn?’

‘But he trusted me. Both of us were so very dear to each other.’

‘That’s all that matters.’

‘When you talk like that, I almost wish it goes off. I’m not much use to anyone. Will they send Val home?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, here goes!’

She got up, just waving Ahmed aside with the explanation that she had a little need, and strolled the twenty yards to the horses and the trunks. She gave a nod to Abdullah’s escort, but she did not sit on the cushion as I had told her. She picked it up and began to walk back with the two guards hissing Arabic and grabbing the other end. Ahmed, still keeping his eye on me, ordered her to drop it. The door of the farmhouse remained obstinately shut. The voices were not loud enough for anyone to come out and see what the matter was.

Ahmed hesitated, knowing that she was a friend of his revered master and reluctant to use force. For a moment his attention was concentrated on this unseemly wrangle for the precious cushion. I made one dive for the scrub behind me and another for the thicker stuff a few yards uphill, where I dropped flat expecting a volley of shots. Ahmed, however, trusted to a powerful torch. I suppose he knew he had me at his mercy and—mixed motives again—was well aware that I was required for further interrogation and far more valuable alive than dead. Besides that, he did not want to be blamed for carelessness.

He was very close, but the myrtle behind which I was crouching was too dense for him to see me. He was a fool to use the torch at all, for he blinded himself. Even so, I had no chance whatever of crawling down to the track and running across it to Limpsfield’s exploder. He charged round the little thicket to get me and for a moment held the beam a bit too high. I was able to slide away into thicker, lower stuff. Of course he heard me and walked fairly straight towards my very inadequate cover. To my astonishment there was a quick slithering of feet far beyond my actual position. Ahmed strode on towards the sound, thinking that he had mistaken my cover and that I was getting too far away. Remember that there were patches of bare, stony ground where a man could move a few steps quickly and silently, so any slight change of position was conceivably possible even though we were never more than ten yards apart.

He must have spotted something moving, for at last he lost patience and fired twice. That allowed me to cross behind him with a couple of plunges which gave me two much better bushes for hide-and-seek. But this time I made far too loud a noise. He had no more doubt where I was and ran the beam of his torch systematically over the ground and through the cover. He was so intent on his hunting that he took no notice of a rustle out to his right. He may have thought that I was throwing sticks or stones to distract him—which wouldn’t have been a bad idea if I had ever had time to think of it—but he was almost within reach of me and knew it. As for me, my mind was wholly occupied with wondering if he would kill me when I put up my hands. I was just rising to my knees when I was suddenly covered by a thick shower of blood and Ahmed toppled over into the bush, his body suspended over me. My saviour had to be Holloway, but what he had done I could not then imagine. I shouted to Limpsfield to fire.

I never foresaw such complete, volcanic and utter devastation. The place was rickety anyway and the charges were heavy. A huge stone landed between Holloway and myself, missing us by inches as he was wiping his tulwar on the dead grass. I recovered my belt and revolver from Ahmed and observed, with almost more of a shock than the explosion, that he had no head.

As the echoes died away, there was nothing alive in or about the farmhouse. At least I hope not. I could hear one of the escort galloping away, and the sentry on the ridge escaped and bolted. The two guards who had been disputing the cushion with Biddy were dead. Two other human figures were distinguishable a few yards from the doorway. They must have gone out at the sound of the shots and were still near enough to be smashed down by flying stone and timber. All the horses were killed except for one knocked down but unhurt and three stampeding up the valley. I called to Wilson and Flowers to turn them if they could.

Meanwhile little runnels of red fire were worming their way under the debris. One of the paraffin lamps had probably been blown against something solid rather than straight into the sky. When a shaft of flame flickered high and clear I saw Biddy standing on the slope unhurt except for rips from the thorn into which she had been thrown. I found her absolutely deprived of voice. She gave a trembling nod when I asked her if she was all right. I had forgotten, perhaps not even noticed, that I was drenched with blood.

It was only then that cause and effect began to separate themselves clearly enough for me to ask Holloway what had happened.

‘Saw you were in trouble, sir, so I upped and cut ’is ’ead off. Sorry about the mess, but went through him same as butter, it did.’

Like the good soldier he was, he had taken orders as the word of God and considered how best to carry them out. The enemy, I had written, must be silenced in the most convenient manner without the use of fire-arms. And so, as we were not issued with commando knives or knuckle dusters, he had gone off to borrow a tulwar from the mule company.

How did executioners sometimes manage to make such a mess of the job? I suppose Holloway’s tulwar struck right between vertebrae. He was quite unmoved—more inclined to rub his hands with the proper satisfaction of an old cavalryman. A typical Englishman. As individuals the French and Germans aren’t in it with us when it comes to bloodshed. Our fault in war is that on the rare occasions when we actually bring superior forces to bear at the decisive point we are not very proud of it. We prefer the more sporting tradition of Agincourt.

Limpsfield, the kindly and considerate gamekeeper, was aghast at the effect of so simple a movement of his hand. He was not trained as a sapper. Nor was I, for that matter. We comforted ourselves with a singularly false heartiness and turned to the business of catching the three loose horses which were cantering back down the valley followed by Wilson, Flowers and Boutagy. Holloway and Limpsfield got one each, and the third came up to them of its own accord. Any port in a storm, like the rest of us.

The parched June undergrowth had now caught, and the fire was spreading over the ridge and on in the direction of the Hermel road. I had always hoped that if I survived and the operation were successful my party could retire at once up the track and that our responsibility for this regrettable explosion might never be known. Explanations were too difficult since, though I could always offer the proof of the quarry room, I had not much else without producing Oliver. When I put the problem to Limpsfield, he agreed with me. If it was a toss-up, he said, whether we received decorations or a spell in the glass-house, it was wiser to ensure that we got neither. He also pointed out that identification of the bodies would not be easy—at any rate until the cinders were raked over by experienced police. Even then the residue was likely to remain nameless.

The four trunks had been blasted across the track into the bushes, their iron bands and strong cowhide merely distorted. I felt that the worldly half of Biddy, now relieved of awkward explanations to the late colonel, should have its reward. The broken pack saddles were still hanging together enough to be trusted for a few miles, so we loaded up two of the horses, kept the third for riding and allowed the winded fourth, now on its legs, to wander off.

Before we started Boutagy came up to me holding a small bag and asked if he was right to assume that I wished to keep our ‘victorious expedition’ as secret as it had been up to the present. I replied that secret was a strong word, but I certainly intended to be thoroughly unhelpful if questioned. So far as I was concerned, some party of arms traffickers had managed to blow themselves up, and that was all.

‘The villagers may believe it was an accident,’ he said, ‘but they know that you and Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec were with the party, and they will talk.’

I doubted if anyone would ever make the connection between a mysterious explosion near Hermel and a remote hamlet on the Tripoli side of the range. But Boutagy was right. Whispers of our departure with the caravan and conjectures as to how we had survived could reach Sir and be passed from Sir to Magnat.

‘Might I be allowed to deal with these villagers, sir?’ Boutagy went on. ‘I understand the Moslem fellahin. They are dirt.’

I did not agree with his estimate, and Oliver would have gone up in the air with indignation. But Boutagy came of Christian clans which had preserved their faith and homes and women against peasant and pasha through eight hundred years of raid and counter-raid. I asked what he proposed.

‘I shall go into the village with Ahmed’s head while the rest of you are out of sight above the valley. I shall hang it by its hair from a branch and call the men together and show them what the British Secret Service will do if they utter a word. Of d’Aulnoy and the rest they are to know nothing. You and Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec were never there. If they keep their foul mouths shut, they may be sure of our protection. If they do not, we shall take a head a week to provide company for Ahmed.’

I asked him if he was not afraid to go in alone.

‘Afraid of them? When I appear from nowhere with this in my hand—’ he pulled Ahmed’s head out of the bag and held it up to mine as if turning me to stone ‘—it is they who will be afraid. I am an Arab, a man of mystery, whom they have never seen before, telling them that all their friends are dead.’

‘The sergeant-major has taught you to ride a motorbike, hasn’t he?’

‘He has, sir. After office hours. I hope you did not mind.’

‘Well, you might bring mine up with you. It’s under Yasser’s house, the biggest in the village.’

There was an inevitable, unpleasant sequel to his plan which I will not expand. Obviously I had to poke Ahmed’s body into one of the outlying parts of the furnace.

Limpsfield and his detachment had hidden their bikes higher up the track. We were away in ten minutes. None of the citizens and police of Hermel, roused from their beds by the explosion and the glare, could have been more than half way to the farmhouse, and it was most unlikely that they would ever see us traversing the exposed slopes in the grey of dawn and through the rolling smoke. I led the party on Holloway’s bike. Boutagy rode pillion behind Limpsfield and Biddy behind Wilson, their seats padded by rags—of which there was no shortage when far enough from the flames to be collected. Holloway brought up the rear, riding the spare horse and driving the two packhorses in front of him. On that baked ground the motorcycles left little detectable track. What there was I hoped would be muddled by the three following sets of hooves.

When the sun rose we were already at the ford, and stopped to rest and wash. I discarded and buried my sweater and soaked my shorts in the stream. The remarks of my men when led by the skipper in his underpants with his shorts strapped to his belt and floating out behind showed more affection than discipline. There was also some ribaldry—when Biddy was temporarily absent—at Sergeant Wilson’s expense. That formidable bosom was never designed for riding pillion.

She was standing the journey bravely and cheerfully. Well, in happier and simpler days the gallant young wife may have cantered her pony up the Khyber Pass for all I know, and eaten a sheep with Pathan chieftains far more murderous than anyone on the slopes of Qurnat es Sauda—except possibly Holloway and me. I could not decide what to do with her. I had intended to send her straight home through the village, but Boutagy’s scheme made that impossible. One can’t go waving the valued butler’s head in front of his employer.

We were above the village before midday and halted in that trackless scrub beyond the clearing and rubbish dump while Boutagy went marching down with his bag. I crawled to the edge of the escarpment to watch, ready to intervene with a rescue party if required. I could see nothing of Boutagy since he was under the mulberry tree, but I did see the men he was addressing. They looked threatening at first, then all moved an involuntary step back at the point when he must have shown the head and hanged it from a branch. I could hear a faint wail of sorrow which was Ahmed’s requiem. Bowing and obsequious, they led Boutagy into Yasser’s house and surrounded him at a respectful distance as he wheeled out the motorcycle. It started at first kick—which it never did for me—even the carburettor obeying that cruel and sinister agent of the British Secret Service.

When he roared over the top of the ridge I congratulated him on his magnificent performance. He accepted my compliments, standing romantically to attention, but said he had bad news. Miss Valerie, though the house was watched, had disappeared while her mother and I were prisoners. The men anxiously protested their innocence and swore that not one of them would have harmed her if she had stayed.

I was pretty sure what had happened—the cat getting out again. And right under the noses of a vigilant and determined organisation! I told Biddy that we should certainly find her at the section billet, but had an uneasy feeling that I could be wrong. Miss Valerie had had about enough of loneliness and inexplicable intrigue. She knew where to go to find simplicity.

The possibilities were daunting. You don’t see it? Well, I’ll give you a sample. Valerie fished out of the harbour. Valerie weeping over Ibrahim el Amr with his throat cut. Valerie shouting at her mother that they had been at it for months and that, no, he wasn’t a wog but Oliver Enwin. And Lord only knows what complications if Biddy started calling in old friends to the rescue!

I was determined to get a glimpse for myself of the other side of the hill and present the findings to Biddy in my own words before she could get unduly excited; one could be sure she would not serve her daughter’s interests as self-sacrificingly as she had served her country or me or whatever you like to call it. So I changed my plans. I sent her straight home through the village behind Sergeant Wilson, telling him to stay with her till further orders and to drive past the mulberry tree at such a speed that she would be wholly occupied by the bumps and ruts. She was very tired and not unwilling, assuming that Valerie must be with my men in Tripoli.

Before she left she cast a longing eye on the two horses and their load. I had long since decided that if the money was exchangeable it was to be hers—ill-gotten gains providing the strongest of all motives for silence. So I promised her that her baggage would be shortly delivered, allowing Limpsfield and the rest to think that the trunks belonged to her. There was no one to whom I could give the stuff back and I would never have given the section any reason for suspecting me of making money on the quiet.

So we threaded our way along the last of the Hermel track down to the plain through that maze of paths without any stop for explanations at the café—just a cheery wave to say that again we had found no deer.

On arrival I found that Valerie had never called at the billet and that neither Zappa nor Davila had heard any whispers of her presence in the town. I cleaned up and went down to have dinner at my El Mina bar. There I had news of her. She had turned up, looking very tired and dusty, in the course of the previous afternoon—it seemed like two years ago—and immediately asked for Ibrahim el Amr. The Christian proprietor had naturally never heard of him, but mentioned the name to a ragged old vendor of peanuts and sunflower seeds who used to hang around the bar. Only ten minutes later, the proprietor said, she had been fetched by a Moslem seaman from one of the Ruad caiques and had firmly refused any other escort. Though she had not been seen since, an anonymous note had been delivered, in neat European handwriting, that she was all right and that the police were not to be informed. There was more than a suspicion, I think, that she had fallen into my wicked clutches.

I congratulated the proprietor on his tact, said nothing and went home to bed. You’ll think that I was unchivalrous, wholly unconcerned at the fate of beauty in distress. But there was nothing I could do. The situation was entirely in Oliver’s hands. For all I knew, it could be the end of both of them if I started making enquiries and stirred up the rats’ nest. I presumed that news of the death of all the leaders had reached Tripoli, that the rising was off and that informed circles were looking for traitors and awaiting arrest in a state of screaming Arab hysteria.

Next morning I put on an affectionately laundered shirt and shorts, polished my Sam Browne and called at Ninth Army. The I (b) office rang with the Hermel Incident, as it was already christened. Sabotage? French agents taking action on their own? A quarrel between arms traffickers? Signals were buzzing between Army Headquarters, Beirut and Cairo, for it had been established that the explosion was no accident. The exploder and its wires had been found. My opinion was not asked. I was merely an interested audience for excited gossip.

On my way out I passed Reggie Paunce in the corridor. He stopped to say that if the local Gestapo paid more attention to their job than to private correspondence, it would be impossible for terrorists to carry on under their noses and then blow themselves up. I reminded him respectfully that we had nothing to do with civil security and that Hermel was a hundred miles from my district anyway.

Repercussions? Well, I’ll jump forward and deal with the purely military angle while we are on the subject. The bodies of Moustofi Khan and those two Syrian notables were identified. So was the exploder, which had been stolen from a depot of engineering stores in Palestine. Jeremy Fanshawe, I heard, had several fruitless interviews with the Jewish Agency trying to find out which particular band of inflammable Zionists were carrying on a private war in the Lebanon. Abdullah el Bessam vanished without trace—due to the added fuel of all that fat no doubt. As for d’Aulnoy and the two Germans, gelignite leaves no evidence of nationality except in a laboratory. One must not forget—I certainly didn’t—that an army on active service abroad does not have the full resources of Scotland Yard.

No, no repercussions except for some questions, which I vaguely answered, about reported movements of my section in and around Sir. The only reprimand I received was for pulling Magnat’s leg in the matter of some lousy lieutenant of gendarmerie whose disappearance he was fussing about, together with a warning that I had to be more polite to the French and must not expect them to understand my thoroughly irresponsible sense of humour. I was also asked to co-operate with an official inquiry into what motorcycles, if any, had been lost or stolen in local campaigns, so we must have left tracks outside the farmhouse which were traced back to the Hermel road. But nobody bothered to look for them among the rocks and scrub on the flanks of Qurnat es Sauda. To this day I cannot find the Hermel-Sir track marked on any map.

I won’t say I foresaw all this as I left Headquarters, but it seemed a very possible outcome. I was not over-bothered about the baffled military. What could destroy me was Oliver Enwin and the dear Ronson-Bolbec family. Their joint capacity to get me shot at dawn with the option of the evening was far more imminent than that of Security Intelligence Middle East.

When I got back to my hotel the reception clerk, sounding very impressed, informed me that an Arab Dignitary was waiting to speak to me in the upstairs lounge. I pictured some Cadi or Imam from Homs with an awkward bit of evidence which would be most costly to suppress. A flurry of robes was sitting in a dark corner of the room, and at first sight I thought they contained some desert sheikh. His beard, though still scanty, had already a perceptible curl. I put on my best manners for the benefit of the waiter and ushered him to my room.

‘Just back from Mecca, Oliver?’

‘From Muscat. You should remember.’

‘You’ve heard the news?’

‘Yesterday at midday. It was you?’

‘I was among those present, yes.’

‘I don’t know how you could bring yourself…’

‘I have been waiting to express my feelings for Hitler for some time—ever since he fooled my beloved country into thinking he was an affectionate uncle. Where’s Valerie? And get on with it!’

‘Back in the valley.’

‘Does nothing ever change?’

‘Yes. She is married.’

‘You mean, you took advantage…’

‘Why not? I did not think she was likely to see you and her mother again, and it’s quite legal by Moslem law. But I am afraid the success of Field Security has complicated our future.’

Legal? Well, he had the requisite witnesses. He had the consent of the bride who was over the age of puberty. He paid a formal dowry. And a Moslem is at liberty to marry a Christian. The marriage was a farce since the bridegroom did not exist. But so long as he could remain Ibrahim el Amr, it was good.

‘Who has got the marriage certificate, if there is one?’

‘She has. In Arabic and French. She’ll have to produce it to Mummy some time soon.’

I was not surprised. These hillside affairs do tend to increase the population. I said that their chance of being reunited seemed to me slim.

‘I do not agree,’ he replied in a tone which suggested that he already considered himself the responsible father of a family. ‘I am leaving tonight by caique for Turkey. I shall need a few months to make a living. When I have done so, you can send me Valerie by the Taurus Express.’

‘But too many people know who Ibrahim el Amr is.’

‘No, they don’t. Tripoli thinks he is Youssef Mokaddem. So do the German agents in Turkey. And they are not likely to contact me till all this blows over, if ever.’

‘What about British agents?’

‘Try to check up on a citizen of Muscat who is living quietly in Turkey and has bribed the local police! You might get a reply from the Muscat Residency in six months that no Ibrahim el Amr is known. So what? He’s a refugee from Sumatra. His family has been there for a hundred years. And that’s the end of it. You can’t get a security report from the Japanese.’

With Hadji and Abdullah out of the way, he had some reason for confidence—or what Oliver would call confidence. He told me how Abdullah had turned up in town and required Ibrahim el Amr to call on him. Oliver sent back one of his toughs with a peremptory reply that if any calling was being done Abdullah would do it.

‘He didn’t like risking his belly in that rabbit warren of warehouses,’ Oliver said. ‘He knew at once that I was not the real Youssef Mokaddem but hadn’t the guts to denounce me to my face. My chaps saw what sort of man he was and put on a show just to make him wobble with fear.’

However, Ibrahim el Amr knew that he had little chance of escape. He had bid his hand too high and Hadji had called the bluff. Then Valerie turned up, having jumped for her cedar branch in the darkness and nipped straight up the hillside while front door and back were guarded. She had managed to flit round the outskirts of Sir over channels and walls without being spotted, which I thought impossible. Foam-born Aphrodite must have cast a veil over her. At dawn she got a lift from a peasant cart going into Tripoli market. I haven’t much respect for Arabs, as you know, but one must admit that very commonly they have an unquestioning chivalry more straightforward than our own.

When Ibrahim el Amr heard of her arrival, he ordered his guerrillas to bring her in and pulled out all the stops of oratory. He exclaimed that many of them would be dead before the Germans landed, that the girl was bearing his child and that they must be married so that she could inherit his wealth. Valerie of course didn’t give a damn whether she was married to Oliver by Moslem rites or a witch-doctor with a pattern of intertwined testicles painted on his forehead. She remained orientally meek. She never gave away that he was anything but her Moslem lover. And by those rats down in the warehouses it was considered a triumph that one of their leaders should have bagged such a honey of obvious breeding from the ruling race.

Next day came the deadly news. With unknown retribution on the way, Ibrahim el Amr, like the rest of them, was free to do the best for himself that he could.

‘And what the hell do you think you’re going to do when the caique puts you ashore?’ I asked.

‘In these countries there is always something for an active man.’

‘But you don’t speak Turkish.’

‘It will take me four and a half months. Meanwhile there is Greek and Arabic.’

A vista of unpardonable crimes stretched away into the future. Helping a deserter to escape to a neutral country. Smuggling currency. Conniving at a pretended marriage to a pure little English lily with cousins in Parliament and the War Office. But, as against all that, and always assuming that some officious Turk or Briton did not intercept the caique, I should be delivered from Captain Oliver Enwin for good.

The temptation—combined perhaps with a measure of human charity—was too great for me. I walked over to the billet and collected the four trunks. While Oliver hid in the bathroom, my men brought them up to my room, undoubtedly thinking that I was going to make a discreet and thorough security check of Biddy’s possessions before I returned them.

The bent and loosened locks gave us no trouble except for two which we had to cut out. When Oliver saw the contents, I pointed out to him that some capital would ease his way in Turkey and that it would be even more effective in calming down the situation up at d’Aulnoy’s villa. I tipped the lot on to the floor and ordered him to go through it carefully without allowing so much emotion to cloud his money-changer’s eye.

Abdullah el Bessam’s pay chests contained the equivalent of about fourteen thousand pounds in packets of old notes and new, mostly of small denominations. Oliver took the new, saying that he was sure he could get rid of them at a discount while Biddy would at once land herself in gaol if she took wads of them round to the bank. We left her something over eight thousand in old notes which she could safely dribble out for daily needs or change in quantity.

His portion fitted into a single trunk. After we had said good-bye in my room, the night porter carried it downstairs and, at Oliver’s request, sent for a hamal who would take it down to El Mina on his head. The hamal set off at his professional trot with Oliver striding behind—a dignified, old-fashioned figure careless of effete townsmen who took taxis, charitable towards the poor who used the tram. I watched him saluted by a Moslem policeman and his answering gesture which deprecated so great an honour. That was the last sight I have ever had of him.

Next day I presented the empty trunk to my laundry maid and drove to Sir, leaving the truck with Gunn while I walked up to the valley alongside Holloway and the three horses, one of them loaded with the two remaining trunks. Valerie’s welcome was cold and jittery—too unsure of herself even to take her usual refuge in moody silence. She could no longer live on the hope that one week or the next Oliver would turn up. He had told her that this time she must be patient indefinitely. And she had not the least idea how much I knew or what help I could be.

Biddy on the other hand was bouncing about, not unnaturally pleased with herself. As soon as Holloway had carried the trunks into the house and led off the three horses to the village—I don’t think they were theirs, but they must have been desperately needed—she asked me how much she had.

‘More than eight thousand pounds, and it’s safe to stick to it.’

‘Eight thousand!’ she yelled. ‘Oh, Val, we can go home! Where’s the rest of it?’

I ignored the suggestion that I was not behaving like an officer and a gentleman and explained that the rest was in trust for Valerie. Valerie shook her head at me violently behind her mother’s back, but I quieted her down with the discreet wave of a conductor silencing the woodwind.

‘Val is quite irresponsible,’ her mother complained. ‘Just look at the way she disobeyed and escaped to Tripoli!’

‘I think she was very sensible. She knew very well that she might not see either of us again.’

‘But she had only to go to Reggie or someone and be sent home. I can’t think what she was doing down there.’

The perfect opening. I nodded to Valerie to bear down on the kettledrum.

‘I got married,’ she said.

‘But you haven’t had time! Who to?’

I was desperately afraid she would say Oliver Enwin. But of course she could not. The certificate would have been worthless. She produced it for our inspection.

‘Ibrahim el Amr!’ I exclaimed, doing my best to express surprise and admiration. ‘But I didn’t know you knew him!’

‘We have been meeting.’

I was eloquent. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. I said that he came of an old Arabian family, was educated in the west, a descendant of the Prophet and of immense distinction. I almost believed myself. There was a truth independent of truth in my last glimpse of Oliver when the policeman saluted him.

Biddy took her face out of her hands.

‘Has he got any money?’ she asked.

‘He will have.’

‘But where is he? When can I see him?’

‘Not for a while. He’s gone to Turkey.’

And, by God, I hoped he had only to wait for night to land! When I walked back to Sir with Wilson and Holloway, I began to realise that again I had created about as much trouble as I had prevented. But all remaining problems were out of my hands. Rommel settled them for me. At the end of June, when there was nothing between him and Alexandria but our last stronghold of El Alamein, all British women were evacuated.

Biddy was shipped home with her money changed to sterling. Valerie insisted on going to the British Embassy in Ankara. Cables flew back and forth, and the cousins gave orders from Whitehall. So I did in fact send her up by the Taurus Express as instructed. I think Biddy was only too pleased to hand responsibility to her unknown son-in-law. She was all right, Jack. And even if she never got the château, at least she was able to cheer her old age by long holidays in something damn near a deer park between Adana and the mountains.

I would love to know her reaction when she met Ibrahim after the war. She must have recognised him. But it would not have been difficult for Valerie to threaten her into silence. Social position, you see. What was little Oliver Enwin compared to this romantic and scholarly figure, already accepted in diplomatic society, whose marriage was an idyll of East and West. I can hear her saying how in India she and her husband always accepted distinguished Mohammedans as equals. Not wholly hypocrisy, bless the old fool! If there’s any illusion of money where she is, I hope it’s her husband who signs the cheques.

Ah, I see that at last the name means something to you! It’s so hard to combine two different identities in one’s memory, as Oliver said. Yes, my dear man, he is the Ibrahim el Amr, the Professor of Oriental Languages who writes articles for The Times and is invited to Washington whenever they need a tip straight from the stable. Naturally I have never gone near them. Nobody else knows who he is, and the children, I hear, are brilliant. I don’t want them all to start fussing about what I might give away. Somebody may have recognised him once, for I was told in the club a story of his masquerading as a British officer in the war. For what purpose was unknown. But it was all very patriotic, and an example of the love felt for us by the most distinguished Arab notables.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1971 by Geoffrey Household

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

978-1-5040-0661-3

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter One: THE DESERTER

Chapter Two: KNIGHT ERRANT

Chapter Three: SECRET AGENT

Chapter Four: IBRAHIM EL AMR

Copyright