Stewart, Angus Read online

  'And I'd thought you simply a nice, ordinary girl with a strong head for the Old Man's depth charges.' The officer stood up, sniffing with some embarrassment, as the outer door closed behind the rating. He unlocked a small safe built beneath the bunk on which he had been sitting. 'A coded message came this morning. And there's this.' He handed Caroline a sheet of blue paper and a heavy package. 'Not a very lady-like model, I'm afraid.'

  Caroline smiled briefly. 'Silencer?' She was incurious. Any real importance would lie in the message.

  'Well, yes. Only we had to knock that up on board, actually. Bit unusual. Not much demand, you see.—Eh, what happens if that thing drops out of your handbag in the High Street or whatever?'

  Caroline looked up from pencilling correlates beneath the jumbled figures that composed the coded message. 'Silly girl protecting her virginity. I'm too pretty and patrician to be gaoled for long.'

  'I see. Just as well the silencer looks like a bit of Sparks' brass bedstead then, I suppose.'

  The message was coming out: 'Dingo retired wander sector C weight lead in sandtray and abort.'

  Caroline re-read what she had written with mixed irritation and relief. Her sacking from the orphanage clearly no longer mattered. Perhaps it had even been arranged. In that case the inspiration must he London's, since presumably the Moroccan grande dame was also interested in maintaining the status quo. Yet how could a girl possibly wander into the desert and assess troop strength and disposition? And why? Was their network so impoverished as to have no sources in the south? Wasn't there some equivalent of a U.2.? Or couldn't one be borrowed? A wave of purely feminine irritation rose in Caroline. She was supposed simply to settle in Tangier and wait, within a quite loose liaison of passive eyes and ears. The death of her Australian contact presumably was responsible for the cancellation of the scheme. It had clearly also been taken as negating her own long term usefulness. She began to envisage some brain in London inspired only by the thought of whatever could now be done with that girl. It fitted with the crassness of christening an Australian 'Dingo', albeit for use only in cipher: with a mind whose unconscious was curiously revealed as thinking of foreign armies as toy soldiers in mock array on a table top . . .

  She found herself looking at the clumsy parcel made of the gun. Had the Australian been the man with whom the little boy had lived? The system was that one knew only of contacts considered either junior or inferior. In Tangier she knew of precisely one. The child had described violent death—witnessed it. That precluded any leak as to her own identity under duress. Yet the issue of a gun, after whose silencer she had so automatically asked, suggested danger to herself. Again, perhaps the dead Australian had been someone else . . .

  'You have a telephone?' she asked the naval officer.

  He led her to one in the radio compartment. At four o'clock there was already gin in Lady Simpson's voice.

  'It's Caroline!' Caroline said brightly. 'A frightful thing's just occurred to me about the roses. The child almost certainly forgot to water them before bringing them to you, and I . . .'

  'Roses?' Lady Simpson's voice lacked none of its imperiousness.

  'Why, haven't they arrived?' Caroline was incredulous. 'The child set off,' she lied.

  'Then, dear, they may simply have got no further than my maid. I asked not to be disturbed. A terrible thing has happened.'

  'Can I help at all?' Caroline filtered concern into her voice.

  'I think not, dear. An old friend has taken his own life. Dan was a rough diamond, but he had a heart of gold. He had been ill. But I just can't understand it'

  'I'm terribly sorry.' Caroline had no need to pervert feeling now. Yet it wasn't clinched. 'Dan,' she said deliberately. 'Was he one of the English residents?' There was a pause, in which she could picture Lady Simpson's straying attention exactly.

  'English? Why no, dear. He had colonial origins. An Australian.'

  Keeping her grimness to herself, Caroline commiserated as best she could; then produced some final chatter about the non-existent flowers, before ringing off. Her course now had better be to contact the one man in the city whose name she had been allowed to know. Perhaps he was already a suicide too.

  Her face may have been over severely set. At least the first officer, still showing signs of embarrassment, sensed the need to obviate either the one phenomenon or the other with levity.

  'None of my business,' he said, and laughed nervously, 'but that silencer. Rather suggests a double-O prefix or whatever, doesn't it?'

  'None of your business, right!' Caroline smiled happily now that her mind was made up. 'But I'm not going to kill anyone. One's issued—or is supposed to be—whenever a gun is. In fact I'm not taking the gun. "Rejected by operative" is the form of words—perhaps you wouldn't mind writing that on the package.' The first officer looked poised for a valediction about bravery and good luck, and the hurried on: 'Could Denning run me into Tangier? The children's bus won't want to go for some time.'

  'I'll call him.' The officer took cue from her briskness.

  Caroline lit a cigarette, burned the message, and stepped from the caravan into the heavily damp mist. Somehow she must get south and count soldiers.

  * * * * *

  His shoes were broken. He had tried several tricks and pleas but, with no money left for the bus, he had been walking two days. Now Achmed could see the city, standing white in the hot afternoon sun. From boredom he had begun counting the concrete posts with their red painted tops. Jay had called them Olympics because they looked like the tipped cigarettes. It had been on a first-class rapido with green windows they had ridden once to Tetuan. Achmed still smouldered with resentment at his father. When he had returned with food from Larache, he had simply taken the remaining money from him. Achmed had stored his possessions in the family chest, then left.

  A thousand Olympics, and he had missed some, thinking. He ceased counting altogether. Frederick's sister would not have arrived; but it was the day of Raphael's party. He carried nothing but his flute, and the gold about his neck, so that he could prove his identity to Frederick's sister. He wondered now whether she would mind its having been melted. The Jesus man's feet still showed. Thinking about this made him look at his own. Rachid would mend and clean his shoes for no money.

  The road now was lined with very tall trees. They didn't grow in the hills, and he didn't know their name. Their trunks were peeling, striped with brown and the colour of old bone, and their dagger-like leaves hung down, looking tired and heavy with dust, although it was only the beginning of summer. In places the road was still unrepaired where it had cracked and broken with the weight of winter rain that flooded the streams coming down from the mountains. Achmed crossed a bad patch, crudely bridged with rubble and railway sleepers. The water-course was quite thy. As he topped the rise on the other side the city was much nearer, and he had his first glimpse of the curving beach and bright sea. He began happily to whistle a tune he had heard on the radio, his lips struggling to encompass the sounds, which were quite different from any his flute made.

  He was in the suburbs when he saw the first of the special troops, and knew that the king must be coming. This excited him. He asked some of the soldiers when the king might arrive. Perhaps tomorrow, they told him.

  He stood now in front of the bookshop. Palely, but perceptible to his carefully searching eyes, the light still burned its the window. There too, undisturbed, was the book from which he had torn the picture of the lions. He had left it deliberately balanced so that he would know if anything in the window had been moved. There were few people about in the European town. The shops were shut. Suddenly he felt hungry and turned towards the Medina. With the Tanjoua excitedly expecting the king, someone would give him food.

  * * * * *

  'But I'm only part time!' Brown protested. 'Who's going to look after my little boy?'

  When he answered the door, the strange woman had simply walked quickly through his flat and waited for him to join her on the
balcony. There she had proposed that he chauffeur her south.

  'You must consider your own son,' Caroline said now.

  Brown looked in angry amazement at the woman who mysteriously commanded this secret. 'Don't tell me why I'm still in this business,' he said after a moment. An idea was forming in his mind. Manolo already had a British passport. 'When do you want to go?' he asked.

  'Tomorrow.'

  'Tomorrow! But Manolo's got a dentist appointment. He'll skip it if I'm not here. How important is all this?'

  'The trip south is simply my instructions.' Caroline was guarded. 'You probably know more about what's happened here.'

  'My security rating is pretty low, you know.' Brown regarded her ironically. 'Even here. There was an innocent old man called Halliday. He got killed. Then Dan Gurney got killed. He was important, though how much so I've no idea. But he was the clearing house for anything people like Halliday and myself happened to pick up. Our brief, as you know, was simply to be alive to any current, overt or otherwise, that might represent an irritant—or future threat—to the status quo. We're a sloppy and half-hearted lot. Killings are unprecedented. And certainly not allowed for in the salary scale. Mine's two hundred pounds a year, as a matter of fact. So what these deaths mean, heaven knows. They're decidedly cheating. I'm quite sure no Republican—and that means communist—coup is either imminent, or likely. But it would appear they have got bored all of a sudden with being watched—however naively—by London. A trouble is that, with Gurney gone, I've no means even of knowing whether this sort of rude escalation is happening in other parts of the country.—Have you?'

  Caroline shook her head. 'Perhaps we'll learn more in Marrakesh.'

  'You have a contact there?'

  'Only consular.'

  'How long do you want to be away?' The girl's blue eyes continued to regard him steadily, and Brown was beginning to feel resigned.

  'Say ten days at most.'

  'Then I'm putting Manolo on the morning 'plane to Gib.'

  'Won't he miss his dentist appointment?' Caroline mocked gently.

  'Better than have someone break in here with a gun looking for me. In fact I see us all in considerable danger,' Brown said, leading up to it. 'How important are you? Do you have a direct link with London?'

  'I can contact London.'

  Brown looked steadily at her. Something told him that this girl could not be threatened. Perhaps threats were only a complicating expedient with any woman. But about this person Caroline Adam he sensed an added wilfulness. Her hair, straight falling chestnut that curled forward attractively an inch clear of her shoulders, the neat, gentle mouth, which he placed suddenly now as touched by some disconcerting echo of Manolo's, were startlingly out of key with her eyes. It was as if these had far outgrown the innocence of her other features. At this moment too they had the hard, almost double-glazed imperturbability of the true intellectual. Their gaze, her presence, were alike an unnerving experience for Simon Brown.

  'Look,' he faltered, 'I have a problem with my child. And I don't know who the hell felt they had the moral right to tell you. Or why. And I don't care. But with Gurney and Halliday violently killed, the situation has turned dangerous and professional, and certainly beyond me. Now I'm apparently being asked to motor you to a war in the middle of the desert into the bargain. I'll do it; but in return I want a marriage certificate that will legitimatise my son. The details I have all ready worked out. For the convenience of London, the ceremony took place in Gibraltar. I'd like to collect the proof within three days at Marrakesh. As a matter of fact the —eh, she and I made a day trip to Gib at about the right time—I have police friends both sides, who made it possible . . .'

  Brown had looked away from the girl while he spoke. On this edge of the city the ground was open. Below the balcony a boy in a ragged djellaba stood timelessly leaning upon a stave amid his grazing goats. Beyond him, the squat white bulk of the French cathedral, with its orange tiled spire and roof, caught the full splendour of the richer, gold light, that was characteristic of the hour before sudden dusk, and which turned the creeping shadows purple. The rounded, Charf hill stood brightly behind it, a modulation so neat as to be faintly comical, as if it had been contrived for a giant's Japanese garden. Lone, sentinel cypresses surrounded it: still, black fountains against the sky, which the wind could transform into wild horses' manes. They were the domestic boundary of the city; the last foreground, behind which, far away, was the dark etching of the Rif foothills. The cathedral clock chimed the half-hour. At any moment Manolo would be home. Brown could see some of his schoolfellows in the street below. They contrasted disconcertingly with the shoeless goatherd.

  'What do you think?' he said. 'Will you have a try?'

  Turned once more to the girl, he saw it was her softer features responding.

  'I'll do what I can,' Caroline said.

  A weight seemed removed from Brown, even against so tentative a promise, and hope. He smiled suddenly, gesturing into the flat. 'Then I'll get the note with everything you need to know—without addressing the concealed microphones in there!'

  'Fraud into history,' he said, returning, and handing her the note. 'Makes one think. Or perhaps it's prefer not to. There's my real name, girl's name, time, place, two witnesses signatures for forged transcription—an illiterate Arab on her side; on mine a Gibraltarian cigarette smuggler, later shot dead during an incident its the Strait. And a good fellow, as a matter of fact,' he added uncomfortably, holding out the sheet of paper.

  'You've prepared it all very carefully.' The girl's tone was matter of fact as she folded the note away. Perhaps it was only Brown's nervousness that detected irony, as if he were somehow implicated in a convenient death.

  'When Toni was dying in the Colonial Hospital he gave me his signature on a blank sheet of paper because I asked for it and because he knew whatever use I put it to would not dishonour him!' he burst out. 'The dead bury their dead. Nashib is just eighteen months old.—Now do girl spies take their first drink at four-thirty-three?' he went on, recovering, 'because on just averagingly distracting days like this I do.'

  Caroline shook her head. The smile, Brown saw, was intriguingly sweet, if sparingly released. It was as much in acknowledgement of this, as of Skipper Toni's memory, that he administered himself a stiff slug of contraband whisky standing at the ice box, before carrying a larger one back out on to the balcony. Caroline had seated herself in a deck-chair.

  Then let's to work for Queen and country,' he said. 'We leave tomorrow. How?'

  Caroline ground out a cigarette, emphasising practicality herself. 'On honeymoon.'

  'But that's bigamy! Or am I to become a Muslim?'

  'There need have been no actual ceremony.'

  'The situation's familiar,' Brown said.

  'But you will not be.' Caroline allowed herself the ghost of a smile. 'Now, I picked up these half an hour ago—from a man who "found them on the beach". Ten shillings the pair.'

  'Let me reimburse you!' Brown said gallantly. 'Why are there two?' The whisky, perhaps, was promoting a defensive stupidity in him.

  'The one with a stone is an engagement ring,' Caroline patiently explained, 'and the plain circlet is a wedding ring. A young bride commonly wears both. Study them, please'

  'Proceed,' Brown said profoundly, handing them back.

  'What's your car?'

  'Deux-chevaux.'

  'Get a sound Land Rover.'

  'Just like that?'

  'Mrs. Brown is loaded.'

  'For how long can I stay married to a Treasury appropriation?'

  Caroline smiled. 'Not a moment longer than I can help.' Brown started at the sound of a door. 'Manolo. It's been algebra and he'll be in a temper,' he explained quickly. 'Presumably the pretence doesn't take effect until we're clear of Tangier. Meanwhile there's the bafflement of my friends to consider. I'm going to a party tonight. You'd better come. It'll make our disappearance tomorrow more acceptable—a casual tour. Quite the only
thing one cannot afford here is any element of mystery. Okay?'

  'I knew you'd wake up eventually.' Caroline was smiling with almost prim approval, Brown thought.

  At that moment Manolo erupted on to the balcony. He carried a glass of milk, and an expensive pastry, which he must have bought on his way home. Brown made introductions. Manolo merely looked thoughtful. For her part, Caroline regarded this person, at least some of whose functions, and rather nominally at that, she supposed herself to be usurping. The boy had a precious haircut and brown eyes whose pigmentation was strangely diluted, so that they could accurately be described as golden. His striped tee-shirt was crisp, and the white cotton trousers he wore in a way that proclaimed his consciousness that there must be nothing bulky in the pockets. On his feet were black sneakers that must have cost considerably more than Caroline herself had ever paid for a pair of shoes in her life. A few rotten teeth, she was surprised to find herself thinking maliciously, would bring welcome relief to the decadent perfections of Manolo.

  Her scrutiny had not gone unremarked by Brown. 'Manolo, I want you to go to the Don Silvas for a few days,' he began hurriedly, 'and we can talk later. Meanwhile there are things to do quickly . . .'

  'Has it got something to do with toothbrushes?' Manolo interrupted suspiciously, as if unsure, Caroline thought, of how much to code some signal in front of herself.

  'Has what?' Brown was blank.

  'Going to Gibraltar.'

  'I am not worried about Jay Gadston.'

  'Then what, hombre?' The boy was regarding Caroline resentfully now.

  'I have to be away from Tangier for a bit, scripting something.'

  Manolo nodded thoughtfully. 'I'll miss the math exam.'

  ' "Maths".'

  'Mrs. Cooper-Madison says "math".'

  'She's American. You're not.'

  'They have better bicycle engines in Gibraltar.' Manolo gave the word its Spanish 'G', quite perversely, Caroline was sure.

  'They're allowed motorised cycles here at fourteen,' Brown explained. 'We can talk about that too,' he said to the boy.