DESMOND BAGLEY

Flyaway

AND

Windfall

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Flyaway

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Windfall

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

The Circumstances Surrounding the Crime

Epilogue

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

FLYAWAY

DEDICATION

To Lecia and Peter Foston of the Wolery

MAP

EPIGRAPH

Two little dicky-birds,

Sitting on a wall;

One named Peter,

The other named Paul.

Fly away, Peter!

Fly away, Paul!

Come back, Peter!

Come back, Paul!

No man can live in the desert and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad.

Wilfred Thesiger

ONE

We live in the era of instancy. The clever chemists have invented instant coffee; demonstrating students cry in infantile voices, ‘We want the world, and we want it now!’ and the Staffords have contrived the instant flaming row, a violent quarrel without origin or cause.

Our marriage was breaking up and we both knew it. The heat engendered by friction was rapidly becoming unsupportable. On this particular Monday morning a mild enquiry into Gloria’s doings over the weekend was wantonly interpreted as meddlesome interference into her private affairs. One thing led to another and I arrived at the office rather frayed at the edges.

Joyce Godwin, my secretary, looked up as I walked in and said brightly, ‘Good morning, Mr Stafford.’

‘Morning,’ I said curtly, and slammed the door of my own office behind me. Once inside I felt a bit ashamed. It’s a bad boss who expends his temper on the staff and Joyce didn’t deserve it. I snapped down the intercom switch. ‘Will you come in, Joyce?’

She entered armed with the secretarial weapons – stenographic pad and sharpened pencil. I said, ‘Sorry about that; I’m not feeling too well this morning.’

Her lips twitched in a faint smile. ‘Hangover?’

‘Something like that,’ I agreed. The seven year hangover. ‘What’s on the boil this morning?’

‘Mr Malleson wants to see you about the board meeting this afternoon.’

I nodded. The AGM of Stafford Security Consultants Ltd was a legal formality; three men sitting in a City penthouse cutting up the profits between them. A financial joke. ‘Anything else?’

‘Mr Hoyland rang up. He wants to talk to you.’

‘Hoyland? Who’s he?’

‘Chief Security Officer at Franklin Engineering in Luton.’

There was once a time when I knew every employee by his given name; now I couldn’t even remember the surnames of the line staff. It was a bad situation and would have to be rectified when I had the time. ‘Why me?’

‘He wanted Mr Ellis, but he’s in Manchester until Wednesday; and Mr Daniels is still away with ’flu.’

I grinned. ‘So he picked me as third choice. Was it anything important?’

The expression on Joyce’s face told me that she thought my hangover was getting the better of me. A Chief Security Officer was expected to handle his job and if he rang the boss it had better be about something bloody important. ‘He said he’d ring back,’ she said drily.

‘Anything else?’

Wordlessly she pointed to my overflowing in-tray. I looked at it distastefully. ‘You’re a slave-driver. If Hoyland rings I’ll be in Mr Malleson’s office.’

‘But Mr Fergus wants the Electronomics contract signed today,’ she wailed.

‘Mr Fergus is an old fuddy-duddy,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to Mr Malleson about it. It won’t hurt Electronomics to wait another half-hour.’ I picked up the Electronomics file and left, feeling Joyce’s disapproving eye boring into my back.

Charlie Malleson was evidently feeling more like work than I – his in-tray was almost half empty. I perched my rump on the edge of his desk and dropped the file in front of him. ‘I don’t like this one.’

He looked up and sighed. ‘What’s wrong with it, Max?’

‘They want guard dogs without handlers. That’s against the rules.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t catch that.’

‘Neither did Fergus and he should have. You know what I think about it. You can build defences around a factory like the Berlin Wall but some bright kid is going to get through at night just for the devil of it. Then he runs up against a dog on the loose and gets mauled – or killed.’ Charlie opened the file. ‘See Clause 28.’

He checked it. ‘That wasn’t in the contract I vetted. It must have been slipped in at the last moment.’

‘Then it gets slipped out fast or Electronomics can take their business elsewhere. You wanted to see me about the board meeting?’

‘His Lordship will be at home at four this afternoon.’

His Lordship was Lord Brinton who owned twenty-five per cent of Stafford Security Consultants Ltd. I got up and went to the window and stared at the tower of the Inter-City Building – Brinton’s lair. From the penthouse he overlooked the City, emerging from time to time to gobble up a company here and arrange a profitable merger there. ‘Four o’clock is all right; I’ll tell Joyce. Is everything in order?’

‘As smooth as silk.’ Charlie eyed me appraisingly. ‘You don’t look too good. Got a touch of ’flu coming on?’

‘A touch of something. I was told the name of a man this morning and I didn’t know he worked for us. That’s bad.’

He smiled. ‘This business is getting bigger than both of us. The penalty of success.’

I nodded. ‘I’m chained to my damned desk seven hours out of eight. Sometimes I wish we were back in the bad old days when we did our own legwork. Now I’m shuffling too many bloody papers around.’

‘And a lot of those are crisp, crackling fivers.’ Charlie waved at the view – the City of London in all its majesty. ‘Don’t knock success on this hallowed ground – it’s immoral.’ The telephone rang and he picked it up, then held it out to me.

It was Joyce. ‘Mr Hoyland wants to speak to you.’

‘Put him on.’ I covered the mouthpiece and said to Charlie, ‘You might like to listen to this one. It’s about time you administrative types knew what goes on at the sharp end of the business.’

The telephone clicked and clattered. ‘Mr Stafford?’

‘Max Stafford here.’

‘This is Hoyland from …’

‘I know who you are, Mr Hoyland,’ I said, feeling like a con man. ‘What’s your trouble?’

‘I’ve come up against a funny one, sir,’ he said. ‘A man called Billson vanished a week ago and I’ve run into a blank wall.’

‘How critical is Billson?’

‘He’s not on the technical side; he’s in the accounts office. But …’

‘Have you checked the books?’

‘They balance to a penny,’ said Hoyland. ‘It’s not that, sir; it’s the attitude of the company. I’m getting no cooperation at all.’

‘Expand on that.’

‘Well, Billson is a bit of a dumb bunny and he’s getting paid a lot more than he’s worth. He’s on £8000 a year and doing the work of an office boy. When I asked Isaacson why, I got a bloody dusty answer. He said the salary structure is no concern of security.’

Hoyland was annoyed, and rightly so. I was annoyed myself because when we took on a contract it was stipulated that everything was the concern of security. ‘He said that, did he? Who is Isaacson?’

‘Chief Accountant,’ said Hoyland. ‘Can you get on the blower and straighten him out? He’s not taking much notice of me.’

‘He’ll get straightened out,’ I said grimly. ‘Let’s get back to Billson – what do you mean when you say he’s vanished?’

‘He didn’t turn up last week and he sent in no word. When we made enquiries we found he’d left his digs without explanation.’ Hoyland paused. ‘That’s no crime, Mr Stafford.’

‘Not unless he took something with him. You say he isn’t critical?’

‘Definitely not. He’s been a fixture in the accounting department for fifteen years. No access to anything that matters.’

‘Not that we know of.’ I thought about it for a few moments. ‘All right, Mr Hoyland; I’ll have a word with Isaacson. In the meantime check back on Billson; you never know what you might find.’

‘I’ll do that, Mr Stafford.’ Hoyland seemed relieved. Bucking top management was something he’d rather not do himself.

I put down the telephone and grinned at Charlie. ‘See what I mean. How would you handle a thing like that?’

‘Franklin Engineering,’ he said reflectively. ‘Defence contractors, aren’t they?’

‘They do a bit for the army. Suspension systems for tanks – nothing serious.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m going to blow hell out of this joker, Isaacson. No money-pusher is going to tell one of my security officers what concerns security and what doesn’t.’

Charlie tilted back his chair and regarded me speculatively. ‘Why don’t you do it personally – face to face? You’ve been complaining about being tied to your desk, so why don’t you pop over to Luton and do some legwork? You can easily get back in time for the board meeting. Get out of the office, Max; it might take that sour look off your face.’

‘Is it as bad as that?’ But the idea was attractive, all the same. ‘All right, Charlie; to hell with the desk!’ I rang Joyce. ‘Get on to Hoyland at Franklin Engineering – tell him I’m on my way to Luton and to hold himself available.’ I cut off her wail of protest. ‘Yes, I know the state of the intray – it’ll get done tomorrow.’

As I put down the telephone Charlie said, ‘I don’t suppose it is really important.’

‘I shouldn’t think so. The man’s either gone on a toot or been knocked down by a car or something like that. No, Charlie; this is a day’s holiday, expenses paid by the firm.’

TWO

I should have remembered Hoyland’s name because I remembered his competent, square face when I saw it. He was a reliable type and an ex-copper like so many of our security officers. He was surprised to see me; it wasn’t often that the top brass of Stafford Security appeared in the front line, more’s the pity.

His surprise was mingled with nervousness as he tried to assess why I had come personally. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ I assured him. ‘Only too glad to get away from the desk. Tell me about Billson.’

Hoyland rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t know much about him. You know I’ve only been here three months; I was transferred here when Laird retired.’

I didn’t know – there was too damned much about my own firm I didn’t know. It had grown too big and depersonalized. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I took over Laird’s files and checked his gradings. Billson came well into the green scale – as safe as houses. He was at the bottom of my priorities.’

‘But you’ve rechecked since he disappeared?’

Hoyland nodded. ‘Forty-four years old, worked here fifteen years. As much personality as a castrated rabbit. Lodges with a Mrs Harrison in the town. She’s a widow.’

‘Anything between him and Mrs Harrison?’

Hoyland grinned. ‘She’s seventy.’

That didn’t mean much; Ninon de L’Enclos was a whore at eighty. ‘What about girl-friends?’

‘Not Billson – the girls didn’t go for him from what I’ve heard.’

‘All right – boy-friends?’

‘Not that, either. I don’t think he was the type.’

‘He doesn’t seem much of anything,’ I said caustically.

‘And that’s a fact,’ said Hoyland. ‘He’s so insignificant he hardly exists. You’d walk past him and not know he was there.’

‘The original invisible man,’ I commented. ‘All the qualifications for a sleeper.’

‘Isn’t fifteen years too long?’ queried Hoyland. ‘Besides, he left everything in order.’

‘As far as we know, that’s all. Do the Special Branch boys know about this?’

‘They’ve been poking around and come to the same conclusion as me.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Billson is probably in some hospital, having lost his means of identification. But there is a mystery; why was he overpaid and why is management being coy about it?’

Hoyland nodded. ‘I talked to Stewart about it first – he’s Billson’s immediate boss – and he pushed me on to Isaacson. I got nowhere with him.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said, and went to find Stewart, who proved to be a sandy Scotsman, one of the new breed of bookkeepers. No dusty ledgers for him; figures were something which danced electronically in the guts of a computer.

No, he had no idea where Billson might have gone. In fact, he knew nothing about Billson, full stop.

‘Isn’t that a little odd for a department head? Surely you know something about your subordinates?’

‘He’s a very strange man,’ said Stewart. ‘Reserved most of the time but capable of the most frantic outbursts occasionally. Sometimes he can be very difficult.’

‘In what way?’

Stewart shrugged. ‘He goes on about injustice; about people not being given the proper credit for achievement. He’s very bitter about it.’

‘Meaning himself?’

‘No; it was always about others being repressed or cheated.’

‘Any political implications?’

‘Not at all,’ said Stewart positively. ‘Politics mean nothing to him.’

‘Did he do his work well?’

Stewart offered me a wary look and said over-carefully, ‘He did the work we asked of him to our satisfaction.’

‘Would you say he was an achiever himself?’ I smiled. ‘Was he in line for promotion, or anything like that?’

‘Nothing like that.’ Stewart seemed aware that he had spoken too quickly and emphatically. ‘He’s not a dynamic man.’

I said, ‘When did you join the firm, Mr Stewart?’

‘Four years ago. I was brought down from Glasgow when the office was computerized.’

‘At that time did you make any attempt to have Billson fired or transferred to another department?’

Stewart jerked. ‘I … er … I did something like that, yes. It was decided to keep him on.’

‘By Mr Isaacson, I take it.’

‘Yes. You’ll have to ask him about that,’ he said with an air of relief.

So I did. Isaacson was a more rarefied breed of accountant than Stewart. Stewart knew how to make figures jump through hoops; Isaacson selected the hoops they jumped through. He was an expert on company law, especially that affecting taxation.

‘Billson!’ he said, and smiled. ‘There’s a word in Yiddish which describes a man like Billson. He’s a nebbish.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A person of less than no account. Let me put it this way; if a man walks out of a room and it feels as though someone has just come in, then he’s a nebbish.’

I leaned back in my chair and stared at Isaacson. ‘So here we have a nebbish who draws £8000 for a job worth £2000, if that. How do you account for it?’

‘I don’t have to,’ he said easily. ‘You can take that up with our managing director, Mr Grayson.’

‘And where will I find Mr Grayson?’

‘I regret that will be difficult,’ said Isaacson in a most unregretful manner. ‘He’s in Switzerland for the skiing.’

He looked so damned smug that I wanted to hit him, but I kept my temper and said deliberately, ‘Mr Isaacson, my firm is solely responsible for security at Franklin Engineering. A man has disappeared and I find this lack of cooperation very strange. Don’t you find it odd yourself?’

He spread his hands. ‘I repeat, Mr Stafford, that any questions concerning Mr Billson can be answered only by my managing director.’

‘Who is sliding down hills on a couple of planks.’ I held Isaacson’s eye. ‘Stewart wanted to fire Billson but you vetoed it. Why?’

‘I didn’t. Mr Grayson did. He said Billson must stay.’

‘Surely you asked his reasons.’

‘Of course.’ Isaacson shook his head. ‘He gave none.’ He paused. ‘I know nothing of Billson, Mr Stafford, other than that he was … protected, shall we say.’

I thought about that. Why should Grayson be Billson’s fairy godfather? ‘Did you know that Billson was “protected” when Stewart wanted to fire him?’

‘Oh yes.’ Isaacson smiled a little sadly. ‘I wanted to fire him myself ten years ago. When Stewart brought up the suggestion I thought I’d test it again with Mr Grayson.’ He shrugged. ‘But the situation was still the same.’

I said, ‘Maybe I’d better take this up at a higher level; perhaps with your Chairman.’

‘As you wish,’ said Isaacson in a cold voice.

I decided to lower the temperature myself. ‘Just one more thing, Mr Isaacson. When Mr Hoyland asks you for information you do not – repeat not – tell him that what he wants to know is no concern of security. You give him all the information you have, as you have given it to me. I hope I make myself clear?’

‘Very clear.’ Isaacson’s lips had gone very thin.

‘Very well; you will allow Mr Hoyland access to everything concerning Billson, especially his salary record. I’ll have a word with him before I leave.’ I stood up. ‘Good morning, Mr Isaacson.’

I checked back with Hoyland and told him what I wanted, then went in search of the Widow Harrison and found her to be a comfortable motherly old soul, supplementing her old age pension by taking in a lodger. According to her, Billson was a very nice gentleman who was no trouble about the house and who caused her no heart-searching about fancy women. She had no idea why he had left and was perturbed about what she was going to do about Billson’s room which still contained a lot of his possessions.

‘After all, I have me living to make,’ she said. ‘The pension doesn’t go far these days.’

I paid her a month in advance for the room and marked it up to the Franklin Engineering account. If Isaacson queried it he’d get a mouthful from me.

She had not noticed anything unusual about Billson before he walked out ‘No, he wasn’t any different. Of course, there were times he could get very angry, but that was just his way. I let him go on and didn’t take much notice.’

‘He was supposed to go to work last Monday, but he didn’t. When did you see him last, Mrs Harrison?’

‘It was Monday night. I thought he’d been to work as usual. He didn’t say he hadn’t.’

‘Was he in any way angry then?’

‘A bit. He was talking about there being no justice, not even in the law. He said rich newspapers could afford expensive lawyers so that poor men like him didn’t stand a chance.’ She laughed. ‘He was that upset he overturned the glue-pot. But it was just his way, Mr Stafford.’

‘Oh! What was he doing with the glue-pot?’

‘Pasting something into that scrapbook of his. The one that had all the stuff in it about his father. He thought a lot of his father although I don’t think he could have remembered him. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? He was only a little boy when his father was killed.’

‘Did he ever show you the scrapbook?’

‘Oh yes; it was one of the first things he did when he came here eight years ago. That was the year after my late husband died. It was full of pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines – all about his father. Lots of aeroplanes – the old-fashioned kind like they had in the First World War.’

‘Biplanes?’

‘Lots of wings,’ she said vaguely. ‘I don’t know much about aeroplanes. They weren’t like the jets we have now. He told me all about his father lots of times; about how he was some kind of hero. After a while I just stopped listening and let it pass over me head. He seemed to think his dad had been cheated or something.’

‘Do you mind if I see his room? I’d like to have a look at that scrapbook.’

Her brow wrinkled. ‘I don’t mind you seeing the room but, come to think of it, I don’t think the book’s there. It stays on his dressing-table and I didn’t see it when I cleaned up.’

‘I’d still like to see the room.’

It was not much of a place for a man to live. Not uncomfortable but decidedly bleak. The furniture was Edwardian oversize or 1930s angular and the carpet was clean but threadbare. I sat on the bed and the springs protested. As I looked at the garish reproduction of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ I wondered why an £8000-a-year man should live in a dump like this. ‘The scrapbook,’ I said.

‘It’s gone. He must have taken it with him.’

‘Is anything else missing?’

‘He took his razor and shaving brush,’ said Mrs Harrison. ‘And his toothbrush. A couple of clean shirts and some socks and other things. Not more than would fill a small suitcase. The police made a list.’

‘Do the police know about the scrapbook?’

‘It never entered me head.’ She was suddenly nervous. ‘Do you think I should tell them, sir?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell them.’

‘I do hope you can find Mr Billson, sir,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘I wouldn’t want to think he’s come to any harm. He really should be married with someone to look after him. His sister came every month but that really wasn’t enough.’

‘He has a sister?’

‘Not a real sister – a half-sister, I think. The name’s different and she’s not married. A funny foreign name it is – I never can remember it. She comes and keeps him company in the evening about twice a month.’

‘Does she know he’s gone?’

‘I don’t know how she can, unless the police told her. I don’t know her address but she lives in London.’

‘I’ll ask them,’ I said. ‘Did Mr Billson have any girl-friends?’

‘Oh no, sir.’ She shook her head. ‘The problem is, you see, who’d want to marry him? Not that there’s anything wrong with him,’ she added hastily. ‘But he just didn’t seem to appeal to the ladies, sir.’

As I walked to the police station I turned that one over. It seemed very much like an epitaph.

Sergeant Kaye was not too perturbed. ‘For a man to take it into his head to walk away isn’t an offence,’ he said. ‘If he was a child of six it would be different and we’d be pulling out all the stops, but Billson is a grown man.’ He groped for an analogy. ‘It’s as if you were to say that you feel sorry for him because he’s an orphan, if you take my meaning.’

‘He may be a grown man,’ I said. ‘But from what I hear he may not be all there.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kaye. ‘He held down a good job at Franklin Engineering for good pay. It takes more than a half-wit to do that. And he took good care of his money before he walked out and when he walked out.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘Well, he saved a lot. He kept his current account steady at about the level of a month’s salary and he had nearly £12,000 on deposit. He cleared the lot out last Tuesday morning as soon as the bank opened.’

‘Well, I’m damned! But wait a minute, Sergeant; it needs seven days’ notice to withdraw deposits.’

Kaye smiled. ‘Not if you’ve been a good, undemanding customer for a dozen or more years and then suddenly put the arm on your bank manager.’ He unsealed the founts of his wisdom. ‘Men walk out on things for a lot of reasons. Some want to get away from a woman and some are running towards one. Some get plain tired of the way they’re living and just cut out without any fuss. If we had to put on a full scale investigation every time it happened we’d have our hands full of nothing else, and the yobbos we’re supposed to be hammering would be laughing fit to bust. It isn’t as though he’s committed an offence, is it?’

‘I wouldn’t know. What does the Special Branch say?’

‘The cloak-and-dagger boys?’ Kaye’s voice was tinged with contempt ‘They reckon he’s clean – and I reckon they’re right.’

‘I suppose you’ve checked the hospitals.’

‘Those in the area. That’s routine.’

‘He has a sister – does she know?’

‘A half-sister,’ he said. ‘She was here last week. She seemed a level-headed woman – she didn’t create all that much fuss.’

‘I’d be glad of her address.’

He scribbled on a note-pad and tore off the sheet. As I put it into my wallet I said, ‘And you won’t forget the scrapbook?’

‘I’ll put it in the file,’ said Kaye patiently. I could see he didn’t attach much significance to it.

I had a late lunch and then phoned Joyce at the office. ‘I won’t be coming in,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I ought to know?’

‘Mrs Stafford asked me to tell you she won’t be in this evening.’ Joyce’s voice was suspiciously cool and even.

I hoped I kept my irritation from showing. I was becoming pretty damned tired of going home to an empty house. ‘All right; I have a job for you. All the Sunday newspapers for November 2nd. Extract anything that refers to a man called Billson. Try the national press first and, if Luton has a Sunday paper, that as well. If you draw a blank try all the dailies for the previous week. I want it on my desk tomorrow.’

‘That’s a punishment drill.’

‘Get someone to help if you must. And tell Mr Malleson I’ll meet him at four o’clock at the Inter-City Building for the board meeting.’

THREE

I don’t know if I liked Brinton or not; he was a hard man to get to know. His social life was minimal and, considered objectively, he was just a money-making machine and a very effective one. He didn’t seem to reason like other men; he would listen to arguments for and against a project, offered by the lawyers and accountants he hired by the regiment, and then he would make a decision. Often the decision would have nothing to do with what he had been told, or perhaps he could see patterns no one else saw. At any rate some of his exploits had been startlingly like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Hindsight would show that what he had done was logically sound, but only he had the foresight and that was what made him rich.

When Charlie Malleson and I put together the outfit that later became Stafford Security Consultants Ltd we ran into the usual trouble which afflicts the small firm trying to become a big firm – a hell of a lot of opportunities going begging for lack of finance. Lord Brinton came to the rescue with a sizeable injection of funds for which he took twenty-five per cent of our shares. In return we took over the security of the Brinton empire.

I was a little worried when the deal was going through because of Brinton’s reputation as a hot-shot operator. I put it to him firmly that this was going to be a legitimate operation and that our business was solely security and not the other side of the coin, industrial espionage. He smiled slightly, said he respected my integrity, and that I was to run the firm as I pleased.

He kept to that, too, and never interfered, although his bright young whiz-kids would sometimes suggest that we cut a few corners. They didn’t come back after I referred them to Brinton.

Industrial espionage is a social disease something akin to VD. Nobody minds admitting to protecting against it, but no one will admit to doing it. I always suspected that Brinton was in it up to his neck as much as any other ruthless financial son-of-a-bitch, and I used the firm’s facilities to do a bit of snooping. I was right; he employed a couple of other firms from time to time to do his ferreting. That was all right with me as long as he didn’t ask me to do it, but sooner or later he was going to try it on one of our other clients and then he was going to be hammered, twenty-five per cent shareholder or not. So far it hadn’t happened.

I arrived a little early for the meeting and found him in his office high above the City. It wasn’t very much bigger than a ballroom and one entire wall was of glass so that he could look over his stamping ground. There wasn’t a desk in sight; he employed other men to sit behind desks.

He heaved himself creakily out of an armchair. ‘Good to see you, Max. Look what I’ve gotten here.’

He had a new toy, an open fire burning merrily in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox. ‘Central heating is all very well,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing like a good blaze to warm old bones like mine. It’s like something else alive in the room – it keeps me company and doesn’t talk back.’

I looked at the fireplace full of soft coal. ‘Aren’t you violating the smokeless zone laws?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s an electrostatic precipitator built into the chimney. No smoke gets out.’

I had to smile. When Brinton did anything he did it in style. It was another example of the way he thought. You want a fire with no smoke? All right, install a multi-thousand pound gadget to get rid of it. And it wouldn’t cost him too much; he owned the factory which made the things and I suppose it would find its way on to the company books under the heading of ‘Research and Development – Testing the Product’.

‘Drink?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The working day seems to be over.’

He pressed a button next to the fireplace and a bar unfolded from nowhere. His seamed old face broke into an urchin grin. ‘Don’t you consider the board meeting to be work?’

‘It’s playtime.’

He poured a measured amount of Talisker into a glass, added an equal amount of Malvern water, and brought it over to me. ‘Yes, I’ve never regretted the money I put into your firm.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ I sipped the whisky.

‘Did you make a profit this year?’

I grinned. ‘You’ll have to ask Charlie. He juggles the figures and cooks the books.’ I knew to a penny how much we’d made, but old Brinton seemed to like a bit of jocularity mixed into his business.

He looked over my shoulder. ‘Here he is now. I’ll know very soon if I have something to supplement my old age pension.’

Charlie accepted a drink and we got down to it with Charlie spouting terms like amortization, discounted cash flow, yield and all the jargon you read in the back pages of a newspaper. He doubled as company secretary and accountant, our policy being to keep down overheads, and he owned a slice of the firm which made him properly miserly and disinclined to build any administrative empires which did not add to profits.

It seemed we’d had a good year and I’d be able to feed the wolf at the door on caviare and champagne. We discussed future plans for expansion and the possibility of going into Europe under EEC rules. Finally we came to ‘Any Other Business’ and I began to think of going home.

Brinton had his hands on the table and seemed intent on studying the liver spots. He said, ‘There is one cloud in the sky for you gentlemen. I’m having trouble with Andrew McGovern.’

Charlie raised his eyebrows. ‘The Whensley Group?’

‘That’s it,’ said Brinton. ‘Sir Andrew McGovern – Chairman of the Whensley Group.’

The Whensley Group of companies was quite a big chunk of Brinton’s holdings. At that moment I couldn’t remember off-hand whether he held a controlling interest or not. I said, ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Andrew McGovern reckons his security system is costing too much. He says he can do it cheaper himself.’

I smiled sourly at Charlie. ‘If he does it any cheaper it’ll be no bloody good. You can’t cut corners on that sort of thing, and it’s a job for experts who know what they’re doing. If he tries it himself he’ll fall flat on his face.’

‘I know all that,’ said Brinton, still looking down at his hands. ‘But I’m under some pressure.’

‘It’s five per cent of our business,’ said Charlie. ‘I wouldn’t want to lose it.’

Brinton looked up. ‘I don’t think you will lose it – permanently.’

‘You mean you’re going to let McGovern have his way?’ asked Charlie.

Brinton smiled but there was no humour in his face. ‘I’m going to let him have the rope he wants – but sooner than he expects it. He can have the responsibility for his own security from the end of the month.’

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘That’s only ten days’ time.’

‘Precisely.’ Brinton tapped his finger on the table. ‘We’ll see how good a job he does at short notice. And then, in a little while, I’ll jerk in the rope and see if he’s got his neck in the noose.’

I said, ‘If his security is to remain as good as it is now he’ll have to pay more. It’s a specialized field and good men are thin on the ground. If he can find them he’ll have to pay well. But he won’t find them – I’m running into that kind of trouble already in the expansion programme, and I know what I’m looking for and he doesn’t. So his security is going to suffer; there’ll be holes in it big enough to march a battalion of industrial spies through.’

‘Just so,’ said Brinton. ‘I know you test your security from time to time.’

‘It’s essential,’ I said. ‘We’re always doing dry runs to test the defences.’

‘I know.’ Brinton grinned maliciously. ‘In three months I’m going to have a security firm – not yours – run an operation against McGovern’s defences and we’ll see if his neck is stuck out far enough to be chopped at.’

Charlie said, ‘You mean you’re going to behead him as well as hanging him?’ He wasn’t smiling.

‘We might throw in the drawing and quartering bit, too. I’m getting a mite tired of Andrew McGovern. You’ll get your business back, and maybe a bit more.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Charlie. ‘The Whensley Group account is only five per cent of our gross but it’s a damned sight more than that of our profits. Our overheads won’t go down all that much, you know. It might put a crimp in our expansion plans.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Brinton. ‘I promise.’ And with that we had to be satisfied. If a client doesn’t want your business you can’t ram it down his throat.

Charlie made his excuses and left, but Brinton detained me for a moment. He took me by the arm and led me to the fireplace where he stood warming his hands. ‘How is Gloria?’

‘Fine,’ I said.

Maybe I had not bothered to put enough conviction into that because he snorted and gave me a sharp look. ‘I’m a successful man,’ he said. ‘And the reason is that when a deal goes sour I pull out and take any losses. You don’t mind that bit of advice from an old man?’

I smiled. ‘The best thing about advice is that you don’t have to follow it.’

So I left him and went down to the thronged street in his private lift and joined the hurrying crowds eager to get home after the day’s work. I wasn’t particularly eager because I didn’t have a home; just a few walls and a roof. So I went to my club instead.

FOUR

I felt a shade better when I arrived at the office next morning. I had visited my fencing club after a long absence and two hours of heavy sabre work had relieved my frustrations and had also done something for the incipient thickening of the waist which comes from too much sitting behind a desk.

But the desk was still there so I sat behind it and looked for the information on Billson I had asked Joyce to look up. When I didn’t find it I called her in. ‘Didn’t you find anything on Billson?’

She blinked at me defensively. ‘It’s in your in-tray.’

I found it buried at the bottom – an envelope marked ‘Billson’ – and grinned at her. ‘Nice try, Joyce; but I’ll work out my own priorities.’

When Brinton had injected funds into the firm it had grown with an almost explosive force and I had resolved to handle at least one case in the field every six months so as not to lose touch with the boys on the ground. Under the pressure of work that went the way of all good resolutions and I hadn’t been in the field for fifteen months. Maybe the Billson case was an opportunity to see if my cutting edge was still sharp.

I said abruptly, ‘I’ll be handing some of my work load to Mr Ellis.’

‘He’ll not like that,’ said Joyce.

‘He’d have to take the lot if I was knocked down by a car and broke a leg,’ I said. ‘It’ll do him good. Remind me to speak to him when he gets back from Manchester.’

Joyce went away and I opened the envelope and took out a four-page article, a potted history of the life and times of Peter Billson, Aviation Pioneer – Sunday Supplement instant knowledge without pain. It was headed: The Strange Case of Flyaway Peter, and was illustrated with what were originally black-and-white photographs which had been tinted curious shades of blue and yellow to enliven the pages of what, after all, was supposed to be a colour magazine.

It boiled down to this. Billson, a Canadian, was born appropriately in 1903, the year the first aeroplane took to the sky. Too young to see service in the First World War, he was nourished on tales of the air fighting on the Western Front which excited his imagination and he became air mad. He was an engineering apprentice and, by the time he was 21, he had actually built his own plane. It wasn’t a good one – it crashed.

He was unlucky. The Golden Age of Aviation was under way and he was missing out on all the plums. Pioneer flying took money or a sponsor with money and he had neither. In the late 1920s Alan Cobham was flying to the Far East, Australia and South Africa; in 1927 Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo, and then Byrd brought off the North and South Pole double. Came the early’ thirties and Amy Johnson, Jim Mollison, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post were breaking records wholesale and Billson hadn’t had a look-in.

But he made it in the next phase. Breaking records was all very well, but now the route-proving stage had arrived which had to precede phase three – the regular commercial flight. Newspapers were cashing in on the public interest and organizing long-distance races such as the England-Australia Air Race of 1934, won by Scott and Campbell-Black. Billson came second in a race from Vancouver to Hawaii, and first in a mail-carrying test – Vancouver to Montreal. He was in there at last – a real heroic and intrepid birdman. It is hard to believe the adulation awarded those early fliers. Not even our modern astronauts are accorded the same attention.

It was about this time that some smart journalist gave him the nickname of Flyaway Peter, echoing the nursery rhyme. It was good publicity and Billson went along with the gag even to the extent of naming his newborn son Paul and, in 1936, when he entered the London to Cape Town Air Race he christened the Northrop ‘Gamma’ he flew Flyaway. It was one of the first of the all-metal aircraft.

The race was organized by a newspaper which beat the drum enthusiastically and announced that all entrants would be insured to the tune of £100,000 each in the case of a fatality. The race began. Billson put down in Algiers to refuel and then took off again, heading south. The plane was never seen again.

Billson’s wife, Helen, was naturally shocked and it was some weeks before she approached the newspaper about the insurance. The newspaper passed her on to the insurance company which dug in its heels and dithered. £100,000 was a lot of money in 1936. Finally it declared unequivocally that no payment would be forthcoming and Mrs Billson brought the case to court.

The courtroom was enlivened by a defence witness, a South African named Hendrik van Niekirk, who swore on oath that he had seen Billson, alive and well, in Durban four weeks after the race was over. It caused a sensation and no doubt the sales of the newspaper went up. The prosecution battered at van Niekirk but he stood up to it well. He had visited Canada and had met Billson there and he was in no doubt about his identification. Did he speak to Billson in Durban? No, he did not.

All very dicey.

The judge summed up and the case went to the jury which deliberated at length and then found for the insurance company. No £100,000 for Mrs Billson – who immediately appealed. The Appellate Court reversed the decision on a technicality – the trial judge had been a shade too precise in his instructions to the jury. The insurance company took it to the House of Lords who refused to have anything to do with it. Mrs Billson got her £100,000. Whether she lived happily ever after the writer of the article didn’t say.

So much for the subject matter – the tone was something else. Written by a skilled journalist, it was a very efficient hatchet job on the reputation of a man who could not answer back – dead or alive. It reeked of the envy of a small-minded man who got his kicks by pulling down men better than himself. If this was what Paul Billson had read then it wasn’t too surprising if he went off his trolley.

The article ended in a speculative vein. After pointing out that the insurance company had lost on a legal technicality, it went on:

The probability is very strong that Billson did survive the crash, if crash there was, and that Hendrik van Niekirk did see him in Durban. If this is so, and I think it is, then an enormous fraud was perpetrated. £100,000 is a lot of money anywhere and at any time. £100,000 in 1936 is equivalent to over £350,000 in our present-day debased currency.

If Peter Billson is still alive he will be 75 years old and will have lived a life of luxury. Rich men live long and the chances are that he is indeed still alive. Perhaps he will read these words. He might even conceive these words to be libellous. I am willing to risk it.

Flyaway Peter Billson, come back! Come back!

I was contemplating this bit of nastiness when Charlie Malleson came into the office. He said, ‘I’ve done a preliminary analysis of the consequences of losing the Whensley Group,’ and smiled sourly. ‘We’ll survive.’

‘Brinton,’ I said, and tilted my chair back. ‘He owns a quarter of our shares and accounts for a third of our business. We’ve got too many eggs in his basket. I’d like to know how much it would hurt if he cut loose from us completely.’ I paused, then added, ‘Or if we cut loose from him.’

Charlie looked alarmed. ‘Christ! it would be like having a leg cut off – without anaesthetic.’

‘It might happen.’

‘But why would you want to cut loose? The money he pumped in was the making of us.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But Brinton is a financial shark. Snapping up a profit is to him as mindless a reflex as when a real shark snaps up a tasty morsel. I think we’re vulnerable, Charlie.’

‘I don’t know why you’re getting so bloody hot under the collar all of a sudden,’ he said plaintively.

‘Don’t you?’ I leaned forward and the chair legs came down with a soft thud on to the thick pile carpet. ‘Last night, in a conversation lasting less than four minutes, we lost fifteen per cent of Brinton’s business. And why did we lose it? So that he can put the arm on Andrew McGovern who is apparently getting out of line. Or so Brinton says.’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

‘Whether he’s telling the truth or not isn’t the point. The point is that our business is being buggered in one of Brinton’s private schemes which has nothing to do with us.’

Charlie said slowly, ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

I stared at him. ‘Do you, Charlie? I don’t think so. Take a good long look at what happened yesterday. We were manipulated by a minority shareholder who twisted us around his little finger.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Max! If McGovern doesn’t want us there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.’

‘I know that, but we could have done something which we didn’t. We could have held the Whensley Group to their contract which has just under a year to run. Instead, we all agreed at the AGM to pull out in ten days. We were manoeuvred into that, Charlie; Brinton had us dancing on strings.’

Charlie was silent.

I said, ‘And you know why we let it happen? We were too damned scared of losing Brinton’s money. We could have outvoted him singly or jointly, but we didn’t.’

‘No,’ said Charlie sharply. ‘Your vote would have downed him – you have 51 per cent. But I have only 24 to his 25.’

I sighed. ‘Okay, Charlie; my fault. But as I lay in bed last night I felt scared. I was scared of what I hadn’t done. And the thing that scared me most of all was the thought of the kind of man I was becoming. I didn’t start this business to jerk to any man’s string, and that’s why I say we have to cut loose from Brinton if possible. That’s why I want you to look for alternative sources of finance. We’re big enough to get it now.’

‘There may be something in what you say,’ said Charlie. ‘But I still think you’re blowing a gasket without due cause. You’re over-reacting, Max.’ He shrugged. ‘Still, I’ll look for outside money if only to keep you from blowing your top.’ He glanced at the magazine cutting on my desk. ‘What’s that?’

‘A story about Paul Billson’s father. You know – the accountant who vanished from Franklin Engineering.’

‘What’s the score on that one?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. At first I had Paul Billson taped as being a little devalued in the intellect – running about eighty pence in the pound – but there are a couple of things which don’t add up.’

‘Well, you won’t have to worry about that now. Franklin is part of the Whensley Group.’

I looked up in surprise. ‘So it is.’ It had slipped my mind.

‘I’d hand over what you’ve got to Sir Andrew McGovern and wish him the best of British luck.’

I thought about that and shook my head. ‘No – Billson disappeared when we were in charge of security and there’s still a few days to the end of the month.’

‘Your sense of ethics is too strongly developed.’

‘I think I’ll follow up on this one myself,’ I said. ‘I started it so I might as well finish it. Jack Ellis can stand in for me. It’s time he was given more responsibility.’

Charlie nodded approvingly. ‘Do you think there’s anything in Billson’s disappearance – from the point of view of Franklin’s security, I mean?’

I grinned at him. ‘I’ll probably find that he’s eloped with someone’s wife – and I hope it’s Andrew McGovern’s.’

FIVE

I went down to Fleet Street to look for Michael English, the journalist who had written the article on Peter Billson. His office thought he was at the Press Club, the Press Club invited me to try El Vino’s. I finally ran him to ground in a pub off the Strand.

He was a tall, willowy, fair-haired man whom I disliked on sight, although what he had written about Billson might have influenced my feelings. He was playing poker dice with a couple of other journalists and looked at me doubtfully when I gave him one of my business cards to prick his curiosity.

‘Security!’ he said. There was a shade of nervousness.

I smiled reassuringly. ‘I’d like to talk to you about Billson.’

‘That little twit! What’s he put you on to me for?’ Apprehension surrounded English like a fog.

‘You’ve seen him recently?’

‘Of course I have. He came to the office making trouble. He threatened a law suit.’ English snorted with unhumorous laughter. ‘Our lawyer saw him off smartly on that one.’

I was deliberately obtuse. ‘I’m surprised he bothered you. If your article was correct he stands a good chance of a jail sentence – although his grey hairs might save him, I suppose.’

English looked at me in surprise. ‘It wasn’t the old man. It was someone who claimed to be his son – said he was Paul Billson. He made quite a scene.’

I looked around and saw an empty corner table. ‘I’d like to talk to you about it. Over there where it’s quiet. What will you have?’

English hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. Make it a double scotch.’

As I ordered the drinks he said, ‘I suppose you’re investigating for the insurance company.’ I made an ambiguous murmur, and he said, ‘I thought they gave up years ago. Isn’t there a time limitation on a crime like that?’

I smiled at him as he splashed water perfunctorily in his glass. ‘The file is still open.’

English had been called into his editor’s office the day after the article had appeared – the day before Billson went missing. He found the editor trying to cope with an angry and agitated man who was making incoherent threats. The editor, Gaydon, said in a loud voice, ‘This is Mr English who wrote the article. Sit down, Mike, and let’s see if we can sort this out.’ He flicked a switch on the intercom. ‘Ask Mr Harcourt if he can come to my office.’

English saw trouble looming ahead. Harcourt was the resident lawyer and his presence presaged no good. He cleared his throat and said, ‘What’s the trouble?’

Gaydon said, ‘This is Mr Paul Billson. He appears to be disturbed about the article on his father which appeared in yesterday’s issue.’

English looked at Billson and saw a rather nondescript man who, at that moment, was extremely agitated. His face was white and dull red spots burned in his cheeks as he said in a high voice, ‘It was nothing but outright libel. I demand a retraction and a public apology.’

Gaydon said in a calming voice, ‘I’m sure that Mr English wrote the truth as he saw it. What do you say, Mike?’

‘Of course, you’re right,’ said English. ‘Every matter of fact was checked against the original court records and the contemporary newspaper reports.’

‘I’m not complaining about the facts,’ said Billson. ‘It’s the damned inferences about my father. I’ve never read anything so scurrilous in my life. If I don’t get a public apology I shall sue.’

Gaydon glanced at English, then said smoothly, ‘It shouldn’t come to that, Mr Billson. I’m certain we can come to some arrangement or agreement satisfactory to all parties.’ He looked up as Harcourt entered the office and said with a slight air of relief, ‘This is Mr Harcourt of our legal department.’

Rapidly he explained the point at issue, and Harcourt said, ‘Do you have a copy of the article?’

He settled down to read the supplement which Gaydon produced and the office was uneasily quiet until he had finished. Gaydon tapped restlessly with his forefinger; English sat quite still, hoping that the film of sweat on his forehead didn’t show; Billson squirmed in his seat as the pressure within him built higher.

After what seemed an interminable period Harcourt laid down the magazine. ‘What exactly are you complaining about, Mr Billson?’

‘Isn’t it evident?’ Billson demanded. ‘My father has been blackguarded in print. I demand an immediate apology or I sue.’ His finger stabbed at English. ‘I sue him and the newspaper.’

‘I see,’ said Harcourt thoughtfully. He leaned forward. ‘What do you believe happened to your father?’

‘His plane crashed,’ said Billson. ‘He was killed – that’s what I believe.’ He slammed his hand on the magazine. ‘This is just plain libel.’

‘I believe that you will be unable to sue,’ said Harcourt. ‘You can sue only if your own reputation is at stake. You see, it’s an established principle of law that a dead man cannot be libelled.’

There was a moment of silence before Billson said incredulously, ‘But this man says my father is not dead.’

‘But you believe he is dead, and you would be bringing the case to court. It wouldn’t work, Mr Billson. You needn’t take my word for it, of course; you can ask your own solicitor. In fact, I strongly advise it.’

‘Are you telling me that any cheap journalist can drag my father’s name through the mud and get away with it?’ Billson was shaking with rage.

Harcourt said gravely, ‘I should watch your words, Mr Billson, or the shoe may be on the other foot. Such intemperate language could lead you into trouble.’

Billson knocked over his chair in getting to his feet. ‘I shall certainly take legal advice,’ he shouted, and glared at English. ‘I’ll have your hide, damn you!’

The door slammed behind him.

Harcourt picked up the magazine and flipped it to English’s article. He avoided looking directly at English, and said to Gaydon, ‘I suggest that if you intend to publish work of this nature in future you check with the legal department before publication and not after.’

‘Are we in the clear?’ asked Gaydon.

‘Legally – quite,’ said Harcourt, and added distastefully, ‘It’s not within my province to judge the moral aspect.’ He paused. ‘If the widow takes action it will be different, of course. There is a clear implication here that she joined with her husband in cheating the insurance company. How else could Peter Billson profit other than with his wife’s connivance?’

Gaydon turned to English. ‘What about the widow?’

‘It’s okay,’ said English. ‘She died a little over a year ago. Helen Billson married a Norwegian during the war and changed her name to Aarvik. It was when I stumbled over that fact that I decided to write up the story of Billson.’

Harcourt snorted and left, and Gaydon grinned at English. ‘That was a bit close, Mike.’ He picked up a pen. ‘Be a good chap and pick up that chair before you leave.’

I bought English another drink. ‘So Paul Billson didn’t have a leg to stand on.’

English laughed. ‘Not a hope. I didn’t attack his reputation, you see. Christ, I’d forgotten the man existed.’

I said mendaciously, ‘I’m not really interested in Paul Billson. Do you really think that Peter Billson faked his death to defraud the insurance company?’

‘He could have,’ said English. ‘It makes a good story.’

‘But do you believe it?’

‘Does it matter what I believe?’ He drank some scotch. ‘No, of course I don’t believe it. I think Billson was killed, all right.’

‘So you were pretty safe in issuing that challenge to come forth.’

‘I like to bet on certainties,’ said English. He grinned. ‘If he did defraud the insurance company he wasn’t likely to rise to the bait, was he? I was on sure ground until his son popped up.’

I said, ‘About that insurance. £100,000 is a hell of a lot of money. The premium must have been devilish high.’

‘Not really. You must remember that by 1936 aeroplanes were no longer the unsafe string-and-sealing wax contraptions of the ’twenties. There wasn’t a great deal of doubt that an aircraft would get to where it was going – the question was how fast. And this was at the time of a newspaper war; the dailies were cutting each other’s throats to buy readers. Any premium would be a drop in the bucket compared with what they were spending elsewhere, and £100,000 is a nice headline-filling sum.’

‘Did Billson stand a chance in the race?’

‘Sure – he was a hot favourite. Flyaway – that Northrop of his – was one of the best aircraft of its time, and he was a good pilot.’

‘Who won the race?’

‘A German called Helmut Steiner. I think Billson would have won had he survived. Steiner only won because he took a hell of a lot of chances.’

‘Oh! What sort of chances?’

English shrugged. ‘I don’t remember the times personally – I’m not that old – but I’ve read up on it. This was in the times of the Nazis. The Berlin Olympics were on and the Master Race was busy proving its case. German racing cars were winning on all the circuits because the Auto-Union was State subsidized; German mountaineers were doing damnfool things on every Alpine cliff – I believe some of them dropped off the Eiger at the time. It didn’t prove they were good climbers; only that they were good Nazis. Germany had to beat everybody at everything, regardless of cost.’

‘And Steiner?’

‘Subsidized by the Hitler regime, of course; given a stripped military plane and a crackerjack support team seconded from the Luftwaffe. He was good, all right, but I think he knew Billson was better, so he took chances and they came off. He pressed his machine to the limit and the engine blew up on him as he landed in Cape Town. He was lucky it didn’t happen sooner.’

I thought about that. ‘Any possibility of Billson being sabotaged?’

English stared at me. ‘No one has come up with that idea before. That really is a lulu.’

‘What about it?’

‘My God, the lengths to which insurance companies will go! What will you do if Billson was sabotaged? Sue the German government for £100,000? I doubt if Bonn would fall for that one.’ He shrugged. ‘Billson’s plane was never found. You haven’t a hope.’

I drained my glass. There wasn’t much more I could get out of English and I prepared a sharp knife to stick into him. ‘So you don’t think you’ll have any trouble from Paul Billson.’

‘Not a chance,’ he scoffed. ‘Harcourt may be pious and sanctimonious but he tied Billson into knots. You can’t libel a dead man – and Billson swears his father is dead.’

I smiled gently. ‘A man called Wright once wrote about William Ewart Gladstone imputing that he was a hypocrite, particularly in sexual matters. This was in 1927 and Gladstone was long dead. But his son, the then Lord Gladstone, took umbrage and also legal advice. Like Paul Billson, he was told that the dead cannot be libelled, but he nailed Wright to the cross all the same.’

English gave me a wet-eyed look. ‘What did he do?’

‘He libelled Wright at every opportunity. He called Wright a liar, a fool and a poltroon in public. He had Wright thrown out of his club. In the end Wright had to bring Gladstone to court to protect his reputation. Gladstone had Norman Birkett appear for him, and Birkett flayed Wright in open court. When the case was finished so was Wright; his professional reputation was smashed.’ I slid the knife home. ‘It could happen to you.’

English shook his head. ‘Billson won’t do that – he’s not the man for it.’

‘He might,’ I said. ‘With help.’ I twisted the knife. ‘And it will give me great pleasure to appear for him and to swear that you told me that you thought his father to be dead, in spite of what you wrote in your dirty little article.’

I rose and left him. At the door of the pub I stopped and looked back. He was sitting in the corner, looking as though someone had kicked him in the belly, knocking the wind out of him.

SIX

I had an early lunch and then belatedly thought to ring Paul Billson’s half-sister. I had expected to find her absent from home in the middle of the working day but the telephone was picked up on the third ring and a pleasant voice said, ‘Alix Aarvik here.’

I told her who and what I was, then said, ‘I take it you haven’t heard from your brother, Miss Aarvik.’

‘No, I haven’t, Mr Stafford.’

‘I’d like to talk to you about him. May I come round?’

‘Now?’ There was uncertainty in her voice.

‘Time is of the essence in these matters, Miss Aarvik.’ A platitude, but I find they tend to soothe people.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll be expecting you.’

‘Within the half-hour.’ I rang off and took a taxi to Kensington.

With a name like hers I had envisaged a big, tow-headed Scandinavian, but she was short and dark and looked in her early thirties. Her flat was comfortable, if sparsely furnished, and I was interested to see that she was apparently moving out. Two suitcases stood in the hall and another on a table was open and half-packed.

She saw me looking around and said, ‘You’ve caught me in the middle of packing.’

I smiled. ‘Found another flat?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m leaving for Canada. My firm has asked me to go. I’m flying tomorrow afternoon.’ She made a gesture which was pathetically helpless. ‘I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing with Paul still missing, but I have my job to consider.’

‘I see,’ I said, not seeing a hell of a lot. Her mother had come into a windfall of £100,000 but there was precious little sign of it around, either sticking to Paul Billson or Alix Aarvik. I made a little small talk while I studied her. She was not too well dressed but managed to make the most of what she had, and she didn’t overdo the make-up. You could see thousands like her in the streets; a typical specimen of Stenographica londiniensis – the London typist.

When I married Gloria I had not a bean to spare and, during my rise to the giddy heights of success, I had become aware of all the subtle variations in women’s knick-knackery from the cheap off-the-peg frock to the one-off Paris creation. Not that Gloria had spent much time in the lower reaches of the clothing spectrum – she developed a talent for spending money faster than I earned it, which was one of the points at issue between us. But I knew enough to know that Alix Aarvik was not dressing like an heiress.

I took the chair she offered, and said, ‘Now tell me about Paul.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘You can start by telling me of his relationship with his father.’

She gave me a startled look. ‘You’ve got that far already?’

‘It wasn’t difficult.’

‘He hero-worshipped his father,’ she said. ‘Not that he ever knew him to remember. Peter Billson died when Paul was two years old. You know about the air crash?’

‘There seems to be a little doubt about that,’ I said.

Pain showed in her eyes. ‘You, too?’ She shook her head. ‘It was that uncertainty which preyed on Paul’s mind. He wanted his father to be dead – rather a dead hero than a living fraud. Do you understand what that means, Mr Stafford?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I arranged for Paul to have psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist told me that it was this that was breaking Paul in two. It’s a dreadful thing to hero-worship a man – your father – and to wish him dead simultaneously.’

‘So he had a neurosis. What form did it take?’

‘Generally, he raged against injustice; the smart-aleck kind of injustice such as when someone takes credit for another’s achievement. He collected injustices. Wasn’t there a book called The Injustice Collector? That’s Paul.’

‘You say generally – how about specifically?’

‘As it related to his father, he thought Peter Billson had been treated unjustly – maligned in death. You know about the court case?’ I nodded, and she said, ‘He wanted to clear his father’s name.’

I said carefully, ‘Why do you talk about Paul in the past tense?’

Again she looked startled and turned pale. ‘I … I didn’t know …’ She intertwined her fingers and whispered, ‘I suppose I think he’s dead.’

‘Why should you think that?’

‘I don’t know. But I can’t think of any reason why he should disappear, either.’

‘This neurosis about injustice – did he apply it to himself? Did he think that he was treated unjustly?’

She looked straight at me and said firmly, ‘Never! He was always concerned about others. Look, Mr Stafford; I’ll come right out and say that Paul wasn’t –’ she caught herself – ‘isn’t too bright. Now you’re in security at Franklin Engineering and I’ll tell you that Paul isn’t a thief or anything like that. He may not be an entirely balanced man, but he’s honest.’

‘I have no doubt about it, Miss Aarvik,’ I said. ‘My enquiries are as much on behalf of Paul as they are for Franklin Engineering. The management of Franklin are very much concerned about what happens to their employees.’

That was pious piffle which I hoped she’d swallow. Neither Stewart nor Isaacson had shown a whit of concern.

She said, ‘Paul knew … knows he’ll never make his way in the world, but he never showed resentment. I knew he found it hard to make out on only two hundred a month, but he never complained.’

I opened my mouth to contradict her and then closed it firmly. I waited the space of ten heart beats before I said, ‘Is that all he got?’

‘£2400 a year – it was all he was worth,’ she said a little sadly. ‘But you must have checked.’

‘Yes,’ I said bemusedly. ‘The exact figure had slipped my memory.’

So Paul had been cheating on his sister. He had told her he earned £2400 a year when he got over three times as much, although according to Hoyland, and now his sister, that was probably as much as he was worth. You think you have a man taped, his life spread before you like a butterfly pinned in a showcase, and he surprises you with an inconsistency.

I said, ‘Did you ever help him financially?’

She hesitated. ‘Not directly.’

Slowly I coaxed the story from her. She had been supporting their mother in her last illness. Mrs Aarvik had been dying of cancer painfully and protractedly. Alix paid for a nurse and private hospital treatment and, towards the end, for the services of a specialist – all beyond the stark necessities of the National Health Service. It was very expensive and her savings ran out.

‘Then Paul needed treatment,’ she said. ‘The psychiatrist I told you about.’

The psychiatrist was also in private practice and also expensive. Miss Aarvik had an understanding bank manager who allowed her a sizeable overdraft in spite of the prevailing credit squeeze. ‘I’m paying it off as quickly as I can.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘That’s why I’m pleased about the Canadian job; it’s at a much higher salary.’

Paul Billson contributed nothing.

‘I knew he couldn’t save,’ she said. ‘So what else could I do?’

What else, indeed? I thought of the £12,000 tucked away in Paul’s deposit account and marvelled at the curious quirks of mankind. Here was a man whom everybody agreed to be a nonentity – a spineless, faceless creature hardly distinguishable from a jellyfish – and he was proving to be human, after all, just like the rest of us. Human enough to have an eye for the main chance and to batten mercilessly on his sister. Which may only go to show that my view of humanity is jaundiced, to say the least of it.

Anyway, it accounted for Miss Aarvik’s sparsely furnished flat and for her neat but somewhat aged dress. If she was paying off a big overdraft she wouldn’t be spending on luxurious fripperies. Which was a pity – she deserved better.

I said, ‘Did the treatment do Paul any good?’

‘I think so. He’s been much quieter of late, until …’

Until English wrote his poisonous article and Paul blew up, nerved himself to tackle a newspaper editor, and then vanished.

‘Think carefully,’ I said. ‘You probably know your brother better than anyone else. If he went off the rails for any reason, what would he be likely to do?’

‘I can’t think of anything. Unless …’ She shook her head. ‘No, that’s silly.’

‘It may not be,’ I said encouragingly.

‘Well, when he was a boy he used to dream of clearing his father’s name by finding the aeroplane; actually going out to Africa and looking for it. It was never found, you know. Not a very practicable dream, I’m afraid; but Paul was never a practicable man.’

I thought about it. Somewhere south of the Mediterranean and north of the Congo. The Sahara. Not at all practicable.

‘Of course, he gave up the idea long ago,’ she said. ‘Even Paul realized it was futile. It would need a lot of money, you see, and he never had the money.’

To tell her that her brother had his pockets stuffed with boodle would have been needlessly cruel. But now I had a lead, for what it was worth. ‘1936 is a long time ago,’ I said. ‘I doubt if there’d be anything to find now. What did your parents think of Paul’s obsession?’

‘My mother always said he’d grow out of it, but he never did. She lived with me and didn’t see very much of him. She didn’t like him talking so much about his father; she thought it was unhealthy. I suppose it was. He never knew his father, you see.’

‘And your father – what did he think?’

She gave a wry smile. ‘You must think we’re an odd family. I never knew my father, either. He died before I was born. My mother married him during the war and he was killed in action. He was Norwegian, you know.’

‘Your mother had a tough life,’ I said. Two husbands killed leaving small children to bring up wasn’t my idea of a bed of roses.

‘Oh, she was always cheerful – right up to the end.’

‘One thing puzzles me,’ I said. ‘Your mother was awarded £100,000 by the court. What happened to it? There must have been something left to keep her more comfortable in her old age.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Aarvik sombrely. ‘I’ve wondered about that myself, but Mother never talked about it. You must realize that I only knew about it years afterwards when I was about thirteen. It didn’t mean much then; children don’t think of things that happened before they were born – the present is much more exciting.’

‘But later – didn’t you ask her?’

‘I tried, but she would never talk about it.’ She looked at me squarely. ‘I think I take after my father, Torstein Aarvik; I never knew him, of course, so I can’t be certain. But Paul took after Mother; they’re alike in so many ways. She could be very silly and thoughtless at times. Not wilfully, you understand; but she did things without thinking too far ahead. Perhaps something happened that she was ashamed to talk about. She wasn’t very bright, but I loved her very much.’

So Paul was the not too bright son of a not too bright mother. That didn’t get me far. I stood up. ‘Well, thank you, Miss Aarvik, for all the information. You’ve been very frank.’

She rose with me. ‘I must thank you for your interest, Mr Stafford.’ She smiled wanly. ‘You’ve certainly been more thorough in your inquiries than the police. Do you think you can find Paul?’

That put me in a moral dilemma. As far as Franklin Engineering was concerned the case was finished; Billson hadn’t embezzled the petty cash nor had he breached security as far as I knew and I couldn’t load further investigation costs on to the Franklin account. Nor could I load the costs on to Stafford Security Consultants Ltd – that wouldn’t be fair to Charlie Malleson or Brinton who weren’t in business for charity.

Neither was I. As far as I was concerned, Paul Billson was an unbalanced man whom I had discovered to be of an unscrupulous disposition and, as far as I could see, Alix Aarvik was better off without him. I decided to give what I had to the police and call it a day.

I said diplomatically, ‘Your information will make it more likely.’

‘If I give you a Canadian address will you write to me?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been wondering whether I should go at all while Paul is still missing.’

It struck me that Canada was the best place for her – somewhere away from the leeching of her brother. ‘There’s nothing you can do if you stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ll certainly write to you.’

She scribbled an address on a stenographic note-pad. ‘I don’t have a home address yet, but that’s the firm I’ll be working for.’

I glanced at the sheet. Apparently she’d be with the Kisko Nickel Corporation of Vancouver; I’d never heard of it. I folded the paper and dutifully put it into my wallet as she escorted me to the door. Already the street lights were on as darkness descended. I thought of the quiet fortitude with which Alix Aarvik faced a not too happy life. She had not paraded her troubles before me; indeed, it had taken quite a bit of my not inconsiderable skill to extract many of the details from her. I hoped she’d be happy in Canada; she was good value.

I deliberated about the best way to go to find a taxi and turned in the direction of Kensington High Street. As I walked a man got out of a car parked by the kerb just ahead. He waited until I came abreast of him, then said, ‘Your name Stafford?’ He had a rough Cockney voice.

A door slammed on the other side of the car as someone else got out. ‘Yes, I’m Stafford.’

‘Got a message for yer, mate. Keep yer bleedin’ nose outter fings wot don’t concern yer. This’ll ’elp yer remember.’

He suddenly drove his fist into my midriff, just below the sternum, and I gasped and doubled up, fighting for breath. I didn’t have much of a chance after that. There were three of them and when I went down they got to work with their boots. It wasn’t long before I passed out – but long enough to feel the pain.

SEVEN

A lot of people came to see me in hospital, some of whom surprised me by their appearance. The police came, of course, but they were followed by a man from the Special Branch checking on Billson because of the defence work done at Franklin Engineering. My wife didn’t show up but she took the trouble to spend two minutes on the telephone ordering flowers to be sent to the hospital, which surprised me mildly.

Lord Brinton came, his hands behind his back. ‘Don’t want to drink this London water,’ he said, and put a bottle of Malvern water on the bedside table. ‘Spoils the taste of the scotch.’ A bottle of Talisker joined the Malvern water.

I smiled – a painful process at the time. ‘My doctor might not approve.’

‘Better than bringing bloody grapes.’ He pulled up a chair and sat warming his ancient and expensive bones at the wall radiator. ‘Not as good as a real fire,’ he grumbled.

‘Hospitals don’t like open fires.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘What the hell happened, Max?’

‘I was beaten up,’ I said patiently.

‘So I see,’ he said with a straight face. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It seems I was “poking my nose into fings wot don’t concern me”, to quote the spokesman of the assault committee. He neglected to be more specific.’

‘Mistaken identity?’

I began to shake my head and hastily decided against it for fear it should fall off. ‘He made sure he knew who I was first.’

‘What were you doing in Kensington?’

‘Following up on a case.’ I told him about Billson and what I had done. ‘Miss Aarvik will be in Canada now,’ I said.

‘Good country,’ observed Brinton. ‘I was born there.’ He said it as though the act of his being born there had conferred a distinction on Canada. ‘I don’t see how all this relates to your being beaten up.’

‘Neither do I. Neither do the police or the Special Branch.’

His eyes sharpened. ‘What’s their interest?’

‘Franklin Engineering makes bits and pieces of tanks.’

‘And they’re following up on Billson?’

‘So it seems – but they’re not pushing too hard. For all anyone can find out he hasn’t committed a crime – yet.’

‘You think he might?’

‘Who knows what a man like Billson might or might not do. He’s lived like a vegetable for fifteen years at least, and now he’s gone charging off God knows where. He could be up to anything.’

‘Well, you’re out of it,’ said Brinton. ‘By the time you get out of here Andrew McGovern will have taken over responsibility for the security of Franklin Engineering.’

‘How big a piece of the Whensley Group have you got?’ I asked.

‘About thirty per cent. Why?’

‘Then you’ll be a big enough shareholder to ask why Billson was paid three times as much as he’s worth and why there’s a mystery made of it.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ said Brinton. ‘Can’t have the shareholders diddled like that. All right, if you weren’t beaten up because of Billson, what else have you been doing recently to get you into trouble?’

‘My life has been blameless.’

Brinton grunted in his throat. ‘Don’t try to con an old sinner. Nobody’s life is blameless. You’re sure you haven’t been sleeping in any of the wrong beds?’ I just looked at him and he said, ‘Not that I’d blame you under the circumstances.’

Soon after that he went away.

Charlie Malleson came to see me. He inspected my assortment of bruises, and said, ‘Better not go out into the streets just yet. Someone from the Race Relations Board might get you for trying to cross the colour line.’

I sighed. ‘You can do better than that, Charlie. If you have to make jokes they’d better be good. How’s business?’

‘We’re coping. How long do you think you’ll be laid up?’

‘Nobody tells me anything – you know what hospitals are like. From the way I feel now it’ll be about six months, but I’ll probably be back in a couple of weeks.’

‘Take your time,’ Charlie advised. ‘Jack Ellis is trying on your shoes to see if they fit.’

‘Good – but that will teach me to prophesy.’ Charlie raised an eyebrow and I explained. ‘I told Joyce that Jack was to take some of my work load. When she queried it I said that if I got knocked down in the street he’d have to take the lot. But this wasn’t the sort of knocking down I had in mind.’ I thought about Jack Ellis, then said, ‘It’s about time we made him a director, anyway. He’s become very good and we don’t want to lose him.’

‘I agree,’ said Charlie. ‘And I think old Brinton will. Max, when did you last take a holiday?’

I grinned. ‘That’s a funny-sounding word. Maybe two years ago.’

‘It’s been four years,’ he said positively. ‘You’ve been knocking yourself out. My advice is to take some time off right now while you have a good enough excuse to fool your subconscious. Take a trip to the Caribbean and soak up some sun for a couple of months.’

I looked out of the window at the slanting rain. ‘Sounds good.’

Charlie smiled. ‘The truth is I don’t want you around while Jack is finding his feet in a top job. You can be a pretty alarming bastard at times and it might be a bit inhibiting for him.’

That made sense, and the more I thought about it the better it became. Gloria and I could go away and perhaps we could paper over some of the cracks in our marriage. I knew that, when a marriage is at breaking-point, the fault is rarely solely on one side, and my drive to set up the firm had certainly been a contributing factor. Perhaps I could do something to stick things together again.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘But I’d better see Jack. There are one or two things he ought to know before he gets his feet wet.’

Charlie’s face cracked into a pleased smile which faded as he said, ‘Who assaulted you, Max?’

We kicked the Billson case around for a while and got nowhere. So Charlie left, promising to send Jack Ellis to see me.

The really surprising visitor was Alix Aarvik.

I gaped as she came in and then said, ‘Sit down, Miss Aarvik – you’ll excuse me if I don’t stand. I thought you were in Canada.’

She sat in the leather club chair which Brinton had had installed for his own benefit. ‘I changed my mind,’ she said. ‘I turned down the job.’

‘Oh! Why?’

She inspected me. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you, Mr Stafford.’

I laughed. By this time I was able to laugh without my ribs grinding together. ‘An occupational hazard.’

Her face was serious. ‘Was it because of your enquiries about Paul?’

‘I can’t see how it could be.’

‘The police came to see me again. And some others who … weren’t ordinary police.’

‘Special Branch. Paul did work in a defence industry.’

‘I didn’t know what to think. They were so uncommunicative.’

I nodded. ‘Their job is to ask questions, not to give answers. Besides, they revel in an aura of mystery. May I ask why you turned down the Canadian job?’

She hesitated. ‘About a quarter of an hour after you left my flat I went out to post a letter. There was an ambulance not far from the street door and you were being put into it.’ She moistened her lips. ‘I thought you were dead.’

I said slowly, ‘It must have given you a shock. I’m sorry.’

There was a rigidity about her which betrayed extreme tension. She opened her mouth and swallowed as though the words would not come, then she made another attempt and said, ‘Did you see who attacked you?’

The penny dropped. ‘It wasn’t your brother, if that’s what you mean.’

She gave a long sigh and relaxed visibly. ‘I had to know,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t leave without knowing, and the police wouldn’t tell me anything.’

I looked at her thoughtfully. ‘If you thought your brother might attack anyone homicidally you should have warned me.’

‘But I didn’t think that,’ she cried. ‘Not when we talked together. It was only afterwards, when I saw you in the ambulance, that it occurred to me.’

I said, ‘I want the truth. Have you seen Paul since he disappeared?’

‘No, I haven’t – I haven’t.’ Her face was aflame with her vehemence.

I said gently, ‘I believe you.’

She was suddenly in tears. ‘What’s happened to Paul, Mr Stafford? What is he doing?’

‘I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know.’ It took me some time to quieten her, and lying flat on my back didn’t help. In order to divert her I said, ‘You were being transferred to Canada. Will the fact that you turned down the offer affect your present job?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Sir Andrew was very good about it.’

A frisson ran down my back. ‘Sir Andrew?’

‘Sir Andrew McGovern. I’m his secretary.’

‘You do mean the Chairman of the Whensley Group?’

‘That’s right. Do you know him?’

‘I haven’t had that pleasure. How did you come to work for him, Miss Aarvik?’

‘I started work at Franklin Engineering eight years ago.’ She smiled. ‘In the typing pool. I like to think I’m good at my job – anyway I didn’t stay long in the typing pool, and four years ago I was transferred to Group Head Office in London – that’s Whensley Holdings Ltd.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We handle the security.’ But not for long I thought.

‘Oh! You mean you employ the men who come around and make sure I’ve destroyed the executive typewriter ribbons?’

‘Sort of. What made you start with Franklin Engineering? How did you get the job?’

‘I was with a firm which went bust,’ she said. ‘I needed another job so Paul suggested Franklin. He’d been working there for quite a while and he said it was a good firm.’

So it was – for Paul Billson. Seeing that I’d started to open the can of worms it seemed a good idea to take the top right off. For instance, was Miss Aarvik’s salary as inflated as her brother’s? ‘Do you mind telling me your present salary, Miss Aarvik?’

She looked at me with some surprise. ‘I don’t think so. I get £4200 a year – before tax.’

I sighed. That was fairly standard for a top secretary; certainly nothing out of the ordinary. And it was the most natural thing in the world to be introduced into the firm by Paul. ‘Why the Canadian transfer?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it a bit odd for the secretary of the boss to be asked to move to another country? Or were you going with Sir Andrew?’

She shook her head. ‘The way Sir Andrew put it, I was doing him a favour. The company I was going to – Kisko Nickel – is undergoing reorganization. I was to organize the office procedures, but only on loan for a year.’

‘You must have been pleased about that. Wasn’t it a step up? From secretarial to executive?’

‘I was bucked about it,’ she admitted. ‘But then Paul …’ Her voice tailed away.

‘When were you offered the job?’

‘It came up rather suddenly – last Monday.’

I wrinkled my brow. That was the day Hoyland rang to tell me of Billson’s disappearance. There was something bloody funny going on but, for the life of me, I couldn’t see how it hung together.

I smiled at her. ‘Well, you see that I am very much alive. In the opinion of the police and of my associates at Stafford Security the attack on me had nothing to do with your brother.’

She looked at me squarely. ‘What of your opinion?’

I lied. ‘I am of the same opinion. If you want my advice you’ll go straight to Sir Andrew McGovern and tell him you’ve reconsidered and you’ll take the Canadian job after all.’

‘And Paul?’

‘There’s nothing you can do about Paul, as I said before. He’ll be found, but it’s better for you to leave it to the professionals. I’ll write to you in Canada.’

She nodded. ‘Perhaps that would be the best thing to do.’

‘One thing – I wouldn’t mention to Sir Andrew that this is my advice, or that you’ve even seen me. My firm and Sir Andrew aren’t on very good terms right now; he’s fired Stafford Security and is setting up his own security organization for the Whensley Group, so I think any mention of me would be tactless, to say the least.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Was this because of Paul?’

‘Not at all. It happened before …’ I stopped short. It hadn’t happened before I knew about Billson. Brinton had sprung it on us at the board meeting on the afternoon when I had just returned from Franklin Engineering. I picked up quickly. ‘Nothing to do with your brother at all, Miss Aarvik.’

When she had gone I stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then I opened the bedside cupboard, stripped the lead foil from Brinton’s bottle of scotch, and poured myself three fingers. Brinton may have been right about it tasting better with Malvern water, but it tasted even better neat. I suddenly really needed that drink.

EIGHT

I soon became very damned tired of that hospital and especially of the food. I had just been served a so-called lunch which began with a watery soup which looked like old dishwater and ended with an equally watery custard which resembled nothing on God’s earth when my doctor walked in, full of that synthetic bonhomie which is taught in medical schools as the bedside manner.

I thrust the tray under his nose. ‘Would you eat that?’

He inspected it, his nose wrinkling fastidiously. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘That wasn’t the question,’ I snarled.

His eyes twinkled. ‘Well, possibly not,’ he conceded.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ I said. ‘I’m discharging myself.’

‘But you’re not ready.’

‘And I never will be if I have to eat this slop. I’m going home to get some decent food in my belly.’ For all Gloria’s faults she wasn’t a half-way bad cook when she wanted to be.

‘The food can’t be all that bad if you’re beginning to feel your oats.’ I glared at him and he shrugged. ‘All right, but the prescribed regimen is another week’s rest and then I want you back here for inspection.’

I said, ‘Where are my bloody trousers?’

So I went home by taxi and found Gloria in bed with a man. They were both naked and he was a stranger – I’d never seen him before to my knowledge but Gloria had a lot of odd friends. There weren’t any fireworks; I just jerked my thumb at the bedroom door and said, ‘Out!’ He grabbed his clothes and disappeared, looking like a skinned rabbit.

In silence I looked at the heap of tousled bedclothes into which Gloria had vanished. Presently the front door slammed and Gloria emerged, looking aggrieved and a little scared. ‘But the hospital said …’

‘Shut up!’

She was stupid enough to ignore me. She informed me at length about the kind of man I was or, rather, the kind of man I wasn’t. She embroidered her diatribe with all the shortcomings she could find in me, culled from seven years of married life, and then informed me that her bedfriend hadn’t been the first by a long shot, and whose fault was that? In short, she tried to work up the familiar instant Stafford row to the nth degree.

I didn’t argue with her – I just hit her. The first time I had ever hit a woman in my life. An open palm to the side of her jaw with plenty of muscle behind it. It knocked her clean out of bed so that she lay sprawling in a tangle of sheets by the dressing-table. She was still for a few moments and then shook her head muzzily as she pushed against the floor to raise herself up. She opened her mouth and closed it again as she caught my eye. Her fingers stroked the dull red blotch on her face and she looked at me unbelievingly.

I ignored her and walked to the wardrobe from which I took a suitcase from the top shelf and began to pack. Presently I broke the silence. ‘You’ll be hearing from my solicitor. Until then you can have the house.’

‘Where are you going?’ Her voice was soft and quiet.

‘Do you care?’

She had nothing to say to that so I picked up the suitcase and left the bedroom. I went downstairs to my study and unlocked the bureau. As I took out my passport I was aware of Gloria standing by the door. ‘You can’t leave me,’ she said desolately.

I turned my head and looked at her. ‘For God’s sake, go and put on some clothes,’ I said. ‘You’ll die of pneumonia.’

When I put the passport and a few other papers into my pocket and walked into the hall she was trudging disconsolately up the stairs. As I walked towards the front door she screamed, ‘Come back, Max!’

I shut the door gently on her shout, closing an era of my life. Sic transit Gloria mundi. A lousy pun but a true one.

NINE

I suppose if I hadn’t left Gloria I wouldn’t have gone on with the Billson case. Billson himself had ceased to be a security matter and was merely a half-way maniac gone on an ancestor-worshipping bender. He was of no concern to anyone but himself and, possibly, Alix Aarvik.

But I had left Gloria, which put me in a somewhat ambiguous position. It had already been agreed that I would take a holiday, partly for my own benefit and partly to give free rein to Jack Ellis. The trouble was that I didn’t feel like a holiday; I couldn’t see myself toasting on the sands of Montego Bay, as Charlie had suggested. And so the devil found work for idle hands.

Besides, I had been assaulted, and if nothing else demanded that something should be done, company policy did.

So I asked Jack Ellis to come and see me at my club. Ellis had joined us four years earlier – young, bright and eager to learn. He was still young, but that didn’t worry me; Napoleon was only twenty-six when he was General of the French Army in Italy and licked hell out of the Austrians. Jack Ellis was twenty-seven, something that might hinder him when negotiating with some of the stuffier chairmen of companies, but time would cure that. In the meantime he was very good and getting better.

I took him aside into the cardroom which was empty in the afternoon. For a while we talked about his job and then I brought him up-to-date on the Billson story. He was puzzled as anyone about the whole affair.

‘Jack,’ I said. ‘I want you to find Billson.’

He gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘But he’s not our pigeon any more. Apart from the fact that Whensley are running their own show now, Billson is out of it.’

I said, ‘When this firm was started certain rules were laid down. Do you remember Westlake, the security guard we had at Clennel Enterprises?’

Ellis’s face was grave. ‘I remember. It happened just after I joined the firm. Shot in the leg during a pay-roll snatch. He had to have it amputated.’

‘But do you remember what happened to the man who shot him? We got to him before the coppers did. We handed him to the law intact, although I’d have dearly loved to break his leg. We also made sure that the story got around. And that’s the rule, Jack – we look after our own. If any gun-happy bandit hurts one of our men he knows he has to cope with the police and our boys. And to coin a phrase – ”we try harder”. Got the picture?’

He smiled faintly and nodded. ‘In this business it makes sense,’ he acknowledged.

‘The top-ranking coppers aren’t too happy about it,’ I said, ‘because they don’t like private armies. But we rub along with the middle level very nicely. Anyway, a member of Stafford Security Consultants Ltd has been assaulted, and the fact it was the boss makes no difference to the principle. I’m not on a personal vendetta but I want those boys nailed.’

‘Okay – but Billson!’

‘He’s got to be connected somehow, so dig into him. The police aren’t doing much because it’s no crime to leave a job. They’ve got him on a list and if they come across him they’ll ask him a few polite questions. I can’t wait that long. All the villains in London know I’ve been done over, and they’re laughing their heads off.’

‘We should be able to get a line on Billson,’ said Jack. ‘It’s not easy for a man to disappear into thin air.’

‘Another thing; no one is to know any of this except me, you and the man you put on the job.’

‘Not even Charlie Malleson?’

‘Not even him. I suspect jiggery-pokery at high levels.’ I saw the expression on Ellis’s face, and said irascibly, ‘Not Charlie, for God’s sake! But I want to cut out even the possibility of a leak. Some of our top industrialists are doing some queer things – Sir Andrew McGovern for one. Now, I want a thorough rundown on him; particularly a survey of any relationship he might have had with Paul Billson and with his secretary, Alix Aarvik.’

‘Okay,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll get it started right away.’

I pondered for a moment. ‘Open a routine file on this. Your clients are Michelmore, Veasey and Templeton; send them the bills in the normal way.’ As he raised his eyebrows I said shortly, ‘They’re my solicitors.’

‘Right.’

‘And good luck with the new job.’ It wouldn’t be fair to Jack if he got the idea that when I came back everything would be as it was before, so I said, ‘If you don’t drop too many clangers it’s yours for good. I’m destined for higher things, such as busting into Europe.’

He went away a very happy man.

It’s not easy for a man to disappear into thin air.

Those praiseworthy citizens who form and join societies dedicated to the preservation of civil liberties are quite right in their concern about the ‘data bank’ society. At Stafford Security we weren’t a whit concerned about civil liberties; what we were doing was preserving the industrial secrecy of our clients, which doesn’t amount to the same thing at all. As a corollary, because we protected against snooping we understood it, and were well equipped to do some snooping ourselves should the mood take us.

The bloodhounds were turned on to Paul Billson. No man living in a so-called civilized society can escape documentation. His name, and sometimes a number attached to his name, is listed on forms without end – driving licence, radio and TV licence, dog licence, income tax return, insurance applications, telephone accounts, gas and electricity accounts, passport applications, visa applications, hire purchase agreements, birth certificate, marriage certificate, death certificate. It seems that half the population is pushing around pieces of paper concerning the other half – and vice versa.

It takes a trained man with a hazy sense of ethics to ferret out another man’s life from the confusion but it can be done, given the time and the money – the less time the more money it takes, that’s all. Jack Ellis hoisted Michelmore, Veasey and Templeton’s bill a few notches and the information started to come in.

Paul Billson applied for a passport the day after he disappeared, appearing in person at the London Passport Office to fill in the form. The same day he applied for an international driving licence. The following day he bought a Land-Rover off the shelf at the main London showroom, paid cash on the barrel and drove it away.

We lost him for a couple of weeks until he picked up his passport, then a quick tour of the consulates by a smooth operator revealed that he had applied for and been granted visas for Niger, Mali, Chad and Libya. That led to the question of what he was doing with the Land-Rover. He had got his green insurance card for foreign travel but a run around the shipping companies found nothing at all. Then our man at Heathrow turned up an invoice which told that a Mr Billson had air-freighted a Land-Rover to Algiers.

Whatever had happened to Paul had blown him wide open. After a lifetime of inactive griping about injustice, of cold internal anger, of ineffectual mumblings, he had suddenly erupted and was spending money as though he had a private mint. Air freight isn’t cheap.

What Jack had dug up about Billson’s finances was fantastic. The £12,000 in Paul’s deposit account was but the tip of an iceberg, and he had nearly £65,000 to play around with. ‘I don’t know where the hell he got it,’ said Jack.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘He saved it. When he vanished he was on £8000 a year and spending about £2500. You do that for enough years and are careful with your investments and you’ll soon rack up £65,000.’

Jack said, ‘I’ll tell you something, Max; someone else is looking for Billson. We’ve been crossing their tracks.’

‘The police?’

‘I don’t think so. Not their style.’

‘The Special Branch, then?’

‘Could be. They move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform.’

I stretched out an arm for the telephone. ‘I’ll ask.’

Because some of our clients, such as Franklin Engineering, were into defence work, contact with the Special Branch was inevitable for Stafford Security. It was an uneasy relationship and we were tolerated only because we could take off them some of their work load. If, for example, we saw signs of subversion we tipped them off and were rewarded by being left alone. A strictly confidential relationship, of course; the trades unions would have raised hell had they known.

The man I rang was politely amused. ‘Billson is no concern of ours. We checked back on what you told us; we even interviewed that bloody journalist – now there’s a slimy bit of work. As far as we’re concerned, Billson is a semi-paranoiac who has gone off the rails a bit. He might interest a psychiatrist, but he doesn’t interest us.’

‘Thanks.’ I put down the telephone and said to Jack, ‘He says they aren’t interested, but would he tell me the truth?’ I frowned as I turned the pages of the report ‘Algiers! Why didn’t Billson apply for an Algerian visa?’

‘He didn’t need to. British citizens don’t need visas for Algeria.’ Jack produced another thin file. ‘About Sir Andrew McGovern. Relationship with Billson – apart from the fact that they’re remotely linked through Franklin Engineering – nil. Relationship with Alix Aarvik – nil. It’s a straight master-and-servant deal – they’re not even “just good friends”. The Kisko Nickel Corporation is undergoing an internal reorganization due to a merger which McGovern engineered. But Alix Aarvik didn’t go to Canada; she’s still operating as McGovern’s secretary.’

I shrugged. ‘As I once said to Brinton, the best thing about advice is that you needn’t take it.’ I smiled sourly. ‘It turned out that his advice was good, but that’s no reason for Alix Aarvik to take mine.’

‘Apart from that there’s not much to get hold of in McGovern,’ said Jack. ‘He does seem to live in Brinton’s pocket.’

‘Not quite,’ I said absently. ‘Brinton has been having trouble with him. That’s why we lost the Whensley account.’ I was thinking of the Sahara; of how big and empty it was.

Jack sniffed. ‘If they have quarrelled no one would notice it. McGovern entertained Brinton at his home two days ago.’

I said, ‘If Brinton pats Andrew McGovern on the back it’s just to find a good spot to stick the knife. Thanks, Jack; you’ve done a good job. I’ll take it from here.’

When he had gone I rang Whensley Holdings and asked for Miss Aarvik. When she came on the line I said, ‘Max Stafford here. So you didn’t go to Canada, after all.’

‘Sir Andrew changed his mind.’

‘Did he? Miss Aarvik, I have some information about your brother which I think you ought to know. Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

She hesitated, then said, ‘Very well. Thank you for your continued interest in my brother, Mr Stafford.’

‘I’ll call for you at your flat at seven-thirty,’ I said.

After that I went down to the club library, took down The Times Atlas, and studied a map of the Sahara for a long time. It didn’t take me as long as that to find out that the idea burgeoning in my mind was totally fantastic, utterly irresponsible and probably bloody impossible.

TEN

I picked up Alix Aarvik that evening and took her to a French restaurant, an unpretentious place with good food. It was only after we had chosen from the menu that I opened the subject over a couple of sherries. I told her where Paul Billson was.

‘So he is trying to find the plane,’ she said. ‘But it’s totally impossible. He’s not the man to …’ She stopped suddenly. ‘How can he afford to do that?’

I sighed. Alix Aarvik was due to receive a shock. ‘He’s been holding out on you. Probably for a long time, judging by the cash he squirrelled away. He was getting £8000 a year from Franklin Engineering.’

It took a while for it to sink in, but as it did her face went pale and pink spots appeared in her cheeks. ‘He could do that!’ she whispered. ‘He could let me pay his bills and not put up a penny for Mother’s support.’

She was becoming very angry. I liked that; it was time someone got mad at Paul Billson. I wasn’t so cool about him myself. I said, ‘I’m sorry to have administered the shock, but I thought you ought to know.’

She was silent for a while, looking down into her glass and aimlessly rotating the stem between her fingers. At last she said, ‘I just don’t understand him.’

‘It seems he didn’t abandon his boyhood dream. He saved up his money to fulfil it.’

‘At my expense,’ she snapped. She gave a shaky laugh. ‘But you must be wrong, Mr Stafford. I know what Paul was doing at Franklin Engineering. They wouldn’t pay him that much.’

‘That’s another mystery. It seems they did. Your brother had damn near £60,000 to his name when he pushed off – and he turned it all into hard cash. If he’s taken it with him to Algiers he’s put a hell of a crimp into the currency regulations. I think Paul is now a law-breaker.’

‘But this is ridiculous.’

‘I agree – but it’s also true; Paul has gone to look for his father’s plane. I can’t think of any other reason why he should shoot off to Algiers with a Land-Rover. He’s looking for a plane which crashed over forty years ago and that’s a hell of a long time. I was looking at a map this afternoon. Do you know how big the Sahara is?’ She shook her head and I said grimly, ‘Three million square miles – just about the same size as the United States but a hell of a lot emptier. It’ll be like searching the proverbial haystack for the needle, with the difference that the needle might not be there.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Suppose Hendrik van Niekirk really did see Peter Billson in Durban after he was supposed to have crashed. You can lay ten to one that Billson wouldn’t have left that plane lying around for anyone to find. If he was a faker after that insurance money my guess is that he’d ditch off-shore in the Mediterranean. He’d row himself ashore in a collapsible dinghy – they had those in 1936, I’ve checked – and get himself lost. So Paul might be looking for something in the desert that’s not there.’

‘I don’t like that,’ she said coldly. ‘You’re implying that my mother was party to a fraud.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t like it much myself, but it’s a possibility that has to be considered. I do it all the time in my business, Miss Aarvik.’

A waiter interrupted us by bringing the first course. Over the onion soup I said, ‘Anyway, that’s where your brother is – somewhere in Algeria if he isn’t already in Niger or Chad or somewhere else as improbable.’

‘He must be brought back,’ she said. ‘Mr Stafford, I don’t have much money, but is it at all possible for your detective agency to look for him?’

‘I don’t run a detective agency,’ I said. ‘I run a security organization. Lots of people get the two confused. Frankly, I don’t see why you want him back. You’ve just heard of how he’s been deceiving you for years. I think you’re better off without him.’

‘He’s my brother,’ she said simply. ‘He’s the only family I have in the world.’

She looked so woebegone that I took pity on her. I suppose it was then the decision was made. Of course I hedged it about with ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ as a sop to my conscience should I renege, but the decision was made.

I said carefully, ‘There’s a possibility – just a possibility, mind you – that I may be going to North Africa in the near future. If I do, I’ll ask around to see if I can find him.’

She lit up as though I’d given her the key to the Bank of England. ‘That’s very good of you,’ she said warmly.

‘Don’t go overboard about it,’ I warned. ‘Even if I do find him your troubles aren’t over. Supposing he doesn’t want to come back – what am I supposed to do? Kidnap him? He’s a free agent, you know.’

‘If you find him send me a cable and I’ll fly out. If I can talk to Paul I can get him to come back.’

‘No doubt you can, but the first problem is to find him. But we have some things going for us. Firstly, there are large areas of the Sahara where he will not look for the aircraft.’ I paused and then said acidly, ‘Not if he has any sense, that is, which I beg leave to doubt’

‘Oh! Which areas?’

‘The inhabited bits – the Sahara is not all blasted wilderness. Then there’s the course Peter Billson intended to fly – that should give us a rough indication of where the plane is likely to be. Is there anyone who’d know such an odd item of information after forty years?’

She shook her head despondently, then said slowly, ‘There’s a man in the Aeronautical Section of the Science Museum – Paul used to talk to him a lot. He’s some sort of aeronautical historian, he has all sorts of details in his records. I don’t remember his name, though.’

‘I’ll check,’ I said. ‘The other point in our favour is that in a relatively empty land a stranger tends to stand out. If Paul is buzzing about remote areas in a Land-Rover he’ll leave a pretty well-defined trail.’

She smiled at me. ‘You’re making me feel better already.’

‘Don’t raise your hopes too high. When … if I go to North Africa I’ll send you an address where you can contact me.’

She nodded briefly and we got on with the meal.

I took her home quite early and then went back to the club to bump into Charlie Malleson who was just coming out. ‘I thought I’d missed you,’ he said. ‘I was just passing and I thought I’d pop in to see you.’

I glanced at my watch. ‘The bar’s still open. What about a drink?’

‘Fine.’

We took our drinks to an isolated table and Charlie said, ‘I rang you at home but no one was in, so I took a chance on finding you here.’ I merely nodded, and he cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘Is it true what I hear about you and Gloria?’

‘Depends what you’ve heard, but I can guess what it is. Bad news gets around fast. It’s true enough. Where did you hear it?’

‘Brinton was saying something yesterday. Gloria’s been talking to him.’

‘Getting her version in first, no doubt. She won’t impress Brinton.’

‘Well, I’m truly sorry it happened this way. Are you starting a divorce action?’

‘It’s in the hands of my solicitor now.’

‘I see,’ he said slowly. I don’t know what he saw and I didn’t really care. ‘How are you feeling otherwise?’ he asked. ‘You’re not long out of hospital.’

I looked at him over the edge of my glass. ‘Have you ever been beaten up, Charlie? Given a thorough going-over by experts?’

‘I can’t say that I have.’

‘It’s the most degrading thing that can happen to a man,’ I said flatly. ‘It isn’t so much what they do to the body; that can stand a lot of punishment. It’s the feeling of utter helplessness. You’re no longer your own man – you’re in the hands of others who can do with you what they like. And you ask me how I feel.’

‘You’re bitter about it, aren’t you, Max? You know, I didn’t expect that of you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you have the reputation of being a pretty cold fish, you know. You run your end of the business like a computer.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with being logical and acting logically,’ I said.

‘No.’ There was a pause before Charlie said, ‘I suppose the divorce will keep you in England.’

I drained my glass. ‘I don’t see why it should. I’m thinking of taking your advice to soak up some sun. I’ll be glad to get away from London for a while.’

Charlie looked pleased. ‘It’ll do you good; you’ll come back like a new man.’

‘How is Jack Ellis settling in?’

‘Very well. I’m glad you said what you did to him about the job; it’s cleared the air and makes things easier all round. How long do you expect to be away?’

‘I don’t really know. Hold the fort, double the profits and bank the proceeds. Expect me when you see me.’

We talked idly for a few more minutes and then Charlie took his leave. I had an obscure feeling that he had not ‘dropped by in passing’ but had come for a reason, to get some question answered. About the divorce? About my health? I went over the conversation and wondered if he had got his answer.

I had an uneasy night. I thought of myself as seen by others – Max Stafford, the cold fish. I hadn’t known Charlie had thought of me in that way. We had always been personal friends as well as getting on well with each other in the business. To get a flash of illumination on oneself through the eyes of another can sometimes come as a shock.

I slept and woke again after having bad dreams of vaguely impending doom. I lay with open eyes for a long time and then, finding sleep impossible, I turned on the bedside light and lit a cigarette.

I prided myself on thinking and acting logically, but where in hell was the logic of goose-chasing to Algiers? The sexual bounce, maybe, from Gloria to Alix Aarvik? The desire to be the parfit, gentil knight on a white charger going on a quest to impress the maiden? I rejected that. Alix Aarvik was a nice enough girl but there was certainly no sexual attraction. Maybe Max Stafford was a cold fish, after all.

What, then?

Maybe it was because I thought I was being manipulated. I thought of Andrew McGovern. He had tried to send Alix to Canada. Why? In the event he didn’t send her. Why? Was it because I had been a bit too quick and caught her and talked to her the day before she was supposed to leave? If the damage had been done there would be no reason to send her away. I had been beaten up immediately after I had seen her. If McGovern had been responsible for that I’d have to think up some new and novel punishment for him.

Was McGovern deliberately putting pressure on me through Brinton? Brinton, on the day of the board meeting, had said he was under pressure from McGovern. What sort of a hold could McGovern have over a shark like Brinton? And if McGovern was doing the squeezing, why was he doing it?

Then there was Paul Billson. Before he entered my life I had been moderately happy, but from the moment Hoyland rang me up to have his hand held there had been nothing but trouble. Everything seemed to revolve around Paul, a man obsessed.

Logic! If everything revolved around Paul Billson, maybe he was the person to talk to. Maybe going to Algiers wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.

I put out the light and slept.

Three days later I flew to Algiers.

ELEVEN

Algiers is the only city I know where the main post office looks like a mosque and the chief mosque looks like a post office. Not that I spent much time in the mosque but I thought I had made a major error when I entered the post office for the first time to collect letters from poste restante. I gazed in wonder at that vast hushed hall with its fretted screens and arabesques and came to the conclusion that it was an Eastern attempt to emulate the reverential and cathedral-like atmosphere affected by the major British banks. I got to know the post office quite well.

Getting to know the whereabouts of Paul Billson was not as easy. Although my French was good, my Arabic was non-existent, which made it no easier to fight my way through the Byzantine complexities of Algerian bureaucracy, an amorphous structure obeying Parkinson’s Law to the nth degree.

The track of my wanderings over Algiers, if recorded on a map, would have resembled the meanderings of a demented spider. At the twentieth office where my passport was given the routine fifteen-minute inspection by a suspicion-haunted official for the twentieth time my patience was nearly at snapping point. The trouble was that I was not on my own ground and the Algerians worked to different rules.

My hotel was in Hamma, in the centre of town near the National Museum, and when I returned, early one evening, I was dispirited. After a week in Algiers I had got nowhere, and if I couldn’t track Billson in a city what hope would I have in the desert? It seemed that my cutting edge had blunted from lack of practice.

As I walked across the foyer to collect my room key I was accosted by a tall Arab wearing the ubiquitous djellaba. ‘M’sieur Stafford?’

‘Yes, I’m Stafford.’

Wordlessly he handed me an envelope inscribed with my surname and nothing else. I looked at him curiously as I opened it and he returned my gaze with unblinking brown eyes. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, unheaded and with but two typewritten lines:

I believe you are looking for Paul Billson.

Why don’t you come to see me?

There was a signature underneath but it was an indecipherable scrawl.

I glanced at the Arab. ‘Who sent this?’

He answered with a gesture towards the hotel entrance. ‘This way.’

I pondered for a moment and nodded, then followed him from the hotel where he opened the rear door of a big Mercedes. I sat down and he slammed the door smartly and got behind the wheel. As he started the engine I said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Bouzarea.’ After that he concentrated on his driving and refused to answer questions. I gave up, leaned back in cushioned luxury, and watched Algiers flow by.

The road to Bouzarea climbed steeply out of the city and I twisted to look through the back window and saw Algiers spread below with the Mediterranean beyond, darkening towards the east as the sun set. Already strings of lights were appearing in the streets.

I turned back as the car swung around a corner and pulled up against a long wall, blank except for a small door. The Arab got out and opened the car door and indicated the door in the wall which was already swinging open. I walked through into a large walled garden which appeared to be slightly smaller than Windsor Great Park, but not much. In the middle distance was a low-slung, flat-roofed house which rambled inconsequently over the better part of an acre. The place stank of money.

The door behind closed with the snap of a lock and I turned to confront another Arab, an old man with a seamed, walnut face. I didn’t understand what he said but the beckoning gesture was unmistakable, so I followed him towards the house.

He led me through the house and into an inner courtyard, upon which he vanished like a puff of smoke into some hidden recess. A woman lay upon a chaise-longue. ‘Stafford?’

‘Yes – Max Stafford.’

She was oldish, about sixty plus, I guessed, and was dressed in a style which might have been thought old-fashioned. Her hair was white and she could have been anyone’s old mother but for two things. The first was her face, which was tanned to the colour of brown shoe leather. There was a network of deep wrinkles about her eyes which betokened too much sun, and those eyes were a startling blue. The blue eyes and the white hair set against that face made a spectacular combination. The second thing was that she was smoking the biggest Havana cigar I’ve ever seen.

‘What’s your poison? Scotch? Rye? Gin? You name it.’ Her voice was definitely North American.

I smiled slowly. ‘I never take drinks from strangers.’

She laughed. ‘I’m Hesther Raulier. Sit down, Max Stafford, but before you do, pour yourself a drink. Save me getting up.’

There was an array of bottles on a portable bar so I went and poured myself a scotch and added water from a silver jug. As I sat in the wicker chair she said, ‘What are you doing in Algiers?’

She spoke English but when she said ‘Algiers’ it came out as ‘el Djeza’ir’. Then she was speaking Arabic. I said, ‘Looking for Paul Billson.’

‘Why?’

I sipped the scotch. ‘What business is it of yours?’

She offered me a gamine grin. ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me.’

I looked up at the sky. ‘Is it always as pleasant here in winter?’

She laid down her cigar carefully in a big ashtray. ‘So okay, Stafford; you’re a hard trader. But just tell me one thing. Are you here to hurt Paul?’

‘Why should I want to hurt him?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said irritably. ‘Must you always answer a question with a question?’

‘Yes, I must,’ I said sharply. ‘Until you declare your interest.’

‘So, all right; let’s quit fencing.’ She swung her legs off the chaise-longue and stood up. Her build was stocky and she was a muscular old bird. ‘I was a friend of Paul’s father.’

That sounded promising, so I gave measure for measure. ‘His sister is worried about him.’

Her voice was sharp. ‘His sister? I didn’t know Peter Billson had a daughter.’

‘He didn’t. His widow remarried during the war to a Norwegian who was killed. Alix Aarvik is Paul’s half-sister.’

Hesther Raulier seemed lost in thought. After a while she said, ‘Poor Helen; she sure had a tough time.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘I knew them both.’ She went over to the bar and poured a hefty slug of neat rye whisky. She downed the lot in one swallow and shuddered a little. ‘Paul told me Helen had died but he said nothing about a sister.’

‘He wouldn’t.’

She swung around. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He treated her pretty badly. People don’t talk about those to whom they’ve been unkind. I’ll tell you this much – Paul wasn’t much help to his mother in her last years.’ I picked up my glass again. ‘Why should you think I’d hurt Paul?’

She gave me a level stare. ‘I’ll have to know a lot more about you before I tell you that, Max Stafford.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘And I’ll need to know a lot more about you.’

She smiled faintly. ‘Seems we’re going to have us a real gabfest. You’d better stay to dinner.’

‘Thanks. But tell me something. Where is Paul now?’

‘Come with me,’ she said, and led me into the garden where she pointed to the south at a low range of hills just visible in the twilight. ‘See those? Those are the foothills of the Atlas. Paul Billson is way to hell and gone the other side.’

By the time we went in to dinner our stiff-legged attitude had relaxed. I was curious about this elderly, profane woman who used an antique American slang; any moment I expected her to come out with ‘twenty-three, skidoo’. I gave her a carefully edited account and ended up, ‘That’s it; that’s why I’m here.’

She was drinking whisky as though she ran her own distillery at the bottom of the garden but not one white hair had twitched. ‘A likely story,’ she said sardonically. ‘A big important man like you drops everything and comes to Algiers looking for Paul. Are you sweet on Alix Aarvik?’

‘I hardly know her. Besides, she’s too young for me.’

‘No girl is too young for any man – I know. You’ll have to do better than that, Max.’

‘It was a chain of circumstances,’ I said tiredly. ‘For one thing I’m divorcing my wife and I wanted to get out of it for a while.’

‘Divorcing your wife,’ she repeated. ‘Because of Alix Aarvik?’

‘Because the man in her bed wasn’t me,’ I snapped.

‘I believe you,’ she said soothingly. ‘Okay, what’s your percentage? What do you get out of it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

A cold blue eye bored into me. ‘Look, buster; don’t give me any of that Limey blandness. You tell me what I want to know or you get nothing.’

I sighed. ‘Maybe I don’t like being beaten up,’ I said, and told her the rest of it.

She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘That’s a hell of a concoction – but I believe it. It’s too crazy to be a spur-of-the-moment story.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ I said feelingly. ‘Now it’s my turn. How do you happen to live in Algiers – for starters.’

She looked surprised. ‘Hell, I was born here.’ It seemed that her father was of French-Arab mixture and her mother was Canadian; how that unlikely match came about she didn’t say. Her mother must have been a strong-minded woman because Hesther was sent to school in Canada instead of going to France like most of the children of the wealthy French colonists.

‘But I haven’t been back in years,’ she said. That would account for her outdated slang.

She had met Peter Billson in Canada. ‘He was older than I was, of course,’ she said. ‘Let’s see; it must have been 1933, so I’d be seventeen.’

And Billson was thirty. Hesther was on vacation, visiting the home of a schoolfriend, when Billson came into her life. She was the guest of McKenzie, a wealthy Canadian who was interested in the development of air travel, particularly in the more remote parts of Canada. Billson had begun to make a name for himself, so McKenzie had invited him for a long weekend to pick his brains.

Hesther said, ‘It was like meeting God – you know what kids are. These days they go nuts over long-haired singers but in those days the fliers were top of the heap.’

‘What sort of a man was he?’

‘He was a man,’ she said simply. She stared blindly back into the past. ‘Of course he had his faults – who hasn’t?– but they were the faults of his profession. Peter Billson was a good pilot, a brave man ambitious for fame, an exhibitionist – all the early fliers were like that, all touting for the adulation of the idiotic public.’

‘How well did you get to know him?’

She gave me a sideways look. ‘About as well as a woman can get to know a man. 1933 was the year I lost my virginity.’

It was hard to imagine this tough, leathery woman as a seventeen-year-old in the toils of love. ‘Was that before Billson married?’

Hesther shook her head. ‘I felt like hell when I had to talk to Helen over the coffee cups. I was sure I had guilt printed right across my forehead.’

‘How long did you know him?’

‘Until he died. I was supposed to come back here in 1934 but I managed to stretch out another year – because of Peter. He used to see me every time he was in Toronto. Then in 1935 I had to come back because my mother threatened to cut off the funds. The next time I saw Peter was when he landed here during the London to Cape Town Air Race of ‘36. I saw him take off from here and I never saw him again.’ There was a bleakness in her voice when she added, ‘I never married, you know.’

There wasn’t much to say to that. After a few moments I broke the uncomfortable silence. ‘I hope you won’t mind telling me a bit more about that. Did you know his flight plan, for instance?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said a little wearily. ‘But I don’t know much. I was a girl of twenty, remember – and no technician. He had that beefed-up Northrop which was a freight carrier. Jock Anderson had installed extra gas tanks in the cargo space and the plan was to fly south from Algiers to Kano in Nigeria. The desert crossing was going to be the most difficult leg, so Jock came here with a team to give the plane a thorough check before Peter took off.’

‘Jock Anderson – who was he?’

‘The flight mechanic. Peter and Jock had been together a long time. Peter flew the planes and pushed them hard, and Jock kept the pieces together when they threatened to bust apart. They made a good team. Jock was a good engineer.’

‘What happened to him afterwards?’

‘When Peter disappeared he broke up. I’ve never seen a man get drunk so fast. He went on a three-day splurge, then he sobered-up and left Algiers. I haven’t seen him since.’

I pondered on that but it led nowhere. ‘What do you think of Paul Billson?’

‘I think he’s a nut,’ she said. ‘Hysterical and crazy. Totally unlike his father in every way.’

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘Same way as I got to know you. I have ears all over this city and when I heard of a man looking into Peter Billson I was curious so I sent for him.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’

‘Gone looking for his Daddy. By now he’ll be in Tammanrasset.’

‘Where’s that?’

Hesther gave me a crooked smile. ‘You go south into the desert until you’re going out of the desert. That’s Tammanrasset, in the Ahaggar about two thousand kilometres south of here. Plumb in the middle of the Sahara.’

I whistled. ‘Why there?’

‘If you’re looking for something in the Ahaggar, Tam is a good place to start.’

‘What’s the Ahaggar like?’

Hesther looked at me for a moment before she said, ‘Mountainous and dry.’

‘How big?’

‘Christ, I don’t know – I haven’t measured it lately. Wait a minute.’ She went away and returned with a book. ‘The Annexe du Hoggar – that’s the administrative area – is 380,000 square kilometres.’ She looked up. ‘I don’t know what that is in square miles; you’ll have to figure that yourself.’

I did, and it came to nearly 150,000 square miles – three times the area of the United Kingdom. ‘Paul Billson is crazy,’ I said. ‘What’s the population?’

Hesther consulted the book again. ‘About twelve thousand.’

‘There doesn’t seem much to administer. People are thin on the ground out there.’

‘If you go there you’ll find out why,’ she said. ‘Are you thinking of going after him?’

‘The idea has crossed my mind,’ I admitted. ‘Which makes me as crazy as he is, I suppose.’

‘Not really. You should find him easy enough. Getting to Tammanrasset is no problem – there are a couple of flights a week.’

‘If I can fly that does make it easier.’

She nodded. ‘Then all you have to do is to wait in Tammanrasset until he shows up. If he’s in the Ahaggar and wants more gas there’s no place he can get it except Tam.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Of course, if you want to chase after him, that’s different. You’d need a guide. Luke Byrne is usually in Tam at this time of year – he might fancy the job.’

‘Who’s he?’

She laughed. ‘Another crazy man. It would tickle his fancy to go looking for a lunatic.’ She lit an after-dinner cigar. ‘If you’re going to Tam you’ll need a permit. If you try to get one yourself it’ll take two weeks – I can get you one in two days. What will you do when you find Paul Billson?’

I shrugged. ‘Persuade him to go back to England if I can.’

‘You’ll find it hard cutting through that obsession.’

‘His sister might stand a better chance, and she said she’d come out. Would you help her, as you’re helping me?’

‘Sure.’

‘What do you believe?’ I asked. ‘Is Peter Billson’s body out there somewhere?’

‘Sure it is – what’s left of it. I know what you mean; I read about that South African son-of-a-bitch who said he’d seen Peter in Durban. I’ve often wondered how big a bribe the bastard took. I’ll tell you this, Max; Peter Billson wasn’t an angel, not by a long way, but he was honest about money. And Helen was the next thing to an angel and no one’s going to tell me that she perjured herself for half a million bucks. It just wasn’t their style.’

She sighed. ‘Let’s quit talking about it now, shall we? It’s not been my practice to look too deeply into the past, and I’m not ready to start now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I’d better go.’

‘Hell, no!’ she said. ‘Stick around and have some more brandy and I’ll match you for dirty stories.’

‘All right,’ I said obligingly, and told her the limerick about the Bishop of Chichester who made all the saints in their niches stir.

I didn’t see Hesther again at that time, but she certainly had some pull because I was ready to leave in a day and a half complete with permit and a seat booked on the plane at her expense delivered to my hotel by her Arab chauffeur. In a covering note she wrote:

I hope you don’t mind about the plane ticket; it’s just that I’d like to do my bit towards the memory of P.B. If you do find that idiot, Paul, club him on the head, put him in a sack and ship him back to Algiers.

I wired Luke Byrne and he’ll be expecting you. You’ll find him at the Hotel Tin Hinan. Give him my regards.

I don’t know if it means anything but someone else is looking for Paul – a man called Kissack. I don’t know anything about him because he blew town before I could check on him.

Best of luck, and come back for another visit.

TWELVE

I didn’t know, what to expect of Tammanrasset but it was certainly different from Algiers. From the air it was a scattering of houses set in a mist of green at the foot of barren hills. Transport from the airstrip was by truck along an asphalted road which led between tall, square pillars which were the entrance to the town. They looked like the decor for a fifth-rate B-movie about the Foreign Legion.

I called it a town, but it would be more appropriate to call it a village. Be that as it may, it was the metropolis of the Ahaggar. The main street was wide, shaded by acacia trees, and bordered by single-storey houses apparently made of dried mud which looked as though they’d wash away in a half-way decent shower of rain. The truck driver blared his horn to clear a path through the pedestrians, tall men dressed in blue and white who thronged the centre of the street as though the internal combustion engine hadn’t been invented.

The truck drew up outside the Hotel Tin Hinan where there was a tree-shaded courtyard filled with spindly metal tables and chairs at which people sat drinking. From a loudspeaker above the hotel entrance came the nasal wail of an Eastern singer. I went inside into a dusty hall and waited until someone noticed me. There was no reception desk.

Presently I was noticed. A dapper man in none too clean whites asked in massacred French what he could do for me. I said, ‘There should be a reservation. My name is Stafford.’

His eyebrows lifted. ‘Ah, M’sieur Stafford! M’sieur Byrne awaits you.’ He steered me to the door and pointed. ‘Voilà!’

I stared at the man sitting at the table. He was dressed in a long blue robe and a white turban and he looked like nobody who could be called Byrne. I turned back to the receptionist only to find that he had gone back into the hotel, so I walked over to the table and said hesitantly, ‘Mr Byrne?’

The man hesitated with a glass of beer half way to his lips and then set it down. ‘Yes,’ he said, and turned to face me. Under shaggy white eyebrows blue eyes stared out of a deeply tanned face which was thin to the point of emaciation so that the nose jutted out like a beak. Beneath the nose was a wide mouth with thin lips firmly compressed. I could not see his chin because a fold of his turban had somehow become wrapped about his neck, but his cheeks were bearded with white hair. He looked like Moses and twice as old.

I said, ‘My name is Stafford.’

‘Sit down, Mr Stafford. Have a beer?’ He spoke in English with an American accent which, under the circumstances, was incongruous.

As I sat down he beckoned to a waiter. ‘Deux bières.’ He turned back to me. ‘Hesther told me about you. She said you might need help.’

‘I might. I’m looking for a man.’

‘So? Most men look for women.’

‘His name is Billson. He’s around here somewhere.’

‘Billson,’ Byrne repeated thoughtfully. ‘Why do you want him?’

‘I don’t know that I do,’ I said. ‘But his sister does. He’s looking for a crashed aeroplane. Are there any of those about here?’

‘A couple.’

‘This one crashed over forty years ago.’

Byrne’s expression didn’t change. ‘None as old as that.’ The waiter came back and put down two bottles of lager and two glasses; Byrne nodded at him briefly and he went away. It seemed that Byrne had a line of credit at the Hotel Tin Hinan.

I poured the beer. ‘I’m told the Ahaggar is a big place – very mountainous. A wrecked plane may not have been found.’

‘It would be,’ said Byrne.

‘But, surely, with the thin population …’

‘It would be found.’ Byrne was positive. ‘How did Billson get here? By air?’

‘He has a Land-Rover.’

‘How long has he been here?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A week – maybe two.’

Byrne stared into the street without moving his eyes and was silent for some time. I leaned back in the chair and let him think it over. This was a man I found hard to assess because I had no notion of the springs which moved him. He was as alien to me as any of the men dressed like him who strolled in the street, in spite of the fact that he spoke English.

Presently he asked, ‘How well do you know Hesther Raulier?’

‘Hardly at all. I met her only two days ago.’

‘She likes you,’ he said. ‘Got a bag?’

I jerked my thumb in the direction of the hotel entrance. ‘In there.’

‘Leave it lay – we’ll pick it up later. I’m camped just outside Tam; let’s take a walk.’ He arose and did something complicated with his head cloth, making quite a production of it. When he had finished his face was hidden, and the cloth left only a slit at eye-level through which he looked.

We left the hotel and walked along the main street of Tammanrasset in a direction away from the airstrip. Byrne was a tall man, yet no taller than any of the other men who, similarly dressed, walked languidly in the street. It was I who was the incongruous figure in that place.

‘Do you always dress like an Arab?’ I asked.

‘Not if I can help it. I don’t like Arabs.’

I stared at him because his answer was incomprehensible. ‘But …’

He bent his head and said, with some amusement, ‘You have a lot to learn, Stafford. These guys aren’t Arab, they’re Imazighen – Tuareg, if you prefer.’

Byrne’s camp was about two miles outside the village. It consisted of three large leather tents set in a semi-circle, their backs to the wind. The sand in front of them had been swept smooth and, to one side, a small fire crackled, setting off detonations like miniature fireworks. In the middle distance camels browsed.

As we approached, a man who had been squatting next to the fire stood up. ‘That’s Mokhtar,’ said Byrne. ‘He’ll look after you while I’m away.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To snoop around. But first you tell me more about Billson.’

Byrne strode over to the fire and the two men had a brief conversation. Mokhtar was another tall man who wore the veil. Byrne beckoned me to join him in the middle tent where we sat on soft rugs. The inner walls of the tent were made of reeds.

‘Right; why does Billson want to find a forty-year-old crash?’

‘It killed his father,’ I said, and related the story.

I had just finished when Mokhtar laid a brass tray before Byrne; on it was a spouted pot and two brass cups. ‘You like mint tea?’ asked Byrne.

‘Never had any.’

‘It’s not bad.’ He poured liquid and handed a cup to me. ‘Would you say Billson was right in the head?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. He’s obsessed.’

‘That’s what I figured.’ He drank from his cup and I followed suit. It was spearminty and oversweet. ‘How does Hesther come into this?’

‘She knew Billson’s father.’

‘How well?’

I looked him in the eye. ‘If she wants you to know she’ll tell you.’

He smiled. ‘Okay, Stafford; no need to get sassy. Did you learn this from Hesther herself?’ When I nodded, he said, ‘You must have got right next to her. She don’t talk much about herself.’

I said, ‘What chance has Billson of finding the plane?’

‘In the Ahaggar? None at all, because it isn’t here. Quite a few wrecks scattered further north, though.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘Hell, I put one of them there myself.’

I glanced at him curiously. ‘How did that happen?’

‘It was during the war. I was in the Army Air Force, flying Liberators out of Oran. We got jumped by a gang of Focke-Wolfs and had the hell shot out of us. The cockpit was in a mess – no compass working – we didn’t know where the hell we were. Then the engines gave up so I put down. I guess that airplane’s still where I put it.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I walked out,’ said Byrne laconically. ‘Took a week and a half.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

I watched him walk away with the smooth, almost lazy stride I had already noticed was common to the Tuareg, and wondered what the hell he was doing in the desert.

Presently Mokhtar came over with another tray of mint tea together with small round cakes.

It was three hours before Byrne came back, and he came riding a camel. The sun was setting and the thorn trees cast long shadows. The beast rocked to its knees and Byrne slid from the saddle, then came into the tent carrying my bag. The camel snorted as Mokhtar urged it to its feet and led it away.

Byrne sat down. ‘I’ve found your boy.’

‘Where is he?’

He pointed north. ‘Out there somewhere – in the mountains. He left five days ago. He applied at Fort Lapperine for a permis but they wouldn’t give him one, so he left anyway. He’s a goddamn fool.’

‘That I know,’ I said. ‘Why wouldn’t they give him a permis?’

‘They won’t – not for one man in one truck.’

‘He’ll be coming back,’ I said. ‘Hesther said Tam was the only place he can get fuel.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Byrne. ‘If he was coming back he’d be back by now. Those Land-Rovers are thirsty beasts. If you want him you’ll have to go get him.’

I leaned back against the reed wall of the tent. ‘I’d like that in more detail.’

‘Paul Billson is an idiot. He filled his tank with gas and went. No spare. Five days is overlong to be away, and if he has no spare water he’ll be dead by now.’

‘How do I get there?’ I said evenly.

Byrne looked at me for a long time, and sighed. ‘If I didn’t know Hesther thought something of you I’d tell you to go to hell. As it is, we start at first light.’ He grimaced. ‘And I’ll have to go against my principles and use a stinkpot.’

What he meant by that I didn’t know, but I merely said, ‘Thanks.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s help Mokhtar get chow.’

‘Chow’ proved to be stringy goat, hard on the teeth and digestion, followed by a strong cheese which I was told was made of camel’s milk. Byrne was taciturn and we went to sleep early in readiness for an early start. I lay on my back at the entrance to the tent, staring up at a sky so full of stars it seemed I could just reach up an arm to grab a handful.

I wondered what I was doing there and what I was getting into. And I wondered about Byrne, who spoke almost as archaic a slang as Hesther Raulier, a man who referred to his food by the World War Two American army term of ‘chow’.

THIRTEEN

Byrne’s ‘stinkpot’ turned out to be a battered Toyota Land Cruiser which looked as though it had been in a multiple smash on a motorway. Since there wasn’t a motor-way within two thousand miles, that was unlikely. Byrne saw my expression and said, ‘Rough country,’ as though that was an adequate explanation. However, the engine ran sweetly enough and the tyres were good.

We left in the dim light of dawn with Byrne driving, me next to him, and Mokhtar sitting in the back. Jerricans containing petrol and water were strapped all around the truck wherever there was an available place, and I noted that Mokhtar had somewhat unobtrusively put a rifle aboard. He also had a sword, a thing about three feet long in a red leather scabbard; what the devil he was going to do with that I couldn’t imagine.

We drove north along a rough track, and I said, ‘Where are we going?’

It was a damnfool question because I didn’t understand the answer when it came. Byrne stabbed his finger forward and said briefly, ‘Atakor,’ then left me to make of that what I would.

I was silent for a while, then said, ‘Did you get a permis?’

‘No,’ said Byrne shortly. A few minutes went by before he relented. ‘No fat bureaucrat from the Maghreb is going to tell me where I can, or cannot, go in the desert.’

After that there was no conversation at all, and I began to think that travelling with Byrne was going to be sticky; extracting words from him was like pulling teeth. But perhaps he was always like that in the early morning. I thought of what he had just said and smiled. It reminded me of my own reaction to Isaacson’s treatment of Hoyland. But that had been far away in another world, and seemed a thousand years ago.

The country changed from flat gravel plains to low hills, barren of vegetation, and we began to climb. Ahead were mountains, such mountains as I had never seen before. Most mountains begin rising gently from their base, but these soared vertically to the sky, a landscape of jagged teeth.

After two hours of jolting we entered a valley where there was a small encampment. There was a bit more vegetation here, but not much, and there were many sheep or goats – I never could tell the difference in the Sahara because the sheep were thin-fleeced, long-legged creatures and I began to appreciate the Biblical quotation about separating the sheep from the goats. Camels browsed on the thorny acacia and there was a scattering of the leather tents of the Tuareg.

Mokhtar leaned forward and said something to Byrne, who nodded and drew the truck to a halt. As the dust drifted away on the light breeze Mokhtar got out and walked over to the tents. He was wearing his sword slung across his back, the hilt over his left shoulder.

Byrne said, ‘These people are of the Tégéhé Mellet. Mokhtar has gone to question them. If a Land-Rover has been anywhere near here they’ll know about it.’

‘What’s the sword for?’

Byrne laughed. ‘He’d feel as undressed without it as you would with no pants.’ He seemed to be becoming more human.

‘The Teg-whatever-it-is-you-said … is that a tribe of some kind?’

‘That’s right. The Tuareg confederation of the Ahaggar consists of three tribes – the Kel Rela, the Tégéhé Mellet and the Taitoq. Mokhtar is of the Kel Rela and of the noble clan. That’s why he’s gone to ask the questions and not me.’

‘Noble!’

‘Yeah, but not in the British sense. Mokhtar is related to the Amenokal – he’s the boss, the paramount chief of the Ahaggar confederation. All you have to know is that when a noble Kel Rela says, “Jump, frog!” everybody jumps.’ He paused, then added, ‘Except, maybe, another noble Kel Rela.’ He shrugged. ‘But you didn’t come out here to study anthropology.’

‘It might come in useful at that,’ I said.

He gave me a sideways glance. ‘You won’t be here long enough.’

Mokhtar came back, accompanied by three men from the camp. All were veiled and wore the long, flowing blue and white gowns that seemed to be characteristic of the Tuareg. I wondered how they kept them so clean in that dusty wilderness. As they came close Byrne hastily adjusted his own veil so that his face was covered.

There were ceremonial greetings and then a slow and casual conversation of which I didn’t understand a single word, and I just sat there feeling like a spare part. After a while Byrne reached into the back of the truck and produced a big round biscuit tin. He took out some small packages and handed them round, and Mokhtar added his own contribution. There was much graceful bowing.

As he started the engine Byrne said, ‘Billson came through here four days ago. He must have been travelling damned slow.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ I said. ‘He’s more used to driving on a road. Which way did he go?’

‘Towards Assekrem – or further. And that’s not going to be any joke.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gave me a considering look. ‘Assekrem is a Tamachek word – it means, “The End of the World”.’

The truck jolted as he moved off. The Tuareg waved languidly and I waved back at them, glad to offer some contribution to the conversation. Then I sat back and chewed over what Byrne had just said. It wasn’t comforting.

Presently I said, ‘What did you give those men back there?’

‘Aspirin, needles, salt. All useful stuff.’

‘Oh!’

Three hours later we stopped again. We had been moving steadily into the mountains which Byrne called Atakor and had not seen a living soul or, indeed, anything alive at all except for thin grasses burnt by the sun and the inevitable scattered thorn trees. The mountains were tremendous, great shafts of rock thrusting through the skin of the earth, dizzyingly vertical.

And then, at a word from Mokhtar, we stopped in the middle of nowhere. He got out and walked back a few paces, then peered at the ground. Byrne looked back, keeping the engine running. Mokhtar straightened and walked back to the truck, exchanged a few words with Byrne, and then took the rifle and began to walk away into the middle distance. This time he left his sword.

Byrne put the truck into gear and we moved off. I said, ‘Where’s he going?’

‘To shoot supper. There are some gazelle close by. We’ll stop a little further on and wait for him.’

We drove on for about three miles and then came across a ruined building. Byrne drew to a halt. ‘This is it. We wait here.’

I got out and stretched, then looked across at the building. There was something strange about it which I couldn’t pin down at first, and then I got the impression that it wasn’t as much ruined as intended to be that way. It had started life as a ruin.

Byrne nodded towards the tremendous rock which towered three thousand feet above us. ‘Ilamen,’ he said. ‘The finger of God.’ I started to walk to the building, and he said sharply, ‘Don’t go in there.’

‘Why not? What is it?’

‘The Tuareg don’t go much for building,’ he said. ‘And they’re Moslem – in theory, anyway. That’s a mosque, more elaborate than most because this is a holy place. Most desert mosques are usually just an outline of stones on the ground.’

‘Is it all right if I look at it from the outside?’

‘Sure.’ He turned away.

The walls of the mosque were of stones piled crazily and haphazardly one upon the other. I suppose the highest bit of wall wasn’t more than three feet high. At one end was a higher structure, the only roofed bit, not much bigger than a telephone box, though not as high. The roof was supported by stone pillars. I suppose that would be a sort of pulpit for the imam.

When I returned to the truck Byrne had lit a small fire and was heating water in a miniature kettle. He looked up. ‘Like tea?’

‘Mint tea?’

‘No other kind here.’ I nodded, and he said, ‘Those stone pillars back there weren’t hand-worked; they’re natural basalt, but there’s none of that around here for twenty miles. Someone brought them.’

‘A bit like Stonehenge,’ I commented, and sat down.

Byrne grunted. ‘Heard of that – never seen it. Never been in England. Bigger, though, isn’t it?’

‘Much bigger.’

He brought flat cakes of bread from the truck and we ate. The bread was dry and not very flavoursome but a little camel cheese made it eatable. It had sand mixed in the flour which was gritty to the teeth. Byrne poured a small cup of mint tea and gave it to me. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of private eye?’ It was the first time he had shown any curiosity about me.

I laughed at the outdated expression. ‘No.’ I told him what I did back in England.

He looked towards the mosque and Ilamen beyond. ‘Not much call for that stuff around here,’ he remarked. ‘How did you get into it?’

‘It was the only thing I know how to do,’ I said. ‘It was what I was trained for. I was in the Army in Intelligence, but when I was promoted from half-colonel to colonel I saw the red light and quit.’

He twitched his shaggy eyebrows at me. ‘Promotion in your army is bad?’ he enquired lazily.

‘That kind is. Normally, if you’re going to stay in the line of command – field officer – you’re promoted from lieutenant-colonel to brigadier; battalion CO to brigade CO. If you only go up one step it’s a warning that you’re being shunted sideways into a specialist job.’ I sighed. ‘I suppose it was my own fault. It was my pride to be a damned good intelligence officer, and they wanted to keep me that way. Anyway, I resigned my commission and started the firm I’ve been running for the last seven years.’

‘Chicken colonel,’ mused Byrne. ‘I never made more than sergeant myself. Long time ago, though.’

‘During the war,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Remember I told you I walked away from a crash?’

‘Yes.’

‘I liked what I saw during that walk – never felt so much alive. The other guys wouldn’t come. Two of them couldn’t; too badly injured – and the others stayed to look after them. So I walked out myself.’

‘What happened to them?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I gave the position of the plane and they sent a captured Fiesler Storch to have a look. Those things could land in fifty yards. It was no good; they were all dead.’

‘No water?’

He shook his head. ‘Goddamn Arabs. They wanted loot and they didn’t care how they got it.’

‘And you came back here after the war?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I let the war go on without me. During the time I was walking through the desert I got to thinking. I’d never seen such space, such openness. And the desert is clean. You know, you can go without washing for quite a time here and you’re still clean – you don’t stink. I liked the place. Couldn’t say as much for the people, though.’ He poured some more mint tea. ‘The Chaamba Arabs around El Golea aren’t too bad, but those bastards in the Maghreb would skin a quarter and stretch the skin into a dollar.’

‘What’s the Maghreb?’

‘The coastal strip in between the Mediterranean and the Atlas.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, early in ’43 I got a letter to say my Pop was dead. He was the only family I had, so I had no urge to go back to the States. And General Eisenhower and General Patton and more of the top brass were proposing to go to Italy. I didn’t fancy that, so when the army went north I came south looking for more favourable folks than Arabs. I found ’em, and I’m still here.’

I smiled. ‘You deserted?’

‘It’s been known as that,’ he admitted. ‘But, hell; ain’t that what a desert’s for?’

I laughed at the unexpected pun. ‘What did you do before you joined the army?’

‘Fisherman,’ he said. ‘Me and my Pop sailed a boat out o’ Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine. Never did like fishing much.’

Fisherman! That was a hell of a change of pace. I suppose it worked on the same principle that the best recruiting ground for the US Navy is Kansas. I said, ‘You’re a long way from the sea now.’

‘Yeah, but I can take you to a place in the Ténéré near Bilma – that’s down in Niger and over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean – where you can pick up sea-shells from the ground in hundreds. Some of them are real pretty. The sea’s been here and gone away. Maybe it’ll come back some day.’

‘Ever been back to the States?’

‘No; I’ve been here thirty-five years and like to die here,’ he said peacefully.

Mokhtar was away a long time, nearly five hours, and when he came back he had the gutted carcass of a gazelle slung across his shoulders. Byrne helped him butcher it, talking the while.

Presently he came over to me and squinted into the sun. ‘Getting late,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll stay here the night. Billson is either between here and Assekrem or he ain’t. If he is, we’ll find him tomorrow. If he ain’t, a few hours won’t make no difference.’

‘All right.’

‘And we’ve got fresh meat. Mokhtar tells me he stalked that gazelle for twenty kilometres and downed it in one shot.’

‘You mean he walked twenty kilometres!’

‘More. He had to come back. But he circled a bit, so say under thirty. That’s nothing for a Targui. Anyway, Mokhtar’s one of the old school; he learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader. With one of those you have to kill with one shot because the gazelle spooks and gets clear away before you can reload. But he likes a breech-action repeater better.’

And so we stayed under the shadow of Ilamen that night. I lay in the open, wrapped in a djellaba provided by Byrne, and looked up at those fantastic stars. A sickle moon arose but did little to dim the splendour of those faraway lights.

I thought of Byrne. Hesther Raulier had compared him with Billson, calling him, ‘another crazy man’. But the madness of Byrne was quite different from the neurotic obsession of Billson; his was the madness that had struck many white men – not many Americans, mostly Europeans – Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger – the lure of the desert. There was a peacefulness and a sanity about Byrne’s manner which was very comforting.

I thought in wonder of the sea-shells to be picked up from the desert a thousand miles from the sea but had no fore-shadowing that I would be picking them myself. The night was calm and still. I suddenly became aware of the startling incongruity of Max Stafford, hot-shot businessman from the City of London, lying in a place improbably called Atakor beneath the Finger of God which was not far from the End of the World.

Suddenly London ceased to matter. Lord Brinton and Andrew McGovern ceased to matter; Charlie Malleson and Jack Ellis ceased to matter; Gloria and Alix Aarvik ceased to matter. All the pettifogging business of our so-called civilization seemed to slough away like an outworn skin and I felt incredibly happy.

I slept.

I woke in the thin light of dawn conscious of movement and sound. When I lifted my head I saw Byrne filling the petrol tank from a jerrican – it was that metallic noise that had roused me. I leaned up on one elbow and saw Mokhtar in the desert mosque; he was making obeisances to the east in the dawn ritual of Islam. I waited until he had finished because I did not want to disturb his devotions, then I arose.

Thirty minutes later after a breakfast of cold roast venison, bread and hot mint tea we were on our way again, a long plume of dust stretching away behind us. Slowly the majestic peak of Ilamen receded and new vistas of tortured rock came into view. According to Byrne, we were on a well-travelled road but to a man more accustomed to city streets and motorway driving that seemed improbable. The so-called road was vestigial, distinguishable only by boulders a shade smaller than those elsewhere, and the truck was taking a beating. As for it being well-travelled I did not see a single person moving on it all the time I was in Atakor.

Nearly three hours later Byrne pointed ahead. ‘Assekrem!’

There was a large hill or a small mountain, depending on how you looked at it, on the top of which appeared to be a building. ‘Is that a house?’ I asked, wondering who would build on a mountain top in the middle of a wilderness.

‘It’s the Hermitage. Tell you about it later.’

We drove on and, at last, Byrne stopped at the foot of the mountain. There seemed to be traces of long-gone cultivation about; the outlines of fields and now dry irrigation ditches. Byrne said, ‘Now we climb to the top.’

‘For God’s sake, why?’

‘To see what’s on the other side,’ he said sardonically. ‘Come on.’

And so we climbed Assekrem. It was by no means a mountaineering feat; a track zig-zagged up the mountain, steep but not unbearably so, and yet I felt out of breath and panted for air. Half way up Byrne obligingly stopped for a breather, although he did not seem in discomfort.

I leaned against the rock wall. ‘I thought I was fitter than this.’

‘Altitude. When you get to the top you’ll be nine thousand feet high.’

I looked down to the plain below where I saw the truck with Mokhtar sitting in its shade. ‘This hill isn’t nine thousand feet high.’

‘Above sea level,’ said Byrne. ‘At Tam we were four and a half thousand high, and we’ve been climbing ever since.’ He rearranged his veil as he was always doing.

‘What’s this about a Hermitage?’

‘Ever hear of Charles de Foucauld?’

‘No.’

‘Frenchman, a Trappist monk. In his youth, so I hear, he was a hellion, but he caught religion bad in Morocco. He took his vows and came out here to help the Tuareg. I suppose he did help them in his way. Anyway, most of what the outside world knows about the Tuareg came from de Foucauld.’

‘When was this?’

‘About 1905. He lived in Tam then, but it wasn’t much of a place in those days. In 1911 he moved here and built the Hermitage with his own hands. He was a mystic, you see, and wanted a place for contemplation.’

I looked at the barren landscape. ‘Some place!’

‘You’ll see why when we get to the top. He didn’t stay long – it damn near killed him; so he went back to Tam and that did kill him.’

‘How so?’

‘In 1916 the Germans bribed the Libyan Sennousi to stir up trouble with the desert tribes against the French. The Tuareg of the Tassili n’ Ajjer joined with the Sennousi and sent a raiding party against Tam. De Foucauld was caught and shot with his hands bound – and it was an accident. An excitable kid of fifteen let a gun go off. I don’t think they meant to kill him. Everyone knew he was a marabout – a holy man.’ He shrugged. ‘Either way he was just as dead.’

I looked at Byrne closely. ‘How do you know all this?’

He leaned forward and said gently, ‘I can read, Stafford.’ I felt myself redden under the implied rebuke, but he laughed suddenly. ‘And I talked to some old guys over in the Tassili who had been on the raid against Tam in 1916. Some of the books I read sure are wrong.’ He half-turned as if about to set off again, but stopped. ‘And there was someone else in Tam not long ago like de Foucauld – but a woman. English, she was; name of Daisy Wakefield. Said she was related to some English lord – something to do with oil. Is there a Lord Wakefield?’

‘There is.’

‘Then that must be the guy.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Sure, Daisy and I got on fine. That’s how I caught up with the news; she subscribed to the London Times. A mite out-of-date by the time it got here but that didn’t matter.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She got old,’ he said simply. ‘She went north to El Golea and died there, God rest her soul.’ He turned. ‘Come on.’

‘Byrne,’ I said. ‘Why are we climbing this mountain?’

‘To see a guy at the top,’ he said without turning.

I trudged after him and thought: My God! Wakefield oil! This damned desert seemed littered with improbable people. In fact, I was following one of them. Maybe two, counting Paul Billson.

The building at the top of Assekrem was simple enough. Three small rooms built of stone. There were two men there who ushered us inside. They were dark-skinned men with Negroid features. Byrne said casually, ‘Don’t handle any of the stuff here; it’s de Foucauld’s stuff – holy relics.’

I looked about with interest as he talked with the men. There was a simple wooden table on which were some books, a couple of old-fashioned steel pens and a dried-out ink-well. In one corner was a wooden cot with an inch-thick mattress which looked about as comfortable as concrete. On a wall was a picture of the Virgin.

Byrne came over to me. ‘Billson went through three days ago, I think. Or it could have been two days because another truck went through the day after, and I’m not sure which was Billson. But that truck came out again yesterday.’

‘We didn’t see it.’

‘Might have gone out the other way – through Akar-Akar.’ He rubbed his jaw reflectively and looked at me. I noticed he hadn’t bothered to keep up his veil in the presence of these men. He said abruptly, ‘I want to show you something frightening – and why de Foucauld built here.’

He turned and went outside and I followed. He walked across the natural rock floor of a sort of patio to a low stone parapet, and then pointed north. ‘That’s where your boy is.’

I caught my breath. Assekrem was a pimple on the edge of a plateau. Below the parapet were vertiginous cliffs, and spread wide was the most awe-inspiring landscape I had ever seen. Range after range after range of mountains receded into the blue distance, but these were none of your tame mountains of the Scottish Highlands or even the half-tamed Swiss Alps. Some time in the past there had been a fearsome convulsion of the earth here; raw rock had ripped open the earth’s belly with fangs of stone – and the fangs were still there. There was no regularity, just a jumble of lava fields and the protruding cores of volcanoes for as far as the eye could see, festering under a brassy sun. It was killer country.

‘That’s Koudia,’ said Byrne. ‘The land beyond the end of the world.’

I didn’t say anything then, but I wondered about de Foucauld. If he chose to meditate here – did he worship God or the Devil?

FOURTEEN

Byrne was still talking to the dark-skinned men who had come out to join us. There was much gesticulating and pointing until, at last, Byrne got something settled to his satisfaction. ‘These guys say they saw something burning out there two days ago.’

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘What is there to burn?’

‘Don’t know.’ He fumbled in the leather pouch which depended from a cord around his neck and took out a prismatic compass. He looked at me and said with a grin, ‘I’m not against all scientific advance. Mokhtar, down there, thinks I’m a genius the way I find my way around.’ He put the compass to his eye to take a sight.

‘How far away?’

‘Don’t know that, either. They say it was a column of smoke – black smoke.’

‘In the daytime?’

There was astonishment in Byrne’s eyes as he looked at me. ‘Sure; how the hell else could they see smoke?’

‘I was thinking about the Bible,’ I said. ‘The Israelites in the wilderness, guided by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.’

‘I don’t think you’ve got that right,’ he said mildly. ‘I read it as a pillar of cloud.’ He turned back to take another sight. ‘But I guess we’d better take a look. I make it just about due north of here, on a compass bearing. I don’t bother none about magnetic variation, not on a short run.’

‘What do you call short?’

‘Anything up to fifty kilometres. Magnetic deviation is another thing. These goddamn hills are full of iron and you’ve got to check your compass bearing by the sun all the time.’

He put the compass away, and from another bag he took a couple of small packages which he gave to the two men. There was a ceremonial leave-taking, and he said, ‘Salt and tobacco. In these parts you pay for what you get.’

As we set off down the steep path I said, ‘There is something that’s been puzzling me.’

Byrne grunted. ‘Hell of a lot of things puzzle me, too, from time to time. What’s your problem?’

‘That veil of yours. I know it’s Tuareg dress, but sometimes you muffle yourself up to the bloody eyebrows and other times you don’t bother. For instance, you didn’t bother up there; you let them see your face. I don’t understand the rationale.’

Byrne stopped. ‘Still on your anthropological kick, huh? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s the politeness of the country. If you’re in a place and you don’t do as everybody does in that place, you could get yourself very dead. Take a Targui and set him in the middle of London. If he didn’t know he had to cross the street in a special place, and only when the light is green, he could get killed. Right?’

‘I suppose so.’

Byrne touched his head cloth. ‘This thing is a chech; it’s a substitute for the real thing, which is a tagelmoust, but you don’t see many of those around except on high days and holidays. They’re very precious. Now, nobody knows why the Tuareg wear the veil. I don’t know; the anthropologists don’t know; the Tuareg don’t know. I wear mine because it’s handy for keeping the dust out of my throat and keeps a high humidity in the sinuses on a dry day. It also cuts down water loss from the body.’

He sat down on a convenient rock and pointed downwards. ‘You’ve seen Mokhtar’s face?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t seem to bother about me seeing it.’

‘He wouldn’t – he’s a noble of the Kel Rela,’ said Byrne cryptically. ‘Society here is highly class-structured and a ceremonial has grown up around the veil. It’s polite to hide your face from your superiors and, to a lesser extent, from your equals. If Mokhtar met the Amenokal you’d see nothing of him except his eyelashes.’

He jerked his thumb upwards. ‘Now, those guys up there are Haratin, and the Haratin were here thousands of years ago, long before the Tuareg moved in. But the Tuareg conquered them and made slaves of them, so they’re definitely not my superior, so the veil don’t matter.’

‘But you’re not a Tuareg.’

‘The male singular is Targui,’ said Byrne. ‘And I’ve been a Targui ten years longer than I was an American.’ He jabbed his finger at me. ‘Now, you’ll see lots of Tuareg faces, because you’re a no-account European and don’t matter. Got it?’

I nodded. ‘I feel properly put in my place.’

‘Then let’s get the hell out of here.’

If I had thought Atakor was bad it was hard to make a comparison with Koudia; I suppose the only comparison could be between Purgatory and Hell. I soon came to realize that the high road I had anathematized in Atakor was a super highway when compared to anything in Koudia.

I put it to Byrne and he explained. ‘It’s simple. People make roads when they want to go places, and who in God’s name would want to come here?’

‘But why would anyone want to be in Atakor except a mystic like de Foucauld?’

‘The Hermitage is a place of pilgrimage. People go there, Moslem and Christian alike. So the going is easy back there.’

After leaving Assekrem and plunging into the wilderness of Koudia I don’t suppose we made more than seven miles in the first two hours – walking pace in any reasonable country. Koudia was anything but reasonable; I don’t think there was a single horizontal bit of land more than five paces across. If we weren’t going up we were going down, and if we weren’t doing either we were going around.

The place was a litter of boulders – anything from head size to as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and the springing of the Toyota was suffering. So was I. We bounced around from rock to rock and I rattled around the cab until I was bruised and sore. Byrne, at least, had the wheel to hold on to, but I don’t think that made it any better for him because it twisted in his hands as though it was alive. As for Mokhtar, he spent more of his time out of the truck than in.

Apart from the boulders there were the mountains themselves, and no one could drive up those vertical cliffs so that was when we went around, Byrne keeping his eyes on his compass so as not to lose direction in all the twisting and turning we had to do. He stopped often to take a reciprocal sighting on Assekrem to make sure we were on the right line.

As I say, Mokhtar spent more time on the ground than in the truck, and it wasn’t too hard for him to keep up. He had a sharp eye for signs of passage, and once he stopped us to indicate tyre marks on a patch of sand. He and Byrne squatted down to examine them while I investigated my bruises. When we were about to start again Byrne said, ‘Superimposed tracks. One vehicle going in and another, later, coming out.’

I had casually inspected those tracks myself but I couldn’t have trusted myself to tell which way the vehicles were going. As a Saharan intelligence officer I was a dead loss.

About seven miles in two hours, then we stopped for a rest and food. There was no vegetation in Koudia at all but Mokhtar had thoughtfully gathered a bundle of acacia twigs while waiting for us at Assekrem and soon had a fire going to boil water for the inevitable mint tea. I said to Byrne, ‘Don’t you ever drink coffee?’

‘Sure, but this is better for you in the desert. You can have coffee when we get back to Tam. Expensive, though.’

The sun was past its height and sinking towards the west as we sat in the shade of the Toyota. This was the hottest part of the day and, in Koudia, that meant really hot. The bare rocks were hot enough to fry eggs and the landscape danced in a constant heat shimmer.

I remarked on this to Byrne, and he grinned. ‘This is winter – would you like to be here in summer?’

‘Christ, no!’

‘This is why they wouldn’t give Billson a permis. And come nightfall the temperature will drop like a rock. You leave water exposed out here and you’ll have half an inch of ice on it by three in the morning. If Billson is lost he’ll either have burned to death or frozen to death.’

‘I like a cheerful man,’ I said acidly.

Mokhtar had disappeared about his private business but suddenly he appeared on top of a boulder about two hundred yards away. He gave a shrill whistle which attracted our attention, and waved both his arms. ‘He’s found something,’ said Byrne, scrambling to his feet.

We went over to Mokhtar and that took us more than ten minutes in that ankle-breaking terrain. When we were fifty yards away Mokhtar shouted something, and Byrne said, ‘He’s found a truck. Let’s see if it’s a Land-Rover.’

As we scrambled on top of the boulder, which was as big as a moderate-sized stately home, Mokhtar pointed downwards, behind him. We walked over and stared to where his finger was pointing. There was a vehicle down there behind the boulder, and it was a Land-Rover. Or, at least, it had been – it was totally burnt-out. There was no sign of Billson or anyone else, and I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t know Billson if I saw him. I was a damn fool for not having a photograph.

Byrne said, ‘The black smoke would come from the burning tyres. Let’s get down there.’

Going down meant going back the way we had come and walking around the boulder. As we came in sight of the Land-Rover, Byrne, in the lead, spread his arms to stop us. He spoke rapidly to Mokhtar who went on ahead, peering at the ground. Presently he waved and Byrne walked over to him, and they had a brief discussion before Byrne beckoned to me.

‘There’s been another truck here; its tracks are on top of those of the Land-Rover, and it went that way.’ He pointed back in the general direction of the Toyota.

‘Where’s Billson?’ My mouth was dry.

Byrne jerked his head at the Land-Rover. ‘Probably in there – what’s left of him. Let’s see.’

He stood up and we walked over to the Land-Rover. It was a total wreck – a burnt-out carcass; it sat on the ground, the wheel rims entangled in the steel reinforcing wires of what had been tyres. There was still a lingering stench of burning rubber in the air.

The window glass had cracked and some of it had melted, and the windscreen was totally opaque so that it was difficult to see inside. Byrne reached out and tugged at the handle of the door on the driver’s side and cursed as it came away in his hand. He walked around and tried the other door. He jerked it open and looked inside, with me looking over his shoulder.

The inside was a mess. The upholstery had burned, releasing blackened coil springs, and even the plastic coating of the driving wheel had burnt away, leaving bare metal. But there was no body, either in front or on the rear seats.

We went around to the back and got the tailgate open, to find scant remnants of what appeared to be two suitcases. Again, no body. I said, ‘The other truck must have taken him away.’

‘Maybe,’ said Byrne noncommittally. He poked around a bit more in the ruined Land-Rover, then he straightened up. ‘Did Paul Billson have any enemies?’

‘He may have had.’ I went cold as I realized we were speaking of Billson in the past tense just as his half-sister had done. I said, ‘I hardly think he’d have the kind of enemy who would follow him to the middle of the Sahara to kill him.’

‘Mmm.’ Byrne made a nondescript noise and continued his examination. ‘I’ve seen lots of burnt-out trucks,’ he said. He picked up a jerrican lying to one side, snapped open the cap, and sniffed. ‘He had gas in here. He must have been carrying it in the back there, because he had no cans strapped on the side when he left. This is empty now.’

‘Perhaps there was an accident when he was refilling the main tank.’

‘Then where’s the body?’

‘As I say – the other truck rescued him.’

Byrne stood back and looked at the Land-Rover, then talked more to himself than to me. ‘Let’s see; twenty-eight gallons in the main tank plus about four in the can – that’s thirty-two. He’d need at least twenty to get here, so he was in trouble without a fire – he didn’t have enough gas to get back to Tam. That leaves twelve gallons – eight in the tank and four in this can, I’d say.’

‘How do you know the can wasn’t empty? He could have refilled his main tank anywhere – even before Assekrem.’

‘There’s been gas in the can until quite recently – it smells too strong. And when I picked it up the cap was still closed. Now, if that can had been full of gas during the fire it would have exploded – but it hasn’t.’

Byrne seemed to be arguing in circles. ‘So he put it in the main tank,’ I said exasperatedly.

‘No,’ said Byrne definitely. ‘I’ve seen a lot of burnt-out trucks in the desert, but never one like this – not with all four tyres gone like that, not with so much fire damage up front.’ He bent down to examine the petrol tank, and then crawled under.

When he emerged he stood up and tossed something in his hand. ‘That was lying on the ground.’ It was a small screw cap with a broken wire hanging from it. ‘That’s the drain cap for the gas tank. The wire which is supposed to stop it unscrewing has been cut. That makes it certain. Someone doused this truck with gas from the can, then decided it would be a good idea to have more. So he drained another four gallons from the tank – maybe eight – to do a really good job of arson. You don’t get auto tyres burning all that easily. Then he tossed in a match and went away, and the guy who would do that wouldn’t be rescuing Billson.’

‘So where’s Billson?’

‘Don’t know. Maybe we’ll find his body around here some place.’

I remembered something. ‘The man I put on Billson’s track back in England seemed to think that someone else was also looking for him.’ I frowned. ‘And then Hesther Raulier …’ I pulled out my wallet and found the note she had enclosed with the air ticket. I scanned it and handed it to Byrne.

He read it through, then said, ‘Know this guy, Kissack?’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Neither have I.’ He gave me back the note.

‘Another thing,’ I said. ‘Billson might have had a lot of money with him. I think he smuggled it out of the UK.’

‘What do you call a lot of money?’

‘The thick end of £60,000.’

Byrne whistled. ‘I’d call that a lot, too.’ He swung around and rooted in the back of the Land-Rover where all that was left of two suitcases were the locks, hinges, metal frames and a pile of ashes. He said, ‘Whether Billson’s money was in here when the fire bust out we’ll never know without a forensic laboratory, and those are a mite scarce around here. Was it common knowledge that Billson would be carrying so much loose dough?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’s really only a guess on my part.’

‘You don’t have a monopoly on guesses,’ said Byrne. ‘And a lot of guys have been killed for less than that.’

As we walked away from the Land-Rover I said, ‘Funny that the chap who did this should close the cap on that empty jerrican; especially as he was going to leave it.’

‘Probably automatic,’ said Byrne. ‘I do it myself. Good habit to have.’

‘I’d still like to know what Billson was doing here,’ I said.

‘He was looking for a wrecked airplane, like you said. And he’d have found it, too – it’s about five miles further north of here. I was going to head there if we hadn’t found this. Billson must have heard about it back in Tam so he came for a look-see, the goddamned fool!’

‘It couldn’t be …’ I began.

‘Of course it couldn’t be his father’s plane,’ said Byrne tiredly. ‘It’s a French military airplane that force-landed back when they were getting ready to blow an atom bomb up at Arak. They got the crew out by chopper, then went back to take out the engines and some of the instruments. Then they left the carcass to rot.’

He went to talk to Mokhtar, and I sat on a rock feeling depressed. Billson must have been the biggest damned fool in the history of the Sahara. He had probably read the Land-Rover’s Owner’s Manual and taken the manufacturer’s fuel consumption claim as gospel, but it’s one thing tooling along a motorway and another fighting your way through Koudia. I doubt if we’d been getting more than five miles to the imperial gallon since we left Assekrem and perhaps ten or twelve in Atakor. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to British Leyland to suggest that the Land-Rover was averaging about the same.

But Billson had probably measured straight lines on a map and set out on that basis. But that was water under the bridge or, more accurately, vapour through the carburettor. What we had now was an entirely different set of circumstances in which Billson’s idiocy didn’t figure because, if we found his body it would be because he had been murdered by a man, and the man was possibly called Kissack.

It was then that I made the discovery. Mokhtar or Byrne would probably have done it, but they didn’t – I did, and it brought back some of my self-respect as a working member of this crazy expedition and made me feel something less of a hanger-on while others did the work.

I was looking down idly at the rock on which I sat when I noticed a small brown stain over which an ant was scurrying. For a moment I wondered how even an ant could live in Koudia, and then I noticed another and then another. There was quite a trail of them going backwards and forwards between a crack in the rock and the stain.

I stood up, looked at the Land-Rover, took a line on it, and then explored further away. Sure enough ten yards further on there was another stained rock, and a little way along there was another. I turned. ‘Hey!’

‘What is it?’

‘I think I’ve found something.’ Byrne and Mokhtar came up and I said, ‘Is that dried blood?’

Mokhtar moistened the tip of his little finger and rubbed it on the stain, then he sniffed his fingertip delicately, looked at Byrne, and said one word. ‘Yeah,’ said Byrne. ‘It’s blood.’

‘There’s a line of it coming from the Land-Rover.’ I turned and pointed towards a narrow ravine. ‘I think he went up there.’

‘Okay – Mokhtar goes first; he’s better at this than we are. He can see a sign you wouldn’t know was there.’

Billson, if it was Billson’s blood, had gone up the ravine but fairly soon it became obvious that he hadn’t travelled in a straight line. Not because of the difficulty of the terrain because he had dodged about quite a bit when he had no obvious need to, and on occasion he had reversed his course. And the blood splashes got bigger.

‘Hell!’ I said. ‘What was he doing? Playing hide-and-seek?’

‘Maybe he was at that,’ said Byrne grimly. ‘Maybe he was being chased.’

We found him at last, tumbled into a narrow crack between two rocks where there was shade. Mokhtar gave a cry of triumph and pointed downwards and I saw him sprawled on sand which was bloodstained. His face wasn’t visible so Byrne gently turned him over. ‘This Billson?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen him.’

Byrne grunted and felt about the body. The face of the man was puffy and swollen and his skin was blackened. Incongruously, he was wearing a normal business suit – normal for England, that is. At least I had had the sense to visit a tailor to buy what was recommended as suitable attire for the desert, even if the tailor had been wrong to the point of being out of his mind. The probability rose that this was indeed Billson.

Byrne said, ‘Whoever the guy is, he has a hole in him. He’s been shot.’ He held out his fingers, red with liquid blood.

‘He’s alive!’ I said.

‘Not for long if we don’t do something.’ Byrne spoke to Mokhtar, who went away fast. He then turned the man over so that he lay more easily and put his hand inside his jacket to withdraw a passport and a wallet from the inside breast pocket. He flipped open the passport one-handedly. ‘This is your boy; this is Paul Billson.’ He gave me the passport and wallet.

I opened the wallet. It contained a sheaf of Algerian currency, a smaller wad of British fivers, and a few miscellaneous papers. I didn’t bother to examine them then, but put the passport and the wallet into my pocket.

‘We’re in trouble,’ said Byrne. He indicated Billson. ‘Or he is. If he stays another night he’ll die for sure. If we try to take him out he’ll probably die. You know how rough it’ll be getting back to Assekrem; I don’t know if he can take it in his condition.’

‘It’s a question of the lesser of two evils.’

‘Yeah. So we try to take him out and hope he survives.’ He looked down at Billson. ‘Poor, obstinate bastard,’ he said softly. ‘I wonder how well Hesther knew his old man? She said in her note to you that she’d wired me. I didn’t tell you it was a ten-page cable, and she was pretty firm and detailed in her instructions.’

‘Has the flow of blood stopped?’ I asked.

‘Yeah; I have the tail of his shirt wadded into the hole. We can’t do much until Mokhtar gets back. He won’t be long.’

‘You must have known about Paul Billson before I arrived.’

‘Sure I did, but he’d taken off by then.’

I said, ‘If you hadn’t waited for me you could have got here earlier.’

‘Not much. I got Hesther’s cable the morning you came. I don’t know when she sent it, but the communications in this country aren’t noted for reliability.’

‘But you did lead me a little way up the garden path.’ It seemed odd to be making conversation over the body of a man who was probably dying.

Byrne said, ‘I wanted time to size you up. I don’t like to travel with people I can’t trust. Hereabouts it can be fatal.’

‘So I passed the examination,’ I said flatly.

He grinned. ‘Just by a hair.’

A shadow fell athwart us. Mokhtar had come back. He had brought cloth for bandages, water, and a couple of sand ladders. The sand ladders, as Byrne had earlier explained, were to put under the wheels of the Toyota if we got stuck in sand. They were about six feet long and of stout tubular steel. ‘Only stinkpots need them,’ Byrne had said. ‘Camels don’t.’

Byrne tore off a strip of cloth, soaked it in water and put it in Billson’s mouth; being careful not to choke him. Then he proceeded to dress the wound while Mokhtar and I lashed the sand ladders together to make an improvised stretcher.

It took us over an hour to get Billson the comparatively short distance back to the Toyota.

FIFTEEN

We had travelled two hours’ worth into Koudia but it took us four hours to get out from the time Byrne started the engine until we drove beneath the peak of Assekrem. He picked his way as delicately as he could through that rocky desolation but, even so, Billson took a beating. Fortunately, he knew nothing of it; he was unconscious. I tended him as best I could, cushioning his body with my own, bathing his face, and trying to get some water into him. He did not move voluntarily nor did he make a sound.

I had expected Byrne to stop at Assekrem where perhaps we could have got help from the Haratin at the Hermitage, but he drove past the beginning of the path up the cliff and we camped about three miles further on. Mokhtar took a roll of cloth from the back of the Toyota and very soon had a windbreak erected behind which we laid Billson. It was now dark so Byrne redressed the wound in the acid light of a glaring pressure lantern.

He sat back on his heels and watched Mokhtar administer a salve to Billson’s blackened face. ‘If we can get some water into him he might survive,’ he said. ‘That’s only a shoulder wound and the bullet went right through without hitting bone. Weakening but not killing. He’s suffered more from exposure than the wound.’

I said, ‘Why didn’t you stop at Assekrem? They might have had something to help him.’

‘Not a chance.’ He nodded towards the Toyota. ‘I have more stuff in my first aid kit than there is in the whole of the Ahaggar, if you except the hospital at Tam. Besides …’ His voice tailed away, which was odd in Byrne because he was usually pretty damned decisive.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you know anything about Algerian law?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Well, Billson broke one of them. He came out here without a permis.’

‘So did you.’

‘But I didn’t apply for one – he did. You can be sure that when he disappeared from Tam they knew where he’d gone. There are police posts on all the main tracks out of Tam and when he didn’t show up at any of those they’d be sure. So when he shows up in Tam he’ll be arrested.’

‘At least he’ll get hospital treatment,’ I said. ‘And when he’s out of hospital I’ll stand bail.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Byrne drily. ‘Because this guy is going to show up with a bullet hole in him and Algerian cops are no different than any other cops – they don’t like mysterious bullet wounds. It’s going to be a mess.’

He held up a finger. ‘One – Billson has broken the law, and it’s a serious offence. The Algerians are nuts on security and they don’t like foreign nationals floating around the desert tribes unobserved. That could mean prison and I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy in an Algerian prison.’ A second finger joined the first. ‘Two – he comes back with a bullet wound and that the cops won’t like either. It’s not an offence to be shot but it means someone else ought to be in jail, and that means trouble where there ought to be no trouble.’ A third finger went up. ‘Three – the guy who was shot is a foreigner and that brings Algiers into the act complete with a gaggle of diplomats. As far as I know Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Algeria years ago. I don’t know who represents British nationals here – could be the Swiss – but that means a three-cornered international hassle, and no one is going to like that.’

‘I begin to see the problems,’ I said thoughtfully.

‘Four,’ said Byrne remorselessly. ‘And this is the big one. Supposing we take Billson into Tam and he goes into hospital. It’s only a small place and within twelve hours everybody is going to know about the man in hospital who was shot – including the guy who shot him …’

‘… and who thinks he’s dead,’ I chipped in.

‘… and whom Billson can identify. What’s to stop him having another crack and finishing the job?’

‘If he’s still around.’

‘What makes you think he won’t be?’ Byrne stood up and looked down at Billson. ‘This guy is giving everybody a pain in the ass – including me.’ He shook his head irritably. ‘If it wasn’t for Hesther …’ His voice tailed away again.

‘Is there an alternative to Tam?’

‘Yeah.’ He kicked at the sand. ‘But I’ll have to think about it.’

He went over to the truck and came back with the rifle, then spoke to Mokhtar who took a full magazine from the pouch hung on his neck. Byrne slipped it into the rifle with a metallic click, worked the action to put a bullet up the spout, and carefully set the safety-catch. ‘I suppose you know how to use one of these, Colonel, sir?’

‘I have been known to.’

‘You might have to use it. It shoots a shade to the left and upwards; say, two inches at ten o’clock at a hundred yards. We’ll stand watches tonight.’

I frowned. ‘Expecting trouble? I’d have thought …’

He broke in. ‘Not really, but Billson will have to be watched throughout the night.’ He held up the rifle. ‘This is for unexpected trouble.’

I stood the middle watch in order to give both Byrne and Mokhtar an uninterrupted run of sleep; I didn’t know where we were going if it wasn’t Tammanrasset, but wherever it was they would have to take me there, so they were more important than me.

Billson was unmoving but still breathing, and I thought he looked a shade better than he had. For one exasperated moment that evening I had thought of quitting and going back to London. As Byrne had said – though less politely – Billson was nothing but trouble for everyone who came near him, and I did think of leaving him to stew in his own juice.

But the thought of going back and telling Alix Aarvik about all this made my blood run cold. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair on Byrne and Mokhtar who had gone to a great deal of trouble to help a man they didn’t know. Also, I would have to be on hand when Billson recovered because someone had to get him out of the country as he had very little money left. And London was far away and receding fast, and I found I quite enjoyed the desert in a masochistic way.

I took the rifle and looked at it in the dim light of the fire. it was an old British Lee-Enfield .303 and, judging by its low number, it had seen service in the First World War, as well as the Second. I took out the magazine and worked the action to eject the round in the breech, then looked down the barrel into the fire. It was as clean as a whistle and any hardened sergeant would have had to give Mokhtar full marks. He had looked after it well. I reloaded and laid the rifle aside, then checked Billson again.

Towards the end of my watch he began to stir and, just before I woke Byrne, he had begun to mutter, but his ramblings were incoherent. I put my hand to his brow but he did not seem to be running a temperature.

I woke Byrne. ‘Billson’s coming to life.’

‘Okay; I’ll tend to him.’ Byrne looked at the sky to get the time. He wore no watch. ‘You get some sleep. We start early; our next camp is at Abalessa.’

I wrapped myself in my djellaba because it was very cold, and lay down. I wasted no time wondering about Abalessa but fell asleep immediately.

Billson was obviously better in the morning, but he was dazed and I doubt if he knew where he was or what was happening to him. We bedded him down in the back of the Toyota on the camel hair cloth that had served as a wind-break and on a couple of djellabas. ‘We can get some camel milk once we’re out of Atakor,’ said Byrne. ‘And maybe scare up some hot soup. That’ll bring him around better than anything else.’

We travelled fast because Byrne said we had a long way to go. Coming out of Atakor we encountered the Tuareg camp we had passed on the way in. They were packing up to go somewhere but found some warm camel milk for Mokhtar. Byrne had thrown a djellaba casually into the back of the truck, covering Billson, and stood guard. ‘There’s no need for anyone to see him.’

We left the camp and stopped for a while a little later while we spooned milk into Billson. He seemed even better after that, even though the skin was peeling from his face and the backs of his hands in long strips. Mokhtar applied more salve and then we set off again, with Byrne really piling on the speed now that the country was much better.

These things are relative. Coming from the green land of England, I would have judged this place to be a howling wilderness. All sand, no soil, and the only vegetation an occasional clump of rank grass and a scattering of thorn trees which, however desirable they may have been to a camel, did nothing for me. But I had not just come from England; I had come from Koudia and Atakor and what a hell of a difference that made. This country was beautiful.

We travelled hard and fast, making few stops, usually to top up the tank with petrol from the jerricans. Billson finished the milk and was able to drink water which put a bit more life into him, although he still wandered in his wits – assuming he had any to begin with. Once Byrne stopped and sent Mokhtar on ahead. He disappeared over a rise, then reappeared and waved. Byrne let out the clutch and we went ahead at a rush, topping the rise and down the other side to cross what, for the Sahara, was an arterial highway.

‘The main road north from Tam,’ said Byrne. ‘I’d just as soon not be seen crossing it.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘We’re going round Tam to the other side – to Abalessa.’ He fell silent and concentrated on his driving.

Abalessa, when we got there, was a low hill on the horizon. We didn’t drive up to it but made camp about a mile away. There was still some gazelle meat left so Mokhtar seethed it in a pot to make soup for Billson before putting on the kettle for the mint tea. Byrne grunted. ‘You can have your coffee when we go into Tam tomorrow. Me, I’m looking forward to a cold beer.’

‘But I thought …’

‘Not Billson,’ said Byrne. ‘He stays here with Mokhtar. Just you and me. We’ve got to make you legal.’

I scratched my chin. I hadn’t shaved during the past few days and it felt bristly. Maybe I’d grow a beard. I said, ‘You’ll have to explain that.’

‘Strictly speaking, you should have reported at the poste de police at Fort Lapperine as soon as you got into Tam. Your name will have been on the airplane manifest, so by now the cops will be wondering where you are.’

‘Nobody told me that. Specifically, you didn’t tell me.’

‘You’d have been told if you’d registered at the hotel. Anyway, I just told you.’ He pointed to the hill in the distance. ‘That’s your alibi – the Tomb of Tin Hinan.’ He paused. ‘Mine, too.’

‘The previous owner of the hotel, I suppose.’

He grinned. ‘The legendary ancestress of the Tuareg. I did see a camera in your bag, didn’t I?’

‘Yes; I have a camera.’

‘Then tomorrow we climb up there and you take a whole raft of photographs and we take them into Tam to be developed. That proves we have been here if anyone gets nosey. I don’t want anyone getting the idea we went the other way – up into Atakor. Not immediately, anyway.’

‘How long do we stay in Tam?’

‘As long as it takes to satisfy that fat little guy behind the desk that we’re on the level – no longer. The story is this; you came into Tam, got talking to me, and asked about the Tomb of Tin Hinan – you’d heard about it – it’s famous. I said I’d take you there and we left immediately, and we’ve been here ever since while you’ve been rootling around like an archaeologist. But you don’t bear down on that too heavily because to do real archaeology you need a licence. Only, tonight I discovered you hadn’t registered with the cops so I’ve brought you back to get things right. Got the story?’

I repeated the gist of it, and Byrne said, ‘There’s more. The fat little guy will ask about your future plans, and you tell him you’re going south to Agadez – that’s in Niger.’

I looked at him blankly. ‘Am I?’

‘Yeah.’ He pointed at Billson. ‘We’ve got to get this guy out of Algeria fast. Clear out of the country.’

I scratched my bristles again. ‘I have no Niger visa. First, I didn’t have time to get one, and secondly I had no intention of going. Looking at this place from England, I decided that there’s a limit to what I could do.’

‘You’ll get by without a visa if you stick with me.’

‘Have you got a visa for Niger?’

‘Don’t need one – I live there. Got a pretty nice place in the Aïr ou Azbine, to the north of Agadez. I come up to Tam once a year to look after a couple of things for Hesther. She’s got interests here.’

Mokhtar served up mint tea. I sat down, feeling comfortably tired after a long day’s drive. ‘How did you come to know Hesther?’ I sipped the tea and found I was coming to like the stuff.

‘When she was younger she used to come down to the Ahaggar quite a lot; that was when the French were here. One time she got into trouble in the Tademaït – that’s about 700 kilometres north of here. Damn place fries your brains out on a hot day. Wasn’t bad trouble but could have gotten worse. Anyway, I helped her out of it and she was grateful. Offered me a job in Algiers but I said I wasn’t going to the damned Maghreb, so she asked me to help her out in Tam. That went on for a couple of years, then once, when she came down to Tam, we got to talking, and the upshot was that she staked me to my place in the Aïr, down in Niger.’

‘What do you do down there?’ I asked curiously. Byrne had to earn a living somehow; he just couldn’t go around helping strangers in distress.

‘I’m a camel breeder,’ he said. ‘And I run a few salt caravans across to Bilma.’

I didn’t know where Bilma was and a salt caravan sounded improbable, but the camel breeding I could understand. ‘How many camels have you got?’

He paused, obviously calculating. ‘Pack animals and breeding stock together, I’d say about three hundred. I had more but the goddamn drought hit me hard. Seven lean years, just like in the Bible. But I’m building up the herd again.’

‘Who is looking after them now?’

He smiled. ‘If this was Arizona you’d call Mokhtar’s brother the ranch foreman. His name is Hamiada.’ He stretched. ‘Got film for your camera?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s okay then. I reckon I’ll go to sleep.’

‘Aren’t you going to eat?’

‘We’ll eat well in Tam tomorrow. There’s just enough chow left to feed Mokhtar and Billson until we come back. Wake me at midnight.’ With that he rolled over and was instantly asleep.

So I went hungry that night but I didn’t mind. I looked around and saw that Mokhtar was asleep, as was Billson. It seemed as though I had been elected to stand first watch.

At about eleven Billson awoke and was coherent for the first time. He muttered a little, then said clearly, ‘It’s dark. Why is it dark?’

‘It’s night time,’ I said softly.

‘Who are you?’ His voice was weak but quite clear.

‘My name is Stafford. Don’t worry about it now, Paul; you’re quite safe.’

He didn’t say anything for some time, then he said, ‘He shot me.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But you’re all right now. Go to sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.’

He fell silent and when I looked at him closely five minutes later I saw that his eyes were closed and that he was breathing deeply and evenly.

At midnight I woke Byrne and told him about it, then went to sleep myself.

SIXTEEN

We didn’t have much time for Billson in the morning because Byrne wanted to get back to Tam and we still had to go to the mound of Abalessa to take photographs, and so we had time to exchange only a few words. Mine were consoling – Byrne’s were more in the nature of threats.

Billson was very weak, but rational. He had some more of the soup that Mokhtar prepared and managed to eat a few bits of the meat. As I knelt next to him he said, ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Max Stafford. Your sister sent me to find you.’

‘Alix? How did she know where I’d gone?’

‘It wasn’t too hard to figure,’ I said drily. ‘I suppose you know you did a damn silly thing – bolting like that.’

He swallowed. ‘I suppose so,’ he said reluctantly. He looked past me. ‘Who are those Arabs?’

‘They’re not Arabs. Now listen, Paul. You made a bigger mistake when you went into Atakor without a permit. Did you know that you didn’t have enough petrol to get back to Tam?’ His eyes widened a little and he shook his head. ‘And then you were shot. Who shot you – and why?’

His face went blank and then he frowned and shook his head. ‘I don’t remember much about that.’

‘Never mind,’ I said gently. ‘All you have to do is to get well. Paul, if the police find you they’ll arrest you and you’ll go to prison. We are trying to stop that happening.’

I turned as Byrne called, ‘Are you ready?’ There was impatience in his voice.

‘Coming.’ I stood up and said to Billson, ‘Rest easy.’

Byrne was more forthright. A Tuareg in full fig can be pretty awe-inspiring but, to the recumbent Billson, Byrne towering over him must have seemed a mile high. There is also something particularly menacing about a man who utters threats when you can’t see his face.

Byrne said, ‘Now, listen, stupid. You stay here with this man and you don’t do a goddamn thing. If you step out of line just once Mokhtar will cut your crazy head off. Hear me?’

Paul nodded weakly. I noted that Mokhtar was wearing his sword and that the rifle was prominently displayed. Byrne said, ‘If you do one more screwball thing we’ll leave you for the vultures and the fennecs.’ He strode away and I followed him to the Toyota.

On top of the mound of Abalessa were the ruins of a stone building, very unTuareglike. ‘French?’ I asked. ‘Foreign Legion?’

‘Hell, no!’ said Byrne. ‘Older than that. There’s one theory that this was the southernmost post of the Romans; it has a likeness to some of the Roman forts up north. Another theory is that it was built by the remnants of a defeated legion that was driven down here. The Romans did lose a couple of legions in North Africa.’ He shrugged. ‘But they’re just theories.’

‘What’s this about Tin Hinan?’

‘Over here.’ I followed him. ‘She was found down there.’ I peered into the small stone chamber which had obviously been covered by a hand-worked stone slab that lay nearby. ‘It’s still a mystery. The Tuareg have a story that a couple called Yunis and Izubahil were sent from Byzantium to rule over them; that would be about the year 1400. Some of the jewellery found on her was East Roman of that period, but some of the coins dated back to the fifth and sixth century. And there were some iron arm rings which the Byzantines didn’t wear.’

He changed his tone and said abruptly, ‘We’re not here for a history lesson – get busy with your snapshots. Put me in one of them, and I’ll do the same for you. Fool tourists are always doing that.’

So I ran off a spool of pictures and Byrne took a couple of me and we went away although I should have liked to have stayed longer. I have always liked a good mystery which, I suppose, was the reason I was in the Sahara anyway.

Abalessa was about sixty miles from Tammanrasset and we made it in just about two and a half hours, being helped during the last stretch by the asphalted road from the airstrip to Tam. That ten-mile bit was the only paved road I saw in the whole Sahara and I never found out why it had been put there.

Byrne pulled up outside the Hotel Tin Hinan. ‘Go in and make your peace,’ he said. ‘I’m going to nose around. I’ll meet you back here in, maybe, an hour. You can have a beer while you’re waiting.’

‘Am I staying here tonight?’

‘No, you’ll be with me. But you’ll probably have to pay for your room reservation. Give me your film.’

So I took the film from the camera, gave it to him and got out, and he drove away blasting the horn. There was the predictable confusion in the hotel with reproaches which I soothed by paying the full room charge even though I had not used it. The manager’s French was bad but good enough for me to hear that the police had been looking for me. I promised faithfully to report to the poste de police.

Then I went into the courtyard, sat at a table, and ordered a beer, and nothing had ever tasted so good. Nothing had changed in Tammanrasset since the day I had flown in and seen it with new eyes. The Tuareg walked down the sandy street in their languid, majestic manner, or stood about in small groups discussing whatever it was that Tuareg discuss. Probably the price of camels and the difficulty of shooting gazelle. A lot of them wore swords.

Of course, there was no reason why Tam should have changed. It was I who had changed. Those few days in Atakor and Koudia had made the devil of a difference. And now it seemed I was to go down to Niger – to a place called Agadez and where was it? Ah yes; the Aïr ou something or other. I didn’t know how far it was and I wondered if I could buy a map.

There were other things I needed. I looked down at myself. The natty tropical suiting the London tailor had foisted on me was showing the strain of desert travel. I gave the jacket an open-handed blow and a cloud of dust arose. With those travel stains and my unshaven appearance I probably looked like a tramp; any London bobby would have run me in on sight. But I saw no chance of buying European-style clothing in Tam. I’d ask Byrne about that.

I finished the beer and ordered a coffee which came thick and sugary and in very small quantity, which was just as well, and I decided I’d rather stay with the mint tea. I was half way through the second beer when Byrne pitched up. His first act was to order a beer and his second to drain the glass in one swallow. Then he ordered another, and said, ‘No one called Kissack has been around.’

‘So?’

He sighed. ‘Don’t mean much, of course. A guy can change his name. There’s a party of German tourists going through.’ He laughed. ‘Some of them are wearing Lederhosen.’

I wasn’t very much amused. In the desert Lederhosen weren’t any more ridiculous than the suit I was wearing. I said, ‘Have you any maps? I’d like to know where I’m going.’

‘Don’t use them myself, but I can get you one.’

‘And I can do with some clothes.’

He inspected me. ‘Wait until we get further south,’ he advised. ‘Nothing much here; better in Agadez. Your prints will be ready in an hour; I put the arm on the photographer.’ He drained his glass. ‘Now let’s go tell the tale to the cops.’

Outside the entrance to the poste de police he said, ‘Got your passport?’

I pulled it out of my pocket and hesitated. ‘Look, if I say I’m going to Niger it’s going to look funny when he finds no Niger visa in here.’

‘No problem,’ said Byrne. ‘He won’t give a damn about that. Niger is another country and it’s not his worry what trouble you find yourself in there. He’ll be only too happy to get you out of Algeria. Now go in and act the idiot tourist. I’ll be right behind you.’

So I reported to the plump uniformed policeman behind the desk, and laid down my passport. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, M’sieur Stafford,’ he said coldly. ‘What kept you?’ He spoke heavily accented French.

‘Merde!’ said Byrne. ‘It was only a couple of days.’ I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised that Byrne spoke French, but I was. It was ungrammatical but serviceable.

‘Three and a half, M’sieur Byrne,’ said the policeman flatly.

‘I thought he’d reported – I only found out last night, and we came straight in.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Abalessa.’ He added something in a guttural language totally unlike that in which he spoke to Mokhtar. I took it to be Arabic.

‘Nowhere else?’

‘Where else is there to go out there?’ asked Byrne.

I said, ‘I suppose it’s my fault. I jumped at the chance to go out there as soon as I met Mr Byrne. I didn’t know I had to report here until he told me last night.’ I paused, and added, ‘It’s quite a place out there; I’m not sure it’s Roman, though.’

The policeman didn’t comment on that. ‘Are you staying in Tammanrasset long, M’sieur Stafford?’

I glanced at Byrne. ‘No; I’m going down to Agadez and the Aïr.’

‘With M’sieur Byrne?’

‘Yes.’

He suddenly seemed more cheerful as he picked up my passport. ‘We have much trouble with you tourists. You don’t understand that there are strict rules that you must follow. There is another Englishman we are looking for. It all wastes our time.’ He opened the passport, checked me against the photograph, and flicked the pages. ‘There is no visa for Algeria here,’ he said sharply.

‘You know it’s not necessary,’ said Byrne.

‘Of course.’ The policeman’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Byrne. ‘Very good of you to instruct me in my work.’ He put his hands flat on the table. ‘I think a lot about you, M’sieur Byrne. I do not think you are a good influence in the Ahaggar. It may be that I shall write a report on you.’

‘It won’t get past the Commissioner of Police in Algiers,’ said Byrne. ‘You can depend on that.’

The policeman said nothing to that. His face was expressionless as he stamped my passport and pushed it across the desk. ‘You will fill out fiches in triplicate. If you do not know how I am sure M’sieur Byrne will instruct you.’ He indicated a side table.

The fiche was a small card, somewhat smaller than a standard postcard and printed in Arabic and French. I scanned it, then said to Byrne, ‘Standard bureaucratic stuff – but what the hell do I put down under “Tribe”?’

Byrne grinned. ‘A couple of years ago there was a guy here from the Isle of Man. He put down Manx.’ He wilted a little under my glare and said, ‘Just put a stroke through it.’

I filled in all three fiches and put them on the policeman’s desk. He said, ‘When are you leaving for Niger?’

I looked at Byrne, who said, ‘Now. We just have to go to Abalessa to pick up some gear.’

The policeman nodded. ‘Don’t forget to report at the checkpoint outside town. You have an unfortunate habit of going around it, M’sieur Byrne.’

‘Me? I never!’ said Byrne righteously.

We left and, just outside the office, passed a man carrying a sub-machine-gun. Once in the street I said, ‘He doesn’t like you. What was all that about?’

‘Just a general principle. The boys in the Maghreb don’t like foreigners getting too close to the Tuareg. That guy is an Arab from Sidi-bel-Abbès. It’s about time they recruited their police from the Tuareg.’

‘Can he get you into trouble?’

‘Fat chance. The Commissioner of Police lives in Hesther Raulier’s pocket.’

I digested that thoughtfully, then said, ‘What did you say to him in Arabic?’

Byrne smiled. ‘Just something I wouldn’t want to say to your face. I told him you were a goddamn stupid tourist who didn’t know which end was up. I also managed to slip in that we were waiting for a roll of film to be developed. With a bit of luck he’ll check on that.’

We went shopping. Byrne seemed well known and there was a lot of good-natured chaffing and laughter – also a lot of mint tea. He bought salt, sugar and flour, small quantities of each in many places, spreading his custom wide. He also bought a map for me and then we went back to the hotel for a final beer.

As we sat down he said, ‘No trace of Kissack, but the word is out to look for him.’

The map was the Michelin North and West Africa, and the scale was 40 kilometres to the centimetre, about 63 miles to the inch. Even so, it was a big map and more than covered the small table at which we were sitting. I folded it to more comfortable proportions and looked at the area around Tammanrasset. The ground we had covered in the last few days occupied an astonishingly small portion of that map. I could cover it with the first joint of my thumb.

I observed the vast areas of blankness, and said, ‘Where are we going?’

Byrne took the map and put his finger on Tammanrasset. ‘South from here, but not by the main road. We take this track here, and as soon as we get to Fort Flatters we’re in Niger.’ He turned the map over. ‘So we enter the Aïr from the north – through Iferouane and down to Timia. My place is near there. The Aïr is good country.’

I used my thumb to estimate the distance. It was a crow’s flight of about four hundred miles, probably six hundred on the ground and, as far as I could see, through a lot of damn all. The Aïr seemed to be mountainous country.

I said, ‘What’s an erg?’

Byrne clicked his tongue. ‘I guess it’s best described as a sea of sand.’

I noted with relief that there was no erg on the route to the Aïr.

We drank our beer leisurely and then wandered down the street to pick up the photographs. Suddenly Byrne nudged me. ‘Look!’ A policeman came out of a doorway just ahead and crossed the road to go into the poste de police. ‘What did I tell you,’ said Byrne. ‘He’s been checking those goddamn pictures.’

‘Hell!’ I said. ‘I didn’t think he’d do it. A suspicious crowd, aren’t they.’

‘Keeping the Revolution pure breeds suspicion.’

We collected the photographs, picked up the Toyota at a garage where it had been refuelled and the water cans filled, and drove back to Abalessa.

Mokhtar reported no problems, but Billson suddenly became voluble and wanted to talk. He seemed a lot stronger and, since he hadn’t been able to talk to Mokhtar, it all came bursting out of him.

But Byrne would have none of it. ‘No time for that now. I want to get out of here. Let’s go.’

Again we picked up speed as we hit the asphalted section of road and, because we had to go through Tam, Billson was put in the back of the truck and covered with a couple of djellabas. The road to the south left Tam from Fort Lapperine and, as we turned the corner, I was conscious of the man standing outside the poste de police, cradling a sub-machinegun in his arms, and sighed with relief as we bumped out of sight.

About four miles out of town Byrne stopped and went to the back of the truck where I joined him. He uncovered Billson, and said, ‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right.’

Byrne looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Can you walk?’

‘Walk?’

Byrne said to me, ‘There’s a police checkpoint just around the corner there. I bet that son of a bitch back there has told them to lay for me.’ He turned to Billson. ‘Yes, walk. Not far – two or three kilometres. Mokhtar will be with you.’

‘I think I could do that,’ said Billson.

Byrne nodded and went to talk to Mokhtar. I said to Billson, ‘You’re sure you can do it?’

He looked at me wanly. ‘I can try.’ He turned to look at Byrne. ‘Who is that man?’

‘Someone who saved your life,’ I said. ‘Now he’s saving your neck.’ I went back and got into the cab. Presently Byrne got in and we drove on. I looked back to see Billson and Mokhtar disappear behind some rocks by the roadside.

Byrne was right. They gave us a real going-over at the checkpoint, more than was usual, he told me afterwards – much more. But you don’t argue with the man with the gun. They searched the truck and opened every bag and container, not bothering to repack which Byrne and I had to do. They pondered over my passport for a long time before handing it back and then we had to fill in more fiches, again in triplicate.

‘This is damn silly,’ I said. ‘I did this only this morning.’

‘Do it,’ said Byrne shortly. So I did it.

At last we were allowed to go on and soon after leaving the checkpoint Byrne swerved off the main track on to a minor track which was unsignposted.

‘The main road goes to In Guezzam,’ he said. ‘But it would be tricky getting you over the border there. Fort Flatters will be better.’ He drove on a little way and then stopped. ‘We’ll wait for Mokhtar here.’

We got out of the truck and I looked at the map. After a few minutes I said, ‘I’m surprised they’re not here by now. We were a fair time at the checkpoint and it doesn’t take long to walk three kilometres.’

‘More like eight,’ said Byrne calmly. ‘If I’d told him the truth he might have jibbed.’

‘Oh!’

Presently Mokhtar emerged on to the side of the road. He was carrying Billson slung over his shoulder like a sack. We put him in the back of the truck and made him as comfortable as possible, revived him with water, and then drove on.

SEVENTEEN

We drove to the Aïr in easy stages, doing little more than a hundred miles a day. It was during this period that I got to know Paul Billson, assuming that I got to know him at all because he was a hard man to fathom. I think Byrne got to know him a lot better than I did.

In spite of his garrulity at Abalessa, he felt a lot less like talking after passing out while going around the checkpoint, but he was a lot better that evening when we made camp. We now had tents which were carried on a rack on top of the truck, and while Byrne and Mokhtar were erecting them I dressed Billson’s wound. It was clean and already beginning to heal, but I puffed some penicillin powder into it before putting on fresh bandages.

He was bewildered. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said pathetically. ‘Who are you?’

‘I told you – Max Stafford.’

‘That means nothing.’

‘If I said that I was responsible for security at Franklin Engineering would that mean anything?’

He looked up. ‘For God’s sake! You mean you’ve chased all the way out here because I left Franklin’s in a hurry?’

‘Not entirely – but you get the drift. There’s a lot you can tell me.’

He looked around. We were camped on the lee side of a ridge almost at the top. I had queried that when Byrne picked the spot; camping on the flats at the bottom of the ridge would have been better, in my opinion. Byrne had shaken his head. ‘Never camp on low ground. More men die of drowning in the Sahara than die of thirst.’ When I expressed incredulity he pointed to mountains in the northeast. ‘You could have a thunderstorm there and not know it. But a flash flood sweeping through the wadis could come right through here.’ I conceded his point.

Billson said, ‘Where are we?’

‘About fifty miles south-east of Tammanrasset.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Niger. We’re getting you out of Algeria; the police are looking for you. You bent the rules.’

‘Why are you doing this for me?’

I put the last knot in the bandage and snipped off the loose ends. ‘Damned if I know,’ I said. ‘You’ve certainly proved to be a bloody nuisance. Niger is probably the last place in the world I want to go to.’

He shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Have you remembered anything about the man who shot you?’

‘A bit,’ said Billson. ‘I stopped because one of the tyres was going soft and I thought I might have to change a wheel. I was looking at it when this other car came along.’

‘Car or truck?’ A car seemed improbable in Koudia.

‘A Range-Rover. I thought he might help me so I waved. He came up and stopped about ten yards away – then he shot me.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that. I felt this blow in my shoulder – it knocked me down. It didn’t hurt; not then.’

I looked at Billson speculatively. This sounded an improbable story, but then, Billson collected improbabilities about him as another man might collect postage stamps. And I never forgot for one moment that I had been badly beaten up in a quiet street in Kensington.

‘Did you see the man?’

‘Yes. He – they chased me.’

‘How many?’

‘Two of them.’

‘Were they locals? I mean, were they Arabs or Tuareg?’

‘No, they were white men, like you and me.’

‘Didn’t he say anything before he shot you?’

‘No. As I said, the car just stopped and he shot me.’

I sighed. ‘So what happened then?’

‘Well, when I fell down they couldn’t see me because I was behind the Land-Rover. Close by there was a gap between two rocks and I nipped in there. I heard them getting out of their car so I went between the rocks and up a sort of cleft and ran for it.’

He fell silent so I prompted him. ‘And they chased you. Did they shoot at you again?’

He nodded. ‘Just the one man. He didn’t hit me.’ He touched his shoulder. ‘Then this started to hurt and I became dizzy. I don’t remember any more.’

He had collapsed and fortunately fallen out of sight down a cleft in the rocks. The men had probably searched for him and missed him, not too difficult in Koudia. But burning his Land-Rover was another way of killing him; I couldn’t imagine a man with a gunshot wound and no water walking out of Koudia.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

‘We were looking for you.’

He stared at me. ‘Impossible. Nobody knew where I’d gone.’

‘Paul, you left a trail as wide as an eight-lane motorway,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t difficult for me, nor for someone else, evidently. Do you have any enemies? Anyone who hates you badly enough to kill you? So badly that they’d follow you to the middle of the Sahara to do it?’

‘You’re mad,’ he said.

‘Someone is,’ I observed. ‘But it’s not me. Does the name of Kissack mean anything to you?’

‘Not a thing.’ He brooded a moment. ‘What happened to my Land-Rover? Where is it?’

‘They burned it.’

He looked stricken. ‘They burned it!’ he whispered. ‘But what about …’ He stopped suddenly.

‘How much money did you have in those suitcases?’ I asked softly. He didn’t answer, so I said, ‘My assessment is about £56,000.’

He nodded dully.

‘Whether they searched those cases before dousing them with petrol or not doesn’t matter. You’ve lost it.’ I stood up and looked down at him. ‘You’re a great big law-breaker, Paul. The British can nail you for breaking currency regulations, and now the Algerians are looking for you. If they find you with a bullet hole in you that’ll bring more grief to someone. Jesus, you’re a walking disaster.’

‘Sorry to have been the cause of trouble,’ he mumbled. His hand twitched, the fingers plucking at his jacket.

I contemplated that piece of understatement with quiet fury. I bent down and stuck my finger under his nose. ‘Paul, from now on you don’t do a single thing – not a single bloody thing, understand, even if it’s only unzipping your fly – without consulting either me or Byrne.’

His head jerked towards Byrne. ‘Is that him?’

‘That’s Byrne. And walk carefully around him. He’s as mad at you as I am.’

They had finished putting up the tents and Mokhtar had a fire going. I told Byrne what I had got from Billson, and he said contemplatively, ‘Two Europeans in a Range-Rover. They shouldn’t be hard to trace. And they shot him just like that? Without even passing the time of day?’

‘According to Paul – just like that.’

‘Seems hard to believe. Who’d want to shoot a guy like that?’

I said tiredly, ‘He was driving around with 56,000 quid in British bank notes packed in his suitcase. I shouldn’t think it went up in flames in the Land-Rover. He probably opened his mouth too wide somewhere along the line, and someone got greedy.’

‘Yeah, you could be right. But that doesn’t explain Kissack.’

‘I don’t believe he exists.’

‘If Hesther says he was looking for Paul Billson, then he exists,’ said Byrne firmly. ‘Hesther don’t make mistakes.’

We had mutton that night because Mokhtar had bought a sheep that morning from a passing Targui at Abalessa. He grilled some of it kebab-style over the fire and we ate it with our fingers. It was quite tasty. Byrne pressed Billson to eat. ‘I’m trying to fatten you up,’ he said. ‘When we get to Fort Flatters you’ve got to walk some more.’

‘How much more?’ asked Billson.

‘Quite a piece – maybe thirty kilometres. We’ve got to get you round the Algerian border post.’ He turned to me. ‘You’ll have a walk, too; around the Niger border post.’

I didn’t look forward to it.

The next night I tackled Paul again, this time not about what he’d been up to in North Africa, but about the puzzling circumstances of his life in England. I could have questioned him as we drove but I didn’t want to do it in front of Byrne. Paul might unburden himself to a single interrogator but he might not before an audience.

I dressed his wound again. It was much better. As I rewrapped the bandage I said, ‘How much did you earn at Franklin Engineering, Paul?’

‘£200 a month.’

‘You’re a damned liar,’ I said without heat. ‘But you always have been, haven’t you? You were on £8000 a year – that’s nearly four times as much. Now, tell me again – how much did you earn?’ He stayed sullenly silent, and I said, ‘Tell me, Paul; I want to hear it from you.’

‘All right. It was £8000 a year.’

‘Now, here comes the £8000 question,’ I said. ‘Do you consider that you were worth it to Franklin Engineering?’

‘Yes – or they wouldn’t have paid it to me.’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ Again he maintained silence. ‘Do you know that Mr Isaacson wanted to fire you ten years ago, but the managing director wouldn’t agree?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know that Mr Stewart wanted to fire you when he arrived from Glasgow to reorganize the accounts office, and again the managing director wouldn’t have it?’

‘No.’

‘Who is your guardian angel, Paul?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘You were doing work that any sixteen-year-old office boy could do. Do you think that was worth eight thousand quid a year?’

He avoided my eye. ‘Maybe not,’ he muttered.

‘Then how come you were paid it? There must have been some reason. Who were you blackmailing?’

That got him angry. ‘That’s a damnable thing to say,’ he spluttered. ‘You’ve no right …’

I cut in. ‘How did you get the job?’

‘It was offered to me. I got a letter.’

‘When was this? How long ago?’

Billson frowned in thought, then said, ‘Must have been 1963.’

‘Who sent the letter?’

‘A man called McGovern. He was managing director of Franklin.’

McGovern! Then managing director of Franklin Engineering, later Chairman of the Board, now Chairman of the entire Whensley Group and knighted for his services to industry. Sir Andrew McGovern, who ran like a thread through Billson’s life and who wanted to run his own security operation as soon as Billson disappeared.

I said, ‘What was in the letter?’

‘McGovern offered me a post at £2000 a year.’ Billson looked up. ‘I grabbed it.’

He would! £2000 wasn’t a bad salary back in 1963 when the average pay was considerably less than £1000. ‘Didn’t you wonder why McGovern was offering that?’

‘Of course I did.’ Billson stared at me. ‘But what did you expect me to say? I wasn’t going to turn it down because it was too much.’

I had to smile at that. Billson might be stupid, but not stupid enough to say, ‘But, Mr McGovern; I’m not worth half that.’ I said, ‘So you just took the money and kept your mouth shut.’

‘That’s right. I thought it was all right at first – that I’d have to earn it. It worried me because I didn’t know if I could hold down that sort of job. But then I found the job was simple.’

‘And not worth £2000 then or £8000 now,’ I commented. ‘Now tell me; why was McGovern grossly overpaying you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Billson shrugged and said again, almost angrily, ‘I tell you – I don’t know. I’ve thought about it for years and come to no answer.’ He glowered at me. ‘But I wasn’t going to ask McGovern.’

No, he wouldn’t; he’d be frightened of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. I laid that aspect aside and turned to something else. ‘How did Alix come to work for Franklin Engineering?’

‘There was a vacancy in the typing pool,’ said Billson. ‘I told her about it and she applied. She got the job but she wasn’t in the typing pool long. She became McGovern’s secretary and he took her with him when he moved to London. Alix is a clever girl – she has brains.’

‘Did McGovern know she’s your half-sister?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t tell him.’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘Look, it was like this. I hardly saw McGovern. I wasn’t in the kind of job where you hob-nob with the managing director. During the first six years I don’t think I saw McGovern as many times, and I haven’t seen him at all since. That’s when he moved to London.’

Very curious indeed! I said, ‘Now, it’s a fact that you kept your enhanced pay a secret from your sister. Why did you do that?’

‘Oh, hell!’ Billson suddenly grabbed a handful of sand. ‘I’ve just told you – Alix is smart. If she knew she’d ask me why – and I couldn’t tell her. Then she’d dig into it and perhaps find out.’ He wagged his head. ‘I didn’t want to know.’

He was afraid that Alix would shake all the leaves off the money tree. Billson might be a stupid man in many ways but he had cunning. Before he started work for Franklin Engineering he had already lived for many years at low pay and was quite content to continue to do while he amassed a small fortune. But to what end?

‘You’ve acted the bastard towards Alix, haven’t you, Paul?’ I said. ‘You must have known she was in financial difficulties and had to borrow money from the bank. And it was to help you, damn it!’

He said nothing. All he did was to pour fine sand from one hand to the other. I suppose a psychologist would call that a displacement activity.

‘But the psychiatrist didn’t help much, did he? You had a sudden brainstorm.’

‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he said petulantly. ‘You don’t know why I’m here. No one does.’

‘Do you think I’m a damned fool?’ I demanded. ‘You’ve come out here to find your father’s aeroplane.’

His jaw dropped. ‘How do you know that? You couldn’t … no one could.’

‘Jesus, Paul; you’re as transparent as a window-pane. You read that article by Michael English in the Sunday supplement and it sent you off your rocker. I talked to English and he told me what happened in the editor’s office.’

‘You’ve seen English?’ He dropped the sand and dusted off his hands. ‘Why have you been following me? Why come out here?’

It was a good question. My original idea had just been to ask a few questions in Algiers and let it go at that. I certainly hadn’t expected to be on my way to Niger in the company of one Targui, one pseudo-Targui and one man who was half way round the bend. It had been a chain of circumstances, each link not very important in itself, excepting perhaps when we found Billson half dead.

I said wearily, ‘Let’s say it’s for Alix and leave it at that, shall we?’ It was the truth, perhaps, but only a fraction of it. ‘She worries about you, and I’m damned if you deserve it.’

‘If I hadn’t been shot I’d have found it,’ he said. ‘The plane, I mean. I was within a few miles of it.’ He drove his fist into the sand. ‘And now I’m going in the opposite direction,’ he said exasperatedly.

‘You’re wrong,’ I said flatly. ‘That crashed aircraft in Koudia is French. Byrne knows all about it. Ask him. You went at that in the way you go about everything – at half-cock. Will you, for once in your life, for God’s sake, stop and think before you take action? You’ve been nothing but a packet of trouble ever since you left Franklin.’

I didn’t wait for an answer but got up and left him and, for once, I didn’t confide my findings to Byrne. This bit really had nothing to do with him; he knew nothing of England or of London and could contribute nothing.

I walked out of camp a couple of hundred yards and sat down to think about it. I believed Billson – that was the devil of it. I had told him that he was as transparent as glass, and it was true. Which brought me to McGovern.

I thought about that pillar of British industry for a long time and got precisely nowhere.

EIGHTEEN

And so we travelled south.

At the Algerian border post Mokhtar guided Billson on foot around it while Byrne and I went through. There were more fiches to fill in – in triplicate, but we didn’t get the full treatment we had had at the police post outside Tammanrasset. We went on and waited for Billson in the no-man’s-land between the Algerian post and Fort Flatters in Niger, then it was my turn to walk, and Mokhtar took me on a long and circuitous route around the fort. If the two border posts compared notes, which Byrne doubted they would, then two men would have gone through both.

When Mokhtar and I rejoined the truck beyond Fort Flatters Byrne seemed considerably more cheerful. I was footsore and leg-stretched and was glad to ease myself down creakily into the seat next to him. As he let out the clutch he said gaily, ‘Nice to be home.’

We were eighty miles into Niger when we camped that night and the country hadn’t changed enough to justify Byrne’s cheeriness, but thereafter it became better. There was more vegetation – thorn trees, it’s true – but there was also more grass as we penetrated the mountains, and I saw my first running water, a brook about a foot across. According to Byrne, we had left the desert but, as I have said, these things are relative and this was still a wilderness to the untutored eye.

‘The Aïr is an intrusion of the Sahel into the desert,’ said Byrne.

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘What’s the Sahel?’

‘The savannah land between the desert and the forest in the south. It’s a geographer’s word. Once they called it the Sudan but when the British pulled out they left a state called the Sudan so the geographers had to find another word because they didn’t want to mix geography and politics. They came up with Sahel.’

‘Doesn’t look much different from desert.’

‘It’s different,’ said Byrne positively. ‘These uplands get as much as six inches of rain a year.’

‘That’s a lot?’

‘A hell of a lot more than Tam,’ he said. ‘There’ve been periods of up to ten years when it hasn’t rained there at all.’

We stopped at a small village called Iferouane which must have been important in the Aïr because it had an airstrip. Although the people here were Tuareg there was a more settled look about them. ‘Still nomadic,’ said Byrne. ‘But there’s more feed around here, so they don’t have to move as far or as often.’

There were more animals to be seen, herds of camels, sheep and goats, with a few hump-backed cattle. The Tuareg seemed to be less formal here than in the north and some of the faces I saw were decidedly Negroid. I mentioned that to Byrne, and he shook his head. ‘Those people are either Haratin or slaves.’

‘Slaves!’

‘Sure. The Tuareg used to go raiding across the Niger Bend to bring back slaves.’

‘Is there still slavery?’

‘Theoretically – no. But I wouldn’t bet on it. A few years ago a British novelist bought a slave in Timbouctou just to prove that it could be done. Then he set the man free which was a damnfool thing to do.’ He saw my frown. ‘He had no land, so he couldn’t grow anything; he had no money so he couldn’t buy anything – so what was the poor bastard to do? He went back to his old master.’

‘But slavery!’

‘Don’t get the wrong idea,’ said Byrne. ‘It’s not what you think and they don’t do too badly.’ He smiled. ‘No whips, or anything like that. Here, in the Aïr, they grow millet and cultivate the date palms on a share-cropping basis. Theoretically they get a fifth of the crop but a smart guy can get as much as half.’

Byrne seemed well-known and popular in Iferouane. He talked gravely with the village elders, chaffed the young women, and distributed sweets and other largesse among the children. We stayed there a day, then pushed on south over rougher country until we arrived at Timia and Byrne’s home.

Ever since we had left Fort Flatters, Billson had avoided me. He couldn’t help being close in the truck but he didn’t talk and, out of the truck, he kept away from me. I suppose I had not hidden my contempt of him and, naturally enough, he didn’t like it. I had penetrated his thick skin and wounded whatever amour propre he had, so he resented me. I noticed that he talked a lot with Byrne during this time and that Byrne appeared to show interest in what he was saying. But Byrne said nothing to me at the time.

Byrne was un Tuareg enough to have built himself a small house on the slopes of what passed for a pleasantly-wooded valley in the Aïr. The Tuareg in the area lived, not in leather tents as they did in the desert to the north, but in reed huts, cleverly made with dismountable panels so that they could be collapsed for loading on the back of a pack camel. But Byrne had built a house – a minimal house, it is true, with not much in the way of walls – but a house with rooms. A permanent dwelling and, as such, foreign to the Tuareg.

We arrived there late and in darkness and I didn’t see much that night because we ate and slept almost immediately. But next morning, Byrne showed me around his kingdom. Close by there was something which, had it been permanent, would have been called a village and Byrne talked to a man whom he told me was Hamiada, Mokhtar’s brother. Hamiada was tall, even for a Targui, and his skin, what little I could see of it above his veil, was almost as white as my own.

Byrne said to me, ‘Most of the herd’s grazing out towards Telouess – about twenty kilometres away. I’m going out there tomorrow. Like to come?’

‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘But what about Billson?’ Billson was not with us; when we had left that morning he was still asleep.

Byrne looked troubled. ‘I want to talk to you about him – but later. Now I want to show you something.’

Hamiada had gone away but he returned a few minutes later leading a camel. It was one of the biggest beasts I had seen and looked to be about ten feet high at the hump, although it could hardly have been that. It was of a colour I had never seen before, a peculiar smokey-grey. Byrne said, ‘This is my beauty – the cream of my herd. Her name is Yendjelan.’

He spoke with such obvious pride that I felt I had to echo it even though I was no expert on the finer points of camel-breeding. ‘She’s a very fine animal,’ I said. ‘A racing camel?’

He chuckled. ‘There’s no such thing. She’s a Mehari – a riding camel.’

‘I thought they raced.’

‘Camels don’t run – not unless they’re urged. And if they run too far they drop dead. Fragile animals. When you come with me tomorrow you’ll be riding one. Not Yendjelan, though; she’s mine.’

Yendjelan looked at me in the supercilious way of a camel, and her lip curled. She thought as much of the idea of me riding a camel as I did.

We looked at some more of Byrne’s herd, the few that were browsing close by. As I watched them chewing up branches of acacia, three-inch thorns included, I wondered how in hell you controlled a camel. Their mouths would be as hard as iron.

We accepted Hamiada’s hospitality – cold roast kid, bread and camel milk. Byrne said abruptly, ‘About Billson.’

‘Yes.’

‘What was your intention?’

I sighed. ‘I don’t quite know. I thought if we could get him further south into Nigeria, then I could get him on to a plane back to England.’

Byrne nodded. ‘Yes, south to Kano, a plane from there to Lagos, and so home.’ He paused, chewing thoughtfully like one of his own camels. ‘I don’t know if that would be such a good thing.’

‘Why not?’

‘The guy’s unstable enough as it is. He’s come out here and made a bust of it so far. If he goes home now he knows he’ll never be able to come back, and that might knock him off his perch entirely. He could end up in a looney-bin. I don’t know that I’d like that. Would you?’

I thought of the biblical bit about being one’s brother’s keeper. Also the Chinese bit to the effect that if you save a man’s life you are responsible for him until he dies. Also the Sinbad bit about the Old Man of the Sea. ‘What’s he to you?’ I asked.

Byrne shrugged. ‘Not much. Something to Hesther, though.’

I wondered, not for the first time, about the exact relationship between Byrne and Hesther Raulier. She’d said she’d never married but that did not necessarily mean much between a man and a woman. I said, ‘What are you suggesting? That we indulge him in his fantasies?’

‘Fantasies? Oh, sure, they’re fantasies as far as Billson is concerned. I mean, it’s fantastic for Billson to suppose that he could come out here and find that airplane unaided. But, as far as the plane itself is concerned, I’ve been talking to him and what he says makes a weird kind of sense.’

‘You mean he’s talked you into believing that the plane’s still here?’

‘Must be,’ said Byrne simply. ‘It was never found.’

‘Not necessarily so,’ I said. ‘Not if Billson did defraud the insurance company.’

‘I thought Hesther had talked you out of that way of thinking.’

‘Maybe – but for Christ’s sake, the Sahara is a bloody big place. Where the hell would we start?’

Byrne drained a bowl of camel milk. ‘Billson really studied that last flight of his father. He’s got all the details at his fingertips. For instance, he knew that when his old man took off from Algiers he intended to fly a great circle course for Kano.’ He chuckled. ‘I borrowed your map and traced that course. It’s been a few years since I had to do spherical trigonometry but I managed.’

‘And what conclusion did you come to?’

‘Okay; the distance is 2800 kilometres – about 1500 nautical miles, which is the unit he’d work in for navigational purposes. It would take him over the Ahaggar about 150 kilometres east of Tam. It would take him right over here, and smack bang over Agadez. Paul wasn’t all that crazy when he went to look at an airplane in the Ahaggar. ’Course he should have checked with someone first – me, for instance – but the idea was good.’

‘Where is all this leading?’

Byrne said, ‘All the planes in that race took the great circle course because a great circle is the shortest distance between two points on the earth’s surface. Now, Agadez lies exactly on that course and so it made a good aiming point. Furthermore, it was a condition of that leg of the race that the planes had to fly low over Agadez – it was a sort of checkpoint. Every plane except two buzzed Agadez and was identified. One of the planes that wasn’t seen at Agadez was Billson’s.’

‘And the other?’

‘Some Italian who got a mite lost. But he arrived in Kano, anyway.’

‘Maybe Peter Billson had weather trouble,’ I said. ‘Forced down.’

‘He was forced down all right,’ agreed Byrne. ‘But not by weather. Paul has checked that out; got meteorological data for the time of flight. He’s been real thorough about this investigation. The weather was good – no sandstorms.’

‘Obsessionally thorough.’

‘Yeah,’ said Byrne. ‘But thorough all the same. Now, when Peter Billson went down it would be likely to be to the north of Agadez, and one thing’s for sure – it wasn’t in the Aïr. There are too many people around here and the plane would have been found. The same applies anywhere north of the Ahaggar. If it went down there it would have been found by some Chaamba bedouin.’

‘So that leaves the Ahaggar and you’re certain it’s not there. You’re talking yourself into a corner.’

He said, ‘When the French were getting ready to blow that atom bomb at Arak they lost three planes in the Ahaggar. I’ve told you about one of them. They gave the Ahaggar a real going-over, both from the air and on the ground. They found three planes which was all they expected to find. I’m pretty sure that if Billson’s plane had been there the French would have found it.’

‘Perhaps they did,’ I said. ‘And didn’t bother to mention it.’

Byrne disagreed. ‘It would have made big news. You don’t suppose Billson was the only record-breaking airman lost in the Sahara, do you? There was a guy called Lancaster went down in 1933 south of Reggan in the Tanezrouft. He wasn’t found until 1962 and it made the headlines.’

I worked it out. ‘Twenty-nine years.’

‘He was still with the plane, and he left a diary,’ said Byrne. ‘It made bad reading. Paul knows all about Lancaster; he knows how long a crashed plane can remain undetected here. That’s why he thinks he can still find his father.’

‘This place where Lancaster crashed – where is it?’

‘In the Tanezrouft, about 200 kilometres south of Reggan. It’s hell country – reg, that’s gravel plain for as far and farther than you can see. I know a bit of what happened to Lancaster because I read about it back in ’62 and Paul has refreshed my memory. Lancaster was flying a light plane and put down at Reggan to refuel. He took off, got into a sandstorm and lost direction; he flew east damn near as far as In Salah before he put down at Aoulef to find out where he was. He’d intended to fly to Gao on the Niger Bend and that was due south, but he’d used up too much fuel so he went back to Reggan. He left next day and after a while his engine quit. So he crashed.’

‘Didn’t they search for him?’

‘Sure they did – by air and ground. I don’t know how good their air search was back in 1933, but they did their best. Trouble was they were looking mostly in the wrong place, towards Gao. Anyway, he had two gallons of water and no more, because he had an air-cooled engine. He died eight days later, and was found twenty-nine years later. That’s the story of Lancaster.’

‘Who found him?’

‘A routine French patrol working out of Bidon Cinq. What the hell they were doing in the Tanezrouft I don’t know. Probably on a vehicle-testing kick – I can think of no other reason for going into that hell hole.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’ve made a point. So Peter Billson and his plane can still be in the desert. Are you proposing that we go look for it in this place – the Tanezrouft?’

‘Not goddamn likely,’ said Byrne. ‘I think it possible that Billson went off course. When he disappeared there was a search but, just like Lancaster, he wasn’t found because they weren’t looking in the right place.’

‘And you know the right place, I suppose.’

‘No, but think of this. Lancaster’s plane was found by the French. For all we know it might have been seen much earlier by, say, some Hartani or even a Targui. But why would they want to report it? It would mean nothing to them. Don’t forget, this plane crashed only three years after the final battle between the French and the Tuareg when the French got the upper hand at last. The Tuareg felt they didn’t owe the French a goddamn thing. Sure, if they’d found Lancaster alive they’d have brought him out, but they wouldn’t care much about a dead guy in a dead plane.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Spit it out. What are you getting at?’

Byrne said, ‘Would you put up, say, five camels to help find Paul’s old man?’

The question was so unexpected that I blinked with astonishment and I suppose I was testy. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘I mean put up the price of five camels.’

‘How much is a camel worth?’ I asked suspiciously.

Byrne scratched his jaw through his veil. ‘An ordinary pack camel will go for about a hundred pounds sterling. A reasonable Mehari will fetch between a hundred fifty and two hundred.’ He laughed. ‘You couldn’t buy Yendjelan for a thousand. Okay, let’s say five hundred.’

‘You want me to put up £500,’ I said carefully. ‘To find Paul’s father.’

‘I’d put up the same,’ he said. ‘In camels.’

‘So now we have ten camels,’ I said. ‘How do they help? Do we ride them spaced a hundred yards apart in a sweep of the bloody Sahara?’

‘No,’ said Byrne calmly. ‘They’re a reward for a sighting of a plane that crashed in 1936 – payable when we’re taken to see it.’

It was a good idea provided I was willing to fork out £500 to help Paul Billson, which wasn’t a cast-iron certainty. A good idea but for one thing – the time element. I said, ‘For God’s sake! How long will it take for news of this reward to get around? Two months? Three months? I don’t have that much time to spend here, and if I go, then Billson goes, even if I have to do what Hesther suggested – club him and put him in a sack.’

Byrne laughed quietly. ‘You don’t know much about the desert. There are trucks going up from Agadez to Tam every day – two days’ journey at the most. Those truck drivers waste no time in sight-seeing; they’ve seen it already. From Tam to In Salah – another day. From Agadez east to Bilma – two days. From Bilma to Djanet in the Tassili n’ Ajjer – two more days driving fast. In six days minimum I can get news to all the important oases in the desert. The whole Sahara is a big sounding-board if the news is important enough.’

I was sceptical. ‘Word of mouth?’

‘Word of mouth – hell!’ Byrne snorted. ‘Ten thousand leaflets handed out. Printed in Arabic, of course. Those who can’t read will go to the public letter-writers for a reading as soon as they hear of a ten-camel reward.’

‘You’re crazy,’ I said. I looked around at the thorn trees and the browsing camels. ‘Where the blazes are you going to get ten thousand leaflets printed here?’

‘I’ll draw it up tonight,’ he said. ‘Then have them Xeroxed in Agadez. They have a machine in the bank.’ He leaned forward and peered at me. ‘Something the matter?’ he enquired gently.

‘No,’ I said weakly. ‘Nothing the matter. It’s just the idea of blanketing the Sahara with leaflets seems a bit weird. You’ve never worked for J. Walter Thompson, have you?’

‘Who’s he?’

‘A small advertising agency back in the States – and elsewhere.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘If you ever leave the desert I’d apply for a job with him. You’d do well.’

‘You’re nuts!’ he said. ‘Well, what about it?’

I started to laugh. Between chuckles I said, ‘All right … I’ll do it … but it won’t be for Paul Billson. It’ll be worth it just to say I’ve done a saturation advertising campaign in the Sahara.’

Byrne wagged his head. ‘Okay – I don’t care why you do it so long as you do it.’

‘What do I do?’ I said. ‘Give you a cheque?’

‘Now what in hell would I do with a cheque?’ he asked. ‘I’ll put up your half and you get the cash to Hesther in Algiers as and when you can.’ He paused. ‘Pity we don’t have pictures of the plane. Paul had some but they went up with the Land-Rover.’

‘I can help there. I got some photocopies from the Aeronautical Department of the Science Museum in London. Not Billson’s plane but one exactly like it.’

‘Good,’ said Byrne. ‘We’ll put those on the hand-out. Or maybe drawings might be better.’ He adjusted his veil and stood up. ‘There’s one thing you maybe haven’t thought of.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If the guy who shot Paul is still around he might get to know of these leaflets if he has local connections. If he does he’ll be drawn down here like a hornet to a honey-pot. It might turn out real interesting.’

It might indeed!

NINETEEN

When Paul Billson heard what we were going to do he took it as his due. He didn’t even thank us, and I could have picked him up and shaken him as you would try to shake sense into a puppy. But that was the man, and he wasn’t going to change. Byrne settled down to draw up his leaflet and I wandered away to think about things – mostly about Byrne, because I was fed up with thinking about Paul.

From what I had seen of Byrne’s camels he seemed to take pride in breeding a superior animal. If his information on the price of camels was correct and a pack camel would cost £100, then it would be reasonable to assume that his might average, say, £150. That would make him worth £45,000 in stock alone, regardless of his other interests. He had said he ran salt caravans; I didn’t know if that was profitable but I assumed it was. Then there was whatever he got from Hesther Raulier for looking after her affairs in the desert, and there were probably other sources of income.

It seemed likely that Byrne was a wealthy man in his society. I don’t know how far the Tuareg had been forced into a cash economy – I had seen very little money changing hands – but even on a barter basis Byrne would be rich by desert standards.

Next day Byrne and I went into Agadez, Paul staying behind on Byrne’s insistence. ‘I don’t want you seen in Agadez,’ he said. ‘You’d stand out like the Tree of Ténéré. You spend the day here – and stay put. Understand?’

Paul understood. It wasn’t what Byrne said, it was the way he said it that drove it home into Paul’s skull.

As we drove away Byrne said, ‘And Hamiada will see that he stays put.’ There was a touch of amusement in his voice.

I said, ‘What was that you said about a tree?’

‘The Tree of Ténéré?’ He pointed east. ‘It’s out there. Only tree I’ve ever heard of being put on the maps. It’s on your map – take a look.’

So I did, and there it was – L’Arbre du Ténéré, about a hundred and sixty miles north-east of Agadez in the Erg du Ténéré, an area marked yellow on the map – the colour of sand. ‘Why should a tree be marked?’

‘There’s not another tree in any direction for about fifty kilometres,’ said Byrne. ‘It’s the most isolated tree in the world. Even so, a fool French truck driver ran into it back in 1960. It’s old – been there for hundreds of years. There’s a well there, but the water’s not too good.’

So the map indicated – eau trés mauvaise à 40 m.

It was a little over a hundred miles to Agadez over roughish country. Even though we were able to pick up speed over the last forty miles of reasonable track it took us five hours, averaging twenty miles an hour for the whole trip.

Agadez seemed a prosperous little town by Saharan standards. It even had a mosque, something I had not seen in Tam. We parked the truck outside the Hotel de l’Aīr and went inside to have a beer, then Byrne went to the bank to have his leaflets printed. Before he left he said, ‘You might like to do some shopping; it’s better here than in Tam. Got any money?’

It occurred to me that Byrne was laying out considerable sums during our travels and he would need recompense. I dug out my wallet and checked it. I had the equivalent of about a hundred pounds in Algerian currency, another four hundred in travellers’ cheques and a small case stuffed with credit cards.

Byrne looked at my offerings and said, ‘None of that is much use here. You give anyone a strange piece of paper or a bit of plastic and he’ll laugh at you.’ He produced a small wad of local currency. ‘Here. Don’t worry, I’ll bill you when you leave, and you can settle it with Hesther in Algiers.’

And I had to make do with that.

I walked along the dusty street and found that American influence had even penetrated as far as Agadez – there was a supermarket! Not that an American would have recognized it as such but it was passable, although the stock of European-style clothing was limited. I bought a pair of Levi’s and a couple of shirts and stocked up with two cartons of English cigarettes. Then I blinked at an array of Scotch whisky, not so much in astonishment that it was there at all but at the price, which was two-thirds the London price. I bought two bottles.

I took my booty and stowed it in the Toyota, then had another beer in the hotel while waiting for Byrne. When he came back we took the Toyota to a filling station to refuel and there, standing next to the pumps, was a giraffe.

I stared at it incredulously. ‘For God’s sake! What the hell …’

The giraffe bent its neck and looked down at us with mild eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Byrne. ‘Haven’t you seen a giraffe before?’

‘Not at a filling station.’

Byrne didn’t seem in the least surprised. ‘I’ll be a little while here. This is where we start the distribution of our message.’

I nodded wordlessly and watched the giraffe amble away up the main street of Agadez. As Byrne opened the door I said, ‘Hang on. Satisfy my curiosity.’

‘What about?’

I pointed. ‘That bloody giraffe.’

‘Oh, that. It’s from the zoo. They let it out every morning, and it goes back every night to feed.’

‘Oh!’ Well, it was an explanation.

We arrived back at Byrne’s place in the Aīr the next day, having camped on the way. I was getting to like those nightly camps. The peace was incredible and there was nothing more arduous to think about than the best place to make the fire and the best place to sleep after testing the wind direction. It was a long way from the busy – and now meaningless – activities of Stafford Security Consultants Ltd.

At that particular camp I offered Byrne a scotch, but he shook his head. ‘I don’t touch the hard stuff, just have the occasional beer.’

I said, ‘I can’t get over the fact that it’s cheaper than in England.’

‘No tax on it,’ he said. ‘In England you need a lot of money to build essentials like Concorde airplanes so your taxes are high.’ His tone was sardonic. ‘Out here who needs it?’ He picked up the bottle. ‘This stuff is brought up from Nigeria, mostly for the tourist trade. Same with the cigarettes. Might even have come up on the back of a camel.’

The whisky tasted good, but after the first I found I didn’t want another. I said, ‘The most incredible thing today was that bloody giraffe.’

‘Civilized people hereabouts,’ said Byrne. ‘Don’t like to keep things in cages. Same with camels.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, a Tuareg-trained camel is worth more than one trained by an Arab, all other things being equal. A Targui is kinder about it and the camel responds. Real nice people.’

Looking up at the stars that night I thought a lot about that.

After that nothing very much happened except that I got a new suit of clothes and learned how to ride a camel, and the two were connected. Byrne was going out to inspect his herd, and when I arrived for my camel-riding lesson in jeans he shook his head solemnly. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I really don’t think so.’

And so I dressed like a Targui – loose, baggy trousers in black cotton cloth fitting tight around the ankles, a white gandoura, the Tuareg gown, and another blue gandoura on top of that. There was a djellaba too, to be worn in cold weather or at night. Literally topping it off was the chech, twenty feet of black cotton, about eighteen inches wide, which Byrne painstakingly showed me how to arrange.

When I was dressed in all my finery I felt a bit of a fool and very self-conscious, but that wore off quickly because no one else took any notice except Billson and I didn’t give a damn for his opinion. He wouldn’t change his clothing nor ride a camel; I think he had slightly Empire notions about ‘going native’.

A camel, I found, is not steered from the mouth like a horse. Once in the saddle, the Tuareg saddle with its armchair back and high cross-shaped pommel, you put your bare feet on the animal’s neck and guide it by rubbing one side or the other. Being on a camel when it rises to its feet is the nearest thing to being in an earthquake and quite alarming until one gets used to it.

Byrne, Hamiada and I set out with two pack camels for the grazing grounds near Telouess and were going to be away for over a week, Byrne commenting that he could not reasonably expect any reaction from his leaflet campaign for at least a fortnight. He had arranged with the owner of the filling station for the distribution of the leaflets in packets of 500 to the twenty most important oases south of the Atlas mountains.

‘And it’ll take that time to bring Paul up to the mark,’ he said. ‘Because one thing is certain – if we find that airplane it’s going to be in some of the lousiest country you’ve ever seen, else the French would have found it years ago.’

What Billson did while we were away I don’t know. I never found out and I didn’t ask.

Looking back, I think those days spent wandering in the Aīr was the most idyllic time of my life. The pace was slow, geared to the stride of a camel, and the land was wide and empty. One fell into an easy rhythm, governed not by the needs of other men but by the passage of the sun across the sky, the empty belly, the natural requirements of the beast one was riding.

We found Byrne’s herd and he looked at the animals and found their condition good. They were looked after by a family of Tuareg headed by a man called Radbane. ‘These people are of the Kel Ilbakan,’ said Byrne. ‘A vassal tribe from south of Agadez. They graze their stock here in the winter and help me with mine.’

We accepted Radbane’s hospitality and stayed at his camp for two days, and then struck west, skirting the base of a mountain called Bagzans. We were striking camp on the ninth day out of Timia when Hamiada gave a shout and pointed. We had visitors; three camels were approaching, two with riders. As they came closer Byrne said, ‘That’s Billson.’

He frowned, and I knew why. It would need something urgent to get Billson up on to a camel.

They came up to the camp and I noted that Billson’s camel was on a leading rein held by the Targui who accompanied him. The camels sank to their knees and Billson rocked violently in the saddle. He slid to the ground painfully, still incongruously dressed in his city suit, now worn and weary. His face was grey with fatigue and he was obviously saddle-sore. I had been, too, but it had worn off.

I said, ‘Come over here, Paul, and sit down.’ Byrne and Hamiada were talking to the Targui. I dug into my saddlebag and brought out the bottle of whisky which was still half full. I poured some into one of the small brass cups we used for mint tea and gave it to Paul. It was something he appreciated and, for once, he said, ‘Thanks.’

‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked.

‘I saw him,’ he said.

‘Who did you see?’

‘The man who shot me. He was in Timia asking questions, and then came on to Byrne’s place.’ He paused. ‘In the Range-Rover.’

‘And you saw him? To recognize him?’

Paul nodded. ‘I was bored – I had no one to talk to – so I went down among the Tuareg. There’s a man who can speak a little French, about as much as me, but we can get on. I was outside his hut when I saw the Range-Rover coming so I ducked inside. The walls are only of reeds, there are plenty of cracks to look through. Yes, I saw him – and I knew him.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘No; he had the other man with him.’

‘Then what happened?’ I looked up. Byrne had come over and was listening.

‘He started to talk to the people, asking questions.’

‘In Tamachek?’ asked Byrne abruptly.

‘No, in French. He didn’t get very far until he spoke to the man I’d been with.’

‘That would be old Bukrum,’ said Byrne. ‘He was in the Camel Corps when the French were here. Go on.’

‘They just talked to the old man for a bit, then they went away. Bukrum said they asked him if there were any Europeans about. They described me – my clothes.’ His fingers plucked at his jacket. ‘Bukrum told them nothing.’

Byrne smiled grimly. ‘He was told to say nothing – they all were. Can you describe these men?’

‘The man who asked the questions – the one who shot me – he was nearly six feet but not big, if you see what I mean. He was thin. Fair hair, very sunburned. The other was shorter but broader. Dark hair, sallow complexion.’

‘Both in European clothes?’

‘Yes.’ Paul eased his legs painfully. ‘Bukrum and I had a talk. He said he’d better send me to you because the men might come back. He said you’d be where wheels wouldn’t go.’

I looked at the jumble of rocks about the slopes of Bagzans. Bukrum had been right. I said, ‘I’ve asked this question before but I’ll ask it again. Can you think of any reason – any conceivable reason – why two men should be looking for you in the Sahara in order to kill you?’

‘I don’t know!’ said Paul in a shout. ‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t know!’

I looked at Byrne and shrugged. Byrne said, ‘Hamiada and I will go to Timia and nose around. We’ll make better time on our own.’ He pointed to the Targui who was talking to Hamiada. ‘His name is Azelouane; he’s Bukrum’s son. He’ll take you to a place in the hills behind Timia and you stay there until I send for you. There’s water there, so you’ll be all right.’ He looked at the three camels which Azelouane had brought. ‘You stay here today; those beasts need resting. Move off at first light tomorrow.’

Within ten minutes he and Hamiada were mounted and on their way.

It took us two days to get to the place in the hills behind Timia so, with the day’s enforced rest, that was three days. There was a pool of water which Azelouane called a guelta. He, too, had a small smattering of French so we could talk in a minimal way with the help of a lot of hand language. We were there for three more days before Byrne came.

During this time Billson was morose. He was a very frightened man and showed it. Having a hole put in you with intent to kill tends to take the pith out of a man, but Paul had not really been scared until now. Probably he had reasoned that it was a case of mistaken identity and it was over, his attacker having given him up for dead after burning the Land-Rover. The knowledge that he was still being pursued really shook him and ate at his guts. He kept muttering, ‘Why me? Why me?’ He found no answer and neither did I. He also got rid of the rest of my whisky in short order.

Byrne arrived late at night, riding tall on Yendjelan and coming out of the darkness like a ghost. Yendjelan sank to her knees, protesting noisily as all camels do, and he slid from the saddle. Azelouane unsaddled her while I brewed up some hot tea for Byrne. It was a cold night.

He sat by the fire, still huddled in his djellaba with the hood over his head, and said, ‘You making out all right?’

‘Not bad.’ I pointed to where Billson was asleep. ‘He’s not doing too well, though.’

‘He’s scared,’ said Byrne matter-of-factly.

‘Find anything?’

‘Yeah. Two guys – one called Kissack, a Britisher; the other called Bailly. He’s French, I think. They’re scouring the Aīr looking for Billson.’ He paused. ‘Looking for me, too. They don’t know about you.’

‘How do they know about you?’

‘My name had to go on that leaflet,’ he said. ‘That’s how I figured it. No point in issuing a reward unless you give the name and place of the guy offering it.’

‘Where are they now?’

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