Pol was giggling, as a thick swarthy man in a white tunic stepped forward and handed Philby a dark whisky. He drank it in the rocking chair next to Pol and gave him a full account of the chase. Pol scarcely interrupted, except to stifle his laughter. When Philby had finished, the Frenchman laid a fat pink claw on Philby’s knee and cooed ecstatically: ‘So our little séjour in Switzerland was not in vain — eh, my friend? Now you should have little to worry you. And we can start making plans.’
Next evening Pol gave a small buffet dinner. Apart from Peters, who stood immobile by the door, and Pol’s four squat blue-chinned manservants — whom Philby recognized from the hijacking of the Troika-Caravelle — there were less than a dozen guests. They seemed prosperous and polite and inoffensive. Only one caught Philby’s attention, a thin dark man in a cheap brown suit, with crooked cheeks and one white eye like a burnt-out flashbulb. Philby recognized him at once as an Arab, probably of humble origins.
Pol himself paid almost no attention to the man, preferring to concentrate on the food: terrine de campagne, salmon mousse, artichoke hearts, and strawberries and cream served with Château d’Yquem. But one thing about Pol struck Philby as out of character: not once did he see the Frenchman drinking. The same went for the small brown-suited Arab.
Quick to suspicion, Philby reasoned that the little man scarcely looked like one of those fat-cat oil-emissaries from Saudi-Arabia or from the Gulf States where abstinence is de rigueur. Only one other Arab country enforced the same taboos, and that was Libya.
Philby had nothing to go on — not a grain of evidence with which he could even broach Pol, let alone interrogate him. The Frenchman’s business affairs were wide and eccentric, and some paltry dealings with an oil-rich state across the Mediterranean would hardly be out of order. Yet Philby — for better or worse — was still very much Pol’s creature, and throughout the evening, the ugly thought kept crossing his mind that Pol, in his role as the supreme deus ex machina, might already be planning to link the immature fanaticism of Libya to that of a certain African state.
Pol would do it for money, Philby thought. He would do anything for money. But more dangerous still, he would do it because he enjoyed doing it — for the devious pleasure of the game. And it was because Philby understood these emotions so well himself, that in moments like these he came close to fearing Pol.
CHAPTER 23
The object was washed up on the shore twelve kilometres from Gagra. It came in with the early tide, while the fishing boats were still at sea, and lay for some hours undisturbed on the empty beach below the village of Dhugali. It was first discovered by an ancient man, known simply as the ‘Old One’, who boasted of having been five years old when Napoleon invaded Russia. The locals treated him affectionately as a harmless simpleton, but the authorities considered him a public nuisance and often threatened to have him confined to an asylum.
For the Old One had a reputation for inventing fantastic stories. Once he had come out with a tale of having seen clouds of men falling out of the sky, holding umbrellas, on to the mountains behind Dhugali; and since it was early in the Cold War, he was taken seriously. Special units of Security Forces had been dispatched to the area to search for the invading saboteurs, until the Old One confessed with great mirth that all he had seen was a flock of snow-geese. And on another occasion, during the jittery months following Stalin’s death, he had convulsed the village one evening by saying that he had just met the old tyrant walking quietly on the sands, his withered arm tucked into the jacket of his grey tunic.
So no one was prepared to take him seriously when he broke into the local café that morning, shouting that there was a dead cow lying on the beach with blond hair and that it smelt like the tomb.
It was the smell that finally attracted two more people to the spot — an elderly couple, both Party members, whose word could be trusted. The local militia arrived and found the body of a woman who had been in the water for about two weeks. What was left of her face was badly mutilated. The Criminal Police in Gagra were called in and the body was taken to the morgue at Police Headquarters.
The autopsy revealed that it was the body of a well-nourished woman of between thirty-five and forty-five, and that she had died not from drowning, but from a series of blows to her head and face. The only item of clothing left on her was a pair of partially decayed nylon tights, of Western make; and buried in one of the swollen, pulpy fingers was a gold wedding-ring. The hallmark was again Western, and an expert later identified it as of British origin. The corpse’s teeth also contained some expensive fillings that were not typical of Soviet dentistry.
The Gagra Criminal Police at once began re-examining the file on a missing British woman who had disappeared eighteen days before from the Intourist Grand Hotel in Gagra on the day that she had checked in. Her name was Mrs Joyce Eileen Warburton, aged thirty-nine, and she had been employed for the last five months in the English-language section of Radio Moscow.
The head waiter at the hotel confirmed that she had dined in the restaurant with a man who
