CHAPTER 4
‘Naturally,’ said Pol, ‘you were treated abominably. The English are so quick to accuse our French justice, but even after the Algerian story we never treated our officers as you were treated.’ He sipped his black coffee and sighed. ‘To kill many men in war is called “duty”. To kill one man, under special circumstances, so easily becomes a cause macabre, even a crime. You British are particularly vulnerable, of course. Your authorities hate nothing more than to be embarrassed; and the cause of that embarrassment is often sacrificed with a terrible fury.’
Owen Packer looked through the French windows across the mud flats of the estuary to the distant town of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. The tide was out and the fishing boats were lolling under the jetty, showing their rusted bellies to the darkening sky. Outside the hotel there was a little square with a triangle of plane trees, their branches cropped like poodles, arranged around a statue of Joan of Arc. The fishermen, in their flat black caps and blue boilersuits, were drinking downstairs in the bar, while Sarah was in Room 3, preening herself for the evening meal.
‘You are absolutely forbidden to drink alcohol?’ Pol asked abruptly.
‘It is not advisable,’ Packer said.
Pol did not pursue the matter. Together they watched the wild duck sweeping down over the mud flats. ‘How did you feel when you killed this man?’
‘Like putting a girlfriend off for dinner at the last moment.’
‘You are very cynical for an Anglo-Saxon. I have never heard a man compare the act of killing to using a telephone.’
‘You know what happened.’
‘Yes,’ said Pol. ‘The British were playing nursemaid to one of those ridiculous old syphilitic sheikhs. The sheikh was senile and stupid enough to send his favourite son to Paris and Oxford, where the young man picked up a lot of dangerous ideas about progress and social reform, and other absurdities. He even went on a goodwill trip to Moscow, and when he got home to papa’s kingdom, one of the first things he did was to attack the ancient custom of stoning women to death for adultery. Unfortunately the old man was a bit passé, and didn’t seem too keen on either telling his boy to shut up, or on having his head chopped off. So the paternal British felt they had better take a hand in the affair.’
He grinned at Packer. ‘You were a comparatively new boy at the game — a bright clean graduate. The commandant called you in and gave you a drink — eh?’ He giggled. ‘Maybe several?’
Packer said nothing.
‘You were perhaps a little “cooked” as we say. And then he made you his proposition.’
‘Oh God,’ said Packer, ‘get me something to drink. A brandy — or at least some beer.’
‘You would not make such a suggestion, I think, if Mademoiselle Sarah were here?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Packer said angrily.
‘You are an alcoholic.’
Packer stared at the floor. ‘I don’t know.’
Pol sat nodding slowly. ‘You know. It is in your dossier. It was the main reason why they threw you out.’
Packer looked up quickly. ‘They threw me out because I killed the wrong man.’ He laughed nastily. ‘Those Arabs are like the Chinese, they all look the same! But please, go on.’
‘They found the poor fellow with a broken neck in his crashed sports car a few miles from the town. Apparently another bad habit he had picked up at Oxford — driving too fast while under the influence. Only, as I said, he wasn’t the only one that night who had been enjoying himself. There was a certain Captain Packer who happened to be in Abud Zur, on some confidential mission for the British War Office. He had been drinking with his Commanding Officer just before the incident. Perhaps he had had one glass too many and had forgotten — or perhaps he did not know — that the old sheikh had more than one son. Two of them, to be precise, with almost identical names. So easy to confuse Arab names, don’t you think, Capitaine Packer? And doubly unfortunate that they both drove English sports cars.’
‘I was badly briefed.’
‘Quite, quite. There is no need to upset yourself, my friend. The British authorities merely wanted to protect their own interests. They could hardly have you kill the original son after what had happened. Even the Arab conception of Fate has its limits! So they put you behind a desk in Aden, where you were in charge of leave schedules. That’s when the little problem of drink began, I believe? It was soon so bad that they sent you back to England where you spent six weeks in a military hospital near Andover.’ He paused. ‘I do not remember the exact medical details, but it appears that your addiction to alcohol was accompanied by outbursts of extreme violence.’
Packer did not move. Pol stirred the dregs of his coffee and said gently, ‘I have purposely begun at the end — at the tragic end. But it was not all tragedy. I know nothing of your family background, except that you went to one of those English private schools for the bourgeoisie, which you call “public” schools, I think?’ He gave Packer a bright smirk. ‘And afterwards you spent a year in Grenoble, where you learnt French. Then you were conscripted into the army for two years, and after six months were sent to Malaya during the Emergency, where you underwent a training course at the Jungle Warfare School in Jahore Baru. From there you were sent on special anti-terrorist operations. The reports state that you did well.’
‘What reports?’
Pol ignored him. ‘Would you
