‘Certainly.’
I wondered why they hadn’t picked me up at the airport. The only answer I could come up with was that they wanted the minimum of public display. Interesting, since I was only looking for a man who’d stolen money and a bracelet from his own sister.
‘Shall I be back there tonight?’
‘Certainly, Mr Carver.’
I turned to Wilkins. ‘Drop my stuff and come round and have breakfast with me in the morning. Bring Olaf if he’s in a breakfast mood.’
I got out and the policeman waved the taxi on. It roared away, leaving a dust cloud behind it and I could hear the radio going full blast.
They put me in the back of the Land-Rover and we headed for town. One of the things about strange towns is never to reach them at night. You have no sense of topography or direction and if you have to take quick action you are at a loss to know which way to head. Not that I thought this might be necessary tonight. But you never knew. Some of the politest police opening gambits lead up to nasty end games sometimes.
There was a nasty end game this time. But not the kind I could have anticipated. We drove into the town and I didn’t try to make any sense out of it until for a few moments we swung along a wide esplanade with the sea on our right and the lights of shipping somewhere way ahead from a harbour. Then we turned into a side-street and pulled up in front of a blank-faced building with double wooden doors. From a socket over the door projected a Libyan national flag.
I got out with my police escort and he took me by the arm and through the door. He said nothing and I went with him, his palm on my elbow, feeling like some old man being helped across the street by a good Samaritan. We went down a tiled corridor that smelled of old cooking and stale tobacco, up a stone flight of steps and then through a half-glass door into a large, low-ceilinged room. One wall held what looked like a collection of large metal filing cabinets. There was a bare, chromium-topped table in the centre and sitting on one edge of it was another Libyan in a white overall. My guide said something to him in Arabic and the man got up and jerked a half-smoked cigarette into a drainway under the table. For the first time I got the smell in the room and a flicker of familiarity trembled inside me.
The man in overalls went over to one of the filing cabinets and pulled it open. It didn’t surprise me now to see it come out about six feet on its rollers. He made a motion with his hand for me to come over. I did.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. I stook there and took out a cigarette. The policeman who had come up alongside me held out a lighter. The man in overalls watched me guardedly. Neither of them said anything.
Lying in the container was a naked man. I inhaled smoke to get the chemical smell out of my throat and to fight down an edge of nausea. I’d seen plenty of dead men, and even a few who had been in the water a long time, but to stand there and look down at this one took more out of me than any of the others had. I let my eyes go from what had been the head down the length of the body to his feet. I did it deliberately, slowly, and with half of my thoughts a long way away. Then I stepped back, turned and heard the cabinet roll back behind me.
To the policeman I said, ‘What now?’
He said, ‘Please to come with me.’
I did, avoiding his helping hand, moving alongside him and wondering how Jane Judd and Gloriana Stankowski were going to take the news, because tabbed neatly round the right wrist of the body had been a label, marked—Martin Freeman, British.
CHAPTER 6
The Apprentice Tail
The room, though I didn’t know it then, was in the Police Headquarters on the Sciara Sidi Aissa which was a street one block south of the waterfront. Almost next door, though I didn’t know that until the next morning when I got a town map and began to take my bearings, was the Hotel Casino Uaddan, and a little further up the street to the east was the Libya Palace Hotel.
It was a small, high room with a framed photograph of King Idris of Libya over a fireplace which was piled high with old pine-cones. On the opposite wall was a framed photograph of H.R.H. El-Hassan El-Rida El-Senussi, the Crown Prince of Libya, and just below it, flickering in the slight sea draught from the half-open window, a calendar of the Oasis Oil Company which told me that it was now April 21 and cuckoo time back home. I had to admit to a slight touch of nostalgia for the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the tube rush in the evenings and Mrs Meld leaning over the garden gate. I always got nostalgia when I sensed that I was getting into something deep and far from home.
The man behind the desk wore a plain navy blue suit, a white cotton shirt and a black tie with a white stripe right down its middle. He was in his thirties, had a brown face as smooth as a pecan nut, pleasant dark eyes, a small, thin-lipped mouth, and short, wiry black hair. He looked as though no one had ever rushed him in his life, or was ever going to, because he had long ago decided that, paradise as the bosom of Allah might be, he was in no hurry to reach it—so the form for longevity was a calm, even-paced life and always keep your voice down. On the edge of his desk was a
