He watched my police corporal escort out of the room, and then gave me a slow nod which was a greeting and an invitation to sit on the chair lying just off his desk.
‘Mr Carver?’
‘Yes.’
‘Captain Asab, Libyan State Police.’ He put out an arm slowly and tapped the announcement board across his desk.
‘And not without a sense of the dramatic. Why this build-up?’
‘You have been inconvenienced?’
‘Only to the extent that by now I’d thought I’d be having a leisurely drink at my hotel and changing my socks.’
He smiled. ‘Moslems are especially enjoined to be kind and charitable to the masakeen—unfortunate. I regret, however, I have no drink to offer you. However, I will try not to keep you too long.’
‘Don’t rush anything.’
He gave me a look and said, ‘At the moment you are a little uncertain. Perhaps of my attitude? Perhaps of your status? Do not worry. My only wish is to give you all the information I can to help you to bring your business here to a conclusion.’
‘How’s your colloquial English?’
‘Fair to middling. I did three years at the London School of Economics—and ended up a policeman, which just shows that you can never tell which way the ball’s going to bounce. I don’t myself—but light up if you want to.’
I lit a cigarette and he slowly opened a drawer as I did so.
‘Where was Martin Freeman fished out of the drink?’ I asked him.
He pushed an open shallow cardboard box across the desk to me. ‘A little way up the coast, west of the town, two days ago. He was fully dressed, a sports jacket and trousers and so on. That’s all he had on him.’ He nodded at the box.
I took the box and went through the stuff All of it had suffered from water exposure. There was a British passport in Freeman’s name, a leather wallet with about ten pounds in Libyan sterling, a couple of membership cards of clubs in Rome, a bunch of keys, a Ronson leather-bound lighter, a silver cigarette case with the initials M.F. on the outside and two water-pulped cork-tipped cigarettes inside.
‘Where would the rest of his stuff be? He was a visitor here. He must have had a case or something at his hotel.’
‘That we have been unable to trace.’
It could have been a lie, but whether it was or not didn’t seem important to me.
‘How did you know I was looking for him?’
‘We were informed by the British Embassy here when we reported the recovery of the body to them. I gather, too, from them that your Treasury officials in London were interested in him.’
‘Why?’
‘The details are confidential, but, I imagine, irrelevant now. You can go and see them, if you wish, but they asked me to tell you that Mrs Stankowski is being informed of her brother’s death and she will give whatever instructions are necessary for dealing with the body. In other words the affair is out of your hands.’
‘Unless—when she knows the facts—she tells me she would like to know why, before being tipped into the sea, he was shot through the head.’
‘Whether it was murder or suicide, Mr Carver—that is our concern. We need no help.’
‘Got any ideas on the subject?’
‘At the moment, few.’
‘The body floated ashore?’
‘Yes.’ He reached slowly for the cardboard box and began to put it back in the drawer.
‘So he could have been in the water anything from six days onwards?’
‘About that.’
‘What did the autopsy show? About the time in the water, I mean.’
‘There is some doubt. The head wound complicates it.’
‘Well I can tell you he hadn’t been drifting around more than twelve days.’
He looked at me calmly, but it was the kind of calm that covered surprise. Tell this man that some forgotten old uncle out in the Fezzan had left him Solomon’s treasure and there still wouldn’t be a flicker; in fact, you could tell him anything and he would still be the same. But one thing was for sure—he was never going to tell me or anyone else anything that he had decided was best kept to himself.
‘How can you know?’
‘Because he played a round of golf at the Seabreeze course twelve days ago with a friend called Bill Dawson. You got a line on any Bill Dawson?’
‘No. But thank you for the information.’
‘Just that? Thanks. No questions as to how I know?’
He smiled. ‘Tomorrow, maybe. At the moment I don’t want to delay your whisky and soda.’
‘I can wait. In the visitors’ book at Seabreeze they both entered their hotel as the Del Mehari—that’s where I am staying—and the hotel people told my secretary that neither of them had stayed there.’
He shook his head. ‘Maybe they did. Some of my countrymen, Mr Carver, are lazy and inefficient. It is a young country. I’ll look into it.’
‘Check the Magarba Garage too. I think you’ll find that Freeman or Dawson hired a car there some time in the last twelve days.’ I stood up. ‘And let’s be as frank as we can with one another. Okay, there are lots of things you don’t want to tell me. Fine, if that’s how you feel it must be. But it hardly is the way to encourage cooperation from me—that’s if there’s anything I could do to help.’
‘If I fancy you can help me I’ll get in touch with you. But please understand that I do not wish you to encroach on what is now purely a police matter.’
Encroach. It was a good word. The trouble was that I had encroached already. And it was a good feeling. My late-night and early-morning lassitude was gone. La Piroletta had been the final dose of tonic to brighten the whites of my eyes. But more than health now I could hear distantly the rattle of a cash register and that, if you’ve got your health and the kind of fluctuating bank balance
