At the airport, as I came out of the ticket office with my boarding card, I found Captain Asab waiting for me. It was a blazing hot morning and he wore a heavy overcoat and a light grey astrakhan cap. His brown face was smooth with years of calm, reflective living.
He shook hands with me and said, ‘I was out here on other business, so I thought I would wish you bon voyage.’
‘Thank you. I’m off to London.’
‘I am not interested in your destination, so long as you are leaving Libya. I like a reasonably quiet life, Mr Carver; just straightforward murders, smuggling, theft and assault. But you strike me as the kind of man who attracts—could we say encourages?—unusual complications.’
‘It’s a dull world. I do my best. By the way, thank you for the two men you’ve had following me. The young one, I thought at first, was a novice in training. He’s better than that. I recommend him to your notice.’
He smiled. ‘You’ve made a mistake. I have had no one following you.’
‘No?’
‘No. But it could have been your Embassy, of course. After all, they have to look after their nationals.’
‘Maybe.’
I gave him a big smile and moved off. But I didn’t even mean ‘Maybe’. The Embassy didn’t give a damn about me. They went along with the Perkins theory. The sooner I had my neck broken and was dropped in the sea the better.
The aircraft was scheduled to stop at Malta and Rome on the way back. At Malta I got off and bought myself a flight on Swissair to Tunis. I got in at six o’clock that evening and had a taxi drive me up to Bizerta. I found myself a cheap hotel and lay back on a lumpy bed staring at the ceiling for about an hour before I turned out the light and tried to sleep. I didn’t sleep much, but in between staving off dive-bombing mosquito attacks I did a lot of thinking. My chief worry was, who the hell had put the Apprentice Tail on me? I didn’t come up with any answer and, anyway, I still thought that he had rated the bottle of whisky.
The next morning I bought myself a map and made an enquiry at the Poste et Telegraphe office. From the sea at Bizerta there is a narrow cut—La Goulette—that runs back inland and opens out into a wide lake. Most of Bizerta is on the westward side of this lake. You can cross this cut by a ferry and, if you’re lucky, get a taxi on the other side. The Villa La Sunata was about two miles down the coast to the east.
I didn’t bother with a taxi. I walked, with my jacket slung over my arm, the pocket with my gun in it thumping against my thigh bone. It was a tourist brochure day. Blue sky, sun blazing, cicadas sawing away in the umbrella pines, Arab women squatting amongst the myrtle and shrub watching their goats feed, a great yellow run of beach below the coast road, handfuls of terns dive-fishing in the shallow water off the sands, God in His heaven, and nothing much right with the world. You could have it all in a package tour, thirteen days, air travel included, for under forty pounds.
Personally, I’d decided what I wanted. I didn’t want money, I didn’t want a woman, I didn’t even particularly want excitement—I was in good health now—but I thought it might be fun to have some kudos. Also it would be nice to teach Manston a lesson. I’d offered to help and been turned down. Good—I’d show him the mistake he had made, and maybe I’d collect an Order of the British Empire from a grateful government for services rendered. Possibly, too, I might be able to do something for those two incompetents, Freeman and Pelegrina. I did the last half-mile wondering why I had a soft spot for them. Perhaps it was the sheer audacity of their act which appealed. It is not every day you run into a couple of incompetent dreamers who have kidnapped the son of a British Prime Minister. Not that I go for kidnapping, of course. Who does?
Mind you, if it had been the father and not the son who had been kidnapped, I couldn’t have cared less—such is the strength of political passion. They could have cut off his ears one by one and sent them to show they meant business, and slit his throat finally when they despaired of getting ransom money. Well, why not? I’m from the west of England and have been a Liberal all my life. And, anyway, if I hadn’t been from the West Country I would still have been a Liberal because I just naturally gravitate to lost causes.
The villa stood up on a rising bluff of hillside surrounded by pines, scrub oak and thickets of oleanders. The driveway was barred with a wooden gate and there was a little wooden chalet lodge with an Arab custodian sitting on the ground outside it, his back to the wall, his eyes closed and a festoon of flies at each corner of his mouth. He didn’t move as I tramped by. I got a glimpse of the villa about two hundred yards back up the drive. It faced the sea. Behind it the land would slope down to the lake, and the lake was big enough to take shipping. Some night recently La Sunata had slipped in there and Bill Dawson had been off-loaded.
Along the road side of the property was a fence—stout posts and four wire strands. When I was out
