‘Olaf isn’t the kind to stay quiet. And, by God, if he gets near you he’s capable of doing things to you which would make any efforts of mine seem charitable.’
Duchêne shrugged his shoulders.
Paulet said, ‘All you have to do is be sensible and wait for Saraband Two. If Manston gets in touch with you when you return to London, you know nothing. Nothing until you receive your instructions from Saraband Two. You can say that you were late getting back to London because you broke your journey in Rome for a day or so.’
‘You think I can get away with that—or with not telling him about you?’
Duchêne shrugged. ‘Who cares? You will get instructions on those points from Saraband Two. You will not, I imagine, be asked to perform too complicated a dance.’
I stared at him. For the first time since I had known him he had allowed himself a touch of humour. Not that there was any hint of it on his face. But he had to be feeling good to have gone so far out of character.
‘Ha-ha,’ I said flatly.
It was practically the last thing I said to them. I was kept another half-hour in the room. I didn’t see Freeman or Pelegrina. Finally Mimo and Peter Brown of Wimbledon drove me back to Tunis to catch a plane to London. They had collected my cases from the Bizerta hotel and had paid my bill. Decent of them.
It was a hard drive for both of them. By nature they were affable souls who liked nothing better than a little light gossip to make the miles spin by without tedium. But Duchêne must have given them instructions not to talk. Maybe he thought they might let something slip, something which I could use. If one thing was for sure, it was that Duchêne was not trusting me an inch. The only hold he had over me was Wilkins—and it was a sound one. When Wilkins came out of this one safe and well, I knew that I was in for the worst half-hour of my life. Worse still, long before she got at me I knew that I was going to have Olaf to deal with. All I could hope was that he would leave me sufficiently in one piece to be able to deal with Saraband Two and then the Sutcliffe-Manston outfit. I had a dark future ahead and my face must have shown it, because as Mimo and Peter Brown left me at the airport, Mimo patted me on the arm and said, ‘Do not worry too much. Everything will be all right. One day you tell your children about this and have a big laugh.’
‘Children? I’m not even married.’
‘Is that necessary?’
I went into the airport buildings, tempted to phone the police, or Manston at the Tripoli Embassy, and put them on to the Villa La Sunata. Temptation lasted only a few seconds. The villa would be cleared by now and I should only be making things impossible for Wilkins. I was sitting in a big cleft stick and any move I made was just going to be from one discomfort to another.
However, on the plane I found some comfort. Not much, but enough. I knew my Wilkins and I knew her philosophy and her literary style. To begin with she was not afraid of anything that walked on two legs, and she had a sturdy conviction that melodrama was not something that could touch her life. She didn’t believe that she could be kidnapped. If it happened she would still refuse to believe it. The only real affliction in her life was a tendency to catch colds easily, a sniff her only valid protest against fate.
As for her literary style, it was anything but long-winded. Short, tart and to the point was Wilkins’s style.
Eighteen thousand feet above the Gulf of Tunis I opened her letter—which Duchêne had left with me, since he knew eventually I would have to show it to Manston as part of my credentials and serious intent as a go-between—and began to work out the simple code which Wilkins and I had established long ago. I’d had the devil’s own job to persuade her, years ago, that one day it might be useful. This was the first time in two years that she had ever used it. All I had to do was to list in running order the first and last letters of each paragraph. That gave me ONSHIPREDSTACKBLUEBAND. Which gave me ON SHIP RED STACK BLUE BAND.
Clever Wilkins. Somewhere, at least to begin with, she had been held—after the hijacking on the Leptis Magna road—on a ship whose funnel was red with a blue band round it. Single funnel, probably. Probably, too, a cargo boat of some kind. Well, probably again, that ship could have been in harbour in the last week in some port between, say, Alexandria and Sfax, maybe as far up as Tunis. If Olaf came raging after me, I could hand it to him and he could postpone killing me until he had tried to trace it.
*
I got in late, poached myself a couple of stale lion-stamped eggs and ate them on two toasted pieces of ready-sliced, untouched-by-hand, flavourless loaf. I washed it down with half a glass of milk that probably came from a cow untouched by human hand, finished up feeling slightly sick and, as a specific against indigestion and growing gloom, made myself a very strong whisky and soda.
I sat and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring and Saraband Two to announce himself. I wanted action to chase away the blues. I didn’t get it.
Mrs Meld, seeing the light on when she put her cat out for the night, came in, eyes puffy from watching television, and said, ‘Have a nice time then, Mr Carver?’
‘Splendid.’
‘That’s the spirit then. I’ll be in to do your breakfast in the morning per usual. See what happened to the
