They Came to Baghdad

‘Something I heard – from a friend of mine.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Girls like you have too many friends,’ grumbled Edward. ‘You are a devil, Victoria. I love you madly and you don’t care a bit.’

‘Oh yes, I do,’ said Victoria. ‘Just a little bit.’

Then, concealing her delighted satisfaction, she asked:

‘Edward, is there any one called Lefarge connected with the Olive Branch or with anything else?’

‘Lefarge?’ Edward looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so, Who is he?’

Victoria pursued her inquiries.

‘Or any one called Anna Scheele?’

This time Edward’s reaction was very different. He turned on her abruptly, caught her by the arm and said:

‘What do you know about Anna Scheele?’

‘Ow! Edward, let go! I don’t know anything about her. I just wanted to know if you did.’

‘Where did you hear about her? Mrs Clipp?’

‘No – not Mrs Clipp – at least I don’t think so, but actually she talked so fast and so unendingly about everyone and everything that I probably wouldn’t remember if she mentioned her.’

‘But what made you think this Anna Scheele had anything to do with the Olive Branch?’

‘Has she?’

Edward said slowly, ‘I don’t know…It’s all so – so vague.’

They were standing outside the garden door to the Consulate. Edward glanced at his watch. ‘I must go and do my stuff,’ he said. ‘Wish I knew some Arabic. But we’ve got to get together, Victoria. There’s a lot I want to know.’

‘There’s a lot I want to tell you,’ said Victoria.

Some tender heroine of a more sentimental age might have sought to keep her man out of danger. Not so, Victoria. Men, in Victoria ’s opinion, were born to danger as the sparks fly upwards. Edward wouldn’t thank her for keeping him out of things. And, on reflection, she was quite certain that Mr Dakin hadn’t intended her to keep him out of things.

III

At sunset that evening Edward and Victoria walked together in the Consulate garden. In deference to Mrs Clayton’s insistence that the weather was wintry Victoria wore a woollen coat over her summer frock. The sunset was magnificent but neither of the young people noticed it. They were discussing more important things.

‘It began quite simply,’ said Victoria, ‘with a man coming into my room at the Tio Hotel and getting stabbed.’

It was not, perhaps, most people’s idea of a simple beginning. Edward stared at her and said: ‘Getting what?’

‘Stabbed,’ said Victoria. ‘At least I think it was stabbed, but it might have been shot only I don’t think so because then I would have heard the noise of the shot. Anyway,’ she added, ‘he was dead.’

‘How could he come into your room if he was dead?’

‘Oh Edward, don’t be stupid.’

Alternately baldly and vaguely, Victoria told her story. For some mysterious reason Victoria could never tell of truthful occurrences in a dramatic fashion. Her narrative was halting and incomplete and she told it with the air of one offering a palpable fabrication.

When she had come to the end, Edward looked at her doubtfully and said, ‘You do feel all right, Victoria, don’t you? I mean you haven’t had a touch of the sun or – a dream, or anything?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Because, I mean, it seems such an absolutely impossible thing to have happened.’

‘Well, it did happen,’ said Victoria touchily.

‘And all that melodramatic stuff about world forces and mysterious secret installations in the heart of Tibet or Baluchistan. I mean, all that simply couldn’t be true. Things like that don’t happen.’

‘That’s what people always say before they’ve happened.’

‘Honest to God, Charing Cross – are you making all this up?’

‘No!’ cried Victoria, exasperated.

‘And you’ve come down here looking for someone called Lefarge and someone called Anna Scheele –’

‘Whom you’ve heard of yourself,’ Victoria put in. ‘You had heard of her hadn’t you?’

‘I’d heard the name – yes.’

‘How? Where? At the Olive Branch?’

Edward was silent for some moments, then said:

‘I don’t know if it means anything. It was just – odd –’

‘Go on. Tell me.’

‘You see, Victoria. I’m so different from you. I’m not as sharp as you are. I just feel, in a queer kind of way, that things are wrong somehow – I don’t know why I think so. You spot things as you go along and deduce things from them. I’m not clever enough for that. I just feel vaguely that things are – well – wrong – but I don’t know why.’

‘I feel like that sometimes, too,’ said Victoria. ‘Like Sir Rupert on the balcony of the Tio.’

‘Who’s Sir Rupert?’

‘Sir Rupert Crofton Lee. He was on the plane coming out. Very haughty and showing-off. A VIP. You know. And when I saw him sitting out on the balcony at the Tio in the sun, I had that queer feeling you’ve just said of something being wrong, but not knowing what it was.’

‘Rathbone asked him to lecture to the Olive Branch, I believe, but he couldn’t make it. Flew back to Cairo or Damascus or somewhere yesterday morning, I believe.’

‘Well, go on about Anna Scheele.’

‘Oh, Anna Scheele. It was nothing really. It was just one of the girls.’

‘Catherine?’ said Victoria instantly.

‘I believe it was Catherine now I think of it.’

‘Of course it was Catherine. That’s why you don’t want to tell me about it.’

‘Nonsense, that’s quite absurd.’

‘Well, what was it?’

‘Catherine said to one of the other girls, “When Anna Scheele comes, we can go forward. Then we take our orders from her – and her alone”.’

‘That’s frightfully important, Edward.’

‘Remember, I’m not even sure that was the name,’ Edward warned her.

‘Didn’t you think it queer at the time?’

‘No, of course I didn’t. I thought it was just some female who was coming out to boss things. A kind of Queen Bee. Are you sure you’re not imagining all this, Victoria?’

Immediately he quailed before the glance his young friend gave him.

‘All right, all right,’ he said hastily. ‘Only you’ll admit the whole story does sound queer. So like a thriller – a young man coming in and gasping out one word that doesn’t mean anything – and then dying. It just doesn’t seem real.’

‘You didn’t see the blood,’ said Victoria and shivered slightly.

‘It must have given you a terrible shock,’ said Edward sympathetically.