by M. M. Kaye
He put down his glass and sat down rather suddenly on the end of his bed, and Dany gazed back at him dazedly. She had taken in very little of what he had said, because her mind was filled with only one distracting thought: she could not catch the plane! She would have to stay here and face the police and questions and inquests and newspaper men, and the scandalized disapproval of Aunt Harriet who would, understandably, feel that all her dire predictions as to the fatal consequences of independence had been fully justified. She was caught!
‘No!’ said Dany on a sob. ‘Oh no! I can’t stay here. I won’t. I will go to Zanzibar. They shan’t stop me. But — but they can if I haven’t got a passport! What am I going to do? Oh why did I ever telephone Mr Honeywood? Why did I ever change the times? If I’d only gone in the afternoon instead!’
‘And found the body? You wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘It would have been better than this! Far, far better. Can’t you do something?’
‘Such as what?’ demanded Lash reasonably. ‘Call up the cops? That would be one helluva help! Now just shut up and let me think for a minute. I don’t know how you expect anyone to think while you’re carrying on in this uninhibited manner. Hush, now!’
He helped himself to another drink and relapsed into frowning silence while Dany struggled with an overwhelming desire to burst into tears, and was only restrained from this course by a strong suspicion that Mr Lashmer J. Holden, Jnr, was quite capable of boxing her ears should she try it.
She sat down weakly on the nearest chair, her brain feeling as numb and useless as wet cotton wool. The whole thing was impossible and horrible and fantastic: she must be dreaming and she would wake up suddenly and find herself back in her snug, safe bedroom at Glyndarrow. This could not be happening …
But it was Lashmer J. Holden, Jnr, who woke up.
‘I’ve got it!’ he announced. ‘By God, what it is to have a brain! Can you type?’
‘Yes,’ said Dany, bewildered.
‘What about shorthand?’
‘A — a little.’
‘Secretarial college?’
‘No. Class at school. Why____’
‘Never mind. It’ll have to do. O.K. Consider yourself engaged.’
‘W-what!’ gasped Dany.
‘Oh — in a purely secretarial capacity. Nothing personal. I’m through with women. Now listen, kid; here’s the layout — and is it a lily! If someone thinks they’re going to use you as a red-herring to cover up their own get-away, let’s wreck the scheme. I’ve been travelling with a secretary — Miss Kitchell. But Ada has developed mumps, and I haven’t so far been able to get hold of a suitable substitute who possesses a valid passport and the necessary visas and forms and whathaveyou to enable her to leave pronto. So what do we do? We take you!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Dany crossly. ‘You know quite well that I haven’t got a passport either! That’s the whole point.’
Mr Holden made an impatient noise that is normally rendered in print as ‘Tcha!’
‘Use your brain, girl! I’m not taking you as you. I shall take you as Miss Kitchell. You aren’t too unlike her. Height about right. Eyes roughly the right colour. Shape a whole lot better, but they don’t include that in the photograph. She’s older of course, and her hair’s red, but she wears glasses and a fringe and about a million curls. The thing’s a gift! We dye your hair red — it’s a pity, but one must suffer for one’s art — get it fringed and frizzed à la Ada and buy you a pair of glasses. It’s a cinch!’
‘But — but … No! it isn’t possible! She won’t agree.’
‘She won’t be asked,’ said Mr Holden firmly. ‘I have all her documents right here in a brief-case with my own, and all the files and things we need. She sent ’em to me along with the bad news, and forgot to take her own stuff out. So there we are. Masterly, I think. And what’s more it will enable me to put a long-cherished theory to the test.’
‘What theory?’ asked Dany faintly.
‘That no one ever yet looked like the photograph on their passport, and that anyway no official ever really glances at the thing. Well, we shall know tomorrow.’
‘We can’t do it,’ protested Dany, though with less conviction. ‘We can’t possibly do it!’
‘Why not?’
‘Well — there’s this secretary of Tyson’s — Nigel Ponting. He’s meeting the plane at Nairobi, and he’s bound to have seen photographs of me, and____’
‘By the time I’ve finished with you,’ said Mr Holden blithely, ‘you will have ceased to resemble any photograph ever taken. Except possibly the libel that is pasted to Ada’s passport, and that only remotely. And he will not be expecting you, because we will cover that contingency by sending your parents an express cable to say ‘Sorry. Delayed — writing.’ That’ll hold ’em! As for this Ponting, he is an elegant tulip of the precious and scented variety that your great and glorious country has suddenly taken to breeding like rabbits. A pain — no kidding. I met him last time your step-father was in the States, and I can assure you he wouldn’t know one girl from the next. One of those. So phooey to Ponting. You don’t have to worry about him.’
‘Well…’ began Dany hesitantly; and was caught in another spasm of panic and doubt. ‘No! No, I can’t. We couldn’t!’
‘What’s to stop us? They can’t give us more than a two-year stretch at Sing Sing — or Borstal, or wherever they send you in this country. And what are two years among so many? Haven’t you British any guts?’
There was a sudden angry sparkle in Dany’s grey eyes, and her chin lifted. ‘All right. I’ll do it.’
‘That’s the girl,’ approved Mr Holden, and helped himself to another drink.
‘I can’t think,’ he said, ‘why I don’t write for a living instead of publishing the puerile efforts of lesser minds. It’s all here — brains, dash, fertility of invention and a frank approach to the problems of daily life. What are you just sitting there for? Get going, girl! Jump to it!’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ inquired Dany, startled.
‘Well, pack I guess. You’ve got to get out of here before the cops catch up on you, so the sooner you check out the better. Get the girl at the desk to call up and cancel your seat on the plane and to send off that cable. That’ll help. And tell the room girl and the hall porter and anyone else you meet that you’ve just heard that your bedridden old grandmother is dangerously ill in Manchester or Aberdeen or some place, and you’re having to cancel your trip and rush to her side. Ask the hall porter to get you a taxi to go to whatever station it is where trains leave for the wilds of Caledonia.’
‘King’s Cross, I think,’ said Dany.
‘O.K. King’s Cross. And when you get there, grab a porter and get him to put your bags in the checkroom, and I’ll meet you in the booking hall in an hour and a half’s time. Think you can make it?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Try, nothing! You’ll make it or else. If there’s one thing that makes me madder than a hornet it’s women who keep one waiting around. I’ve put up with plenty of that in the past, but no more of it for L. J. Holden, Jnr. No sir! Not from now on. Besides, there won’t be much time to waste. We have a stiff itinerary before us. Check you in at another hotel, change all your baggage labels, find an intelligent hairdresser and buy a pair of spectacles, for a start. So the sooner you get going the better. See you at King’s Cross at 11 a.m. sharp. And mind, I’m not waiting there for ever! Ten minutes is my limit.’
It was, in actual fact, twenty. But he was still there, and in excellent spirits — in every meaning of the words.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ apologized Dany breathlessly, ‘but as I was checking out I saw him again — at least it may not have been, but I thought____’
‘Saw who?’ demanded Lash, confused.
‘The African — or whatever he is. I told you I passed one when I was leaving Mr Honeywood’s. No, it couldn’t possibly have been the same one I suppose. I’m being silly. B
ut he was talking to the man at the desk about some letters, and it gave me such a jolt that I forgot I’d left a coat in the ladies’ room, and so of course I had to go back and fetch it, and that made me late. I was afraid you would have left.’
‘Another two minutes, and your fears would have proved well founded. But a mish ish as good as a — A miss ish — Oh, well; the hell with it! Let’s go.’
He hailed a porter, retrieved Dany’s suitcases from the left-luggage office where they had been deposited only a few minutes previously, and half an hour later she was sitting in front of a large looking-glass, swathed in a peach-coloured overall, while Mr Holden explained breezily to a giggling blonde hairdresser’s assistant the details of Miss Ada Kitchell’s coiffure.
‘He’s a one, isn’t he? Your gentleman friend,’ said the blonde, dunking Dany’s head into a basin. ‘In films, are you dear? Must be ever so interesting. Ever been a red-head before? No? Well I expect it’ll make a nice change. You won’t know yourself.’
‘Not bad,’ said Lash, viewing the result some time later: ‘Not bad at all. Though I can’t say that it’s an improvement. Definitely a retrograde step. Or is that because I’m seeing two of you? Never mind — you can’t have too much of a good thing. Let’s eat.’
They had eaten at a small restaurant in a side-street near the hairdresser’s shop. Or rather Dany had eaten while Mr Holden had confined himself to drinking. And later that day he had deposited her at a sedate family hotel in Gloucester Road, with instructions to keep to her room and not to panic. He would, he said, call for her on the following morning on his way to the Air Terminal, and he regretted his inability to entertain her further, but he had a date that evening. In fact, several.
‘You won’t oversleep, or anything dreadful?’ said Dany anxiously, suddenly terrified by a vision of being abandoned — alone, red-headed and masquerading as Miss Ada Kitchell — in darkest Gloucester Road.
‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Holden, shocked. ‘You don’t suppose that I intend to waste valuable time in going to sleep, do you? In the words of some poet or other, I am going to “cram the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of drinking done”. Or know the reason why!’
‘But you didn’t have any sleep last night,’ protested Dany, worried.
‘What’s that got to do with it? Tomorrow is another day. Be seeing you, sister.’
Dany passed the remainder of the day in solitude and acute anxiety, and crept out at dusk to buy the evening papers. But a fire in a large London store, a train crash in Italy, another revolution in South America and the fifth marriage of a well-known film star, had combined to push the murder of Mr Henry Honeywood off the front pages and into small type.
There were no further details, and with repetition the accounts lost much of their horror for Dany, and became more remote and impersonal. Which soothed her conscience somewhat, though not her fears, for there had been nothing either remote or impersonal about the gun that had been hidden in her room at the Airlane. Or in the fact that someone had stolen her passport! The whole thing might sound like an impossible nightmare, but it had happened. And to her — Dany Ashton. Oh, if only — if only she had gone to see Mr Honeywood at the proper time!
She had passed a sleepless night, and was looking white and worn when Lash collected her in a taxi at a comparatively early hour on the following morning. But a glimpse of herself in the large Victorian looking-glass that adorned the hall of the family hotel had at least served to convince her that no one would be likely to recognize her. She had not even recognized herself, and for a fleeting moment had imagined that the wan-faced young woman with the over-dressed red hair and wide-rimmed spectacles was some stranger who was standing in the narrow, chilly hall.
Lash, however, apart from a noticeable pallor and the fact that his eyes were over-bright, showed no signs of fatigue. He exuded high-spirits and was accompanied by a strong smell of whisky and the cat Asbestos, and no one would have suspected for a moment that he had not been to bed or had any sleep at all for two consecutive nights.
He had dismissed with a single short word Dany’s trembling assertion that she had changed her mind and couldn’t possibly go through with it, and once in the taxi and en route to the Air Terminal had made her take several sea-sick pills and swallow them down with rye whisky.
She had been unable to eat any breakfast that morning, panic having deprived her of appetite, and the raw spirit, coming on top of a sleepless night and an empty stomach, had quietened her postoperative nerves and filled her with a pleasant glow of confidence which had lasted until the passengers bound for Nairobi were marshalled in the departure lounge, and she had found herself standing next to a slim, youngish-looking man with a thin, triangular, attractive face, observant brown eyes and a square, obstinate chin.
Catching Dany’s eye he had smiled at her; a swift and singularly pleasant smile that she found it impossible to resent, and said: ‘I see that we’re both bound for Zanzibar. Have you ever been there before?’
His voice was as irresistibly friendly and good-humoured as his smile, and Dany smiled back at him and shook her head.
‘No? That’s a pity: I’d hoped to pick up a few pointers. This’ll be my first visit too. As a matter of fact, I never expected to make it. I’ve had my name down on half a dozen waiting lists for weeks on end, but all the Nairobi planes seemed to be booked solid. I’d almost given up hope when my luck turned — someone cancelled a seat only yesterday, and I got it.’
‘Oh,’ said Dany, jumping slightly. ‘H-how lucky for you.’
‘It was that all right! I’m a feature writer. Freelance. My name’s Dowling — Larry Dowling.’
‘Oh,’ said Dany faintly. ‘A — reporter.’
Mr Dowling looked pained. ‘No. Feature writer. Have you ever heard of a novelist called Frost? Tyson Frost? But of course you have! Well, he’s got a house in Zanzibar, and I’ve been commissioned by a newspaper and a couple of magazines to try and get a feature on him. That is, if he’ll see me. He’s not an easy man to get at, from all accounts. Still, I ought to be able to get something out of the trip, even if Frost won’t play. Might be able to do something on the elections down there. There’s a rumour that the local Moscow-Nasser stooges are making an all-out bid for control of the island.’
‘Of Zanzibar? But it’s quite an unimportant little place!’ protested Dany, momentarily forgetting her own predicament in a sudden sense of outrage. Was there then no longer any lovely, romantic spot left in all the world that was free from squabbling political parties?
Mr Larry Dowling laughed. ‘You know, there was a time when a good many people might have said the same of Sarajevo. But they learnt differently. I’m afraid you’ll find that in a world that plays Power Politics there is no such thing any longer as “an unimportant little place”.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Dany involuntarily. ‘Why does everything have to be spoiled!’
Mr Dowling lifted a quizzical eyebrow, but his pleasant voice was sympathetic; ‘That’s Life, that is. I didn’t mean to depress you. I’m sure you’ll find Zanzibar every bit as attractive as you expect it to be. I believe it’s a lovely place. Are you staying with friends there, or are you going to put up at the hotel like me? I hear there is____’
He broke off, his attention sharply arrested by the Vision at that moment entering the crowded lounge. A vision dressed by Dior and draped in mink, preceded, surrounded and followed by a heady waft of glamour and exceedingly expensive scent, and accompanied by a slim, dark Italianate young man and a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with grey hair and cold pale eyes.
Her entrance created something of a stir, and Mr Holden, also turning to look, lost a considerable portion of his bonhomie.
‘Here come some of your step-father’s guests,’ he observed sourly to Dany. ‘The Latin type is Eduardo di Chiago. A Roman louse who races his own cars and is a friend of Tyson’s — he would be! The one with white whiskers and Foreign Office written all over
him (erroneously, he’s oil) is Yardley. Sir Ambrose. He’s been getting a lot too thick with Elf of late, and she’d better watch her step — there was a rumour around that his Company might be heading for the rocks; and not the kind of rocks she collects, either! It’s a pity it isn’t true. But at least we don’t have to put up with him for long. He’s only going as far as Khartoum.’
He did not identify the Vision, but he did not need to. It was, unmistakably, the original of the affectionately inscribed photograph that had adorned his dressing-table at the Airlane. His ex-fiancée and Lorraine’s great friend, Amalfi Gordon.
‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ sighed Dany wistfully, speaking aloud without realizing it.
‘Is she?’ said Mr Holden coldly.
He directed a brief scowling glance at the Vision, and turned his back on it. But Mrs Gordon had seen him.
‘Why — Lash!’ Her warm, throaty voice was clearly audible even above the babble of the crowded lounge, but Mr Holden affected to be deaf.
It did him no good. Mrs Gordon descended upon him in a wave of scented sweetness. ‘Lash, darling — it’s lovely to see you! I was so afraid you’d decide not to come after all.’
