by Mary Stewart
‘Oh, this is heaven after that bus! Have you ever been in one of the local buses?’
He laughed. ‘No, praise be to Allah, I have not.’
‘I should have warned you to keep right away from me until I’ve had a bath.’
‘I’ll take the risk. Where are you staying in Beirut?’
‘The Phoenicia. But don’t you bother about that, I can get a taxi from anywhere it suits you to throw me out.’
‘It’s no trouble, we’ll be passing it.’
‘Thanks all the same, but as a matter of fact I’ve a call to make first in the Rue Badaro. I don’t know where it is, but perhaps you do?’
‘Yes, of course. Well, that’s even simpler, it’s practically on the way. The Rue Badaro joins this one just before the place where the National Museum is. If we cut through the side streets when we get to the city we can go in that way, and I’ll drop you.’
‘Thank you very much.’
His voice betrayed no curiosity. He had given me a brief glance – unreadable because of the dark glasses – when I had mentioned the Rue Badaro, and I thought he must surely know that the Sûreté Générale was there, but he was either too indifferent or too well-bred to question me about my affairs. He asked merely: ‘What happened to your group?’
‘Oh, I didn’t break away from them today! I’m only stranded and thrown on your mercy because I hadn’t a proper visa and my own car went on … that is, there were reasons why I had to send my driver on to Damascus, even if it meant my finding my own way home to Beirut. The group actually left on Saturday, and in a way, that’s the cause of the trouble.’ I explained briefly what had happened about the visa.
‘I see. But how extraordinarily awkward. I suppose you have to get a new visa? Then do I gather it’s the Sûreté you want in the Rue Badaro?’
‘Yes,’ In spite of myself I cast a worried glance at my watch. ‘Have you any idea what their hours are?’
He didn’t answer immediately, but I saw him give a quick glance at his own wrist, then he leaned forward and said something in Arabic to the driver. The big car surged forward smoothly at an increased pace. Mr Lovell smiled at me. ‘You should be all right. In any case, I might be able to help you. Stop worrying.’
‘You? You mean you know someone there?’
‘You might say so. I can see how the mistake occurred, it’s no one’s fault, and I doubt if there will be any difficulty in getting you a new visa. You’ll have to pay another half-crown, I’m afraid, and wait while they fill in a form or two in triplicate, but that’s all it will take. So relax now till we get there. I promise you it’ll be all right. And if you like, I’ll come in with you and see you through it.’
‘Oh – would you really? I mean – if you’ve time? It’s terribly good of you!’ I found myself stammering in a sort of confusion of relief.
‘Think nothing of it,’ he said calmly. ‘Do you smoke?’
‘No, well, sometimes I do. Thank you, I think I will. Oh, are they Turkish?’
‘No, Latakia – it’s the best Syrian tobacco. Go on, try it.’
I took one, and he lit it for me. The driver, who all this time had said nothing, was smoking already. Mr Lovell lit a cigarette for himself and leaned back beside me. His lighter I saw, was a gold Flaminia, and the cigarette-case had been gold, too. The cuff-links in the silk cuffs were of heavy gold with a beautiful, deliberately ‘roughed’ surface. A man of substance, and certainly a man of easy self-assurance. Someone of importance, perhaps? He had that air. I began to wonder if quite by chance I had found the ‘useful contact’ in Beirut that I had talked of to Daddy. It certainly seemed as if I could stop worrying about the Sûreté and the visa.
He was silent, half turned away to look out of his window. We sat for a while smoking in silence, while the big car sped silently south and west, then took the High Lebanon pass in its stride and began to nose downhill towards the distant sprawl of Beirut. I was content to sit back in silence and stop thinking. This was an interval, a gap in time, a moment to free-wheel before the next effort. And the next effort would be eased for me by the pleasant and competent Mr Lovell.
It was only then, as I found myself relaxing, brittle tension melting like toffee into a sweet goo of softened bone and nerve and sleepy muscle, that I realised how taut and tight-strung I must have been, how senselessly, uselessly keyed up to meet something which could have been no more than a challenge of my own imagination. Something I had let Hamid see and feel, and which, because he had over-interpreted me, I had been left to sort out on my own. Well, I seemed to be doing just that … and meanwhile the car sailed on at speed, and the sun beat warm and heavy through the window, and the breeze stirred the ash in grey dust from my cigarette and feathered the smoke away in veils of blue nylon, and I was content to lift a lazy hand to wave it away from my eyes, then drop the hand, palm up, into my lap while I leaned back, tranquil, without thought.
My companion, seemingly as relaxed as I, was turned away from me gazing out at the view on his side of the car. Here the steep hillside fell away from the road in an abrupt sweep of rock-strewn green to the dark sprawl of forest and the gleam of running water. Beyond the forested stream the land rose again through terraced fields of gold and green and dark-gold to more stony heights, and the grey seams of snow. The poplars along the road’s edge flashed and winked past like telegraph posts, bare and lacy against the far snow and the hot blue sky.
‘Good Lord!’
Mr Lovell, who had been gazing out almost dreamily, stiffened to attention, whipped off his dark glasses, craned his neck farther, and shaded his eyes to stare down the mountainside.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, really – rather a pretty sight, that’s all. And not quite as out of place here as one might think.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘It still goes on, of course, the high romance – Haroun Al Raschid and the perfumes of Arabia and blood on the roses. It’s an Arab riding down there with a pair of Persian greyhounds, you know them? – salukis, beautiful things. How very dramatic’
I didn’t for the moment take in what he was saying. I was fiddling with the ashtray in the back of the seat in front of me, trying to stub out my cigarette.
He added: ‘He ought to have a hawk on his wrist, probably has, but it’s too far away for me to see.’
I looked up quickly. ‘Did you say a rider with two salukis? Here?’
It must be pure coincidence, of course. We must be miles on the wrong side of Beirut, and Dar Ibrahim was a long way away. It couldn’t be John Lethman and the salukis. But it was enough of a strange coincidence to make me sit up straighter and say: ‘Where? Can I see?’
I had to lean right across him to see down the hill. He sat back to let me do so, indicating a point well below us and some way off.
The car was sliding smoothly round the outside of a bend. The road was bounded by neither wall nor fence, its verge only a yard of dried clay where thistles grew between the poplars, and beyond this the steep mountainside. I peered down.
‘I can’t see anything. What’s the colour of the horse?’
‘Bright chestnut.’ He pointed again. ‘There, look, just going into the trees. Quick. The man’s in white. See?’
I strained to see where his right hand pointed. As I leaned close across him his left arm came quietly round me and held me fast.
For a moment I thought he was supporting me against the swing of the car on the bend. Then – incredulously, as his arm tightened – that this was a heavy pass; and I stiffened against it and tried to pull away. He held me, the arm like iron, his hand now gripping my left arm and holding it helpless. With my body pressed to his my right arm was imprisoned against him.
‘If you keep still you won’t be hurt.’
The voice, whispering now, was recognisable. The eyes, too, uncovered and staring into mine. The long nose, the olive face that would look pale in lamplight …
But it was mad. If it was mad to suppose John Lethman was riding out here f
orty miles from Dar Ibrahim it was still madder to suppose that my Great-Aunt Harriet, disguised as a man of forty-odd was holding me with this ferocious strength with one hand, while the other came up holding something that gleamed …
I screamed. The Arab driver drove smoothly on without even turning his head. He took a hand off the wheel to tap ash into the tray under the fascia-board.
‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ Gasping and twisting in his grip, I fought as hard as I could, and the car rocked, swinging wide on the next bend. But there was nothing coming. There was nothing on the road.
The dizzy swoop of the car round the bends, cliff on one side, open sky on the other, like the flight of a fulmar through an empty bright afternoon; the flicking pulse of shadow as the poplars whipped by; the unheeding silence of the Arab driver … all these combined in some curiously merciful way to insulate me from the nightmare of what could not – could not possibly – be happening.
He was grinning. From a few inches away, his teeth looked obscene, like something in a horror film. Great-Aunt Harriet’s eyes blinked and glittered as he fought to hold me.
‘Who are you?’ It was a last gasp on the edge of hysteria, and I saw him recognise the fact. His voice was smooth. He had me still now, boneless, dumb.
‘You remember now, of course. I told you we’d met before, but we weren’t introduced properly. Henry Lovell Grafton, if you want it in full … Mean anything to you? Yes, I thought it might. And now hold still, or I’ll hurt you.’
On the phrase his right hand flashed down at my bare arm. Something pricked, clung stinging, was withdrawn. He dropped the hypodermic into his pocket and smiled again, holding me tightly.
‘Pentothal,’ he said. ‘Being a doctor has its uses. You have ten seconds, Miss Mansel.’
14
… Nor do I know how long it is
(For I have lain entranced I wis).
S. T. Coleridge: Christabel
I was to find that Dr Henry Grafton had a habit of overestimating. It took about seven seconds to put me under, and when I awoke it was to near-darkness, the thick closeness of a shut and windowless room lit only by the faint light from a small barred opening high in the wall above the door.
At first, of course, the waking seemed normal. I opened blurred eyes on a dark wall where shadows moved slightly like rags in a draught. It was warm and very quiet, a heavy airless quiet that slowly conveyed to me the sense of being shut in. A small fluttering, like that of a moth against a pane, pattered into my consciousness through the layers of drugged sleep. It worried me. I must move and let the poor creature out. I must open the window and let in the air …
But not yet; I wouldn’t move just yet. My body felt slack and heavy, my head was aching, and I was cold. This last had its own compensations, for when I put a hand to my throbbing forehead the hand was damply cool, and comforting. I was, I found, lying on blankets. I scruffled a couple of these over myself, and turned on my face, cold hands against cheeks and forehead. The heavy lassitude of the drug still possessed me, and in a vague way – nothing was other than vague – I was thankful for it. I had an idea that something large, dark and terrifying loomed and gibbered just out of reach; but something in me refused to face it yet. I checked my groping mind, shut my eyes against the blankets, and thought of sleep …
I have no idea how long it was before I came back to consciousness the second time: I imagined it was no great while. This time the return was final, sharp, and altogether frightening. I was suddenly wide awake, and fully aware of all that had happened. I even knew where I was. I was back at Dar Ibrahim. The smell told me, seconds before my brain caught up with my senses – dead air and dust and lamp-oil, and the indefinable sharp smell of Great-Aunt Harriet’s tobacco. I was in one of the storerooms under the Seraglio lake, behind one of those massively locked doors in the underground passage where Charles and I had gone exploring to find the Prince’s Divan …
That was it. That was the gibbering thought that had lain in wait for my return from the dead; the thought I had been refusing to face.
The interview in the Prince’s Divan. Great-Aunt Harriet. Henry Grafton … I could only think of one reason for Henry Grafton’s grotesque masquerade to fob off my persistence, for the dusty abandonment of the Chinese treasures and the beloved books, even for the glimpse I had had of the ruby ring on Halide’s hand. Something had happened to my Great-Aunt Harriet which this gang had been at pains to hide. Not just ill, or even crazy – they must have known they needn’t fear her family when it came to Will-making, and wherever Lethman and Halide might stand, I didn’t think this was Henry Grafton’s concern. And surely the risks were too great for the rewards? Nor could she be a prisoner, like me; there had been no attempt to stop me wandering where I wished through the palace by daylight.
Well, then, she was dead. And for some reason the death had had to be concealed. At the moment, my skin crawling with cold in that warm airless dungeon, I could only think of one reason for that. But whatever it was that had necessitated the masquerade and the midnight prowling, and now the elaborate operation that had hauled me back into the net, I was soon going to find out – the hard way.
And Charles who had apparently, heaven knows how, suspected the truth – Charles was miles away, heading for Damascus with Hamid after him. Even if Hamid caught him up and persuaded him to come back for me, it would be some time before they would find my trail. No one would miss me at the Phoenicia; and Ben had said ‘Come when you can …’
Christy Mansel, sunk without trace.
Like Great-Aunt Harriet and her little dog Samson. Or like the Gabriel Hounds, locked away in the dust of the rotting palace for ever …
This was sheer crying stupidity, the drug reducing me when I could afford it least to a useless contraption of slack nerves and jellied bone. I slapped the nerves down hard, sat up, and tried to look about me.
Gradually, the place took shape. A few feet of dusty floor near the bed where the dim light fell, a low ceiling hung with webs, a stretch of rough stone wall where a tumble of leather and metal – harness, perhaps? – hung from a rusty hook. The tiny flickering sound came again from outside, the fluttering of a wick in an oil lamp. The weak light wavered through the tiny grating to drown within a yard or two in thick darkness where, faintly, could be seen stacked shapes of crates, boxes, tins like small petrol-cans …
I had certainly been right about where I was. The ventilator must look out on lamplight in the underground corridor, and the door below it could be one of those massively barred affairs with the uncompromising locks that Charles and I had seen. There would be no questioning that door. And there was, of course, no window.
The silence was intense, thick and suffocating like the stillness one finds in caves, the silence of underground. I held myself still, listening. My body felt stiff and sore here and there, as if there were bruises, but the headache was gone, to be followed by an awareness which at that moment was worse and more painful, a feeling of quickness, a light aliveness and nerve-end vulnerability, like a snail that has been torn from its shell and wants nothing better than to creep back inside.
The silence was complete. There was no way of telling if anyone else was still about in the palace. You would think I had been buried alive.
The cliché slipped through my mind without thought, then struck home like a poisoned dart, as with it came the quick vision of the rock above me, the tons of rock and earth with the heavy sheet of water lying over it. Man-made; fallible; rotten, probably, as the rest of the place was rotten. The weight must be terrific. If there was the slightest flaw in the rock above me, the slightest movement of earth—
Then with the rush of cold prickling over my skin, I heard it through the dead silence, the tick of settling earth.
I was on my feet, rigid and sweating, before commonsense broke over me like a breath of sweet air. The ticking was merely my watch. I stretched up on tiptoe near the door, holding my wrist high towards the ventilator. I cou
ld just see it. The little familiar face was like a friend, the familiar tick brought sanity and the knowledge that it was a few minutes short of six o’clock. It had been just on four in the afternoon when I had accepted the lift from Henry Grafton. I had been unconscious for more than twelve hours.
I put a hand down to the door and, for what it was worth, tried it. The latch lifted silk-smooth, but the door never budged a millimetre. This was so much a foregone conclusion that I hardly registered it with any emotion at all. I was conscious all the time of the positive effort involved in keeping at bay the image of the tons of rock and water pressing down over my head.
The sound which a little while ago I had been dreading came now like the lifting of a nightmare. A key in the lock.
When the door opened smoothly, in that accustomed, well-oiled silence, I was sitting, I hoped composedly, on the bed, trying to conceal with a straight back and poker face that I couldn’t have trusted my legs to let me stand. My lips were dry and my heart thumping. What I expected I have no idea. But I was afraid.
It was John Lethman, carrying a lamp, and behind him Halide, as ever with a tray. I smelled soup and coffee as soon as the door opened. If I had thought about it, I’d have expected to be ravenously hungry, but I wasn’t. He put the lamp up in a wall-niche, and the girl came past him to set the tray down on a packing-case. She let her big kohl-rimmed eyes slide side sideways to look at me, I saw pleasure there. The smile reached the corners of her mouth in a malicious little curl. The silk of her dress shimmered, bordered with gold, and I was sharply reminded of what my own state must be, crumpled from the blankets and with my hair all anyhow. I ignored her stonily, and said abruptly to Lethman:
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘To whom?’
‘To Great-Aunt Harriet, of course. Don’t try to keep the charade up, I know your beastly pal was masquerading. Where’s my aunt?’
