I
As Bob Rawlinson walked along the echoing marble corridors of the Palace, he had never felt so unhappy in his life. The knowledge that he was carrying three-quarters of a million pounds in his trousers pocket caused him acute misery.
He felt as though every Palace official he encountered must know the fact. He felt even that the knowledge of his precious burden must show in his face. He would have been relieved to learn that his freckled countenance bore exactly its usual expression of cheerful good nature.
The sentries outside presented arms with a clash. Bob walked down the main crowded street of Ramat, his mind still dazed. Where was he going? What was he planning to do? He had no idea. And time was short.
The main street was like most main streets in the Middle East. It was a mixture of squalor and magnificence. Banks reared their vast newly built magnificence. Innumerable small shops presented a collection of cheap plastic goods. Babies’ bootees and cheap cigarette lighters were displayed in unlikely juxtaposition. There were sewing machines, and spare parts for cars. Pharmacies displayed flyblown proprietary medicines, and large notices of penicillin in every form and antibiotics galore. In very few of the shops was there anything that you could normally want to buy, except possibly the latest Swiss watches, hundreds of which were displayed crowded into a tiny window. The assortment was so great that even there one would have shrunk from purchase, dazzled by sheer mass.
Bob, still walking in a kind of stupor, jostled by figures in native or European dress, pulled himself together and asked himself again where the hell he was going?
He turned into a native café and ordered lemon tea. As he sipped it, he began, slowly, to come to. The atmosphere of the café was soothing. At a table opposite him an elderly Arab was peacefully clicking through a string of amber beads. Behind him two men played tric trac. It was a good place to sit and think.
And he’d got to think. Jewels worth three-quarters of a million had been handed to him, and it was up to him to devise some plan of getting them out of the country. No time to lose either. At any minute the balloon might go up….
Ali was crazy, of course. Tossing three-quarters of a million lightheartedly to a friend in that way. And then sitting back quietly himself and leaving everything to Allah. Bob had not got that recourse. Bob’s God expected his servants to decide on and perform their own actions to the best of the ability their God had given them.
What the hell was he going to do with those damned stones?
He thought of the Embassy. No, he couldn’t involve the Embassy. The Embassy would almost certainly refuse to be involved.
What he needed was some person, some perfectly ordinary person who was leaving the country in some perfectly ordinary way. A business man, or a tourist would be best. Someone with no political connections whose baggage would, at most, be subjected to a superficial search or more probably no search at all. There was, of course, the other end to be considered … Sensation at London Airport. Attempt to smuggle in jewels worth three-quarters of a million. And so on and so on. One would have to risk that—
Somebody ordinary—a bona fide traveller. And suddenly Bob kicked himself for a fool. Joan, of course. His sister Joan Sutcliffe. Joan had been out here for two months with her daughter Jennifer who after a bad bout of pneumonia had been ordered sunshine and a dry climate. They were going back by “long sea” in four or five days’ time.
Joan was the ideal person. What was it Ali had said about women and jewels? Bob smiled to himself. Good old Joan! She wouldn’t lose her head over jewels. Trust her to keep her feet on the earth. Yes—he could trust Joan.
Wait a minute, though … could he trust Joan? Her honesty, yes. But her discretion? Regretfully Bob shook his head. Joan would talk, would not be able to help talking. Even worse. She would hint. “I’m taking home something very important, I mustn’t say a word to anyone. It’s really rather exciting….”
Joan had never been able to keep a thing to herself though she was always very incensed if one told her so. Joan, then, mustn’t know what she was taking. It would be safer for her that way. He’d make the stones up into a parcel, an innocent-looking parcel. Tell her some story. A present for someone? A commission? He’d think of something….
Bob glanced at his watch and rose to his feet. Time was getting on.
He strode along the street oblivious of the midday heat. Everything seemed so normal. There was nothing to show on the surface. Only in the Palace was one conscious of the banked-down fires, of the spying, the whispers. The Army—it all depended on the Army. Who was loyal? Who was disloyal? A coup d’état would certainly be attempted. Would it succeed or fail?
Bob frowned as he turned into Ramat’s leading hotel. It was modestly called the Ritz Savoy and had a grand modernistic façade. It had opened with a flourish three years ago with a Swiss manager, a Viennese chef, and an Italian Mâitre d’hôtel. Everything had been wonderful. The Viennese chef had gone first, then the Swiss manager. Now the Italian head waiter had gone too. The food was still ambitious, but bad, the service abominable, and a good deal of the expensive plumbing had gone wrong.
The clerk behind the desk knew Bob well and beamed at him.
“Good morning, Squadron Leader. You want your sister? She has gone on a picnic with the little girl—”
“A picnic?” Bob was taken aback—of all the silly times to go for a picnic.
“With Mr. and Mrs. Hurst from the Oil Company,” said the clerk informatively. Everyone always knew everything. “They have gone to the Kalat Diwa dam.”
Bob swore under his breath. Joan wouldn’t be home for hours.
“I’ll go up to her room,” he said and held out his hand for the key which the clerk gave him.
He unlocked the door and went in. The room, a large double-bedded one, was in its usual confusion. Joan Sutcliffe was not a tidy woman. Golf clubs lay across a chair, tennis racquets had been flung on the bed. Clothing lay about, the table was littered with rolls of film, postcards, paperbacked books and an assortment of native curios from the South, mostly made in Birmingham and Japan.
Bob looked round him, at the suitcases and the zip bags. He was faced with a problem. He wouldn’t be able to see Joan before flying Ali out. There wouldn’t be time to get to the dam and back. He could parcel up the stuff and leave it with a note—but almost immediately he shook his head. He knew quite well that he was nearly always followed. He’d probably been followed from the Palace to the café and from the café here. He hadn’t spotted anyone—but he knew that they were good at the job. There was nothing suspicious in his coming to the hotel to see his sister—but if he left a parcel and a note, the note would be read and the parcel opened.
Time … time … He’d no time….
Three-quarters of a million in precious stones in his trousers pocket.
He looked round the room….
Then, with a grin, he fished out from his pocket the little tool kit he always carried. His niece Jennifer had some plasticine, he noted, that would help.
He worked quickly and skilfully. Once he looked up, suspicious, his eyes going to the open window. No, there was no balcony outside this room. It was just his nerves that made him feel that someone was watching him.
He finished his task and nodded in approval. Nobody would notice what he had done—he felt sure of that. Neither Joan nor anyone else. Certainly not Jennifer, a self-centred child, who never saw or noticed anything outside herself.
He swept up all evidences of his toil and put them into his pocket … Then he hesitated, looking round.
He drew Mrs. Sutcliffe’s writing pad towards him and sat frowning—
He must leave a note for Joan—
But what could he say? It must be something that Joan would understand—but which would mean nothing to anyone who read the note.
And really that was impossible! In the kind of thriller that Bob liked reading to fill up his spare moments, you left a kind of cryptogram which was always successfully puzzled out by someone. But he couldn’t even begin to think of a cryptogram—and in any case Joan was the sort of commonsense person who would need the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed before she noticed anything at all—
Then his brow cleared. There was another way of doing it—divert attention away from Joan—leave an ordinary everyday note. Then leave a message with someone else to be given to Joan in England. He wrote rapidly—
Dear Joan—Dropped in to ask if you’d care to play a round of golf this evening but if you’ve been up at the dam, you’ll probably be dead to the world. What about tomorrow? Five o’clock at the Club.
Yours, Bob.
A casual sort of a message to leave for a sister that he might never see again—but in some ways the more casual the better. Joan mustn’t be involved in any funny business, mustn’t even know that there was any funny business. Joan could not dissimulate. Her protection would be the fact that she clearly knew nothing.
And the note would accomplish a dual purpose. It would seem that he, Bob, had no plan for departure himself.
He thought for a minute or two, then he crossed to the telephone and gave the number of the British Embassy. Presently he was connected with Edmundson, the third secretary, a friend of his.
“John? Bob Rawlinson here. Can you meet me somewhere when you get off? … Make it a bit earlier than that? … You’ve got to, old boy. It’s important. Well, actually, it’s a girl … ” He gave an embarrassed cough. “She’s wonderful, quite wonderful. Out of this world. Only it’s a bit tricky.”
Edmundson’s voice, sounding slightly stuffed shirt and disapproving, said, “Really, Bob, you and your girls. All right, 2 o’clock do you?” and rang off. Bob heard the little echoing click as whoever had been listening in, replaced the receiver.
Good old Edmundson. Since all the telephones in Ramat had been tapped, Bob and John Edmundson had worked out a little code of their own. A wonderful girl who was “out of this world” meant something urgent and important.
Edmundson would pick him up in his car outside the new Merchants Bank at 2 o’clock and he’d tell Edmundson of the hiding place. Tell him that Joan didn’t know about it but that, if anything happened to him, it was important. Going by the long sea route Joan and Jennifer wouldn’t be back in England for six weeks. By that time the revolution would almost certainly have happened and either been successful or have been put down. Ali Yusuf might be in Europe, or he and Bob might both be dead. He would tell Edmundson enough, but not too much.
Bob took a last look around the room. It looked exactly the same, peaceful, untidy, domestic. The only thing added was his harmless note to Joan. He propped it up on the table and went out. There was no one in the long corridor.
II
The woman in the room next to that occupied by Joan Sutcliffe stepped back from the balcony. There was a mirror in her hand.
She had gone out on the balcony originally to examine more closely a single hair that had had the audacity to spring up on her chin. She dealt with it with tweezers, then subjected her face to a minute scrutiny in the clear sunlight.
It was then, as she relaxed, that she saw something else. The angle at which she was holding her mirror was such that it reflected the mirror of the hanging wardrobe in the room next to hers and in that mirror she saw a man doing something very curious.
So curious and unexpected that she stood there motionless, watching. He could not see her from where he sat at the table, and she could only see him by means of the double reflection.
If he had turned his head behind him, he might have caught sight of her mirror in the wardrobe mirror, but he was too absorbed in what he was doing to look behind him….
Once, it was true, he did look up suddenly towards the window, but since there was nothing to see there, he lowered his head again.
The woman watched him while he finished what he was doing. After a moment’s pause he wrote a note which he propped up on the table. Then he moved out of her line of vision but she could just hear enough to realize that he was making a telephone call. She couldn’t catch what was said, but it sounded lighthearted—casual. Then she heard the door close.
The woman waited a few minutes. Then she opened her door. At the far end of the passage an Arab was flicking idly with a feather duster. He turned the corner out of sight.
The woman slipped quickly to the door of the next room. It was locked, but she had expected that. The hairpin she had with her and the blade of a small knife did the job quickly and expertly.
She went in, pushing the door to behind her. She picked up the note. The flap had only been stuck down lightly and opened easily. She read the note, frowning. There was no explanation there.
She sealed it up, put it back, and walked across the room.
There, with her hand outstretched, she was disturbed by voices through the window from the terrace below.
One was a voice that she knew to be the occupier of the room in which she was standing. A decided didactic voice, fully assured of itself.
She darted to the window.
Below on the terrace, Joan Sutcliffe, accompanied by her daughter Jennifer, a pale solid child of fifteen, was telling the world and a tall unhappy looking Englishman from the British Consulate just what she thought of the arrangements he had come to make.
“But it’s absurd! I never heard such nonsense. Everything’s perfectly quiet here and everyone quite pleasant. I think it’s all a lot of panicky fuss.”
“We hope so, Mrs. Sutcliffe, we certainly hope so. But H.E. feels that the responsibility is such—”
Mrs. Sutcliffe cut him short. She did not propose to consider the responsibility of ambassadors.
“We’ve a lot of baggage, you know. We were going home by long sea—next Wednesday. The sea voyage will be good for Jennifer. The doctor said so. I really must absolutely decline to alter all my arrangements and be flown to England in this silly flurry.”
The unhappy looking man said encouragingly that Mrs. Sutcliffe and her daughter could be flown, not to England, but to Aden and catch their boat there.
“With our baggage?”
“Yes, yes, that can be arranged. I’ve got a car waiting—a station wagon. We can load everything right away.”
“Oh well.” Mrs. Sutcliffe capitulated. “I suppose we’d better pack.”
“At once, if you don’t mind.”
The woman in the bedroom drew back hurriedly. She took a quick glance at the address on a luggage label on one of the suitcases. Then she slipped quickly out of the room and back into her own just as Mrs. Sutcliffe turned the corner of the corridor.
The clerk from the office was running after her.
“Your brother, the Squadron Leader, has been here, Mrs. Sutcliffe. He went up to your room. But I think that he has left again. You must just have missed him.”
“How tiresome,” said Mrs. Sutcliffe. “Thank you,” she said to the clerk and went on to Jennifer, “I suppose Bob’s fussing too. I can’t see any sign of disturbance myself in the streets. This door’s unlocked. How careless these people are.”
“Perhaps it was Uncle Bob,” said Jennifer.
“I wish I hadn’t missed him … Oh, there’s a note.” She tore it open.
“At any rate Bob isn’t fussing,” she said triumphantly. “He obviously doesn’t know a thing about all this. Diplomatic windup, that’s all it is. How I hate trying to pack in the heat of the day. This room’s like an oven. Come on, Jennifer, get your things out of the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. We must just shove everything in anyhow. We can repack later.”
“I’ve never been in a revolution,” said Jennifer thoughtfully.
“I don’t expect you’ll be in one this time,” said her mother sharply. “It will be just as I say. Nothing will happen.”
Jennifer looked disappointed.
[Cat Among the Pigeons -Agatha Christie] Two The Woman on The Balcony