Sheiks and Adders (11 page)

But first there was an encounter (which Appleby had known would be inevitable) with the Birch-Blackies. Jane Birch-Blackie had got herself tricked out as a dairymaid of the spruced-up sort to be found in the art of George Morland. Her husband, not at all in the true spirit of fancy dress, had taken it into his head to don his black hunting-coat and buff Bedford cord breeches – thus presenting a most unseasonable appearance to any instructed person who cared to give thought to the matter. Master William Birch-Blackie (shortly to withstand 217 days of siege in an obscure township in Bechuanaland) glowered darkly in his parents’ rear. He plainly regarded himself as having been ruthlessly conscripted for this disagreeable duty in the interest of cultivating his father’s constituency, and would greatly have preferred to be out shooting rabbits.

‘Well, well, my dear John!’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie exclaimed with instant cordiality. ‘Under the greenwood tree, eh? Tommy Pride, too. Two souls with but a single thought. I’d hardly have expected to see either of you at this show. Where’s Judith?’

‘Judith’s at home, and I’ve been haled here by one of the daughters of the house. Why Tommy has come, I’ve no idea.’

‘Tommy’s a real archer,’ Mrs Birch-Blackie said, glancing at Appleby’s useless bow. ‘I expect he hopes to win a coconut.’

‘You don’t win coconuts at archery,’ William Birch-Blackie said from his retired station and in the special voice employed by children when correcting the ludicrous misapprehensions of their elders. ‘Coconuts are at fairs, not fêtes. And fairs are rather better fun.’

‘Nice day for the thing,’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie said, ignoring this evidence of disaffection. ‘I haven’t spotted Chitfield yet, or I’d have congratulated him. Big effort, this, and in aid of something or other, of course. I believe it’s the Retired Gardeners.’

‘Retired Gardeners is at the Brothertons’ on Friday,’ Mrs Birch-Blackie pronounced decisively. ‘This is Distressed Gentlefolk. But Ambrose says we have to go to the Retired Gardeners, too. I’m bound to say we work uncommonly hard.’

‘As the gardeners did in their time, no doubt.’ Appleby offered this thought with gravity. ‘I’ve never met Richard Chitfield, but I thought I’d introduce myself. Do you know him well, Ambrose?’

‘Not exactly. Pass the time of day, and all that. Nice simple wife, with no nonsense to her.’

‘Nice and simple, certainly.’ Appleby didn’t think he could go all the way with the commendation just offered. ‘I’ve run into the three children.’

‘Delightful children,’ Jane Birch-Blackie said automatically.

‘Rubbish, my dear,’ her husband said, a shade surprisingly. ‘Speak out of turn at the drop of the hat, all three of them. But Chitfield’s a decent enough chap of his sort. Stumps up to party funds, and so on.’

‘Which I gather he can afford to do.’ It had occurred to Appleby that something useful might be got out of this encounter. ‘In oil, I hear. Are you in oil, Ambrose?’

‘Don’t make us laugh,’ William Birch-Blackie said outrageously. He had recently been denied promotion from a pony to a hunter, and regarded this as an extreme example of the
res
angusta domi
.

‘William, cut off. Go and see how the hot-air balloon is getting on.’

‘Hot air’s about all it is,’ William continued on a pertinaciously ungracious note. ‘Only last month two men got right across the Atlantic in a balloon and landed up in France. I don’t see the point of gaping at a chap soaring skywards from Drool and probably coming smack down on Boxer’s Bottom. I’d prefer a coke to that thrill every time.’

‘Then go and get one. There must be gallons of the stuff around.’ William’s father paused for a moment to watch his son’s departure. ‘A touch of stage-fright,’ he said, as if conscious that his son’s comportment was not that predicated of the best type of English public schoolboy. ‘William will be absolutely on the ball when his curtain goes up. You’ll see. But did you say oil, my dear John? Damned good, that. Half-pay, old boy, and my own three acres and a cow. That’s me.’ The Birch-Blackies were in fact substantial landowners. ‘But my brother, of course, is in with all that City stuff. Knows quite a lot about Chitfield. Some sort of crisis going on, it appears.’

‘Chitfield is involved in a crisis?’ It seemed to Appleby that his hope was at least in some measure to be fulfilled. ‘Connected with oil?’

‘That’s what my brother seemed to say – and he has been around the Middle East a good deal himself, and knows what he’s talking about. Not my territory at all. The Red Sea’s bad enough. Ever been to Aden? Jane and I once went round it in a taxi. In the old days and on the way home, that was. P & O did coaling there, I expect. Ghastly dump – although it’s probably all skyscrapers and Rolls Royces now. Haven’t ever seen any of those little places on the Gulf – nor ever shall now, with Marxists taking over like mad.’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie shook his head in a sombre fashion – the picture of a legislator burdened by heavy care. ‘Trucial States, and all that – besides no end of places with newfangled names and hoary-old corruptions galore. And that’s where this Chitfield’s trouble lies. Two many oily eggs in one rotten basket, you might say. A lot of those chaps who’ve been buying up London and a good deal of England as well, you know, pretty well due to be turfed out on their ear. Produces a lot of coming and going in a hush-hush way.’

‘A shake-up among the sheiks, in fact.’ Appleby had listened with a good deal of attention to all these syntactically imperfect remarks.

‘Being gunned for, some of them, on our own doorstep, you might say. Bombs chucked at them as they go shopping in Bond Street. Shocking state of affairs.’

‘Isn’t it odd,’ Jane Birch-Blackie asked, ‘that so many people seem to have dressed up as Emirs and Arabs and so on this afternoon? It’s taking quite a chance, isn’t it?’

‘They lack imagination,’ Appleby said. He was startled by this unusual display of intelligence on the lady’s part. At the same time he felt it was desirable to move on, and he cast round for a suitable valedictory remark. ‘I look forward,’ he said, ‘to seeing William put up a really good show against those Boers.’

‘He’s going to have a capital force under his command.’ Ambrose Birch-Blackie had been gratified by this remark. ‘I’ve been to some trouble over it, as a matter of fact. Had to chat up that new OC at Sleep’s Hill. But he’s done us proud in the way of kit and equipment. A shade anachronistic, perhaps. But the kids aren’t going to look like Boy Scouts. Believe you me, you’ll take them for a platoon of Guards.’

‘Most gratifying,’ Appleby said. ‘Splendid fun. Goodbye.’ And he left the Birch-Blackies to go on their way.

Richard Chitfield, as things now appeared, required more thinking about than Appleby had been inclined to suppose. He was at or near the centre of an obscure affair which was beginning to exhibit a thoroughly sinister appearance. It might be as well to sort all this out a little before tackling the man himself – and only the more so because a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police had no business whatever to be nosing round Drool Court in a suspicious – or at least suspecting – fashion. And Chitfield could keep at least for another quarter of an hour. Thus feeling that his present need was for seclusion, Appleby changed course, walked down a long formal garden which was historically quite at odds with the house, went through a gate into the park, and there established himself uncompanionably on a solitary seat beneath an enormous oak. He could still hear faintly the military band on the terrace; and yet more faintly there came to his ear a species of dismal yowling which may have emanated from the Basingstoke Druids as they limbered up to cope with the Golden Dawn. Listening to this for a moment, he realized why there had been something familiar lurking in that phrase. An occult society, active back in the Nineties, had called itself the Order of the Golden Dawn, and various poets of that period had been mixed up with it. But he couldn’t recall that it had anything druidical involved. The Basingstoke Druids must just have thought it sounded nice. They were demonstrably a dotty crowd.

But this was by the way, and the present problem concerned sheiks, not druids. So just where did the sheik-business begin?

Chronologically considered, it began with Tibby Fancroft, who had been forbidden to dress up as a desert lover. There was no direct evidence that this had much upset Tibby, but it had upset Cherry Chitfield a good deal. The occasion of her resentment had been entirely childish – but hadn’t there lurked in her, distinct from this, some other occasion of disquiet? It appeared that her father had the habit of making her at least fragmentary and sporadic confidences about his affairs, and it was almost as if she had suspected danger or at least mystery in the interdict imposed upon her lover in so arbitrary a way. It was hard to see any other explanation of her sudden wish – childish in itself, no doubt – to have an important policeman around Drool on the occasion of the fête.

It was going to be dangerous to walk around got up as a sheik
. At this conception Appleby had arrived already, but he now possessed a larger context within which to consider it. It was perfectly true, as Birch-Blackie had observed, that visitors (or emissaries) to England, alike from the Near East and the Middle East, occasionally carried, as it were, a substantial risk of assassination in their luggage. They were more vulnerable, less easily guarded, in this country than in their own. It could even be a matter of hostile sovereign governments having a go at each other in this way on English soil. And it was, of course, just that sort of hinterland, involving (or thought to involve) delicate diplomatic considerations, that would result in such seemingly absurd assignments as that imposed on Tommy Pride and his token force of two men.

There was at least one real sheik at Drool
. This, too, Appleby felt that he knew already. Somehow he hadn’t doubted for an instant that his second sheik had been both authentic and important; and he could now again quite clearly call up the image of that hawk-faced man with the stately carriage. Moreover this was the sheik whom he had briefly glimpsed again as present at that confidential confabulation in Richard Chitfield’s library in company with the half-dozen of grotesquely disguised persons. This alone set the stately sheik radically apart from the others.

Disguise. Disguise within disguise
. Wasn’t the real sheik himself to be thought of as disguised, although in a peculiar sense? All the other sheiks were in fact non-sheiks pretending to be authentic sheiks – whether in a blameless fancy-dress way or for reasons less innocent which remained to be determined. But wasn’t the real sheik involved in a situation that was considerably more complex? Wasn’t he pretending to be in the same boat as the others, supporting – all in the way of fun – a fictitious identity, although in fact he was doing nothing of the kind? He had come to the fête, that was to say, simply as an Englishman who had happened to dress himself up in an Arab fashion. And in this way he had ingeniously made himself into a kind of Invisible Man.

Appleby found himself frowning over this proposition. It penetrated, he believed, well into the target area, but it wasn’t too well put. The elaborate exercise he was studying (for elaborate it most certainly was) had really been mounted to
obviate
the real sheik’s need to disguise himself. Put it
that
way, and the thing begins to come clear. The sheik is something very grand indeed; perhaps even a monarch. He is a haughty and courageous man, and he abates nothing of these qualities because he is also a threatened man as well. He is not at all minded to huddle into western clothes in order to elude the observation of his enemies while attending some meeting or conference of high political or financial importance. So what can one arrange? The answer is an improvised additional element in Richard Chitfield’s already-planned fancy dress fête at Drool Court.

Still reposing (in a manner wholly appropriate to Robin Hood) beneath his majestic oak, Appleby assessed this odd sequence of propositions soberly. Perhaps one didn’t need to posit anything so sensational as an actual threat of terrorist assassination; perhaps nothing more than confidentiality, the avoidance of publicity essential in the sphere of high finance, was in question. Might not the fact that, with the exception of Chitfield himself, all the other men at that meeting had been heavily disguised have a logical place here? At some tentative stage of large-scale negotiation there might be conferring parties anxious to avoid precise identification for a time. If Chitfield was in danger of being in real trouble (as Birch-Blackie had supposed), and if the authentic sheik was indeed a ruler whose position at home was known to be insecure, there might be good reason why men cautiously considering whether to muck in with them might choose to be unrecognizable one to another.

But what about all the other sheiks? Or, more precisely, what about the two distinct categories of other sheiks?

Richard Chitfield appeared to have indulged some indistinct notion that there was safety in numbers – or safety, at least, for his own important and authentic sheik. So he had seen to it that there would be other sheiks on view. This would account for the Pring contingent. It seemed to imply his belief (which might be justified or not) that such terrorists as were involved would be of a singularly trigger-happy disposition, ready to jump to the conclusion that the first appropriately attired person encountered must be the one they were commissioned to attend to. On this view all these people were seriously at risk. And Chitfield had been concerned that his prospective son-in-law, Tibby Fancroft, should not be among them. A few Prings were another matter. If this had been how Richard Chitfield’s mind worked, he was a man quite as ruthless as tycoons of his kind are popularly supposed to be.

And finally there was the other category of pseudo-sheiks: the three men (originally, presumably, in ordinary dress) who had hastily transferred themselves into a further batch of
Arabian Nights
characters at a cost of five pounds per head. For the moment, it had to be admitted, the rôle of these persons was entirely obscure. They might represent, so to speak, reinforcements either on one side or the other. But it was easiest to see them as an enemy within the gates of Drool. The odds were that Richard Chitfield’s elaborate manoeuvre was in danger of failure, as many elaborate manoeuvres turn out to be. The whereabouts of the all-important authentic sheik had become known to his adversaries. And they were here on the spot.