Sheiks and Adders (13 page)

‘It has not. And I imagine it hasn’t escaped your speculative instincts either.’

‘True enough.’ Professor McIlwraith, Appleby thought, was turning a little less pedantic than usual, which was perhaps a good sign. ‘I posit at least one genuine Arab, who is the person actually under threat. The imitation Arabs have been brought in to confuse matters. You might call them extra needles chucked into the haystack.’

‘That’s the only possible explanation of them?’

‘Far from it. There may be more than one category of imitation Arab. Somebody may have decided that, having taken our thought so far, we shall think of all imitation Arabs as necessarily harmless. We shall judge them either to be in Arab costume purely fortuitously – which is perfectly possible – or to be among the spare needles, and therefore necessarily without any lethal intentions.’

‘My dear Appleby, that, if I may say so, is a most refined analysis. I congratulate you.’

‘I don’t want congratulations.’ Appleby was suddenly impatient. ‘I want facts. If I read your mind rightly, you are as apprehensive as I am that some serious threat hangs over this blasted fête. So I think we’d better pool our information. For my part, I’ve told you all I know.’

‘Except about your colleague Colonel Pride.’

‘Perfectly true. But you must tackle him yourself. He’s fair game enough. But you and I can start with the real Arab. I’ve been thinking about him as Sheik somebody. But now I have some reason to think of him as an Emir. Emir Afreet, as a matter of fact.’

‘My dear Appleby, an afreet is–’

‘Yes, I know. But that’s how it came over on a telephone.’

‘Is it, indeed?’ Very naturally, Professor McIlwraith gave this information a moment’s thought. ‘A telephone message to Pride?’

‘To one of Pride’s men. There’s a police presence here, although a regrettably small one. It’s only wise to tell you that.’

‘I see.’ McIlwraith gave this intelligence brief consideration in turn. ‘Emir Hafrait is the name of the man who has come to Drool. You may well have heard of him, Appleby. He’s a fellow of considerable importance in his way. And the occasion of my being here myself, as a matter of fact.’

‘Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere.’

‘Not very far, I fear. The Emir is here for extremely confidential discussions with Chitfield and his associates over oil revenues and so on.’

‘I’d imagined as much.’

‘It’s stuff with which I have nothing to do. But I am Hafrait’s adviser on other matters. They may be called religious matters.’

‘Dear me!’ Appleby was genuinely astonished. ‘I’d have thought–’

‘Quite so. But during my long period in the Middle East I made, as it happens, a fairly searching study of Islam. It isn’t, you know, all that monolithic. In fact you never know in what direction this or that Mohammedan cat will jump. Hafrait’s is a modern and purely secular mind, and he finds it useful that I can offer him a wholly dispassionate view of the warring sects and their political implications. I was to have some discussion with him this afternoon when his commercial concerns were concluded. But now he has disappeared. And that is why I am holding this conversation with you.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Appleby didn’t quite know what to make of all this. It didn’t sound too plausible, but was certainly not to be ignored. ‘Supposing,’ he went on, ‘that your Emir really is under some actual threat – as I may say I’m inclined to accept, since all this hush-hush business would be pointless otherwise. Does the threat come from a purely political quarter – the toppling of one ruler in favour of another – or is it a matter of what is called Big Business in a particularly ruthless aspect, or is the motive one of religious fanaticism – as your last remarks would appear to suggest?’

‘My dear Appleby, you can know little of the Middle East if you believe that there is any separating all that. Search for the motive prompting any action between Suez and Tehran, and nothing but a mishmash confronts you. You wouldn’t care for it, my dear Appleby. It must make complex detective investigation very difficult. But of course the solving of criminal problems is on the whole simply conducted. You simply choose a suitable suspect and find some appropriate means of making him say what you want him to.’

‘I’m afraid you and I would meet with a certain amount of disapproval if we went to work that way.’

‘Decidedly we should. But we must get to work
some
way. I must say, Appleby, that I am displeased with Chitfield. His attitude over the ridiculous Fancroft shows that he has been well aware of the hazardousness of Hafrait’s coming to Drool at all. And he has dealt with the matter in a wholly freakish and irresponsible manner.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you there, McIlwraith. We’d certainly better find your Emir, and find Chitfield as well – and get the whole dangerous business wound up as soon as may be.’

‘Quite so.’ Professor McIlwraith appeared to find encouragement in this brisk assumption that dangerous businesses are by their nature amenable to swift control. ‘Perhaps we’d better separate and scour the place. But would you know Hafrait if you saw him?’

‘I rather imagine I’d know him instantly. I’ve had a couple of sightings, you know: once here in the grounds, and once in the library. Tall and commanding – and even his dark glasses don’t obscure the fact that he looks like an eagle – as emirs no doubt should.’

‘Or like a vulture.’ McIlwraith seemed to offer this alternative as a man well up in Middle East affairs.

‘And Chitfield’s pseudo-sheiks, as I’ve been thinking of them – a little chap called Pring and the others – don’t come within anything like a foot of him. Decidedly a tall man of his hands, your Emir. What, by the way, makes you say so roundly that he has disappeared?’

‘Simply that he was to remain in the library after Chitfield had got rid of his associates and their business with Hafrait – whom I was then to join there. But he’d vanished. Chitfield too, for that matter.’

‘It appears to be a general opinion that Chitfield is likely to have gravitated to his precious theatre – although it looks as if he may well have been distracted from all that nonsense. I suggest that we scour around separately, and meet up there in, say, fifteen minutes. But if you run into Pride, you’d better spare a little time to explaining yourself. There’s too much haphazard about all this at present. Rather more in the way of liaison is distinctly called for.’ Appleby let a good deal of personal disapproval percolate through this remark. ‘Whatever the threat is, I’d like to feel surer than I do that we have an adequate force to cope with it.’

‘Dear me!’ Professor McIlwraith said. ‘I am much to seek, I fear, at this sort of thing. But as your faithful Achates, my dear Appleby, I shall do what I can.’

The Emir Hafrait, having concluded his business with what might be thought of as Chitfield’s crowd, had failed to remain in that library for the purpose of seeing Professor McIlwraith – or for the purpose, perhaps one ought to say, of receiving Professor McIlwraith. No doubt (Appleby told himself as he began his prowl) this was a circumstance less significant than McIlwraith imagined. Harfrait was probably the next thing to royalty, and if it pleased him to wander off and take a look at his client Chitfield’s bizarre entertainment, he might very well judge it the obscure McIlwraith’s business to hang around and await his better leisure. Appleby, in fact, was rather clinging to his notion of an intrepid aristocratic Arab going his own way. The fellow might, of course, have his own effective security around him in a manner unknown even to his host of the afternoon. After all, anybody could be pretty well anything in this fancy-dress crush.

And the crush was still increasing. Appleby was again astonished that such a very large number of presumably rational beings should choose to put in a long and exhausting afternoon at the Chitfield fête. Into an open-air party it is no doubt entirely lawful to cram as many human bodies as you please, but if you had a roof over the heads of this crowd no fire-prevention people would tolerate the spectacle for a second. And it certainly made Appleby’s present occupation peculiarly difficult; the sheer compactedness of the haystack made the hunt-the-needle business distinctly unpromising. And now he became aware of an additional obstacle. As he had already observed, sheiks and druids, unless viewed at close quarters, are much of a muchness, and he found himself repeatedly mistaking the one for the other. The Basingstoke contingent, having presumably despatched the ritual of the Golden Dawn, and having some time to spare before the yet more solemn ceremony of the perlustration of Drool Court, were recreating themselves severally or in small groups by wandering round the less arcane entertainments on offer. And as one or two of them were exceptionally tall, Appleby once or twice found himself imagining that he was about to run the Emir Hafrait to earth when in fact he was doing nothing of the sort. But then – quite suddenly – there the real chap was. Here, most definitely, was not another Pring-type pseudo-sheik. It was impossible to mistake that regal port.

Sir John Appleby, being a well-trained policeman, glanced at his watch, and then made a dive for his quarry. But it had to be a little more than a dive. Richard Chitfield’s distinguished guest was plainly occupying himself in the manner Appleby had judged probable; much like the druids, he was taking a walk round the sights. And now he was standing at the other side of a tight ring of spectators surrounding the hot-air balloon as it laboriously puffed itself into shape. By the time Appleby had circumambulated this mob, the man had vanished. Surely it couldn’t be that he had become aware of the fact that a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, absurdly dressed up as Robin Hood, was about to have the impertinence to accost him? No, it couldn’t be that. It was merely that, by very bad luck, the Emir Hafrait had chosen to move on to the next idle attraction.

Even so, he was so tall that it ought to have been possible to distinguish his head bobbing away in one direction or another. But this wasn’t the case. Some configuration of the terrain must be preventing it. There was nothing to do but continue to move towards the theatre. The theatre was, after all, the centre-piece of the whole jamboree. It was the likeliest place for the Emir himself to be making for, even if circuitously, just as it was the likeliest place at which to effect the almost equally desirable running to earth of Richard Chitfield. But as either of these elusive characters might be almost anywhere else about the place, Appleby now went forward slowly and looking around him – rather like any less exalted policeman on the beat in some shady district. As a consequence of this it took him some time to arrive back at the theatre.

As on the previous occasion, little was happening. There was nothing very surprising about that. What was perhaps unexpected was the large number of persons sitting in patient expectation of whatever might be the next event. This could be because a period had arrived in the afternoon’s proceedings at which people were relieved simply to be able to get off their feet. There was, indeed, a certain bustle in what was at least theoretically behind the scenes– occasioned by William Birch-Blackie and his companions limbering up to defend Mafeking to the death. There was no sign of any Boers. These ought, roughly speaking, to have been recruited from the surrounding juvenile peasantry of Drool. Perhaps they had refused to play. Or perhaps nobody had remembered that Boers were necessary.

Appleby glanced at the spectators. Titania was present, and this time Bottom (last glimpsed in Richard Chitfield’s library) had been restored to her. Sheik Pring was also on view, with Joan of Arc seated incongruously beside him. But now this more or less static scene was broken into by what was at least the ghost of an event. Professor McIlwraith, already arrived at this agreed rendezvous, had spotted Appleby and was advancing upon him at a lumbering run.

‘I’ve seen him!’ McIlwraith called out in an agitated manner. ‘He has been here. But now he has disappeared again.’

‘Do you mean the Emir?’ Naturally enough, Appleby disapproved of this public display of perturbation.

‘Yes, of course. Only ten minutes ago.’

‘Ten minutes ago?’ Appleby was astonished to see that the eminent philologist had glanced at his watch. ‘You thought to note the actual minute you spotted him?’

‘Certainly I did. I hurried straight here, you know. And there Hafrait was – strolling about as if he were at a garden party.’

‘Well, he was – wasn’t he?’ Appleby felt a moment of sheer exasperation. ‘Confound it, McIlwraith! I think there be six Richmonds in the field. That’s all that can be said about it.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that Hafrait – unless he really is an afreet into the bargain – can’t be in two places at the same time. And I could swear I saw him ten minutes ago in quite a different corner of the grounds. How certain are you that your man really was the Emir?’

‘Totally certain. He spoke to me. And in rather a high-handed manner, I’m bound to say. You see, we had an appointment–’

‘Yes, I remember about that.’

‘Well, he simply waved at me – and said, “Our occasion must be a little later, my good McIlwraith”. And then he moved away. I let him go. I was too annoyed to endeavour to detain him.’

‘That was very natural, no doubt. The fact is that the fellow is showing off, isn’t it? He’s amusing himself with a kind of variant on Russian roulette. He’s here, together with some unfortunate double he has brought along with him, and it’s fifty-fifty which of them cops it. The thing is absolutely dotty.’

‘They are a peculiar people, my dear Appleby. It is my conjecture that Hafrait was offended when he heard of Chitfield’s inept plan to have other persons in Arab costume around – and the result has been even more irrational behaviour on his own part. In face of such nonsense, I hardly see we can do other than throw in our hand.’

‘It might be the sensible thing, I agree. But one can’t, unfortunately, contract out of a duty to endeavour to keep the Queen’s peace. In particular, Colonel Pride and his men can’t. We must put Pride wise to this new development at once.’