The Gabriel Hounds (31 page)

‘Drink this. Better? Here, have another cigarette. It’ll help you.’

I took it automatically, and he lit it for me and then moved away to hitch his chair out of the shaft of sunlight which slanted low now from a window, and sat down again.

I flattened my hands on the carved lacquer of the chair arms. Somehow the little, practised touch of solicitude had changed the tone of the interview, the
doctor-patient gesture had put him back, subtly, on top. I made an effort, through the invading fatigue, to resume the cool accusing tone of attack.

‘All right, Dr Grafton. That’s the first part of the inquisition over. For the time being I’ll accept that my great-aunt’s death was a natural one, and that you did all you could. Now we come to why you had to conceal it, what you called the “mystery and the masquerade” … and what you’ve done to me. You’ve an awful lot of explaining still to do. Go on.’

He regarded his hands for a minute, clasped in his lap. Then he looked up.

‘When you rang up my house and were told I was gone, did they tell you anything about me?’

‘Not exactly, but they played hell with the silences. I gather you’re in trouble.’

‘True, I was in trouble, so I got out while the going was good. I can think of a lot of places I’d rather be in than a Lebanese prison.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘Oh quite. A little matter of getting and selling medical supplies illegally. You can get away with murder here more easily.’

‘You wouldn’t just have been deported?’

‘That would hardly have helped. As it happens, I’m a Turkish national, and the penalties there are even worse. Take it from me, I had to get out, and fast, before they caught up with me. But I had assets in the country, and I was damned if I’d leave them without realising them. Naturally, I’d been afraid this might happen one day, so I’d made arrangements. Dar
Ibrahim had been my centre and – shall we call it storeroom? – for some time, and over the past few months I had managed to’ – a flicker of the brown eyelids and a tiny pause – ‘engage John’s interest. So the actual getaway went smoothly enough. I was driven to the airport and checked in, then someone else took over my ticket and boarded the flight. If you know the airport here you’ll know it can be done. John was waiting outside the airport and drove me up here by the back road – the way I brought you today – and I walked down to Dar Ibrahim. Your great-aunt expected me. Naturally I hadn’t told her the truth; I spun her some story about an abortion and procuring drugs without charge for certain poorer class patients. Like the Stanhope woman, she had the highest disregard for the laws of this country, so she took me in and kept it secret. She was too delighted to have her doctor here as a permanency to ask many questions, and she talked too much herself to be over-curious about other people. As for the servants – Halide had her eye on John as a one-way ticket out of Sal’q, and her brother was employed by me already. Jassim’s silence one hardly has to buy; it takes practice to understand more than one word in twelve, and in any case he’s too stupid to know what’s going on. So here I was, sitting pretty, with a good base to work from and John’s help as outside agent to start cashing in on my assets. It went like a dream, no suspicions, winding up as smoothly as clockwork, cash due to come in, myself due to check out finally at the end of the summer …’

He paused. I leaned forward to flick ash into the saucer. It missed, and went on to the table to add to the patina of dust.

He went on: ‘Then just a fortnight ago came your great-aunt’s death. My God, for you to think I’d killed her! I spent nine hours solid at her bedside – right there – fighting for her life like a mother tiger …’ He wiped his upper lip. ‘Well, there you are. She died – and her death could have thrown the doors wide open, and me to the lions. In the end we decided to play it cool – I believe that’s the expression nowadays? – and keep her death quiet. We thought we might just get away with it for the couple of weeks that were needed to complete the current operation. I couldn’t hope to keep it quiet much longer than that, and the risks were too big. We had to cut our losses and plan a complete get-out in a big hurry – but we did it. What we didn’t reckon with was you. Nothing your great-aunt had ever said led us to think we’d have a devoted family hammering at the door within a day or two. But – and just at the wrong moment – you came.’

The sun had almost gone, and its last light sloped in a low bright shaft across my feet. Dust motes swirled in it. I watched them half idly. Beyond their quick dazzle the man in the other chair seemed oddly remote.

‘We thought at first you’d be easy to fob off,’ he said, ‘but you’re a persistent young woman, and a tough one. You managed to put the wind up John, and we were afraid you were in a position, if you really got worried, to whistle up all sorts of help and come back armed with lawyers and writs of habeas corpus and
God knows what else; so we thought we hadn’t much to lose by trying the masquerade, and if it seemed to satisfy you you might keep quiet for the few days’ grace we needed. It was a desperate sort of idea, but I thought I might get away with it for a few minutes in semi-darkness, especially with the male clothes she used. In fact it was that habit of hers that gave me the idea in the first place. If we’d refused to let you see your aunt at all, you’d have been convinced she was ill, or that John was keeping you out for his own ends, and if you’d got suspicious enough to bring a doctor or a lawyer from Beirut, we’d have been sunk. So we tried it, and it worked.’

I nodded, thinking back over the interview; the hoarse whisper disguising the man’s voice, the grotesque glimpses of the balding skull under the turban, the sunken mouth from which presumably he had removed his lower teeth, the alert black eyes. Halide’s nervousness and John Lethman’s watchful, edgy look had been for none of the reasons I had imagined.

‘I get it now,’ I said. ‘All that chat of John Lethman’s at supper – he was finding out all he could about the family so as to fill you in on things Aunt H didn’t tell you. You knew I hadn’t seen her since I was a kid, so you thought you’d probably fool me easily enough, but Charles had seen her recently, so naturally “Great-Aunt Harriet” wouldn’t receive him. Oh, yes, clever enough, Dr Grafton.’ I blew a long cloud of smoke into the air between us. ‘And as a matter of fact you rather enjoyed it, didn’t you? John Lethman tried to hurry me out, and heaven knows I’d have gone, but you
wouldn’t let me, you were enjoying yourself too much making a fool of me.’

He was grinning. Grotesquely, it was Great-Aunt Harriet’s face as I had thought of her, vaguely seen through the smoke and the dusty shaft of sunlight, remote as something glimpsed down the wrong end of a telescope.

I said: ‘Yes, all right, so it worked. You fooled me, and you fobbed Charles off quite successfully, and surely after I’d left the place you were in the clear, so why drag me back? I’d gone hadn’t I, quite satisfied? Why drag me back here like this?’

‘Because we hadn’t fobbed your cousin off, and you know it. Oh, don’t give me that great big innocent look, it doesn’t suit you. Shall I tell you what happened? The first time you left here it wasn’t your driver who met you, it was your cousin, and between you you hatched the plan to let him in on Monday night. He came, and you explored the place together. Yes, my dear, that stare’s a bit more genuine.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Your precious cousin told me all about it himself.’

I don’t think I spoke. I just stared. I couldn’t quite take in what he was saying. The room seemed to be swirling round me, smoke and dusty sunlight dazzling like fog.

‘After you’d gone back to your room that evening, he was to have left by the back gate – the mountain gate, wasn’t he?’ Grafton’s voice was smooth as cream. ‘Well, he didn’t. John and I came across him in the passageway below here, trying to force one of the
padlocked doors. It wasn’t much use denying who he was – you’re very like one another, aren’t you? So we – er, we took him in. He’s been safely locked away in the palace prison ever since. It won’t surprise you to know the palace has its own gaol? Unhappily there was only one cell serviceable, so when we caught you as well, we had to use the storeroom for you.’

‘Here? Charles here? I don’t believe you. He can’t be!’ My brain seemed to be groping, like someone feeling through a roomful of smoke, not sure of the direction of the door or the distance to the window. I think I had a hand to my forehead, ‘You’re lying. You know you’re lying. He wrote me a letter, and left it for me in Beirut. He went to Damascus to see Ben’s father … no, to Aleppo. And we saw him – yes we saw him on the way …’

‘He certainly wrote you a letter. He suggested doing that himself. If he hadn’t done it to ensure you kept away from Dar Ibrahim and didn’t start hunting for him when he failed to turn up at the Phoenicia, we couldn’t have let you go in the morning.’

‘Why did you?’

‘Your driver,’ he said shortly, ‘and your hotel. Your cousin pointed out that it was easier to let you go than to risk someone starting to ask questions. Besides, as he told us, you thought you’d seen your great-aunt alive and well, and could spread the belief that all was normal.’

‘So he wrote the letter – all those elaborate lies – he even pretended he’d seen her himself and recognised her … I’ve been wondering about that, I thought he
must have seen you and made the same mistake as I did … You mean – that letter – it was all quite deliberate? Just to keep me out?’

‘Exactly that.’

I said nothing. The conversation no longer seemed to have much to do with me. He was still smiling, and as I stared at him, bemused, I saw the grin widen. The top teeth were his own; the incisors were yellowish and long. He was talking again, fragments of information drifting like torn paper to lie in a crazy pattern: John Lethman – no doubt the ‘Englishman’ seen in the distance by the faun – had driven the Porsche down to Beirut in the early morning, hidden it in someone’s backyard, woken the someone whose name seemed to be Yusuf and given him the letter, then been driven back by Yusuf, who later got the letter delivered to the hotel and went himself to ride herd on me …

‘But you, my dear, didn’t stay out of the line of fire. You made it fairly obvious that you were going to ask some damned awkward questions and make some damned awkward contacts. You even telephoned England. And from what our man heard of your telephone conversation with Damascus, we decided to remove you.’

‘The Arab in the red tarboosh. He was in the next booth.’ I said it to myself, not to him.

‘Certainly. Well, since you’d made your plans public, and that damned driver was already there with you, and we didn’t want any eyes turning to Dar Ibrahim, we decided to get you the wrong side of the frontier and then let you disappear. All very simple, no great harm
done – your car stopped, yourselves robbed, your papers taken and the car wrecked … somewhere beyond the Antilebanon, we thought, or even off towards Qatana. Yusef was confident he could immobilise you for long enough. So he got the Porsche out and drove it through to wait. It was the bait, of course. You’d have followed it—’

‘Hamid! If you’ve harmed Hamid—!’

‘Not if he’s sensible. Most Arabs are, if you make it worth their while.’ He laughed. ‘I thought at first your being stopped at the frontier was going to bitch all our plans, but it worked out like a dream. You didn’t see me, but I was there, and I saw what happened. My driver followed yours into the frontier buildings and heard the whole thing, so I sent him through to tell Yusuf to go south and get rid of your cousin’s car, but as luck would have it you’d seen it yourself from above the road, and came running down to tell your driver to go through after it. My own car came straight back, and reported he’d crossed yours at the frontier. Since neither your driver nor the Porsche came back, one gathers Yusuf made him listen to reason, or else simply carried out the original plan and left him somewhere to cool off till tomorrow. We can’t afford to let him near a telephone, you must see that.’ A little grunt of amused satisfaction. ‘After that it was so easy it was hardly true. You told everyone within hearing that you were going to the Adonis Hotel to get a car for Beirut, so I simply went there first and waited for you to come. The manager’s new, so there was no fear of his recognising me, but I’m damned sure that by the time you turned
up he was sure he’d known me all his life. You’d never have accepted a lift from someone picking you up on the road, but someone you met in the hotel, someone you were introduced to by name …’ That smile again. ‘I hope you appreciated the touch about the Great Mosque? You remember telling your “great-aunt” all about it?’

‘Very clever. You’re so very clever. Quite a little empire you’ve got, haven’t you, with all your spies and drivers and cars. Something’s paying pretty well. Don’t grin at me like that, you snag-toothed little dago. What have you done with Charles?’

‘I told you. He’s in the lock-up.’ The grin had vanished.

‘Have you hurt him?’

‘There was a bit of a rough-up last night.’

‘You tried to rough Charles up? No wonder John looks the worse for wear. I thought his face was hurting him yesterday, and now I come to think of it, he kept that side turned away. It’s come up lovely now, hasn’t it? Good old Charles! And oh, my poor auntie! Did he hurt you much?’

The smile had certainly vanished. He had flushed darkly, and I saw the vein in his temple begin to beat. ‘He didn’t touch me. I had a gun. I admit John isn’t much use, but then he drugs.’

‘Drugs?’ I don’t think I managed to speak the question, I only looked it. He had gone far away from me again. The room was all shadows now. I found myself straining forward, peering to see where he had gone. Dimly, I knew I should be frantic with worry
about Charles, with fear for myself. But I couldn’t tie my brain down. It wouldn’t work for me. It spun high and light. It floated, lifting me with it out of the chair, up towards the high dim corners of the room.

He was suddenly close, gigantic. He was out of his chair and standing over me. His voice was vicious. ‘Yes, drugs, you silly spoiled little bitch. Drugs. I said “medical supplies”, didn’t I? There’s a fortune in Indian hemp lying there in the cellars waiting for collection tonight, and another fortune growing in the fields above Laklouk if your great-aunt hadn’t died, and I’d been able to hang on till harvest.’ He drew in his breath. ‘And not only hemp. They grow opium in Turkey and Iran, didn’t you know? That’s the real stuff. Opium, morphine, heroin – and I’ve a pipeline across Syria that’s been working like a dream, and all it needs for the processing is a bit of time and the kind of privacy we get here at Dar Ibrahim …’