They Came to Baghdad Read online

  “Must we?” said Victoria dreamily. “Things all labelled and put into cases don’t seem a bit real somehow. I went to the British Museum once. It was awful, and dreadfully tiring on the feet.”

  “The past is always boring,” said Edward. “The future’s much more important.”

  “This isn’t boring,” said Victoria, waving a sandwich towards the panorama of tumbling brick. “There’s a feeling of—of greatness here. What’s the poem ‘When you were a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?’ Perhaps we were. You and I, I mean.”

  “I don’t think there were any Kings of Babylon by the time there were Christians,” said Edward. “I think Babylon stopped functioning somewhere about five or six hundred BC. Some archaeologist or other is always turning up to give lectures about these things—but I really never grasp any of the dates—I mean not until proper Greek and Roman ones.”

  “Would you have liked being a King of Babylon, Edward?”

  Edward drew a deep breath.

  “Yes, I should.”

  “Then we’ll say you were. You’re in a new incarnation now.”

  “They understood how to be Kings in those days!” said Edward. “That’s why they could rule the world and bring it into shape.”

  “I don’t know that I should have liked being a slave much,” said Victoria meditatively, “Christian or otherwise.”

  “Milton was quite right,” said Edward. “‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ I always admired Milton’s Satan.”

  “I never quite got around to Milton,” said Victoria apologetically. “But I did go and see Comus at Sadler’s Wells and it was lovely and Margot Fonteyn danced like a kind of frozen angel.”

  “If you were a slave, Victoria,” said Edward, “I should free you and take you into my harem—over there,” he added gesticulating vaguely at a pile of debris.

  A glint came into Victoria’s eye.

  “Talking of harems—” she began.

  “How are you getting on with Catherine?” asked Edward hastily.

  “How did you know I was thinking about Catherine?”

  “Well, you were, weren’t you? Honestly, Viccy, I do want you to become friends with Catherine.”

  “Don’t call me Viccy.”

  “All right, Charing Cross. I want you to become friends with Catherine.”

  “How fatuous men are! Always wanting their girlfriends to like each other.”

  Edward sat up energetically. He had been reclining with his hands behind his head.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Charing Cross. Anyway, your references to harems are simply silly—”

  “No, they’re not. The way all those girls glower intensely at you and yearn at you! It makes me mad.”

  “Splendid,” said Edward. “I love you to be mad. But to return to Catherine. The reason I want you to be friends with Catherine is that I’m fairly sure she’s the best way of approach to all the things we want to find out. She knows something.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Remember what I heard her say about Anna Scheele?”

  “I’d forgotten that.”

  “How have you been getting on with Karl Marx? Any results?”

  “Nobody’s made a beeline at me and invited me into the fold. In fact, Catherine told me yesterday the party wouldn’t accept me, because I’m not sufficiently politically educated. And to have to read all that dreary stuff—honestly, Edward, I haven’t the brains for it.”

  “You are not politically aware, are you?” Edward laughed. “Poor Charing Cross. Well, well, Catherine may be frantic with brains and intensity and political awareness, my fancy is still a little Cockney typist who can’t spell any words of three syllables.”

  Victoria frowned suddenly. Edward’s words brought back to her mind the curious interview she had had with Dr. Rathbone. She told Edward about it. He seemed much more upset than she would have expected him to be.

  “This is serious, Victoria, really serious. Try and tell me exactly what he said.”

  Victoria tried her best to recall the exact words Rathbone had used.

  “But I don’t see,” she said, “why it upsets you so.”

  “Eh?” Edward seemed abstracted. “You don’t see—But my dear girl, don’t you realize that this shows that they’ve got wise to you. They’re warning you off. I don’t like it Victoria—I don’t like it at all.”

  He paused and then said gravely:

  “Communists, you know, are very ruthless. It’s part of their creed to stick at nothing. I don’t want you knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris, darling.”

  How odd, thought Victoria, to be sitting amidst the ruins of Babylon debating whether or not she was likely in the near future to be knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris. Half closing her eyes she thought dreamily, “I shall wake up soon and find I’m in London dreaming a wonderful melodramatic dream about dangerous Babylon. Perhaps,” she thought, closing her eyes altogether, “I am in London…and the alarm clock will go off very soon, and I shall get up and go to Mr. Greenholtz’s office—and there won’t be any Edward….”

  And at that last thought she opened her eyes again hastily to make sure that Edward was indeed really there (and what was it I was going to ask him at Basrah and they interrupted us and I forgot?) and it was not a dream. The sun was glaring down in a dazzling and most un-London-like way, and the ruins of Babylon were pale and shimmering with a background of dark palms and sitting up with his back a little towards her was Edward. How extraordinarily nicely his hair grew down with a little twirl into his neck—and what a nice neck—bronzed red brown from the sun—with no blemishes on it—so many men had necks with cysts or pimples where their collars had rubbed—a neck like Sir Rupert’s for instance, with a boil just starting.

  Suddenly with a stifled exclamation Victoria sat bolt upright and her daydreams were a thing of the past. She was wildly excited.

  Edward turned an inquiring head.

  “What’s the matter, Charing Cross?”

  “I’ve just remembered,” said Victoria, “about Sir Rupert Crofton Lee.”

  As Edward still turned a blank inquiring look upon her Victoria proceeded to elucidate her meaning which truth to tell, she did not do very clearly.

  “It was a boil,” she said, “on his neck.”

  “A boil on his neck?” Edward was puzzled.

  “Yes, in the aeroplane. He sat in front of me, you know, and that hood thing he wore fell back and I saw it—the boil.”

  “Why shouldn’t he have a boil? Painful, but lots of people get them.”

  “Yes, yes, of course they do. But the point is that that morning on the balcony he hadn’t.”

  “Hadn’t what?”

  “Hadn’t got a boil. Oh, Edward, do try and take it in. In the aeroplane he had a boil and on the balcony at the Tio he hadn’t got a boil. His neck was quite smooth and unscarred—like yours now.”

  “Well, I suppose it had gone away.”

  “Oh no, Edward, it couldn’t have. It was only a day later, and it was just coming up. It couldn’t have gone away—not completely without a trace. So you see what it means—yes, it must mean—the man at the Tio wasn’t Sir Rupert at all.”

  She nodded her head with vehemence. Edward stared at her.

  “You’re crazy, Victoria. It must have been Sir Rupert. You didn’t see any other difference in him.”

  “But don’t you see, Edward, I’d never really looked at him properly—only at his—well, you might call it general effect. The hat—and the cape—and the swashbuckling attitude. He’d be a very easy man to impersonate.”

  “But they’d have known at the Embassy—”

  “He didn’t stay at the Embassy, did he? He came to the Tio. It was one of the minor secretaries or people who met him. The Ambassador’s in England. Besides, he’s travelled and been away from En gland so much.”

  “But why—”

  “Because of Carmichael, of course. C
armichael was coming to Baghdad to meet him—to tell him what he’d found out. Only they’d never met before. So Carmichael wouldn’t know he wasn’t the right man—and he wouldn’t be on his guard. Of course—it was Rupert Crofton Lee (the false one) who stabbed Carmichael! Oh, Edward, it all fits in.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s crazy. Don’t forget Sir Rupert was killed afterwards in Cairo.”

  “That’s where it all happened. I know now. Oh Edward, how awful. I saw it happen.”

  “You saw it happen—Victoria, are you quite mad?”

  “No, I’m not in the least mad. Just listen, Edward. There was a knock on my door—in the hotel in Heliopolis—at least I thought it was on my door and I looked out, but it wasn’t—it was one door down, Sir Rupert Crofton Lee’s. It was one of the stewardesses or air hostesses or whatever they call them. She asked him if he would mind coming to BOAC office—just along the corridor. I came out of my room just afterwards. I passed a door which had a notice with BOAC on it, and the door opened and he came out. I thought then that he had had some news that made him walk quite differently. Do you see, Edward? It was a trap, the substitute was waiting, all ready, and as soon as he came in, they just conked him on the head and the other one came out and took up the part. I think they probably kept him somewhere in Cairo, perhaps in the hotel as an invalid, kept him drugged and then killed him just at the right moment when the wrong one had come back to Cairo.”

  “It’s a magnificent story,” said Edward. “But you know, Victoria, quite frankly you are making the whole thing up. There’s no corroboration of it.”

  “There’s the boil—”

  “Oh, damn the boil!”

  “And there are one or two other things.”

  “What?”

  “The BOAC notice on the door. It wasn’t there later. I remembered being puzzled when I found the BOAC office was on the other side of the entrance hall. That’s one thing. And there’s another. That air stewardess, the one who knocked at his door. I’ve seen her since—here in Baghdad—and what’s more, at the Olive Branch. The first day I went there. She came in and spoke to Catherine. I thought then I’d seen her before.”

  After a moment’s silence, Victoria said:

  “So you must admit, Edward, that it isn’t all my fancy.”

  Edward said slowly:

  “It all comes back to the Olive Branch—and to Catherine. Victoria, all ragging apart, you’ve got to get closer to Catherine. Flatter her, butter her up, talk Bolshie ideas to her. Somehow or other get sufficiently intimate with her to know who her friends are and where she goes and whom she’s in touch with outside the Olive Branch.”

  “It won’t be easy,” said Victoria, “but I’ll try. What about Mr. Dakin. Ought I to tell him about this?”

  “Yes, of course. But wait a day or two. We may have more to go on,” Edward sighed. “I shall take Catherine to Le Select to hear the cabaret one night.”

  And this time Victoria felt no pang of jealousy. Edward had spoken with a grim determination that ruled out any anticipation of pleasure in the commission he had undertaken.

  II

  Exhilarated by her discoveries, Victoria found it no effort to greet Catherine the following day with an effusion of friendliness. It was so kind of Catherine she said, to have told her of a place to have her hair washed. It needed washing terribly badly. (This was undeniable, Victoria had returned from Babylon with her dark hair the colour of red rust from the clogging sand.)

  “It is looking terrible, yes,” said Catherine, eyeing it with a certain malicious satisfaction. “You went out then in that dust storm yesterday afternoon?”

  “I hired a car and went to see Babylon,” said Victoria. “It was very interesting, but on the way back, the dust storm got up and I was nearly choked and blinded.”

  “It is interesting, Babylon,” said Catherine, “but you should go with someone who understands it and can tell you about it properly. As for your hair, I will take you to this Armenian girl tonight. She will give you a cream shampoo. It is the best.”

  “I don’t know how you keep your hair looking so wonderful,” said Victoria, looking with what appeared to be admiring eyes at Catherine’s heavy erections of greasy sausage-like curls.

  A smile appeared on Catherine’s usually sour face, and Victoria thought how right Edward had been about flattery.

  When they left the Olive Branch that evening, the two girls were on the friendliest of terms. Catherine wove in and out of narrow passages and alleys and finally tapped on an unpromising door which gave no sign of hairdressing operations being conducted on the other side of it. They were, however, received by a plain but competent looking young woman who spoke careful slow English and who led Victoria to a spotlessly clean basin with shining taps and various bottles and lotions ranged round it. Catherine departed and Victoria surrendered her mop of hair into Miss Ankoumian’s deft hands. Soon her hair was a mass of creamy lather.

  “And now if you please….”

  Victoria bent forward over the basin. Water streamed over her hair and gurgled down the waste pipe.

  Suddenly her nose was assailed by a sweet rather sickly smell that she associated vaguely with hospitals. A wet saturated pad was clasped firmly over her nose and mouth. She struggled wildly, twisting and turning, but an iron grip kept the pad in place. She began to suffocate, her head reeled dizzily, a roaring sound came in her ears….

  And after that blackness, deep and profound.

  Eighteen

  When Victoria regained consciousness, it was with a sense of an immense passage of time. Confused memories stirred in her—jolting in a car—high jabbering and quarrelling in Arabic—lights that flashed into her eyes—a horrible attack of nausea—then vaguely she remembered lying on a bed and someone lifting her arm—the sharp agonizing prick of a needle—then more confused dreams and darkness and behind it a mounting sense of urgency….

  Now at last, dimly, she was herself—Victoria Jones…And something had happened to Victoria Jones—a long time ago—months—perhaps years…after all, perhaps only days.

  Babylon—sunshine—dust—hair—Catherine. Catherine, of course, smiling, her eyes sly under the sausage curls—Catherine had taken her to have her hair shampooed and then—what had happened? That horrible smell—she could still smell it—nauseating—chloroform, of course. They had chloroformed her and taken her—where?

  Cautiously Victoria tried to sit up. She seemed to be lying on a bed—a very hard bed—her head ached and felt dizzy—she was still drowsy, horribly drowsy…that prick, the prick of a hypodermic, they had been drugging her…she was still half-drugged.

  Well, anyway they hadn’t killed her. (Why not?) So that was all right. The best thing, thought the still half-drugged Victoria, is to go to sleep. And promptly did so.

  When next she awakened she felt much more clearheaded. It was daylight now and she could see more clearly where she was.

  She was in a small but very high room, distempered a depressing pale bluish grey. The floor was of beaten earth. The only furniture in the room seemed to be the bed on which she was lying with a dirty rug thrown over her and a rickety table with a cracked enamel basin on it and a zinc bucket underneath it. There was a window with a kind of wooden latticework outside it. Victoria got gingerly off the bed, feeling distinctly headachy and queer, and approached the window. She could see through the latticework quite plainly and what she saw was a garden with palm trees beyond it. The garden was quite a pleasant one by Eastern standards though it would have been looked down on by an English suburban householder. It had a lot of bright orange marigolds in it, and some dusty eucalyptus trees and some rather wispy tamarisks.

  A small child with a face tattooed in blue, and a lot of bangles on, was tumbling about with a ball and singing in a high nasal whine rather like distant bagpipes.

  Victoria next turned her attention to the door, which was large and massive. Without much hope she went to it and tried it. The door
was locked. Victoria went back and sat on the side of the bed.

  Where was she? Not in Baghdad, that was certain. And what was she going to do next?

  It struck her after a minute or two that the last question did not really apply. What was more to the point was what was someone else going to do to her? With an uneasy feeling in the pit of the stomach she remembered Mr. Dakin’s admonition to tell all she knew. But perhaps they had already got all that out of her whilst she was under the drug.

  Still—Victoria returned to this one point with determined cheerfulness—she was alive. If she could manage to keep alive until Edward found her—what would Edward do when he found she had vanished? Would he go to Mr. Dakin? Would he play a lone hand? Would he put the fear of the Lord into Catherine and force her to tell? Would he suspect Catherine at all? The more Victoria tried to conjure up a reassuring picture of Edward in action, the more the image of Edward faded and became a kind of faceless abstraction. How clever was Edward? That was really what it amounted to. Edward was adorable. Edward had glamour. But had Edward got brains? Because clearly, in her present predicament, brains were going to be needed.

  Mr. Dakin, now, would have the necessary brains. But would he have the impetus? Or would he merely cross off her name from a mental ledger, scoring it through, and writing after it a neat RIP. After all, to Mr. Dakin she was merely one of a crowd. They took their chance, and if luck failed, it was just too bad. No, she didn’t see Mr. Dakin staging a rescue. After all, he had warned her.

  And Dr. Rathbone had warned her. (Warned her or threatened her?) And on her refusing to be threatened there had not been much delay in carrying out the threat….

  But I’m still alive, repeated Victoria, determined to look upon the bright side of things.

  Footsteps approached outside and there was the grinding of an outsize key in a rusty luck. The door staggered on its hinges and flew open. In the aperture appeared an Arab. He carried an old tin tray on which were dishes.

  He appeared to be in good spirits, grinned broadly, uttered some incomprehensible remarks in Arabic, finally deposited the tray, opened his mouth and pointed down his throat and departed relocking the door behind him.