The Key to Rebecca (4 page)

Then they went out.

 

Major Vandam’s office was at Gray Pillars, one of a group of buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fencing which made up GHQ Middle East. There was an incident report on his desk when he arrived. He sat down, lit a cigarette and began to read.

The report came from Assyut, three hundred miles south, and at first Vandam could not see why it had been marked for Intelligence. A patrol had picked up a hitchhiking European who had subsequently murdered a corporal with a knife. The body had been discovered last night, almost as soon as the corporal’s absence was noted, but several hours after the death. A man answering the hitchhiker’s description had bought a ticket to Cairo at the railway station, but by the time the body was found the train had arrived in Cairo and the killer had melted into the city.

There was no indication of motive.

The Egyptian police force and the British Military Police would be investigating already in Assyut, and their colleagues in Cairo would, like Vandam, be learning the details this morning. What reason was there for Intelligence to get involved?

Vandam frowned and thought again. A European is picked up in the desert. He says his car has broken down. He checks into a hotel. He leaves a few minutes later and catches a train. His car is not found. The body of a soldier is discovered that night in the hotel room.

Why?

Vandam got on the phone and called Assyut. It took the army camp switchboard a while to locate Captain Newman, but eventually they found him in the arsenal and got him to a phone.

Vandam said: “This knife murder almost looks like a blown cover.”

“That occurred to me, sir,” said Newman. He sounded a young man. “That’s why I marked the report for Intelligence.”

“Good thinking. Tell me, what was your impression of the man?”

“He was a big chap—”

“I’ve got your description here—six foot, twelve stone, dark hair and eyes—but that doesn’t tell me what he was like.”

“I understand,” Newman said. “Well, to be candid, at first I wasn’t in the least suspicious of him. He looked all in, which fitted with his story of having broken down on the desert road, but apart from that he seemed an upright citizen: a white man, decently dressed, quite well spoken with an accent he said was Dutch, or rather Afrikaans. His papers were perfect—I’m still quite sure they were genuine.”

“But ... ?”

“He told me he was checking on his business interests in Upper Egypt.”

“Plausible enough.”

“Yes, but he didn’t strike me as the kind of man to spend his life investing in a few shops and small factories and cotton farms. He was much more the assured cosmopolitan type: if he had money to invest it would probably be with a London stockbroker or a Swiss bank. He just wasn’t a small-timer ... It’s very vague, sir, but do you see what I mean?”

“Indeed.” Newman sounded a bright chap, Vandam thought. What was he doing stuck out in Assyut?

Newman went on: “And then it occurred to me that he had, as it were, just appeared in the desert, and I didn’t really know where he might have come from ... so I told poor old Cox to stay with him, on the pretense of helping him, to make sure he didn’t do a bunk before we had a chance to check his story. I should have arrested the man, of course, but quite honestly, sir, at the time I had only the most slender suspicion—”

“I don’t think anyone’s blaming you, Captain,” said Vandam. “You did well to remember the name and address from the papers. Alex Wolff, Villa Les Oliviers, Garden City, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, keep me in touch with any developments at your end, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Vandam hung up. Newman’s suspicions chimed with his own instincts about the killing. He decided to speak to his immediate superior. He left his office, carrying the incident report.

General Staff Intelligence was run by a brigadier with the title of Director of Military Intelligence. The DMI had two deputies: DDMI(O)—for Operational—and DDMI(I)-for Intelligence. The deputies were colonels. Vandam’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Bogge, came under the DDMI(I). Bogge was responsible for personnel security, and most of his time was spent administering the censorship apparatus. Vandam’s concern was security leaks by means other than letters. He and his men had several hundred agents in Cairo and Alexandria; in most clubs and bars there was a waiter who was on his payroll, he had an informant among the domestic staffs of the more important Arab politicians, King Farouk’s valet worked for Vandam, and so did Cairo’s wealthiest thief. He was interested in who was talking too much, and who was listening; and among the listeners, Arab nationalists were his main target. However, it seemed possible that the mystery man from Assyut might be a different kind of threat.

Vandam’s wartime career had so far been distinguished by one spectacular success and one great failure. The failure took place in Turkey. Rashid Ali had escaped there from Iraq. The Germans wanted to get him out and use him for propaganda; the British wanted him kept out of the limelight; and the Turks, jealous of their neutrality, wanted to offend nobody. Vandam’s job had been to make sure Ali stayed in Istanbul, but Ali had switched clothes with a German agent and slipped out of the country under Vandam’s nose. A few days later he was making propaganda speeches to the Middle East on Nazi radio. Vandam had somewhat redeemed himself in Cairo. London had told him they had reason to believe there was a major security leak there, and after three months of painstaking investigation Vandam had discovered that a senior American diplomat was reporting to Washington in an insecure code. The code had been changed, the leak had been stopped up and Vandam had been promoted to major.

Had he been a civilian, or even a peacetime soldier, he would have been proud of his triumph and reconciled to his defeat, and he would have said: “You win some, you lose some.” But in war an officer’s mistakes killed people. In the aftermath of the Rashid Ali affair an agent had been murdered, a woman, and Vandam was not able to forgive himself for that.

He knocked on Lieutenant Colonel Bogge’s door and walked in. Reggie Bogge was a short, square man in his fifties, with an immaculate uniform and brilliantined black hair. He had a nervous, throat-clearing cough which he used when he did not know quite what to say, which was often. He sat behind a huge curved desk—bigger than the DMI’s—going through his in tray. Always willing to talk rather than work, he motioned Vandam to a chair. He picked up a bright-red cricket ball and began to toss it from hand to hand. “You played a good game yesterday,” he said.

“You didn’t do badly yourself,” Vandam said. It was true: Bogge had been the only decent bowler on the Intelligence team, and his slow googlies had taken four wickets for forty-two runs. “But are we winning the war?”

“More bloody bad news, I’m afraid.” The morning briefing had not yet taken place, but Bogge always heard the news by word of mouth beforehand. “We expected Rommel to attack the Gazala Line head on. Should have known better—fellow never fights fair and square. He went around our southern flank, took the Seventh Armored’s headquarters, and captured General Messervy.”

It was a depressingly familiar story, and Vandam suddenly felt weary. “What a shambles,” he said.

“Fortunately he failed to get through to the coast, so the divisions on the Gazala Line didn’t get isolated. Still ...”

“Still, when are we going to stop him?”

“He won’t get much farther.” It was an idiotic remark: Bogge simply did not want to get involved in criticism of generals. “What have you got there?”

Vandam gave him the incident report. “I propose to follow this one through myself.”

Bogge read the paper and looked up, his face blank. “I don’t see the point.”

“It looks like a blown cover.”

“Uh?”

“There’s no motive for the murder, so we have to speculate,” Vandam explained. “Here’s one possibility: the hitchhiker was not what he said he was, and the corporal discovered that fact, and so the hitchhiker killed the corporal.”

“Not what he said he was—you mean he was a spy?” Bogge laughed. “How d’you suppose he got to Assyut—by parachute? Or did he walk?”

That was the trouble with explaining things to Bogge, thought Vandam: he had to ridicule the idea, as an excuse for not thinking of it himself. “It’s not impossible for a small plane to sneak through. It’s not impossible to cross the desert, either.”

Bogge sailed the report through the air across the vast expanse of his desk. “Not very likely, in my view,” he said. “Don’t waste any time on that one.”

“Very good, sir.” Vandam picked up the report from the floor, suppressing the familiar frustrated anger. Conversations with Bogge always turned into points-scoring contests, and the smart thing to do was not to play. “I’ll ask the police to keep us informed of their progress—copies of memos, and so on, just for the file.”

“Yes.” Bogge never objected to making people send him copies for the file: it enabled him to poke his finger into things without taking any responsibility. “Listen, how about arranging some cricket practice? I noticed they had nets and a catching boat there yesterday. I’d like to lick our team into shape and get some more matches going.”

“Good idea.”

“See if you can organize something, will you?”

“Yes, sir.” Vandam went out.

On the way back to his own office, he wondered what was so wrong with the administration of the British Army that it could promote to lieutenant colonel a man as empty-headed as Reggie Bogge. Vandam’s father, who had been a corporal in the first war, had been fond of saying that British soldiers were “lions led by donkeys.” Sometimes Vandam thought it was still true. But Bogge was not merely dull. Sometimes he made bad decisions because he was not clever enough to make good decisions; but mostly, it seemed to Vandam, Bogge made bad decisions because he was playing some other game, making himself look good or trying to be superior or something, Vandam did not know what.

A woman in a white hospital coat saluted him and he returned the salute absentmindedly. The woman said: “Major Vandam, isn’t it?”

He stopped and looked at her. She had been a spectator at the cricket match, and now he remembered her name. “Dr. Abuthnot,” he said. “Good morning.” She was a tall, cool woman of about his age. He recalled that she was a surgeon—highly unusual for a woman, even in wartime—and that she held the rank of captain.

She said: “You worked hard yesterday.”

Vandam smiled. “And I’m suffering for it today. I enjoyed myself, though.”

“So did I.” She had a low, precise voice and a great deal of confidence. “Shall we see you on Friday?”

“Where?”

“The reception at the Union.”

“Ah.” The Anglo-Egyptian Union, a club for bored Europeans, made occasional attempts to justify its name by holding a reception for Egyptian guests. “I’d like that. What time?”

“Five o’clock, for tea.”

Vandam was professionally interested: it was an occasion at which Egyptians might pick up service gossip, and service gossip sometimes included information useful to the enemy. “I’ll come,” he said.

“Splendid. I’ll see you there.” She turned away.

“I look forward to it,” Vandam said to her back. He watched her walk away, wondering what she wore under the hospital coat. She was trim, elegant and self-possessed: she reminded him of his wife.

He entered his office. He had no intention of organizing a cricket practice, and he had no intention of forgetting about the Assyut murder. Bogge could go to hell. Vandam would go to work.

First he spoke again to Captain Newman, and told him to make sure the description of Alex Wolff got the widest possible circulation.

He called the Egyptian police and confirmed that they would be checking the hotels and flophouses of Cairo today.

He contacted Field Security, a unit of the prewar Canal Defense Force, and asked them to step up their spot checks on identity papers for a few days.

He told the British paymaster general to keep a special watch for forged currency.

He advised the wireless listening service to be alert for a new, local transmitter; and thought briefly how useful it would be if the boffins ever cracked the problem of locating a radio by monitoring its broadcasts.

Finally he detailed a sergeant on his staff to visit every radio shop in Lower Egypt—there were not many—and ask them to report any sales of parts and equipment which might be used to make or repair a transmitter.

Then he went to the Villa les Oliviers.

 

The house got its name from a small public garden across the street where a grove of olive trees was now in bloom, shedding white petals like dust onto the dry brown grass.

The house had a high wall broken by a heavy, carved wooden gate. Using the ornamentation for footholds, Vandam climbed over the gate and dropped on the other side to find himself in a large courtyard. Around him the white-washed walls were smeared and grubby, their windows blinded by closed, peeling shutters. He walked to the center of the courtyard and looked at the stone fountain. A bright-green lizard darted across the dry bowl.

The place had not been lived in for at least a year.

Vandam opened a shutter, broke a pane of glass, reached through to unfasten the window, and climbed over the sill into the house.

It did not look like the home of a European, he thought as he walked through the dark cool rooms. There were no hunting prints on the walls, no neat rows of bright-jacketed novels by Agatha Christie and Dennis Wheatley, no three-piece suite imported from Maples or Harrods. Instead the place was furnished with large cushions and low tables, handwoven rugs and hanging tapestries.

Upstairs he found a locked door. It took him three or four minutes to kick it open. Behind it there was a study.

The room was clean and tidy, with a few pieces of rather luxurious furniture: a wide, low divan covered in velvet, a hand-carved coffee table, three matching antique lamps, a bearskin rug, a beautifully inlaid desk and a leather chair.