‘I think this is a bit much, Captain Mallory!’ The voice was high pitched in anger, more nasal than ever. I’m not the duty errand-boy, you know. I’ve had a damned hard day and –’
‘Save it for your biography,’ Mallory said curtly, ‘and take a gander at this character in the corner.’
Briggs’s face turned an even deeper hue. He stepped into the room, fists balled in anger, then stopped in his tracks as his eye lit on the crumpled, dishevelled figure still crouched in the corner of the room.
‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘Nicolai!’
‘You know him.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Of course I know him!’ Briggs snorted. ‘Everybody knows him. Nicolai. Our laundry-boy.’
‘Your laundry-boy! Do his duties entail snooping around the corridors at night, listening at keyholes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say.’ Mallory was very patient. ‘We caught him listening outside the door.’
‘Nicolai? I don’t believe it!’
‘Watch it, mister,’ Miller growled. ‘Careful who you call a liar. We all saw him.’
Briggs stared in fascination at the black muzzle of the automatic waving negligently in his direction, gulped, looked hastily away.
‘Well, what if you did?’ He forced a smile. ‘Nicolai can’t speak a word of English.’
‘Maybe not,’ Mallory agreed dryly. ‘But he understands it well enough.’ He raised his hand. ‘I’ve no desire to argue all night and I certainly haven’t the time. Will you please have this man placed under arrest, kept in solitary confinement and incommunicado for the next week at least. It’s vital. Whether he’s a spy or just too damned nosy, he knows far too much. After that, do what you like. My advice is to kick him out of Castelrosso.’
‘Your advice, indeed!’ Briggs’s colour returned, and with it his courage. ‘Who the hell are you to give me advice or to give me orders, Captain Mallory?’ There was a heavy emphasis on the word ‘captain’.
‘Then I’m asking it as a favour,’ Mallory pleaded wearily. ‘I can’t explain, but it’s terribly important. There are hundreds of lives –’
‘Hundreds of lives!’ Briggs sneered. ‘Melodramatic stuff and nonsense!’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I suggest you keep that for your cloak-and-dagger biography, Captain Mallory.’
Mallory rose, walked round the table, stopped a foot away from Briggs. The brown eyes were still and very cold.
‘I could go and see your colonel, I suppose. But I’m tired of arguing. You’ll do exactly as I say or I’ll go straight to Naval HQ and get on the radio-telephone to Cairo. And if I do,’ Mallory went on, ‘I swear to you that you’ll be on the next ship home to England – and on the troop-deck, at that.’
His last words seemed to echo in the little room for an interminable time: the stillness was intense. And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the tension was gone and Briggs’s face, a now curiously mottled white and red, was slack and sullen in defeat.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘No need for all these damned stupid threats – not if it means all that much to you.’ The attempt to bluster, to patch up the shredded rags of his dignity, was pathetic in its transparency. ‘Matthews – call out the guard.’
The torpedo-boat, great aero engines throttled back half speed, pitched and lifted, pitched and lifted with monotonous regularity as it thrust its way into the long, gentle swell from the WNW. For the hundredth time that night Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Running behind time, sir?’ Stevens suggested.
Mallory nodded.
‘We should have stepped straight into this thing from the Sunderland – there was a hold-up.’
Brown grunted. ‘Engine trouble, for a fiver.’ The Clydeside accent was very heavy.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Mallory looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Always the same with these blasted MTB engines,’ Brown growled. ‘Temperamental as a film star.’
There was silence for a time in the tiny blacked-out cabin, a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a glass. The Navy was living up to its traditional hospitality.
‘If we’re late,’ Miller observed at last, ‘why doesn’t the skipper open her up? They tell me these crates can do forty to fifty knots.’
‘You look green enough already,’ Stevens said tactlessly. ‘Obviously, you’ve never been in an MTB full out in a heavy sea.’
Miller fell silent a moment. Clearly, he was trying to take his mind off his internal troubles. ‘Captain?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ Mallory answered sleepily. He was stretched full length on a narrow settee, an almost empty glass in his fingers.
‘None of my business, I know, boss, but – would you have carried out that threat you made to Captain Briggs?’
Mallory laughed.
‘It is none of your business, but – well, no, Corporal, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I haven’t all that much authority invested in me – and I didn’t even know whether there was a radio-telephone in Castelrosso.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I kinda suspected that.’ Corporal Miller rubbed a stubbled chin. ‘If he’d called your bluff, what would you have done, boss?’
‘I’d have shot Nicolai,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘If the colonel had failed me. I’d have had no choice left.’
‘I knew that too. I really believe you would. For the first time I’m beginning to believe we’ve got a chance … But I kinda wish you had shot him – and little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t like the expression on old Briggs’s face when you went out that door. Mean wasn’t the word. He coulda killed you then. You trampled right over his pride, boss – and to a phony like that nothin’ else in the world matters.’
Mallory made no reply. He was already sound asleep, his empty glass fallen from his hand. Not even the banshee clamour of the great engines opening full out as they entered the sheltered calm of the Rhodes channel could plumb his bottomless abyss of sleep.
‘My dear fellow, you make me feel dreadfully embarrassed.’ Moodily the officer switched his ivory-handled flyswat against an immaculately trousered leg, pointed a contemptuous but gleaming toe-cap at the ancient caique, broad-beamed and two-masted, moored stern on to the even older and more dilapidated wooden pier on which they were standing. ‘I am positively ashamed. The clients of Rutledge and Company, I assure you, are accustomed only to the best.’
Mallory smothered a smile. Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable. Such was the major’s casual assurance, so dominating his majestic unconcern, that it was the creek, if anything, that seemed slightly out of place.
‘It