A well-heaped fire blazed in the grate, being poked constantly by a man in vice-admiral’s uniform sitting on a corner of the leather-and-brass club fender. Three other men in civilian clothes sat in a collection of chairs, the one in the best leather arm-chair being Sir Aylmer Corbin of the Foreign Office.
Ranklin couldn’t remember ever having been introduced to Corbin; from a certain moment Corbin knew him, but the moment itself had passed unnoticed, at least by Ranklin. It was the way things worked in Whitehalclass="underline" once you realised a man was important or useful, you knew him and be damned to introductions.
Now Corbin bobbed up to shake Ranklin’s hand. He was a smallish man with pale eyes and a thin, stretched face like a featherless baby bird’s. His movements had a birdlike briskness, too. “Ah, Captain Ranklin from the Bureau. You may not know Vice-Admiral Berrigan, our host here? And Hapgood from the India Office? And you’ve met Fazackerley.”
Ranklin smiled and nodded to them and sat in the empty chair. The Admiral stayed seated on the club fender, poker in hand, and with one leg – perhaps a false one – stuck out stiffly. His expression was one of curiosity, an expression that said: “I thought you’d be grubbier.” Ranklin was getting used to it around Whitehall. Hapgood, the rupee expert from not-quite-the-right-family, just sat smiling, a large fair young man looking like the hero of a school story. You were sure that whatever he had done to get his nose broken at some past time must have been an honourable something. Or perhaps Ranklin felt an instinctive sympathy for him as the other social outsider here.
No matter whose office it was, Corbin was clearly in charge. He launched straight in: “Captain, as your Bureau’s Turkish expert, you’re doubtless up to date on the progress of the Baghdad Railway and its recent problem?”
“I’ve no inside knowledge on this at all.” Ranklin decided to be frank. “So this is just culled from the newspapers. The biggest problem seems to be breaking through the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey, having to build long tunnels and bridges and so on. On top of that, work seems to have stopped because a local bandit has kidnapped a couple of German railway engineers and beaten off a rescue attempt by a Turkish Army detachment that was supposed to be guarding them.”
“Reasonably accurate. However, the ‘bandit’ which the newspapers variously describe as a sheikh or pasha is actually a local chieftain figure who ranks as a bey and is named Miskal. A gentleman of advanced years and at least part-Arab extraction. Now, do you know who I mean by the Dowager Viscountess Kelso?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.”
“Or Harriet Mayhew, as she started life?”
“That rings a bell. Wasn’t she the woman who-?”
“Whatever it was, the answer’s almost certainly Yes. I think she was one of those women who read too much Byron too early . . . sometimes I think there was hardly a carpet in the Middle East without some runaway Englishwoman sprawled invitingly across it, and mostly the fault of that damned poet . . . Anyway, she seems to have made a fairly disastrous early marriage to a diplomatist posted out there, kicked over the traces and ran off with some desert sheikh. Didn’t stick with him, of course; seems to have done the round of sheikhs’ tents more regularly than the milkman.”
Admiral Berrigan chuckled gently. All senior sailors develop some foible, and with a perfectly-cut uniform that had never been near the sea, a non-regulation cravat and pearl pin, he had clearly chosen dandyism. It made a change from drink or religion.
Corbin smiled briefly and went on: “Then – her charms fading, I dare say, and thinking about providing for her old age – she married the fourth Viscount Kelso. He was a widower by then, good deal older than her, and they settled down in Italy – she couldn’t come back to Britain by then, of course. Even the Marlborough House set wouldn’t have touched her . . . He didn’t last long. One likes to think,” he went suddenly pious, “that he died happy. Satiated, anyway.
“Of course, there was a frightful row with the family over his will. In the end, I think, she had to threaten to publish her memoirs . . . Anyway, they let her keep the villa on Lake Maggiore and a reasonable remittance – provided she stayed abroad. And that would be the end of the story, except that in her desert-carpet days she had a fling with Miskal Bey when he was a young officer in an Arab regiment. And our Foreign Secretary, in his wisdom and his quite sincere desire to get the Baghdad Railway off the agenda of Anglo-German disputes, has asked her to use whatever influence she still has with Miskal to get the Railway engineers freed. Nobody knows whether she still has such influence: the point is to show willing on our side. And the Germans have accepted gratefully.”
“The Turks also?”
“Since the prisoners are German nationals, the Turks seem to be giving the Railway pretty much free rein.”
“Tell me, who do you regard as actually running Turkey nowadays?”
Corbin cocked his head and looked at him with a birdy, beady eye. “Isn’t that the sort of the question we should be asking you?”
Ranklin smiled blandly. “Certainly – once our Bureau is as large and well-funded as the Diplomatic Service.”
Corbin considered this. “Perhaps we’ll neither of us live to see that. . . ah, happy day . . . Then, to answer your question: officially, the Committee of the Young Turks – number and composition a secret, but according to our Embassy in Constantinople, dominated by Jews and Freemasons.” He paused, then smiled wryly. “Which seems, one has to admit, rather unlikely for a Muslim country. Perhaps we should remember, charitably, that our Ambassador there is rather new . . . However, of this Committee, a handful seem to be taking over, as one would expect: Talaat, Enver, Djavid, the ones who get their names in the papers. And I dare say it’ll eventually boil down to one strong man, it usually does. Or another revolution, of course . . . May we get back to Lady Kelso?”
Ranklin nodded. “How old is she by now?”
Corbin blinked at this lapse in taste, but perhaps decided that Lady Kelso’s reputation wouldn’t suffer too much damage. “In the region of sixty, I believe . . . And in undertaking this mission, she becomes effectively a nominee of the Foreign Office, so it is quite logical that we should provide a Diplomatic Service escort . . . Perhaps you follow my drift?”
“Ah . . . yes, I think so.”
“Excellent.” He took out his watch and glanced at it. “I must apologise, I’m keeping some tedious but self-important visitor waiting. But I think we’ve covered the broad picture. My colleagues will fill in the details for you.” They shook hands and he scuttled away.
Bewildered, Ranklin looked around the remaining three. But nobody else seemed surprised at Corbin’s disappearance. Fazackerley, still looking young but anxious beyond his years as he had at the Savoy, re-arranged a sheaf of papers, peeked over his spectacles, and took up the thread. “Returning to the Railway itself for the moment. . . The mountains there aren’t especially high, no more than ten thousand feet, but they are, it seems, very steep and jagged. And the winter weather must have made things very difficult. So while everyone seems to know just where Miskal Bey and his captives are – apparently in an old hilltop monastery – it would still take an army to dislodge him. Particularly since someone seems to have sold him repeating rifles.”
“Pity they didn’t make it Maxim guns,” Admiral Berrigan muttered.
A little frown, as if he’d seen someone pass the port the wrong way, crossed Fazackerley’s face. “So if we might return to policy matters . . .”
“Difficult,” Hapgood suggested.
Fazackerley nodded briefly. “Traditionally, Britain has never really liked the Baghdad Railway. The possible threat to India-”
“Dammit,” Berrigan whacked the poker into the fire, “it’s far more of a threat to our oil in Persia, and . . . anywhere else.”