They moved into a dark doorway and watched.
“He’s walking up as cool as you like!” Fox whispered.
“So he is.”
“Going to hand something in, is he?”
“He’s showing something to the coppers. Gibson cooked up a pass system with the Embassy. Issued to their staff and immediate associates with the President’s cachet. Quite an elaborate job. It may be, he’s showing it.”
“Why would he qualify?”
“Well may you ask. Look at this, will you?”
Sanskrit had produced something that appeared to be an envelope. One of the policemen turned on his torch. It flashed from Sanskrit’s face to his hands. The policeman bent his head and the light shone briefly up into his face. A pause. The officer nodded to his mate, who rang the doorbell. It was opened by a Ng’ombwanan in livery; presumably a night porter. Sanskrit appeared to speak briefly to the man, who listened, took the envelope if that was what it was, stepped back and shut the door after him.
“That was quick!” Fox remarked.
“Now he’s chatting to the coppers.”
They caught a faint high-pitched voice and the two policemen’s “Goodnight, sir.”
“Boldly does it, Br’er Fox,” said Alleyn. They set off down the alleyway.
There was a narrow footpath on their side. As the enormous tented figure, grotesque in the uncertain darkness, flounced towards them it moved into the centre of the passage.
Alleyn said to Fox, as they passed it: “As such affairs go I suppose it was all right. I hope you weren’t too bored.”
“Oh, no,” said Fox. “I’m thinking of joining.”
“Are you? Good.”
They walked on until they came to the Embassy. Sanskrit’s light footfalls died away in the distance. He had, presumably, gone back through the hole in the wall.
Alleyn and Fox went up to the two constables.
Alleyn said: “Superintendent Alleyn, C. Department.”
“Sir,” they said.
“I want as accurate and full an account of that incident as you can give me. Did you get the man’s name? You?” he said to the constable who had seemed to be the more involved.
“No, sir. He carried the special pass, sir.”
“You took a good look at it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you didn’t read the name?”
“I–I don’t — I didn’t quite get it, sir. It began with S and there was a K in it. ‘San’ something, sir. It was all in order, sir, with his photograph on it, like a passport. You couldn’t miss it being him. He didn’t want to be admitted, sir. Only for the door to be answered. If he’d asked for admittance I’d have noted the name.”
“You should have noted it in any case.”
“Sir.”
“What precisely did he say?”
“He said he had a message to deliver, sir. It was for the First Secretary. He produced it and I examined it, sir. It was addressed to the First Secretary and had ‘For His Excellency the President’s attention’ written in the corner. It was a fairly stout manilla envelope, sir, but the contents appeared to me to be slight, sir.”
“Well?”
“I said it was an unusual sort of time to deliver it. I said he could hand it over to me and I’d attend to it, sir, but he said he’d promised to deliver it personally. It was a photograph, he said, that the President had wanted developed and printed very particular and urgent and a special effort had been made to get it done and it was only processed half an hour ago. He said he’d been instructed to hand it to the night porter for the First Secretary.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Well, I took it and put it over my torch, sir, and that showed up the shape of some rigid object like a cardboard folder inside it. There wasn’t any chance of it being one of those funny ones, sir, and he had got a special pass and so we allowed it and — well, sir, that’s all, really.”
“And you,” Alleyn said to the other man, “rang the bell?”
“Sir.”
“Anything said when the night porter answered it?”
“I don’t think he speaks English, sir. Him and the bearer had a word or two in the native language, I suppose it was. And then he just took delivery and shut the door and the bearer gave us a goodnight and left.”
Mr. Fox, throughout this interview, had gazed immovably, and to their obvious discomfort, at whichever of the constables was speaking. When they had finished he said in a sepulchral voice to nobody in particular that he wouldn’t be surprised if this matter wasn’t Taken Further, upon which their demeanour became utterly wooden.
Alleyn said: “You should have reported this at once. You’re bloody lucky Mr. Gibson doesn’t know about it”
They said in unison: “Thank you very much, sir.”
“For what?” Alleyn said.
“Will you pass it on to Fred Gibson?” Fox asked as they walked back the way they had come.
“The incident? Yes. But I won’t bear down on the handling of it. I ought to. Although it was tricky, that situation. He’s got the Embassy go-ahead with his special pass. The copper had been told that anybody carrying one was persona grata. He’d have been taking quite a chance if he’d refused.” Alleyn put his hand on Fox’s arm. “Look at that,” he said. “Where did that come from?”
At the far end of the long alleyway, in deep shadow, someone moved away from them. Even as they glimpsed it, the figure slipped round the corner and out of sight. They could hear the soft thud of hurrying feet. They sprinted down the alley and turned the corner, but there was no-one to be seen.
“Could have come out of one of these houses and be chasing after a cab,” Fox said.
“They’re all dark.”
“Yes.”
“And no sound of a cab. Did you get an impression?”
“No. Hat. Overcoat. Rubber soles. Trousers. I wouldn’t even swear to the sex. It was too quick.”
“Damn,” Alleyn said, and they walked on in silence.
“It would be nice to know what was in the envelope,” Fox said at last.
“That’s the understatement of a lifetime.”
“Will you ask?”
“You bet I will.”
“The President?”
“Who else? And at the crack of dawn, I daresay, like it or lump it. Fox,” Alleyn said, “I’ve been visited by a very disturbing notion.”
“Is that so, Mr. Alleyn?” Fox placidly rejoined.
“And I’ll be obliged if you’ll just listen while I run through all the disjointed bits of information we have about this horrid fat man and see if some kind of pattern comes through in the end.”
“Be pleased to,” said Fox.
He listened with calm approval as they walked back into the now deserted Capricorns to pick up their car. When they were seated in it Alleyn said: “There you are, Br’er Fox. Now then. By and large: what emerges?”
Fox laid his broad palm across his short moustache and then looked at it as if he expected it to have picked up an impression.
“I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “I think.”
“What I’m getting at,” Alleyn said, “is— fairly simply — this—”
Alleyn’s threat to talk to the Boomer at the crack of dawn was not intended to be, nor was it, taken literally. In the event, he himself was roused by Mr. Gibson, wanting to know if it really was true that the President was giving Troy another sitting at half-past nine. When Alleyn confirmed this, Gibson’s windy sighs whistled in the receiver. He said he supposed Alleyn had seen the morning’s popular press, and on Alleyn’s saying not yet, informed him that in each instance the front page carried a by-lined three-column spread with photographs of yesterday’s visit by the Boomer. Gibson in a dreary voice began to quote some of the more offensive pieces of journalese. “Rum Proceedings? Handsome Super’s Famous Wife and African Dictator.” Alleyn, grinding his teeth, begged him to desist and he did so, merely observing that all things considered he wondered why Alleyn fancied the portrait proposition.