The fleet split up for the difficult North Passage past St
Anne's into the main harbour. The lush green hills of Mahe were so close that I could pick out the DNI's cottage. Come and have a drink with me tonight,' said the DNI, with the peculiar type of authority the experienced clubman conveys with an invitation not to be refused. A drink and some dinner. I have some excellent turtle steaks from Agalega-the real thing, not the sort of mush they pass off as turtle in Mahe. Varra-varra to start with-I've never seen a fish look more like copper. Mam'zelle Adele will be delighted.'
3 MAM ' ZELLE ADELE
Mam'zelle Adele's smile was welcoming, but her eyes were shadowed. It seemed almost as if a light had been deliberately dimmed above the high cheek-bones and it gave to the sensitive, volatile face and expressive lips a strangeness which, in the unusual tropical half-light before the dark, set my pulses racing. She answered my knock at the DNI'S cottage door and stood holding it open for me to enter. With her was a Limuria creature as strange and elegant as she was-a small pale-grey ring-tailed lemur. I was later to know him as
Nossi Be. He rubbed himself gently against her unstockinged legs, watchful, friendly, but with reservations, like Mam'zelle Adele herself. She could not have been thirty and the pinkish cotton dress-a flushed coral colour favoured by the islanders-did nothing to hide her exquisite figure.
She wore coconut fibre sandals. Her face was tanned, her light hair sun-bleached. That perfect vignette of her standing at the door in the half-dusk is with me yet. You're staring.' She smiled. As she said it, I knew that it was important for me to remember every detail about her. Her voice had a strange, dammed-up quality, like a current race through a reef passage. When I did not reply, there was a touch of light somewhere in the back of those shadowed eyes, like sun striking on the flash of a frigate bird's wing. You'll be John Garland, Commander Peace's friend.'
Somehow the voice had drawn a subtle distinction between myself and Peace by using his title. I was glad of it.
Yes,' I said, at a loss under her scrutiny. Yes, that's right.'
A silence fell between us and she said, I'm Mam'zelle
Adele.',
Not Adele someone or other but-just Mam'zelle Adele?'
She laughed a quiet, easy laugh which met my query halfway.
' In the Grands Carreaux-those are the big fishing-grounds north of St Brandon-there's a poison-fish which they call
Mam'zelle Adele. So it's difficult for anyone in these parts to say simply, Adele-they must add Mam'zelle.' She looked hard at me. A title gives status, you know.'
Was she perhaps trying to explain her relationship with the Dm? I didn't want to discuss it, looking at that unusual face. St Brandon-I like that better than the Portuguese Cargados Carajos.'
Before she could reply, there was a soft tap-tap from inside the bungalow, like a blind person's cane.
My father-I'm French, you know-held the oil puissance for St Brandon.'
Jouissance?'
Concession.' She gave a soft value to the syllables, like a pirogue's keel on sand.
She added, St Brandon has a ring about it.'
I shared her warmth, remembering a grey old ruined abbey on the Atlantic shore of Ireland, where once I had made a pilgrimage to St Brendan's grave. When the squadrons of clouds come to obscure the mountains above the saint's grave, they will tell you in the soft Connemara tongue that it is St 31
Brendan's angels bringing him safely home across the sea from America 800 years before Columbus. I wanted to tell her. The soft tap-tap came to my ears again. It reminded me of the intruder's stethoscope against Peace's coffin. It broke the chain. She sensed it.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
You've been there, then?' Her voice was flat, as if she already knew the answer.
Commander Peace and I called there on our way from Mauritius here,' I replied. An ancestor of his, Sir John Peace was the first Englishman there. He charted it. Peace thought it might be fun to do the same.'
A bit of fun!' she exclaimed ironically. Yes, that is what Commander Peace would have said.'
So Peace had been in touch with the DNI. The shadow of his death lay between us.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
She looked at me, a little puzzled, then said formally, ' Sir George is expecting you.'
Sir George!-the DNI to me. I wondered less now that I saw her why he had set up with Mam'zelle Adele, but it left me with an inexplicable resentment, nevertheless.
She led the way into the fair-sized bungalow. Pressurelamps gave a comforting sizzle. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
Steel against steel. Mam'zelle Adele opened a door. Taptap. Tap-tap. The toughened steel punch was against the white bone. He was tapping it with a tiny hammer: tap-tap, tap-tap. The skull lay on a cushion, surrounded by blue-grey chips. The
DNI did not look up but tap-tapped again. A flake came away and the bone stood out, dirty-white.
Got it!' he exclaimed with satisfaction. He blew the chips away. ' Isn't he a beauty? Scarcely distorted at all-look at those teeth.'
The skull was the size of a horse's, bat the teeth were predatory-as long as a man's finger-and hooked. Above the eye-sockets its shape broadened like an aeroplane's tail. If he's not an Aulacephalodon, I'll eat blue shale,' the DNI remarked.
I drew closer to the grotesque thing on the cushion. Much of the bone was free of its stone matrix.
Aulacephalodon?' I queried.
This chap was a reptile which wandered about Africa two hundred million years ago. Up to now specimens have been confined to the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa32 never found anywhere else. Now I'll rock them-here's blue Karoo shale among the corals of the Saya de Malha Bank.'
Peace and I had skirted Saya de Malha after St Brandon on our way to the Seychelles. It is a vast collection of shoals, atolls and cays scarcely above water-level, extending over thousands of square miles in the Sea of Limuria.
You're talking Greek to Captain Garland and me,' Mam' zelle Adele chided him gently.
The DNI laughed. ' Why yes, I am-Aulacephalodon is Greek for a winged head: look at the winged formation of the back of his skull'
Mam'zelle Adele was reproving. I think we all need a drink, don't you, Sir George?'
Usual, please.'
I asked for whisky, wondering at his commanding tone. Well, he'd been used to ordering people around all his life. He got up and sat on the edge of the table, swinging a leg. He asked didactically, You realize what this means?'
I'm afraid I don't.'
The Karoo,' he said with a schoolmasterish air, is a unique semi-desert area of South Africa which is the richest repository of reptile fossils in the world. Man, of course, had not yet appeared on the scene when they lived.' He looked at me penetratingly. Man is still young in the scheme of things-only a million years, maybe-and some of these creatures were adaptable enough to survive for sixty million. But in man's short stay on the face of the earth he has evinced one characteristic which may cause him to survive longer than any other creature-there has never been a killer like him. There is nothing man will not kill, has not killed. He knows the lesson these creatures never learned-kill first, have the best weapon, and you live.' His voice was precise, prim. Man must kill in order to survive.'
Geoffrey Peace's philosophy,' I replied. But before the words were out, I knew I was wrong: Peace had learnt his killerphilosophy from this man. I looked away. The room commanded a panorama of the fleet anchorage, the isles, and the sea beyond. There was still enough light to see the white tip of Recif where we had buried Peace. The full-width glass doors were closed against the sea-breeze and below them stretched lawn and flowerbeds. Was it coincidence that the DNI was in the Seychelles for the mighty resurgence of British naval power, the Limuria Squadron? What had been his part in restoring the Royal Navy's power and prestige?