Edwards crashed straight into the fence in the darkness and wondered how he’d got to the far side when he picked himself up, gasping for breath, his face covered in soil, spitting grit and something that tasted like spinach. He must have caught the top wire, chest high, and somersaulted on to the other side.
He had, he calculated, at least fifteen seconds start on them, and double that time before the lights came on again in the compound: about two hundred yards start, but across completely flat, open countryside.
For the moment there was no sound of a chase behind him and by the time he had got to the canal, and the lights had come on again, he saw why. The two smart men had stopped by the fence. They stood next to one another now, as though holding each other up in shaky indecision, before one of the men turned and ran back towards the hospital. The other fell to the ground, perhaps with a rifle, his body flat out in a line facing the canal.
Edwards ducked beneath the shallow bank and was twenty yards down the water before he realized that one of his pursuers had been electrocuted.
His feet sank deep into the mud each time he moved, the water rising and falling over his mouth, soft and tasteless as rainwater, and it was a sudden old-fashioned fear of bilharzia or a monstrous go of Gyppy tummy — more than drowning, or cut glass or his slow progress — that made him scramble up on the bank a few minutes later. Fifty yards to his left, between the feeder canal and the Mokattam Hills, there was an embankment and on top of it the double railway line which ran from Bab el Luk to Helwan. When he got to it he saw the lights of Maadi station winking through clumps of palm half a mile away to the south. And beyond the station he could just make out the glare from the croquet floodlights at Maadi Sporting Club. That strange Egyptian passion for the game, which they played late into the night, meant that the locker rooms would still be open.
He came in over the sagging chicken wire beyond the last tennis court, walked past the deserted pool, into the gents, across the showers and from there to the locker room beyond. He knew this moist geography of the Club almost as well as he knew his own bathroom in Kentish Town.
Abdul Khaki, under the letter K, was his benefactor. He had known him ever since he’d first come to teach at Albert College — a witty, careless, overweight man who had once, in slimmer days, played squash for Egypt before making a fortune in real estate — and he had left his locker open. There were a reasonable pair of plimsolls, Slazenger shirt and pants, an old blue blazer and an even older squash racket: Abdul’s second division equipment. Edwards transferred his money, his damp cheque-book, passport, and a book of English stamps and threw his own clothes into the laundry bin. He would get them back in twenty-four hours, beautifully done, if he wanted.
They were playing bridge behind the glass windows of the terrace — beaky, white-haired ladies and crop-headed old men in Rex Harrison cardigans, utterly absorbed. And he could hear the furious clonk of wood on wood as other older and even more vehement members dispatched each other to the nether ends of the croquet court on the far side of the building.
The minute porter in the ragged corduroy jacket who had once looked after King Fuad’s stables at Abdin Palace saluted Edwards carefully as he passed the little sentry box by the main gate of the club.
“Good night, Mr. Edwards, sir. Taxi?”
They never forgot you here, Edwards thought, and he put his hand down the vest pocket of Khaki’s blazer and found a few coins there — the little essential baksheesh that every good club member kept in store for such contingencies. He gave the old fellow a five-piastre piece.
“Thank you, Ahmed.”
A taxi pulled out from the station rank, swung round the sandy circle in leaps and bounds, carburettor stomping and spitting vigorously, and pulled up at the entrance.
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” Ahmed said, opening the door. “Your bat, sir! Don’t forget your bat!” And he pushed the mysterious instrument through the cab window.
He left the taxi at the end of the dusty street, the arch of evergreens stooping overhead all along its length, and came to the house by its back entrance which led to the garden — past the suffragi’s quarters in a thicket of bramble and flowering laurel, through the wilderness of papyrus on the damp margin of the lawn and over the willow pattern bridge.
The lights were on downstairs and on the terrace but all he could see was Bridget’s feet stretched out on a sun chair behind the parapet and its tumble of orange flowered creeper. She was reading probably, as she often did late at night, and Edwards wondered what it was: a travel book from the Council library, a new biography perhaps. He had often brought her out the latest success in that line when he came from London. A surprise … And he wished now that he didn’t have to surprise her, that she’d known he was coming, as he walked up the terrace steps, broken racket in hand, in his billowing shorts. That was surprise enough. A joke as well. Perhaps that was the way to handle it. Anyone for tennis?
Bridget wasn’t reading. There had simply been a silence between them, the empty stillness after a row — as though she and Colonel Hamdy had just had a flaming row: that was it, Edwards was sure of it.
The telephone, taken out on a long extension from the drawing room, was on a table between them. The three of them glanced at it, like a gun, before it started a long, stumbling, jittery ring.
“Aiowa,” the Colonel said. “Aiowa,” between pauses, impatiently, as though confirming a grocery order with a tiresome merchant.
“Well, the man isn’t dead.” The Colonel put the phone down. “Just burnt. The trouble is they think you’re going to blow the Yunis business to the press, that you really are a journalist. That’s the problem. We’ll have to get you out of here.”
Edwards put the racket on the parapet and took a cigarette from a pack on the table. Bridget leant forward, handing him a lighter, taking one herself. He realized he was shaking now, the cigarette bouncing around in his hand. Not from the cold, the terrace was warm from years of continual sunlight. Bridget had never looked like speaking. There was surprise, certainly; the incredulous lines on someone’s face before one laughs.
“Before I came,” Edwards said, looking at her intently, as if searching for a vital response, “what were you fighting about?”
“We weren’t fighting. Hamdy just told me you were here. That you’d been arrested at the airport, being held by security. We were thinking.” She looked at the Colonel. “Now that you’re here you might as well know,” he said. “Why not?” And Bridget went on quickly, as if making up for something, making up for years of necessary lies: “I’m sorry you didn’t know about Hamdy before. I couldn’t tell you.”
“What?”
“That he’s with us. That he’s always been.”
“With Holborn?”
“Yes.” Bridget got up and went to organize a drinks tray in the room behind.
“How the hell is it you’re the only one to know about it then?” Edwards shouted after her. “That’s a likely story.” He was trying to be angry. “How come I’ve never heard of it? With twenty years in the same section.” He was about to add “With twenty years working for the same man” but stopped himself in time.
“Don’t be stupid.” The Colonel came over towards him. “Of course you never heard about it, could never hear of it. Do you think my position with Egyptian intelligence here would have been secure if I’d ever been an official part of the Holborn circle in Cairo? No one knew. Except central office.”