‘Marvellous,’ said Ossie, ‘absolutely delicious.’
It was true. The jam doughnuts in the buffet at Marrakech station are among the best I have ever tasted.
‘You’ve got it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Ossie. He tapped the canvas bag on the table. ‘Went like a dream. Just like you said. A puny little thing. The people who make shoddy safes like that should be locked up.’
‘You sent the message?’
‘I sent “Phase one complete. Commence Phase two. Stop. Eliminate Baker”, then they sent an acknowledgement.’ He smiled. ‘You think that Baix will think Baker means Baix when he intercepts the message?’
‘Unless he’s a bigger dope than I think he is. I’ve used a simple one-part code. I don’t know what else I can do to make it easy for him.’ Ossie chuckled again. He’d taken an unreasonable dislike to Baix and loved the idea of him avoiding a nonexistent assassin.
‘How did it go with you?’ asked Ossie. ‘You keep looking at your watch; you weren’t followed, were you?’
‘No. Train’s due in five minutes,’ I said; it was 2.55 p.m.
‘You won’t drag it in any quicker by quizzing the watch. Tell me about the talk you had with the old nut. And have a doughnut. You are sure you weren’t followed?’
‘I wasn’t followed.’ I took another doughnut and told Ossie about the conversation with da Cunha.
‘But that’s not true,’ Ossie told me at various places in the narrative.
‘If you are going to say “that’s not true” every time I say something that’s not true you’d better go and gargle now or wind up with a sore throat.’
‘Best liar I know, you are,’ said Ossie in great admiration. ‘And so that old blighter is really connected with the English Fascists.’
‘With English Fascists, French Fascists, Belgian Fascists and even German Fascists.’
‘So the Germans have them too,’ said Ossie, like he hadn’t been running his pork-sausage fingers through secrets for the last quarter of a century. ‘That stuff you invented about the message from London. I liked that. What did the message from London really say?’
I passed him the cable that Dawlish had sent me:
KNOBEL STOP NAZI STOP HOAXER STOP WATER FREEZING DISCOVERIES ENTIRELY IRREVOCABLY REPEAT ENTIRELY IRREVOCABLY DISCREDITED REPEAT ENTIRELY: DAWLISH
The long green modern train slid into the station. I helped Ossie with our luggage.
A man with a face like a half-eaten bar of Aero chocolate wanted money for showing us a seat on the almost deserted train. In exchange for my declining to play my part in this transaction he taught me some new Arabic verbs. The train pulled out of the neat little station of Marrakech. Ossie said, ‘That Baix, I’d love to see his face.’
‘That’s just what I’m trying to avoid,’ I said as I opened Ossie’s canvas bag. We both looked at the little radio transmitter that could talk to machines under the sea.