Chapter One

THE DESERTER

NO, LIKE YOU, I cannot claim ever to have caught a spy. Not officially anyway. And it depends on what you mean by caught. I could never tie the case up in a neat packet and pass it upstairs, for all the time there was at least one court martial hanging over me. You were in it too, though quite innocently. Do you remember sending me a signal about Abdullah el Bessam’s cushion and how he doted on it? Well, without that I should not be here now.

The Middle East was a closed world at the end of 1941, in which everyone employed on Intelligence duties knew something of everyone else. We had thrown the Italians out of Libya and Abyssinia. We had occupied Persia and put down the rebellion of Rashid Ali el Gailani in Iraq. Then we had fought the Vichy French in the Lebanon and Syria, sent their army and administrators back to France and handed over the government to the Free French. All those private wars gave us room to move, but we were still a besieged garrison in which it was vital to keep the enemy agent outside the walls.

Security—it’s the opposite of detective work. There the crime exists and a mass of detail leads you to the criminal. In Security one hardly ever starts with a crime; one goes on collecting objectless bits of information until they fall into a pattern. At least that was all which was expected of you and me—plus carrying out any dirty jobs for I (b)^* which had to be kept secret, like the investigation of a friend and colleague.

Did you ever have to do that? Yes, fortunately rare but all in the day’s work. And our reports were often final for better or worse, though in this case, the case of Oliver Enwin, there was no sort of finality. The answer—the true answer—was never known to anyone but me, and that just by an accident of posting.

Before Enwin’s character began to obsess me I thought that he lacked any inner strength. He was good at his job, like so many of those expatriate civilians who had been picked up from obscure hotel rooms in Cairo or Alexandria and given purpose and identity by the Army. I was inclined to distrust them. It was a sign of conceit, of the ultra-conservative English opinion, still prevalent in the nineteen-thirties, that if you had to find a man for a responsible position without much evidence of his integrity, you had better choose one tempered by our deliberately imperial type of education. Shallow thinking. I myself had worked my passage out of that category many years before.

Oliver Enwin, according to his personal file, had come out to Egypt as a minor assistant on an archaeological dig which found nothing beyond a collection of pagan Arab statuettes—about as primitive to civilised Romans as to ourselves but no doubt of interest to the professional. He then joined the British Council: an organisation of semi-intellectual misfits which taught English Literature and Language in the half-world of the Middle East. It always seemed to me a waste of time and money. Again conceit. I doubt if it did much good to the boys and girls whose only ambition was to write English good enough for commercial clerkships, but the teachers obtained insight into the languages and traditions of their customers which soldiers and diplomatists could not.

Besides fluent Arabic, Enwin had French, Italian and enough Greek to chatter his way through lunch in the hideous and respectable homes of the small business men whose overfed children he introduced to the daffodils of Wordsworth and Shakespeare—to one an indecisive British Council sort of blossom and to the other the flower of courage. Aspects of himself though he would not have seen it. He was neutral, too, in appearance, for he belonged to that pre-Celtic Mediterranean race so common in the west of England, with dark, straight hair, brown eyes and a complexion like the most delicate leather—altogether a handsome young man of middle height, who had in him more of the dignity of the Arab than the animation of the Latin.

A rough sketch. It tells you more of the limitations of an amateur British officer than it does of Oliver Enwin. He could be anything to anyone. ‘Wet’ was an adjective I used to hear applied to him, but to me he was more like wet clay with a will moulding it—a very obscure will.

In 1939 he offered himself to the Army and was taken on as an interpreter and translator by Security Intelligence Middle East. There he showed impressive industry, working night and day at his Arabic until it became so good that he could switch without effort between the classical language of the desert and Egyptian. Military Intelligence was not going to waste such material. He was put into uniform, trained—so far as we had the time and facilities to train anybody in those early days of the fortress of the Middle East—and in 1941 was Assistant Defence Security Officer at Nazareth.

By now you may have forgotten what that post involved. The A.D.S.O. within his own district was the eyes and ears of Security. He had money to pay agents and a fairly free hand in choosing them. His advice was taken if he was a good man; if he was too good a man he ran some risk of character assassination. That was why no accusations against a Defence Security Officer were readily believed. You’ll agree that it’s hard to run a security organisation without assuming that your key men are above suspicion; otherwise there is little time to get on with the real business of putting the fear of death or internment into enemy agents.

The choice of men—since we had only the Middle East to draw on—was sometimes odd. An officer of outstanding honesty and conventional character hadn’t a hope against Arabs and Zionists at the top of their form, let alone the German consuls at Antioch and Alexandretta. One needed a man with cunning and languages and a devious mind. He had, of course, to be unbribable and unlikely to set up his girl friend as a trusted agent and pay her rent out of the secret funds; or, if he did do this—and it was not unheard of—he had to persuade his boss that the game was worth it. The perfect A.D.S.O. was a first-class crook with an immaculate sense of honour.

I liked Enwin. Besides meeting him at security conferences, I used now and then to call at his office, usually asking for information from his files. He was direct, though inclined to be patronising. Either he would give me what I wanted without humming and hawing, plus his own impression of the reality behind the verbiage of a security report, or he would warn me that I was trespassing on private property and had better call off my hounds forthwith and stop them yapping.

Now, what happened when a man such as Enwin went wrong? First, one didn’t believe it. The proverb that there is no smoke without flame has no validity for men who live in smoke. But suppose the flame simply could not be ignored? Who investigated?

Civil Police? Well, one would try to pick their brains and use their files without giving away the reason for such sudden curiosity. The Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police? God help us all, no! That steam roller would flatten all the evidence and produce it as paper—neat, unanswerable and almost certainly wrong. You could safely prosecute on it, but you could also be certain that the main half of the story was for ever hidden under the mud.

No, the man who descended into the pit with an inadequate torch and little secret briefing to tell him where to put his feet was the Field Security Officer—our lowly form of security life scattered about between the Nile and the Caspian at the beck and call of all Intelligence, military or civil. We had no axe to grind, no money to pay agents and could be sacrificed—decently and by way of promotion—if anything went wrong. On the other hand each of us commanded thirteen men with inquisitive minds, an assortment of languages and thirteen motorcycles.

So when Captain Oliver Enwin vanished without trace I was ordered by Jeremy Fanshawe, the chief of Military Intelligence in Palestine, to cover up the mess and find a clue to his whereabouts. I was to take over his office temporarily—accounts, lists of agents, private correspondence, everything.

I said that after such a humiliation he could never go back to Nazareth.

‘Why not? So far as the world is concerned you are taking over for a few days because he has been rushed to hospital.’

‘What with?’

‘Worms.’

I do not think Jeremy had given a thought to the disease. The single syllable exploded from him like a laugh. That was typical. Nothing was to be taken too seriously except work. His manner always suggested that the officers of Defence Security and Field Security were members of a very exclusive club and a law to ourselves. Spy-catching, intrigue-busting—well, a gentleman would not choose such a profession, but we should all be back in civilised London after ten years or so, if we were lucky, and meanwhile should look on the frequently comic side of our activities.

I have no doubt that I said that I was utterly incapable of spotting a hole in anybody’s books.

‘I don’t think that’s the trouble, but do your best.’

‘I’ve got a corporal who used to be an accountant. Can I take him with me?’

‘If he can keep his mouth shut, yes.’

‘What about the keys of the safe?’

‘That’s utterly damnable. He left them with Boutagy.’

Boutagy was Enwin’s civilian clerk. He was a Lebanese, therefore probably corrupt; recommended by the police, therefore likely to report to them matters which were not their business; a Christian, so quite certain to weigh the scales against any Moslem. I could understand Jeremy’s horror. To leave the keys of the safe with Boutagy seemed to him a worse crime than vanishing.

He was quite wrong. Boutagy was my own limited kind of man, and I admired him and laughed at him. He was honest as the day, fatherly towards Enwin, and he had that curious devotion to the British which one used to find along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. God knows where it came from. Generations of traders whose word was as good as their bond? Consuls who dared to stand up to Turkish pashas? It’s gone now. The tourists have seen to that. But then it still existed. To Boutagy and his like we were the ethical nation of the world and our honesty of purpose was unquestionable, however tortuous its day-to-day expression. The French were nowhere. The Americans were missionaries. It often seemed to me that Boutagy was the unthinking Victorian patriot, and Enwin the more typical Levantine.

So I was reasonably certain that even persuasion by the Gestapo could not have made Boutagy open that safe when he only held the keys in trust. I also thought it likely that he knew all the secrets it contained already. But I didn’t say so. Boutagy was outside the club, though earning his living within it like a waiter.

‘What am I to look for?’

‘Go through the lot and take as long as you like.’

‘He’ll never speak to me again.’

‘If there’s anything wrong, he won’t have to. If there’s nothing wrong, he would rather it was you than anyone else.’

He added that I was an amoral nihilist, always finding excuses.

‘Is there any investigation going on which could tempt somebody to remove him?’

‘Not so far as I know, but one can’t rule it out. The case might not have got to the stage when it was worth reporting.’

That was true enough. Even my own insignificant office files were full of plots, libellous rumours and beautiful spies, none of which had I any intention of reporting unless or until I had further confirmation. But meanwhile one of these stories might prove to be deadly accurate and known to be in my possession.

‘And if I turn up dirt?’

‘We’ll keep it in the family. If a man is unfit for defence security he can go and censor Arab correspondence or something.’

‘Always assuming that he is not a security risk himself.’

‘Not a trace of fascism, communism, Zionism, T. E. Lawrence or anything else! He’s not a homosexual. He drinks about half as much as you do. Unless his file is hopelessly wrong somewhere, Oliver is fighting the war with a simple heart and very unsimple gifts.’

‘He came out to Egypt two and a half years ago. Is that enough for a man to think and speak in Arabic as well as Oliver?’

‘I suppose it’s due to his affection for them—and very hard work of course.’

I replied that I spoke several European languages and, going by my own experience, I did not think he could master a Semitic speech and its dialects in the time.

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That his file is hopelessly wrong somewhere. Out here we have to accept so much of what a man says about himself. One can’t cable M.I.5 for a report on every clerk.’

‘He’s not working for any kind of enemy.’

‘Can I take that for granted?’

‘You can take nothing for granted.’

I was accustomed to ruthless searches through the privacies of the suspect; but Oliver Enwin was a close colleague equal to me in rank, far superior in responsibilities. I did not feel up to the job of tearing apart all his intimate and official life. I could never forget that we were all cut off from home with no chance of returning till the war was won or lost. Most of us felt the solidarity of exiles and always tried to see ourselves in the other fellow’s place at courts martial and other festivals of public stoning. What haunted me was a premonition that I would not be able to see myself in his place at all. Put it this way! You don’t mind turning over a stone when you know what is likely to be underneath; but in a hot alien land you shrink from disturbing some fantastic and innocent form of life, to be squashed in brutal panic or picked up with unreasoning disgust.

My orders were to drive straight to Nazareth. I paid no attention to them and called first at my section. I had a good excuse: that I did not want to telephone from Enwin’s office and arouse excited speculation. But the truth was that I always gave my first loyalty to my little command. The cheerful presence of my chaps—those of them who were not out in the hills or down at the ports—made the billet the only home I had. I returned to it exactly as a business man will find time to call on his wife before taking an urgent and unexpected trip.

I handed over current affairs to Sergeant-Major Limpsfield. He was our professional adviser and nursemaid, without any special gifts for Security—beyond unbreakable discretion—appointed for his familiarity with the paper work of the Army and his lovable character. Quality of leadership is the correct term. Lovable is not a military word.

He had been a gamekeeper till his employer went bust in the Depression. Then, insistent on an outdoor life, he had enlisted in the Greys. When their horses were at long last taken away, he applied to join Field Security rather than submit to a future of nuts, bolts and the racket of engines. His choice was a tribute to our propaganda which made the service appear more romantic than it was. So what he got was an office job, compensated by swift promotion from Corporal of Horse to Sergeant-Major.

I told Limpsfield that I was taking the section truck, that I did not want it known where I was and that he should say I was up at Headquarters on a job for Colonel Fanshawe.

‘Better not take the truck, sir. There’s only room for one car in Captain Enwin’s garage, and no unit anywhere near which can look after ours.’

Nanny was right as usual. If a vehicle was not locked up or under guard, a party of small boys, provided with spanners by Arab motor dealers, shot out of the alleys like rats and stole every movable part within ten minutes.

‘There’s the spare motorcycle. I’ll see that it’s in order straightaway.’

‘You leave it alone! Last time you got at the throttle and it wouldn’t do more than forty.’

‘That is more than enough on these roads, sir.’

‘And get Corporal Zappa in from the frontier and tell him to report to me at Captain Enwin’s office. He was an accountant, wasn’t he?’

‘Well, yes—of a sort.’

He gave me his sidelong, pheasant-eyed look which suggested that I might ask further questions if I wished, but I let it go. There was no time for a chat and, anyway, Limpsfield disapproved of Zappa whereas I liked him.

I reached Nazareth just after sunset. The smells of Arab cooking, always more appealing in the dusk than the heat of midday, drifted through the white streets of the Latin Quarter and spiced the dust which just stirred on the evening breeze. The Security Office, once the home of some quiet Italian carver of images interned for the duration of the war, inevitably but probably unjustly, was in a lane which ran parallel to the main street. It was not at first sight a place for secrets since one had only to idle at the corner to see all the comings and goings. But that did not matter. There is no possible privacy in a small Arab town; wherever you put your centre of mysteries, it takes less than five minutes for the news of any interesting visitor to reach the principal café. Secrecy lies in the astonishing collection of rumours and speculation which conceal truth more efficiently than silence. I have never been able to decide whether Arabs believe anything or nothing. The fact is that they do not give common sense enough time to operate.

Boutagy opened the heavy wooden door, and I wheeled the motorcycle into a wide passage between the two lower rooms. He told me that he was glad to see me and not someone else, which pleased me though I was well aware that he would have had an equally polite greeting for any officer who arrived to take responsibility off his shoulders. I replied that it was unnecessary to send anyone at all since his loyalty was so well known. Compliments completed, he said that I must be thirsty after my long ride and he would fetch the whisky from Captain Enwin’s flat upstairs. Whisky. The nectar of empire. I should have allowed him to make the proper gesture. But I felt far from imperial and reminded him that Oliver always had a bottle of white wine lowered into the tiled well in the courtyard.

I sat down in the silent, empty office, wide open to some first impression of it which might later be useful. There was nothing. A blank. It was in perfect order—chairs, desk, blotter, typewriter, pencils all where they should be, and nothing in the waste-paper basket. Model for an A.D.S.O.’s office. Architect: Oliver Enwin. Across the passage was Boutagy’s room, once the shop. His red tarboosh, the emblem of his Christianity, rested on top of a filing cabinet. Below it were two grey army blankets, tidily folded, showing that Duty had compelled him to sleep the previous night on the office floor. Duty. Boutagy was more fulfilled by his constancy as a watchdog than alarmed by the responsibility.

He was a curious looking fellow, for his face and his hair were both light brown. He reminded me of an albino, simply because the expected human contrast of complexion and hair was absent. He was about forty, but looked that evening years older. The lines of his round face, always deep, were slits full of bristles and worry, due more to affection for Oliver than the situation. Boutagy was his Limpsfield in a far lonelier job than mine.

Over the wine I listened to his story. When Boutagy arrived at the office, Oliver had already gone. There was nothing surprising in that, except that he always let Boutagy know when he would be back—hours or sometimes days. At 8 p.m., official closing time, Boutagy went upstairs to his flat in case he had come back unnoticed and was feeling ill. The flat was locked. Yet Oliver could not have intended any long journey since his car was still in the garage.

Boutagy went out to see a cousin of his who ran a small restaurant and acted as a very useful unpaid agent; he might know where Oliver was, having served him lunch or a coffee during the day. Sure enough the cousin had seen him early that morning. He handed Boutagy a sealed envelope with a message from Captain Enwin that he was to take it back to the office and open it.

Boutagy did so and found the key of the flat. He went in with an unreasoning premonition that Oliver had committed suicide—though he could hardly have done so and locked the door on the outside. Bang in the middle of the breakfast table was another envelope addressed to him, containing the keys of filing cabinet and safe, the number of the combination and a short note. He took it from an inside pocket and gave it to me on his open palm as miserably as if it were an order for our immediate execution.

My Dear Boutagy,

I shall not be coming back. Here are the keys which you must keep on your person until you hand them over to the officer whom Colonel Fanshawe will send to relieve you. Telephone him at Headquarters in the morning to say that I have gone.

Very sensibly Boutagy had tried to telephone immediately. Jeremy was out. Boutagy refused to leave any message with the Duty Officer beyond saying that Captain Enwin wanted to be called urgently first thing in the morning. Instinct or training had familiarised him with our custom of keeping all scandal in the family.

So Oliver, judging precisely what Boutagy would do, had given himself at least twenty-four hours to get clear. His disappearance was clearly deliberate. It might have been forced by blackmail, threats or embezzlement, but all seemed extraordinarily improbable.

I asked Boutagy what he knew of current investigations. Nothing special was going on, he said, and they had been passing through a quiet period. Captain Enwin had taken advantage of the lull to spend a lot of his time outside the office. On what business? Boutagy had no idea. He was less conversant with his employer’s secrets than I had thought.

Had Captain Enwin looked worried? Not exactly, but for some days he had been unusually silent.

‘And I will tell you this between ourselves,’ Boutagy added. ‘When I came into his office one afternoon last week I thought he had been weeping.’

Nothing remarkable in that for an Arab, nor for those of us who had been away long enough to suffer losses by death or adultery. But Boutagy’s tone was one of disbelief in his own observation. For him a British officer did not weep. His tears were turned to ice by duty or dried up by the daily grind of geniality.

‘Any private letters that day?’

He did not know. He was exasperating. He had conceived his role as one of seeing nothing—an easier task than seeing everything and keeping quiet about it. If the morning mail came into his hands, he seemed to have handed it to Oliver as a little solid package, resisting all curiosity.

‘Anyone who would have killed him?’

‘Ah, yes!’ said Boutagy. ‘At least four!’

I didn’t believe it for a moment. My knowledge of Arabs was never extensive, but the one quality I was sure of was their romanticism. Boutagy was creating an illusion of danger just as you do in those books of yours. You first persuade yourself, and then your public. In real life a modest man of good mental health has difficulty in believing that he himself or any of his friends might be worth assassination.

I asked for the names and looked them up. One was a Kurdish agent, sacked for inventing reports. He ground his teeth and twisted his moustaches in Oliver’s office, possibly threatened assault and certainly threatened to sell all his secrets. As he didn’t know any, he could do no harm. He had then gone to Syria to offer his services to the French Deuxième Bureau and had been kicked out—literally. The French never had our patience. They made unnecessary enemies, but saved time.

Two of the others were violent characters but safely in gaol. They were not security risks at all. Oliver had passed on information which came his way and invited civil police to prove it more formally and take action.

The fourth was pure comedy—a great, black-bearded, greasy, Greek priest who had been making advances to the soldiery. I knew all about him, for at Oliver’s request I had unleashed one of my corporals on to him. He became a bosom friend of his reverence—honi soit qui mol y pense—and reported that the suspicious activities were purely homosexual and that the sinister black-beard did not know a tank from a farm cart.

I went out with Boutagy and had a late meal. Food and wine produced no more information from him. Worry had reduced this affectionate, faithful dog of a man to imperial suet pudding. He was incapable of saying anything except what could have happened? and saying it rather too loud. I let him come to the comforting conclusion that this was a straight case for the Palestine Police and that loss of memory or temporary insanity must be responsible.

Alone in Oliver’s flat I carried out a desultory search for clues. My only discovery was that a lot of paper had been burned in the iron stove and the ashes crushed—all his private correspondence presumably, since there were no letters in the drawers or lying about. Like the office, his flat gave the impression of being prepared by a house agent for the next tenant.

There were dozens of books neatly ranged on flat surfaces. His Majesty’s furnishing did not run to a book-case. The poetry and fashionable novels of the nineteen-thirties were well represented, along with some literary criticism. Quite half his reading was Arabic. I was surprised to find nothing at all on archaeology and made a note of it. There could be a hundred explanations—heavy books, for example, left with some Egyptian friend—but I wanted to know what explanation was right. In the absence of any concrete evidence I felt that his library could be as revealing as his accounts.

Corporal Zappa turned up soon after breakfast. Since a lie, if it is to be convincing and easily remembered, should be as near the truth as possible, I told him to say that he had been working on accounts with Captain Enwin and me.

Zappa was plain, urban English in type, but actually of Anglo-Italian parentage. He spoke his father’s language with elegance and his mother’s with a strong Birmingham accent. His contempt for human nature was so marked that I suspected the Zappas must have been politicians or members of the Mafia. However, it was a useful quality on frontier control. For him everyone was guilty until proved innocent.

‘By the way, what kind of accountant were you?’ I asked.

‘A Turf Accountant.’

‘A bookie?’

‘I’d have had a branch office of my own this year.’

‘No wonder you think we’re all crooks.’

‘Nothing honest but horses, sir, and that’s only because we bring ’em up to beat hell out of the others.’

All the section must have been well aware of his former profession, but I was not. I suppose they knew I would consider bookmaking disreputable, in which they were right, and be prejudiced against Zappa where they were wrong. The section had three loyalties: to the job, to each other and to me. The last two were nearly but not quite the same until I was in serious trouble.

The office accounts were straightforward, and I had no need of Zappa. Cash in hand was in the safe with a rubber band round the notes and an unnecessary label stating the amount—further evidence that Oliver’s disappearance was planned. Assuming that ‘Habib’, ‘BX’ and ‘43’ really existed, all was in order. Fanshawe would know which agents the code names represented and what sums Oliver had been authorised to pay them.

His bank statements for the last two years were in the drawer of his desk upstairs along with the usual advices from the Pay Department. I had a feeling that he had not deliberately left them but had just shoved them back in the drawer after checking his position. Our resentment of the Pay’s mistakes and obtuseness produced the Freudian effect of forgetting all about their exasperating correspondence.

‘Every time Captain Enwin was credited with some back pay he drew a cheque for twenty pounds exactly,’ Zappa remarked. ‘What for?’

For me no column of figures can be made to tell a story; but when Zappa pointed out the dates it was obvious that three times Oliver had taken out twenty pounds over and above his normal cash drawings. This happened whenever he received a lump sum which was long overdue or had been disputed.

What for? A trivial question but fair. The drawings were out of the pattern of his regular living expenses and suggested that he might be paying back a loan or, just possibly, paying some unauthorised agent himself and hoping to get a refund from Fanshawe at a later date.

The only other discovery of interest was that a claim for eighty-eight pounds had been accepted and paid into his bank three days before he disappeared. He had drawn this out, plus his small balance, showing that he had waited for the money to come in. That seemed to rule out suicide—a possibility which had worried me ever since I found that his .38 revolver was missing. All other army property and his uniforms had been pointedly left behind.

It was the end of my amateur investigation, though I stayed in the office another two days supervising the removal of documents and hoping for more evidence. I didn’t get it. Oliver’s motive seemed to be in those papers, burned and so carefully crushed. Jeremy Fanshawe, when he read my report, was good enough to say that at least I had made something out of blank nothing. Perhaps he was being ironical, for I never wrote a report with less facts in it. His own enquiries had produced little more—only that this was not the first time that Oliver’s behaviour had been inexplicable. He was in line for a fellowship in oriental languages at Cambridge, but had cleared out before even taking his degree, giving no reasons to anyone. When I asked Jeremy what he proposed to say to the next of kin, he answered that he wasn’t going to say anything and that Oliver was bound to turn up some time.

Bound to turn up some time. It begged the question. His crime was desertion, forgivable among fighting troops under unbearable strain, but not to a trusted officer living in a comfortable flat and keeping office hours. And he wasn’t bound to turn up. I had talked to an Australian deserter who made himself so popular and useful in a remote Christian Arab village that he managed to live there for three months before news of him came to us. He had not even a common language with his kindly hosts.

A retirement of that sort would be child’s play for Oliver, able to pass himself off as a traveller from any Arab land; but he would never stand the boredom of it. He was essentially urban—not at all the type to find in the simplicities of desert and village relief from the complications of the west. He enjoyed complications so long as they were those of his Arabs. I said that I could well imagine him setting himself up as a letter-writer in the Aleppo bazaars; but Jeremy wouldn’t have it. Not even Oliver, he replied, could slip through the strict security network of the towns.

I kept on trying to arrive at a private solution based on what I knew of him. It wasn’t much. I had never spent a whole day or a gay night with him. I granted him industry, loyalty and a sympathetic understanding of all peoples east of a line from Istanbul to Alexandria, but I did not know what fire was in his belly. What, for example, were his problems of sex? What religious beliefs or instincts had he? And what about the cursory judgment that he was ‘wet’? One could not just reject the opinion of fools as meaningless. In the context of their way of thinking they had spotted a weakness.

That led me off into consideration of the difference between Oliver and myself. We ought to have appeared similar types to a narrow-minded soldier. I knew and loved the other half of the warring world, west of that line from Istanbul to Alexandria, and I liked to think of myself as more European than British. Whether I was or wasn’t an amoral nihilist, as Jeremy said, I went my own way, sometimes disconcertingly. Yet I knew damned well that I would never be described as wet.

Probably that was because I could play the heavy military man with the best of them. Then why was it that Oliver Enwin could not? Perhaps he showed too often that he thought discipline unimportant. To me it was an essential quality of the society—the near communist society—of the Army. To him it was rubbish under foot, obstructing his close and continuous study of Arab culture.

Shallow, too vague analysis. It did leave me, however, with a strong sense of the Something Else in Oliver and a near certainty that it was so essential to him that it had prevailed over duty and disgrace. My most imaginative theory was that he had made some extraordinary archaeological discovery, Islamic or classical, which demanded his immediate attention and was far more important to him than Security. So far as his character was concerned, I was on the right lines. But the motive would not do. There was nothing to prevent him asking for a week’s leave and getting it—or more if he could arouse Jeremy’s easy sympathy.

This at last brought home the unpleasant fact that Oliver could not under any circumstances tell the Something Else to Jeremy, though one could tell him any mortal thing and be sure of a casual, cordial understanding. The possibilities, I had to admit, were sinister. I still could not believe in treasonable activities, but I felt a lot more ruthless towards him than when searching for pitiable scraps of truth in that abandoned office.

^* The branch of the General Staff responsible for counter-espionage.