me. You know I’m a loner, Colonel Raine. I could go by myself, explain that my wife had taken ill. I don’t want any female hanging round my neck, sir.’
‘With this particular female’ Raine said dryly, ‘most men would consider that a privilege. I advise you to forget your concern. I consider it essential that she go. This young lady has volunteered for this assignment. She’s shrewd, very, very able and most experienced in this business – much more so than you are, Bentall. It may not be a case of you looking after her, but vice versa. She can take care of herself admirably. She has a gun and never moves without it. I think you’ll find –’
He broke off as a side door opened and a girl walked into the room. I say ‘walked’ because it is the usual word to describe human locomotion, but this girl didn’t locomote, she seemed to glide with all the grace and more than the suggestion of something else of a Balinese dancing girl. She wore a light grey ribbed wool dress that clung to every inch of her hour-and-a-half-glass figure as if it fully appreciated its privilege, and round her waist she wore a narrow belt of darker grey to match her court shoes and lizard handbag. That would be where the gun was, in the bag, she couldn’t have concealed a pea-shooter under that dress. She had smooth fair gleaming hair parted far over on the left and brushed almost straight back, dark eyebrows and lashes, clear hazel eyes and a delicately tanned fair skin.
I knew where the tan came from, I knew who she was. She’d worked on the same assignment as I had for the past six months but had been in Greece all the time and I’d only seen her twice, in Athens: in all, this was only the fourth time I’d ever met her. I knew her, but knew nothing of her, except for the fact that her name was Marie Hopeman, that she had been born in Belgium but hadn’t lived there since her father, a technician in the Fairey Aviation factory in that country, had brought herself and her Belgian mother out of the continent at the time of the fall of France. Both her parents had been lost in the Lancastria. An orphan child brought up in what was to her a foreign country, she must have learned fast how to look after herself. Or so I supposed.
I pushed back my chair and rose. Colonel Raine waved a vaguely introductory hand and said: ‘Mr and – ah – Mrs Bentall. You have met before, have you not?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He knew damn’ well we’d met before. Marie Hopeman gave me a cool firm hand and a cool level look, maybe this chance to work so closely with me was the realization of a life’s ambition for her, but she was holding her enthusiasm pretty well in check. I’d noticed this in Athens, this remote and rather aloof self-sufficiency which I found vaguely irritating, but that wasn’t going to stop me from saying what I was going to say.
‘Nice to see you again, Miss Hopeman. Or it should be. But not here and not now. Don’t you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’
She looked at me with big hazel eyes wide open under her raised dark brows, then the mouth curved slowly into an amused smile as she turned away.
‘Has Mr Bentall been coming all over chivalrous and noble on my account, Colonel Raine?’ she asked sweetly.
‘Well, yes, I’m afraid he has, rather,’ the colonel admitted. ‘And please, we must have none of this Mr Bentall – Miss Hopeman talk. Among young married couples, I mean.’ He poked a pipe-cleaner through the stem of his pipe, nodded in satisfaction as it emerged from the bowl black as a chimney sweep’s brush and went on almost dreamily. ‘John and Marie Bentall. I think the names go rather well together.’
‘Do you feel that, too?’ the girl said with interest. She turned to me again and smiled brightly. ‘I do so appreciate your concern. It’s really most kind of you.’ A pause, then she added: ‘John.’
I didn’t hit her because I hold the view that that sort of thing went out with the cavemen, but I could appreciate how the old boys felt. I gave her what I hoped was a cool and enigmatic smile and turned away.
‘Clothes, sir,’ I said to Raine. ‘I’ll need to buy some. It’s high summer out there now.’
‘You’ll find two new suitcases in your flat, Bentall, packed with everything you need.’
‘Tickets?’
‘Here.’ He slid a packet across. ‘They were mailed to you four days ago by Wagons/Lits Cook. Paid by cheque. Man called Tobias Smith. No one has ever heard of him, but his bank account is healthy enough. You don’t fly east, as you might expect, but west, via New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and Fiji. I suppose the man who pays the piper calls the tune.’
‘Passports?’
‘Both in your cases in your flat.’ The little tic touched the side of his face. ‘Yours, for a change, is in your own name. Had to be. They’d check on you, university, subsequent career and so forth. We fixed it so that no inquirer would know you left Hepworth a year ago. Also in your case you’ll find a thousand dollars in American Express cheques.’
‘I hope I live to spend it,’ I said. ‘Who’s travelling with us, sir?’
There was a small silence, a brittle silence, and two pairs of eyes were on me, the narrow cold ice-green ones and the large warm hazel eyes. Marie Hopeman spoke first.
‘Perhaps you would explain –’
‘Hah!’ I interrupted. ‘Perhaps I would explain. And you’re the person – well, never mind. Sixteen people leave from here for Australia or New Zealand. Eight never arrive. Fifty per cent. Which means that there’s a fifty per cent chance that we don’t arrive. So there will be an observer in the plane so that Colonel Raine can erect a tombstone over the spot where we’re buried. Or more likely just a wreath flung in the Pacific.’
‘The possibility of a little trouble en route had occurred to me,’ the colonel said carefully. ‘There will be an observer with you – not the same one all the way, naturally. It is better that you do not know who those observers are.’ He rose to his feet and walked round the table. The briefing was over.
‘I am sincerely sorry,’ he finished. ‘I do not like any of this, but I am a blind man in a dark room and there is no other course open to me. I hope things go well.’ He offered his hand briefly to both of us, shook his head, murmured: ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye,’ and walked back to his desk.
I opened the door for Marie Hopeman and glanced back over my shoulder to see how sorry he was. But he wasn’t looking sorry, he was just looking earnestly into the bowl of his pipe so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him sitting there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
Fellow-passengers on the plane, the old hands on the America-Australia run, had spoken of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Viti Levu as the finest in the Western Pacific, and a very brief acquaintance with it had persuaded me that they were probably right. Old-fashioned but magnificent and shining like a newly-minted silver coin, it was run with a quiet and courteous efficiency that would have horrified the average English hotelier. The bedrooms were luxurious, the food superb – the memory of the seven-course dinner we’d had that night would linger for years – and the view from the veranda of the haze-softened mountains across the moonlit bay belonged to another world.
But there’s no perfection in a very imperfect world: the
