‘You see, McLeod, my friend,’ said the Commandant, ‘I did not strike him because I am a cruel man. I am really a soft-hearted man, with five children. That is why I struck him. No one must know I am soft-hearted, or I should surely lose my job.’

  He found that so amusing he had to collapse on the bed to manage his laughter. But all the time a gleam of cool cunning remained steady in his brown eyes.

  ‘So, McLeod,’ he said, ‘you are still a very clever man. You must be, to have caused His Excellency to change his mind. I understand the Prime Minister himself was consulted. So they decided to disregard my advice. You got my note?’

  McLeod nodded.

  ‘I still think I was right, McLeod, my friend. I do not think it is good for you to see these men.’

  ‘Why?’

  The fat shoulders hunched, the thick lips pouted. ‘They murdered your friend. They are crawling reptiles. They should have been wiped off the earth long ago. Seeing them must make you sick. But,’ here he tapped McLeod’s hand with the cane, ‘I must do what you want. It would be foolish to offend a man with such important friends.’ And again, with that slyness always in his eyes, he laughed till the bed creaked.

  ‘I see you are dressed for a party,’ he said, for McLeod wore a black dinner-jacket.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it at the Embassy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps His Excellency is giving a party in your own honour?’

  ‘No, it’s at Mr. Minn’s house, and it’s not for me.’

  The Commandant’s face bulged with melancholy. ‘Ah, those parties at the British Embassy,’ he said, with a great sigh. ‘No one invites me any more. But I remember them. Sometimes in the beautiful houses, sometimes on the lawns. The ladies with their gracious smiles and beautiful dresses. The food, so strange but so good and so much of it; and the Scotch, the wonderful golden Scotch.’

  McLeod remembered how the brigadier and his friends had loved to sip whisky out of disguising tea-cups.

  ‘Well,’ said the Commandant, ‘shall we go?’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘You are making a mistake, McLeod. It is still time to change your mind.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you want to spit in the faces of the men who killed your friend? That is only natural. Be sure myself and my friend the Governor of the prison will turn our backs whatever you wish to do. I think if you were to kill them, in revenge, nothing at all would be said.’

  They were walking along the corridor. The Commandant kept smacking his thigh with his cane. Behind tramped the two tough policemen.

  At the foot of the stairs the little servant, with tears in his cross eyes, raced forward and took McLeod’s hand.

  ‘He still thinks,’ roared the Commandant, ‘we are taking you away to beat you up.’ And he gave the servant a swipe on the bottom with the cane.

  The Italian manager of the hotel was in the vestibule, very nervous but brave. In French he asked McLeod if he should telephone the British Embassy on his behalf. McLeod said it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked the Commandant, when they were outside.

  McLeod explained.

  ‘Foreigners don’t trust us, McLeod. Why? Don’t they know that our souls are ripe like fruit to be plucked by the first person who trusts us?’

  It seemed to McLeod pointless to remind him of his country’s history of treachery, not just because that was the past but also because it could be said of any country.

  ‘However, McLeod,’ said the Commandant more cheerfully, ‘we have as you see a luxurious American car. Why not? Are we not entitled to a little comfort? The road is bad. Life itself is a road full of holes.’

  As McLeod entered the car, with the Commandant’s hand on his back, it occurred to him that in these modern times many men had thus been luxuriously conducted to their necessary if regrettable liquidation. To encourage the thought, a beefy guard sat in front beside the driver, and a jeep of Russian design got ready to follow with the two brutal-looking policemen.

  ‘Tell me,’ murmured McLeod, ‘is it true, according to the Koran, that any faithful follower of Islam can make sure of his place in paradise by exterminating an infidel?’

  The Commandant chuckled, rather sourly. ‘Yes, I believe you could find that somewhere in the Koran,’ he said. ‘It is like your own Bible. Everything is in it that suits you. If you wish to kill your enemy, search through the pages, and you will find sanction. If you wish to forgive him and love him like a brother you will find sanction for that, too. A man takes his choice of what God advises.

  ‘Were you, McLeod, my friend,’ he added softly, ‘reading in your Bible before I came for you tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  The Commandant sighed. ‘I have not read the Holy Koran for years,’ he said. ‘But I have to listen every night to my children practising their recitations.’

  He gave a great sigh, and was silent.

  Soon the tarmac and electric lights of the city were left behind. In the headlamps the dusty road shone like snow.

  McLeod wondered if true enough he was making a mistake in going to see these men. Obviously they had been brutally handled, first to get the confessions out of them, and then because they had confessed. He would not be able to avoid the feeling that any cruelty which had been inflicted on them had been in some way inflicted by him.

  ‘I saw a girl once at a party at your house, McLeod,’ murmured the Commandant. ‘She was Swedish, and very beautiful, with hair like wood ash in colour, and like silk to touch. I could not sleep for many nights afterwards, thinking of her. Sometimes I still lie sleepless and remember her, though my own wife is lying beside me, and my five children are in the next room. Is that foolish? Foolish or not, it is true; and often there are tears in my eyes as I remember.’

  And those tears of regret, McLeod realised, would be as genuine as the snarl of disgust with which the Commandant would look on the condemned men. No wonder the Koran and the Bible, advising human beings, had to give such contradictory advice.

  The Commandant gazed out to where the stars shone as bright as anywhere on earth.

  ‘Perhaps she is married, too, now,’ he said, sighing, ‘and has children.’

  Remembering Karima, McLeod wondered if he would see her in the cell beside the two men, her countrymen, with their faces the same colour as hers, and their eyes as brown?

  ‘But here is the strange thing, McLeod, my friend,’ said the Commandant. ‘She does not know of my existence. I might live in one of those stars for all she knows. At the party she passed very close to me once, and I smiled, but someone else spoke to her just then, and so when she smiled perhaps it wasn’t at me at all, but at this other person.’

  Suddenly he shouted to the driver to stop.

  They had passed a shrine tended by a holy man. The car backed until it was alongside the heap of stones with the stick decorated with rags. The guardian had come creeping hopefully out of the hole where he lived. He was all dust, hair, bones, and rags.

  The Commandant gave the driver some money to thrust into the skinny claw. Blessings were muttered.

  ‘Do you know, McLeod,’ said the Commandant, as they drove on again, ‘some people say – Moslem people – that these holy men ought to ask some blessings for themselves. Look how poor and dirty he was. If you have the lamp of Aladdin in your hand, why not give it a rub for yourself. But you and I know how difficult it is to foresee what will please God. Your friend was killed by people less valuable than rats, and I lie at night, unable to sleep for love of a woman I never even spoke to.’

  Then they were at the fort in which the prison was situated. Towering above in the moonlight, it reminded McLeod of Edinburgh Castle. The road spiralled up to it, and the Commandant grunted to the driver several times to be careful. There was a drop, he muttered, of at least a hundred metres, and the road often broke away at the edge. A lorry had gone over about a month ago; ten men had been killed, and thirty injured; luckily most of them had been criminals.

  At the gate they were scrutinised by an officer who, recognising the Commandant, saluted three times and then went screaming to his men to open the gate.

  ‘This is a place very bad for the nerves,’ muttered the Commandant. ‘It stinks, too. Look, I have brought a handkerchief soaked in my wife’s perfume. I should have warned you to bring something; one of His Excellency’s roses, perhaps.’

  He was still jealous and suspicious of McLeod’s standing with the Minister.

  They got out at a long white building that glimmered sinisterly in the starlight; it looked as if it might contain torture-house and gallows. Appropriate therefore was the stench of human excrement that the brilliance of the stars intensified. The Commandant kept dabbing peevishly at his nose with his handkerchief.

  The Governor of the prison, dressed in military uniform, was expecting them in his office. On its walls were at least two dozen portraits of the king and Prime Minister, while on the desk was a picture of a young man with a flat nose so like the Governor’s he must have been his son. The Governor also had pointed ears, and an amiableness and anxiety to oblige so continuous and excessive that they soon began to fret McLeod’s nerves more than the smell and the dreariness. With quick glances at the huffy Commandant, the Governor kept uttering his silly pleasantries in a shrill voice that would all at once become shriller, like a bird’s whose song is apprehensive.

  ‘It is for you to say, gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘I am at your service. Do you wish to see them here or in their cell? You will find it more comfortable here.’

  ‘I’d rather have them here,’ said the Commandant, ‘but it’s for Mr. McLeod to say. This is his party. As you can see, he’s dressed for it. I hope, wherever we see them, they’re in a fit state to be seen?’

  ‘Certainly. Though I would like to say I was given very short notice.’

  ‘We don’t expect to find them in the best of health. As long as they can speak.’

  ‘Yes, they can speak. I mean, they still have their tongues. But you know how it is with men in their position: they seem to withdraw from the world.’

  ‘There are means,’ sneered the Commandant, ‘of bringing them back to the world.’

  ‘I assure you,’ said the Governor, laughing, ‘what is necessary to know is known.’

  ‘Well, McLeod?’ asked the Commandant. ‘Where is it to be? Here, in comfort? Or in their cell?’

  McLeod for the past two or three minutes had been on the point of deciding to give up the whole thing, and going away tomorrow; but now, angered by the Commandant’s sneer, he said: ‘I’d rather go to their cell.’

  ‘I knew it,’ muttered the Commandant, displeased. ‘All right, let’s go.’

  The way led through a labyrinth of narrow passages between walls the colour of faeces. Out of the cells came chanting, laughter, angry cries, moans, or most often silence. Men in uniform with rifles stood in coffin-shaped nooks in the walls. The Commandant, with his handkerchief constantly at his nose, was furious when he brushed against anything.

  The cell was in a passage where the light was particularly dim and where the other cells seemed to be empty. Two guards, ugly as wrestlers, lounged outside. One, at the Governor’s command, unlocked the door, while the other pointed his revolver as if he expected some savage beast to come rushing out.

  Yet even after the door was open the cell remained silent. The dim light could not penetrate into it. One of the guards offered his torch to the Governor who offered it to the Commandant who signed to McLeod to take it. He did so, and stood for a few seconds with his thumb on the button. Again, even there on the threshold, he was minded to turn and go. If what he had been told was true (and now he found himself wishing it was so that the whole sordid business could be considered at an end), then all he had to do was flick on the torch, and before him would be the men who had killed Donald Kemp. It was then he realised that Kemp had never really been his friend, not even in their undergraduate days; they had never understood or even liked each other very well. It could not have been for Donald’s sake, therefore, that he was there; and as for Margaret Duncan, he had never set eyes on her. Why then had he come, perhaps endangering his career?

  The Commandant, sure that the torch must be broken, cursed the guard and demanded he fetch another; but while the man was protesting that it had been working a minute before they arrived, McLeod switched it on.

  He had not known what emotion he might feel, and now he did not know what emotion he was feeling. The cell was small and had no furniture, not even beds. Crouched against the wall, shackled to it with chains, were the two men, dressed in tunic and short trousers made of some kind of sacking. Their heads were shaved and glinted in the torchlight; their faces were bruised and swollen. One, the elder, had his hands resting on the brick floor in front of him; they seemed strangely tranquil, in spite of the heavy manacles, and of the raw places where his finger-nails had been. The other, instead of toes on one foot, had a contorted mass of flesh; but that might have been a deformity from birth.

  Against his will McLeod was moved to a feeling of sorrow. These men had conquered resentment. God knew what maltreatment they had suffered, and yet as they blinked out at him like blind men they smiled. The effect was of beauty, a terrifying, pathetic beauty. He could find no other word for it. Those gaunt, bruised, cut, forlorn faces were beautiful; not even the shaved heads could spoil it. Not only had resentment been conquered, but pain also, and the fear of pain, and the imminency of violent death, and above all the sorrow of never again seeing people they had loved. They had more peace of mind than any of the men staring in at them.

  ‘Mad,’ muttered the Commandant, through his handkerchief.

  McLeod went into the cell. The man with the misshapen foot tried to cower back further against the wall, but he kept smiling, too. His companion sat very still.

  McLeod realised they could not see him. For all they knew he was another strong-armed guard with a thick club.

  ‘I haven’t come to beat you,’ he said. ‘I am English.’

  Behind him the Commandant laughed. ‘I thought you never called yourself that, McLeod? British you always said, not English.’

  ‘Do you understand?’ asked McLeod.

  The one with no finger-nails nodded. ‘Yes, sahib.’

  ‘What are your names?’

  ‘I am Jamil, he is Sarwar. He is my nephew, sahib. All his life he has been like a little child in his mind.’

  No child, thought McLeod, ill-treated as he had been, would have smiled like that.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Haimir, sahib.’ It was a village McLeod had never heard of.

  ‘Heaps of mud and stones,’ muttered the Commandant. ‘Primitive. Hasn’t changed in a thousand years. Dig the ground with their hands. Can’t build proper houses. Some still live in caves in the cliff-side.’

  McLeod asked Jamil if they were both married.

  ‘I am, sahib. He is not.’

  ‘Look at them,’ said the Commandant. ‘Would you think one is the headman’s brother, and the other his son? I tell you, our country is to be pitied. The Indians say we are one hundred years behind them. They are too generous. We are three hundred years behind.’

  ‘Have you any children?’ McLeod asked Jamil.

  It was the Commandant who answered. ‘He has five,’ he cried, ‘as I have. You see, McLeod, why be surprised? We are all animals. But, my friend, you must come to the point. In the first place, it is very far from pleasant here; and in the second place, your friends at the Embassy will be waiting for you. So, please, come to the point.’

  ‘They say,’ said McLeod, ‘you have confessed to killing an Englishman and an Englishwoman who were guests in your village about eight months ago.’

  Jamil nodded wearily. ‘Yes, we killed them, Sarwar and I.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Do you ask a wolf why it’s a wolf?’ muttered the Commandant peevishly.

  ‘Why did you kill them?’ repeated McLeod. He had minutes ago put out the torch, so that he could now scarcely see the two men huddled on the floor.

  ‘We were cold and hungry because of the snow. We are always cold and hungry during the winter. We thought they would be rich because they were foreigners. So it was planned to kill them while they slept. Sarwar and I were chosen.’

  ‘So there it is, McLeod,’ said the Commandant. ‘A plain case of murder, with robbery the motive. For God’s sake, let us go now, before my head bursts.’

  McLeod ignored him. He spoke to Jamil. ‘What was the man like?’

  The description was so accurate it was clear he must have seen Donald; indeed, he spoke with a kind of weary affection.

  ‘And the woman?’

  He described her as if she was standing before him in sunshine. Her hair he spoke of fondly as being in colour like a certain flower, one of the very few that in spring grew on the barren hills round his village. Not once did he sound to McLeod like a man with two murders on his conscience. But after a month of beatings in this dark cell even guilt itself could have become refined into this peaceful acceptance of pain and imminent death.

  ‘You say they were sleeping,’ said McLeod. ‘Where were they sleeping?’

  ‘In one of the caves.’

  ‘I told you about them,’ said the Commandant. ‘They’re in the hill-side, just above the village. Do you know how long they’ve been there? Two thousand years. Don’t forget to ask them about the bracelet and the photograph.’

  ‘We took them from the bodies,’ said Jamil. ‘We took everything, even their clothes. There was a book.’

  ‘They stripped her naked,’ muttered the Commandant. ‘I did not see her, but everyone tells me she was very beautiful. Think of her, McLeod, naked in the snow, with her blood staining it red.’

  ‘What book?’ asked McLeod.

  For the first time the Governor spoke. ‘He sometimes speaks about a book, but nobody knows anything about it.’

  ‘It would be a Bible,’ said the Commandant. ‘Of course they would burn it.’

  ‘She was sick,’ said Jamil. In the dim light his chains rattled as he made some kind of gesture. ‘Perhaps she would have died soon. Perhaps,’ here his voice sank very low, ‘he would have killed her himself

 

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