LITMIR.BIZ

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I sat up and turned to face her. ‘These tangible assets - what exactly did they consist of?’

      ‘Oh, the usual things. Church plate, precious objects of various kinds. Most of this was rendered down into bullion at the convent, crudely, but effective enough.’

      ‘Why bullion?’ It was something of a superfluous question for I already knew the answer.

      ‘So that my father could fly it out.’

      ‘And how much did that little lot come to?’

      ‘Something over a million pounds sterling in gold and silver. A rough approximation only and then there was a considerable amount in precious stones impossible to estimate and the most important item of all was priceless.’

      ‘And what was that?’

      ‘A statue of the Virgin in beaten silver, known as Our Lady of Tizi Benou, but actually manufactured by the great Saracen silversmith, Amor Khalif in Damascus in the eleventh century’

      ‘My God, but they must have loved you when you flew in with that little lot.’ I said. ‘But we didn’t, Mr Nelson,’ she said calmly. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s still there.’

      ‘The pilot my father hired was a man named Jaeger. A South African. He flew in from France by night at four hundred feet. He told me that was to foil their radar.’ She shook her head and there was a kind of sadness in her voice. ‘He was so alive. A great, black-bearded man who seemed to laugh all the time and wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. I think he was the most romantic figure I’d ever seen in my life.’

      ‘What was the aircraft?’

      ‘A Heron, is that right?’

      I nodded, ‘Four engines. They used them for the Queen’s Flight a few years back. What about passengers?’

      ‘My father and I and Talif who was overseer of the vineyards.’

      ‘What was his story?’

      ‘He had worked for my father for years. They were very close.’ She shrugged. ‘He preferred to come with us rather than stay. There should have been others, but there was trouble at the last moment and we had to leave in a hurry.’

      ‘What went wrong?’

      ‘Oh, I don’t really know. Somehow the local area commander got to know - Major Taleb. He and my father never really got on. Taleb’s mother had been French, but for some reason that only seemed to make him hate France more. He’d fought with the F.L.N. for years.’

      ‘What happened?’

      ‘We took off as Taleb arrived to arrest us. Not that it did us any good. I suppose he must have got on to their air force straightaway’

      ‘And you were intercepted?’

      She nodded. ‘Over the Algerian coast near Cape Djinet. Are you familiar with that coast at all? Do you know the Khufra Marshes?’

      ‘I’ve heard of them.’

      ‘Jaeger managed to crash-land and in one of the lagoons in there. He and my father were killed and the Heron went to the bottom, but Talif managed to get me out in time. He took me to a fishing village not far away, a place called Zarza and nursed me back to health. Later, he got me to France and placed me in the care of the Little Sisters at Grenoble.’

      ‘And did you tell anyone about all this?’

      ‘Only the Sisters, but there was nothing to be done about the situation obviously. To the Algerians, of course, we were all dead.’

      ‘So what happened then?’

      ‘The Order used its influence to get Talif work in Marseilles. I continued my education with them and eventually realised I had a vocation. After my training as a nurse, they sent me to our centre in Dacca.’

      ‘And now you’re back.’

      ‘For a time only. I had yellow fever very badly. It was thought that a spell in Grenoble would prove beneficial.’

      Which was all absolutely fascinating, but came nowhere near explaining more recent events.

      ‘So what’s all this got to do with Redshirt and his friends?’ I demanded.

      ‘That’s simple enough. They work for Taleb. He’s a colonel now in the Algerian Security Police. I’ve made enquiries.’

      ‘But how in the hell did he come back into the picture?’

      ‘Talif came to see me in Grenoble three weeks ago. It seems that about a month ago while working on the Marseilles docks, he was recognised by an Algerian merchant navy officer he’d known years before. He packed his bags at once and moved to Lyon where he got work on the night shift at the local market. When he got home one morning, he found Taleb waiting for him in his room. He told Talif that if he came back to Algeria with him and showed them where the plane had gone down, they’d give him ten per cent and a government job.’

      ‘And what did Talif do?’

      ‘Pretended to agree, then gave him the slip on the way to Marseilles and came to see me.’ She raised her hands and suddenly her face was flooded by the most glorious smile imaginable. ‘Oh, how can I put it to you. It seemed like a sign. Like something that was meant to be.’

      I was completely puzzled. ‘I don’t understand.’

      ‘Our hospital in Dacca was burned to the ground, Mr Nelson. We lost everything. We have willing hands, plenty of those, but now what we need more than anything else in the world is money’

      I saw it all then, in that single, precise moment in time and stared at her in astonishment. ‘And you think the best way of raising it is to pay a quick visit by night to the Khufra Marshes.’

      ‘Exactly,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘When Mr Jaeger was dying, just before the plane sank he gave me the exact bearing, made me repeat it to him. It’s burned into my brain until this very day’

      ‘What do the Sisters of Pity think of this little scheme?’

      ‘They know nothing about it. I was due some leave and I’m taking it. Talif agreed to help and we decided, between us, that Ibiza would be the most suitable base for operations. It’s only two hundred miles from here to Cape Djinet. I borrowed a little money from an old aunt in Dijon and Talif came on ahead of me to procure a suitable boat.’

      ‘You must be stark, staring, raving mad,’ I said.

      ‘Not at all. Talif wrote to tell me he had arranged for a boat and was negotiating with a diver. He suggested I join him this week and booked a hotel room for me.’

      ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You actually intend to go with him?’

      ‘Naturally.’

      The whole thing by then, of course, had assumed all the aspects of a privileged nightmare and I was aware of that curiously helpless feeling again where she was concerned.

      I said, ‘All right, what about Redshirt and his pals last night.’

      ‘There was a note from Talif at the hotel when I got in yesterday. It asked me to meet him at the Mill at La Grande at nine o’clock. It seemed genuine enough. I went out there by taxi.’

      ‘And promptly found yourself in the bag.’

      To my astonishment she said, ‘They were not responsible for their actions, those young men. They were all under the influence of drugs.’

      ‘Oh, I get it,’ I said. ‘I suppose I hit them too hard. Anyway, how can you be sure they weren’t just three fun-loving boys out for kicks?’

      ‘Because they had an argument about keeping me intact, as the one in the red shirt termed it, for Taleb.’

      ‘In other words, things just got out of hand?’

      ‘I suppose

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