‘I am sorry, Monsieur, but you have to wait here. Idris has business.’
‘Yes, well, I have business, too-’
‘Idris’s business,’ said Mustapha, ‘is your business.’
‘My business?’
But Mustapha would say no more. They had to wait until Idris either arrived or sent a message. Mustapha sat down in the shade of the wall. Seymour stood around uncertainly for a while and then sat down on the hotel steps. He wondered if he should go inside and find somewhere more comfortable and less conspicuous to sit. Then he wondered why he was waiting, anyway. This, he couldn’t help thinking, was another thing that wouldn’t look good if word got back to the Foreign Office or Scotland Yard; their man hanging around at the behest of a couple of drug dealers!
Chantale came out of the door, saw him, raised an eyebrow, smiled (was it pityingly?) and then went back inside. To write, no doubt. But what was she writing? Her bloody gossip column, probably. Another, alarming, thought struck him. Might he not be about to figure in it? He would imagine all sorts of barbed comments about people out from London. And, meanwhile, ought he not to be getting on with-?
At that point a small boy appeared. He went up to Mustapha and whispered in his ear. Mustapha stood up.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ve got him!’
Exactly who had they got, wondered Seymour with misgiving? And what, in their world, did they mean by ‘got’?
He would see, said Mustapha confidently, and they set off across the city with the small boy.
He led them to a large yard out of which carts were rumbling. A man was sitting glumly in the dust and Idris was standing over him ostentatiously fingering the dagger at his belt.
A man came out of the stables.
‘Idris, I do this for you because you are my friend. But a cart has to be driven and-’
Idris held up a hand.
‘It will be driven. Wait but a moment. My friends will be here and then — and here they are!’
‘Don’t worry, Mohammed!’ said Mustapha soothingly to the man who had come out of the stables. ‘This will not be forgotten.’
‘I shall be out of a job,’ said the man sitting on the ground. ‘And that won’t be forgotten, either.’
‘Ten minutes, no more!’ warned the man who had come out of the stables. ‘No more!’
He went back inside.
‘So, Fazal…’ began Mustapha.
Fazal, it turned out, was the man Mustapha and Idris had spoken to at the pig-sticking, the man from whom they had got most of their information on that occasion. Dutifully, they secured his name and where he lived. And then, even more surprisingly, they had followed this up by calling on him to ‘invite’ him to come and meet their friend, who, they knew, was anxious to talk to him.
But when they had got to the block where he had said he lived they had been unable to find him. Yes, people in the block assured them, he certainly lived there but no one seemed to have seen him lately. Further inquiries led to a lady who claimed to be his wife. Yes, she said, he hadn’t been around lately. He was a carter who worked irregular hours.
When might they catch him in?
Alas…
Does he not eat, inquired Mustapha, mindful, perhaps, that he was forgoing his own evening meal; and reckoning that after a day such as the carter worked, and after abstaining from food since daylight, one thing he would certainly not be missing was his evening Ramadan meal.
Well, of course…
Then they would see him then.
But when they had come again he was nowhere in sight. Nor was there much evidence of the preparation of a Ramadan meal.
You are mucking us about, said Mustapha severely.
No, no, no, no. That was the last thing she would do. It was just that… well, she had sensed, deep in her heart — she and Fazal were very close, she knew exactly what he would be thinking — and she had suddenly — belatedly, alas — realized that he would not be coming home that night.
Where would he be spending the night, then?
Alas, their closeness did not extend so far…
Mustapha, who did not believe a word of it, was all for cutting her throat. But Idris had had a flash of inspiration.
Could it be, he had asked sternly, that the pair were not actually married? And that Fazal had gone, as all right-thinking men should do, home to his real wife for the Ramadan evening meal?
The lady, flustered, agreed after a while that there could be something in what Idris had said.
So, Mustapha has asked, with rising impatience, where did Fazal and his true wife live?
Alas…
Mustapha had taken out his knife at this point, the lady had shrieked, the block had been aroused, people came swarming, and Mustapha and Idris had been obliged to beat a retreat.
Mustapha had been inclined to abandon their efforts: but Idris had suddenly had another flash of inspiration. He had remembered that the lady had let slip that Fazal was a carter. With a zeal for the chase which threatened to rival even that of the French, he had made a tour of all the carting establishments in the vicinity. Seymour, who realized what the effort must have cost him after the lateness of the day and his fasting, felt a moment’s contrition after his earlier ruminations. Prize bloodhounds Mustapha and Idris might not be but once they got on the trail they stuck to it. And in the end Idris had got his man.
‘So, Fazal…’ said Mustapha.
‘I knew it meant trouble,’ said the carter resignedly, ‘when I heard that you were trying to find me.’
‘Why did you make it difficult for us, then?’ demanded Mustapha.
‘Someone told me who you were,’ said Fazal.
‘Who we were?’
‘That you were in the Business. No offence!’ he added hurriedly. ‘It was just that he thought it would be a good idea if I stayed away from you.’
‘Well, that’s not very friendly.’
‘I would have been all right,’ said the carter gloomily, ‘if it had not been for Fatima.’
‘Well, now we’ve found you,’ said Mustapha, ‘and it’s not all right!’
‘Ten minutes!’ shouted the man who had gone back into the carter’s. ‘That’s all! Then he’s back on the carts!’
‘Start talking!’ ordered Mustapha.
The first part of Fazal’s story Seymour already knew. He and a friend had been following the hunt and had seen Bossu ride off away from the others into the scrub. Fazal, who was evidently a keen student of form, and who had seen Bossu riding on previous occasions, had not wanted to follow him but his friend had persuaded him.
But then ‘Suddenly he wasn’t there! “He’s come off,” I said to my friend. “I knew he was a dead loss. Let’s get back to the others.” “Perhaps he’s broken his neck?” my friend said. “That would be worth seeing! Let’s have a look.” So we ran-’
‘Just stop there for a moment,’ said Seymour. ‘You ran over. At once?’
‘Yes. We guessed he’d come off and-’
‘You got there pretty quickly?’
‘Oh, we weren’t slow.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘Him. With the lance sticking in him. And as soon as I saw that, I said, “Let’s get out of here!” But my friend wanted to have a look. Close up. So-’
‘Hold on. Back to the moment you first saw him. With the lance sticking in. What else did you see?’
‘Well, there was nothing else. Just the bushes. And the sand. And the lance.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve got that bit. But there must have been other things.’
‘I don’t think so…’
‘A horse, for instance?’
‘Well, of course there was a horse. His.’
‘What was it doing? Standing there?’
‘No, no, it was running away. Bolting.’
‘In which direction was it running?’
‘Away. Straight ahead. Away from…’
‘Away from the hunt? Think. Was it running back to the hunt or away from it?’
‘Away from it.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because someone else I’ve talked to has said that they saw, or heard, a horse going back to the hunt.’
‘If they did, that’s not the horse I saw. The horse I saw was definitely bolting. Away from the hunt. The Frenchman had just come off-’