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In a few minutes more Victoria had passed its entrance and had come to a more squalid part. The river was hidden from her by palm plantations fenced off with rusty barbed wire. On the right were tumble-down houses inside rough mud-brick walls, and small shanties with children playing in the dirt and clouds of flies hanging over garbage heaps. A road led away from the river and a car was standing there – a somewhat battered and archaic car. By the car, Edward was standing.

‘Good,’ said Edward, ‘you’ve got here. Get in.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Victoria, entering the battered automobile with delight. The driver, who appeared to be an animate bundle of rags, turned round and grinned happily at her.

‘We’re going to Babylon,’ said Edward. ‘It’s about time we had a day out.’

The car started with a terrific jerk and bumped madly over the rude paving stones.

‘To Babylon?’ cried Victoria. ‘How lovely it sounds. Really to Babylon?’

The car swerved to the left and they were bowling along upon a well-paved road of imposing width.

‘Yes, but don’t expect too much. Babylon – if you know what I mean – isn’t quite what it was.’

Victoria hummed.

‘How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore and ten,

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again.’

‘I used to sing that when I was a small child. It always fascinated me. And now we’re really going there!’

‘And we’ll get back by candlelight. Or we should do. Actually you never know in this country.’

‘This car looks very much as though it might break down.’

‘It probably will. There’s sure to be simply everything wrong with it. But these Iraqis are frightfully good at tying it up with string and saying Inshallah and then it goes again.’

‘It’s always Inshallah, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, nothing like laying the responsibility upon the Almighty.’

‘The road isn’t very good, is it?’ gasped Victoria, bouncing in her seat. The deceptively well-paved and wide road had not lived up to its promise. The road was still wide but was now corrugated with ruts.

‘It gets worse later on,’ shouted Edward.

They bounced and bumped happily. The dust rose in clouds round them. Large lorries covered with Arabs tore along in the middle of the track and were deaf to all intimations of the horn.

They passed walled-in gardens, and parties of women and children and donkeys and to Victoria it was all new and part of the enchantment of going to Babylon with Edward beside her.

They reached Babylon bruised and shaken in a couple of hours. The meaningless pile of ruined mud and burnt brick was somewhat of a disappointment to Victoria, who expected something in the way of columns and arches, looking like pictures she had seen of Baalbek.

But little by little her disappointment ebbed as they scrambled over mounds and lumps of burnt brick led by the guide. She listened with only half an ear to his profuse explanations, but as they went along the Processional Way to the Ishtar Gate, with the faint reliefs of unbelievable animals high on the walls, a sudden sense of the grandeur of the past came to her and a wish to know something about this vast proud city that now lay dead and abandoned. Presently, their duty to Antiquity accomplished, they sat down by the Babylonian Lion to eat the picnic lunch that Edward had brought with him. The guide moved away, smiling indulgently and telling them firmly that they must see the Museum later.

‘Must we?’ said Victoria dreamily. ‘Things all labelled and put into cases don’t seem a bit real somehow. I went to the British Museum once. It was awful, and dreadfully tiring on the feet.’

‘The past is always boring,’ said Edward. ‘The future’s much more important.’

‘This isn’t boring,’ said Victoria, waving a sandwich towards the panorama of tumbling brick. ‘There’s a feeling of – of greatness here. What’s the poem “When you were a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave”? Perhaps we were. You and I, I mean.’

‘I don’t think there were any Kings of Babylon by the time there were Christians,’ said Edward. ‘I think Babylon stopped functioning somewhere about five or six hundred BC. Some archaeologist or other is always turning up to give lectures about these things – but I really never grasp any of the dates – I mean not until proper Greek and Roman ones.’

‘Would you have liked being a King of Babylon, Edward?’

Edward drew a deep breath.

‘Yes, I should.’

‘Then we’ll say you were. You’re in a new incarnation now.’

‘They understood how to be Kings in those days!’ said Edward. ‘That’s why they could rule the world and bring it into shape.’

‘I don’t know that I should have liked being a slave much,’ said Victoria meditatively, ‘Christian or otherwise.’

‘Milton was quite right,’ said Edward. “‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” I always admired Milton’s Satan.’

‘I never quite got around to Milton,’ said Victoria apologetically. ‘But I did go and see Comus at Sadler’s Wells and it was lovely and Margot Fonteyn danced like a kind of frozen angel.’

‘If you were a slave, Victoria,’ said Edward, ‘I should free you and take you into my harem – over there,’ he added gesticulating vaguely at a pile of debris.

A glint came into Victoria’s eye.

‘Talking of harems –’ she began.

‘How are you getting on with Catherine?’ asked Edward hastily.

‘How did you know I was thinking about Catherine?’

‘Well, you were, weren’t you? Honestly, Viccy, I do want you to become friends with Catherine.’

‘Don’t call me Viccy.’

‘All right, Charing Cross. I want you to become friends with Catherine.’

‘How fatuous men are! Always wanting their girl friends to like each other.’

Edward sat up energetically. He had been reclining with his hands behind his head.

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Charing Cross. Anyway, your references to harems are simply silly –’

‘No, they’re not. The way all those girls glower intensely at you and yearn at you! It makes me mad.’

‘Splendid,’ said Edward. ‘I love you to be mad. But to return to Catherine. The reason I want you to be friends with Catherine is that I’m fairly sure she’s the best way of approach to all the things we want to find out. She knows something.’

‘You really think so?’

‘Remember what I heard her say about Anna Scheele?’

‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘How have you been getting on with Karl Marx? Any results?’

‘Nobody’s made a bee-line at me and invited me into the fold. In fact, Catherine told me yesterday the party wouldn’t accept me, because I’m not sufficiently politically educated. And to have to read all that dreary stuff – honestly, Edward, I haven’t the brains for it.’

‘You are not politically aware, are you?’ Edward laughed. ‘Poor Charing Cross. Well, well, Catherine may be frantic with brains and intensity and political awareness, my fancy is still a little Cockney typist who can’t spell any words of three syllables.’

Victoria frowned suddenly. Edward’s words brought back to her mind the curious interview she had had with Dr Rathbone. She told Edward about it. He seemed much more upset than she would have expected him to be.

‘This is serious, Victoria, really serious. Try and tell me exactly what he said.’

Victoria tried her best to recall the exact words Rathbone had used.

‘But I don’t see,’ she said, ‘why it upsets you so.’

‘Eh?’ Edward seemed abstracted. ‘You don’t see – But my dear girl, don’t you realize that this shows that they’ve got wise to you. They’re warning you off. I don’t like it Victoria – I don’t like it at all.’

He paused and then said gravely:

‘Communists, you know, are very ruthless. It’s part of their creed to stick at nothing. I don’t want you knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris, darling.’

How odd, thought Victoria, to be sitting amidst the ruins of Babylon debating whether or not she was likely in the near future to be knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris. Half closing her eyes she thought dreamily, ‘I shall wake up soon and find I’m in London dreaming a wonderful melodramatic dream about dangerous Babylon. Perhaps,’ she thought, closing her eyes altogether, ‘I am in London…and the alarm clock will go off very soon, and I shall get up and go to Mr Greenholtz’s office – and there won’t be any Edward…’

And at that last thought she opened her eyes again hastily to make sure that Edward was indeed really there (and what was it I was going to ask him at Basrah and they interrupted us and I forgot?) and it was not a dream. The sun was glaring down in a dazzling and most un-London-like way, and the ruins of Babylon were pale and shimmering with a background of dark palms and sitting up with his back a little towards her was Edward. How extraordinarily nicely his hair grew down with a little twirl into his neck – and what a nice neck – bronzed red brown from the sun – with no blemishes on it – so many men had necks with cysts or pimples where their collars had rubbed – a neck like Sir Rupert’s for instance, with a boil just starting.

Suddenly with a stifled exclamation Victoria sat bolt upright and her daydreams were a thing of the past. She was wildly excited.

Edward turned an inquiring head.

‘What’s the matter, Charing Cross?’

‘I’ve just remembered,’ said Victoria, ‘about Sir Rupert Crofton Lee.’

As Edward still turned a blank inquiring look upon her Victoria proceeded to elucidate her meaning which truth to tell, she did not do very clearly.

‘It was a boil,’ she said, ‘on his neck.’

‘A boil on his neck?’ Edward was puzzled.

‘Yes, in the aeroplane. He sat in front of me, you know, and that hood thing he wore fell back and I saw it – the boil.’

‘Why shouldn’t he have a boil? Painful, but lots of people get them.’

‘Yes, yes, of course they do. But the point is that that morning on the balcony he hadn’t.’

‘Hadn’t what?’

‘Hadn’t got a boil. Oh, Edward, do try and take it in. In the aeroplane he had a boil and on the balcony at the Tio he hadn’t got a boil. His neck was quite smooth and unscarred – like yours now.’

‘Well, I suppose it had gone away.’

‘Oh no, Edward, it couldn’t have. It was only a day later, and it was just coming up. It couldn’t have gone away – not completely without a trace. So you see what it means – yes, it must mean – the man at the Tio wasn’t Sir Rupert at all.’

She nodded her head with vehemence. Edward stared at her.

‘You’re crazy, Victoria. It must have been Sir Rupert. You didn’t see any other difference in him.’

‘But don’t you see, Edward, I’d never really looked at him properly – only at his – well, you might call it general effect. The hat – and the cape – and the swashbuckling attitude. He’d be a very easy man to impersonate.’

‘But they’d have known at the Embassy –’

‘He didn’t stay at the Embassy, did he? He came to the Tio. It was one of the minor secretaries or people who met him. The Ambassador’s in England. Besides, he’s travelled and been away from England so much.’

‘But why –’

‘Because of Carmichael, of course. Carmichael was coming to Baghdad to meet him – to tell him what he’d found out. Only they’d never met before. So Carmichael wouldn’t know he wasn’t the right man – and he wouldn’t be on his guard. Of course – it was Rupert Crofton Lee (the false one) who stabbed Carmichael! Oh, Edward, it all fits in.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it. It’s crazy. Don’t forget Sir Rupert was killed afterwards in Cairo.’

‘That’s where it all happened. I know now. Oh Edward, how awful. I saw it happen.’

‘You saw it happen – Victoria, are you quite mad?’

‘No, I’m not in the least mad. Just listen, Edward. There was a knock on my door – in the hotel in Heliopolis – at least I thought it was on my door and I looked out, but it wasn’t – it was one door down, Sir Rupert Crofton Lee’s. It was one of the stewardesses or air hostesses or whatever they call them. She asked him if he would mind coming to BOAC office – just along the corridor. I came out of my room just afterwards. I passed a door which had a notice with BOAC on it, and the door opened and he came out. I thought then that he had had some news that made him walk quite differently. Do you see, Edward? It was a trap, the substitute was waiting, all ready, and as soon as he came in, they just conked him on the head and the other one came out and took up the part. I think they probably kept him somewhere in Cairo, perhaps in the hotel as an invalid, kept him drugged and then killed him just at the right moment when the wrong one had come back to Cairo.’

‘It’s a magnificent story,’ said Edward. ‘But you know, Victoria, quite frankly you are making the whole thing up. There’s no corroboration of it.’

‘There’s the boil –’

‘Oh, damn the boil!’

‘And there are one or two other things.’

‘What?’

‘The BOAC notice on the door. It wasn’t there later. I remembered being puzzled when I found the BOAC office was on the other side of the entrance hall. That’s one thing. And there’s another. That air stewardess, the one who knocked at his door. I’ve seen her since – here in Baghdad – and what’s more, at the Olive Branch. The first day I went there. She came in and spoke to Catherine. I thought then I’d seen her before.’

After a moment’s silence, Victoria said:

‘So you must admit, Edward, that it isn’t all my fancy.’

Edward said slowly:

‘It all comes back to the Olive Branch – and to Catherine. Victoria, all ragging apart, you’ve got to get closer to Catherine. Flatter her, butter her up, talk Bolshie ideas to her. Somehow or other get sufficiently intimate with her to know who her friends are and where she goes and whom she’s in touch with outside the Olive Branch.’

‘It won’t be easy,’ said Victoria, ‘but I’ll try. What about Mr Dakin. Ought I to tell him about this?’

‘Yes, of course. But wait a day or two. We may have more to go on,’ Edward sighed. ‘I shall take Catherine to Le Select to hear the cabaret one night.’

And this time Victoria felt no pang of jealousy. Edward had spoken with a grim determination that ruled out any anticipation of pleasure in the commission he had undertaken.

II

Exhilarated by her discoveries, Victoria found it no effort to greet Catherine the following day with an effusion of friendliness. It was so kind of Catherine she said, to have told her of a place to have her hair washed. It needed washing terribly badly. (This was undeniable, Victoria had returned from Babylon with her dark hair the colour of red rust from the clogging sand.)

‘It is looking terrible, yes,’ said Catherine, eyeing it with a certain malicious satisfaction. ‘You went out then in that dust-storm yesterday afternoon?’

‘I hired a car and went to see Babylon,’ said Victoria. ‘It was very interesting, but on the way back, the dust-storm got up and I was nearly choked and blinded.’

‘It is interesting, Babylon,’ said Catherine, ‘but you should go with someone who understands it and can tell you about it properly. As for your hair, I will take you to this Armenian girl tonight. She will give you a cream shampoo. It is the best.’