He sat down beside her frowning to himself.
"That's what got me down at home, you know. The feeling of being watched and spied upon. All the security precautions. Having to account for one's actions, for one's friends... All necessary, I dare say, but it gets you down in the end... And so when someone comes along with a proposition - well, you listen... It all sounds fine..." He gave a short laugh. "And one ends up - here!"
Hilary said slowly:
"You mean you've come to exactly the same circumstances as those from which you tried to escape? You're being watched and spied upon in just the same way - or worse?"
Betterton pushed his hair back nervously from his forehead.
"I don't know," he said. "Honestly. I don't know. I can't be sure. It may be all going on in my own mind. I don't know that I'm being watched at all. Why should I be? Why should they bother? They've got me here - in prison."
"It isn't in the least as you imagined it?"
"That's the odd thing. I suppose it is in a way. The working conditions are perfect. You've every facility, every kind of apparatus. You can work for as long a time as you like or as short a time. You've got every comfort and accessory. Food, clothes, living quarters, but you're conscious all the time that you're in prison."
"I know. When the gates clanged behind us today as we came in it was a horrible feeling." Hilary shuddered.
"Well," Betterton seemed to pull himself together. "I've answered your question. Now answer mine. What are you doing here pretending to be Olive?"
"Olive -" she stopped, feeling for words.
"Yes? What about Olive? What's happened to her? What are you trying to say?"
She looked with pity at his haggard nervous face.
"I've been dreading having to tell you."
"You mean - something's happened to her?"
"Yes. I'm sorry, terribly sorry... Your wife's dead... She was coming to join you and the plane crashed. She was taken to hospital and died two days later."
He stared straight ahead of him. It was as though he was determined to show no emotion of any kind. He said quietly:
"So Olive's dead? I see..."
There was a long silence. Then he turned to her.
"All right. I can go on from there. You took her place and came here, why?"
This time Hilary was ready with her response. Tom Betterton had believed that she had been sent "to get him out of here" as he had put it. That was not the case. Hilary's position was that of a spy. She had been sent to gain information not to plan the escape of a man who had placed himself willingly in the position he now was. Moreover she could command no means of deliverance, she was a prisoner as much as he was.
To confide in him fully would, she felt, be dangerous. Betterton was very near a breakdown. At any moment he might go completely to pieces. In those circumstances it would be madness to expect him to keep a secret.
She said,
"I was in the hospital with your wife when she died. I offered to take her place and try and reach you. She wanted to get a message to you very badly."
He frowned.
"But surely -"
She hurried on - before he could realise the weakness of the tale.
"It's not so incredible as it sounds. You see I had a lot of sympathy with all these ideas - the ideas you've just been talking about. Scientific secrets shared with all nations - a new World Order. I was enthusiastic about it all. And then my hair - if what they expected was a red-haired woman of the right age, I thought I'd get through. It seemed worth trying anyway."
"Yes," he said. His eyes swept over her head. "Your hair's exactly like Olive's."
"And then, you see, your wife was so insistent - about the message she wanted me to give to you."
"Oh yes, the message. What message?"
"To tell you to be careful - very careful - that you were in danger - from someone called Boris?"
"Boris? Boris Glydr, do you mean?"
"Yes, do you know him?"
He shook his head.
"I've never met him. But I know him by name. He's a relation of my first wife's. I know about him."
"Why should he be dangerous?"
"What?"
He spoke absently.
Hilary repeated her question.
"Oh, that." He seemed to come back from far away. "I don't know why he should be dangerous to me, but it's true that by all accounts he's a dangerous sort of chap."
"In what way?"
"Well, he's one of those half balmy idealists who would quite happily kill off half humanity if they thought for some reason it would be a good thing."
"I know the sort of person you mean."
She felt she did know - vividly. (But why?)
"Had Olive seen him? What did he say to her?"
"I can't tell you. That's all she said. About danger - oh yes, she said she couldn't believe it."
"Believe what?"
"I don't know." She hesitated a minute and then said, "You see - she was dying..."
A spasm of pain convulsed his face.
"I know... I know... I shall get used to it in time. At the moment I can't realise it. But I'm puzzled about Boris. How could he be dangerous to me here? If he'd seen Olive he was in London, I suppose?"
"He was in London, yes."
"Then I simply don't get it...Oh well, what does it matter? What the hell does anything matter? Here we are, stuck in this bloody Unit surrounded by a lot of inhuman Robots..."
"That's just how they felt to me."
"And we can't get out" He pounded with his fist on the concrete. "We can't get out."
"Oh yes, we can," said Hilary.
He turned to stare at her in surprise.
"What on earth do you mean?"
"We'll find a way," said Hilary.
"My dear girl," his laugh was scornful. "You haven't the faintest idea what you're up against in this place."
"People escaped from the most impossible places during the war," said Hilary stubbornly. She was not going to give in to despair. "They tunnelled, or something."
"How can you tunnel through sheer rock? And where to? It's desert all round."
"Then it will have to be 'or something.'"
He looked at her. She smiled with a confidence that was dogged rather than genuine.
"What an extraordinary girl you are. You sound quite sure of yourself."
"There's always a way. I dare say it will take time, and a lot of planning."
His face clouded over again.
"Time," he said. "Time... That's what I can't afford."
"Why?"
"I don't know whether you'll be able to understand... It's like this. I can't really - do my stuff here."
She frowned.
"How do you mean?"
"How shall I put it? I can't work. I can't think. In my stuff one has to have a high degree of concentration. A lot of it is - well - creative. Since coming here I've just lost the urge. All I can do is good sound hack work. The sort of thing any twopenny-halfpenny scientific chap can do. But that's not what they brought me here for. They want original stuff and I can't do original stuff. And the more nervous and afraid I get, the less I'm fit to turn out anything worth turning out. And it's driving me off my rocker, do you see?"
Yes, she saw now. She recalled Dr. Rubec's remarks about prima donnas and scientists.
"If I can't deliver the goods, what is an outfit like this going to do about it? They'll liquidate me."
"Oh no."
"Oh yes they will. They're not sentimentalists here. What's saved me so far is this plastic surgery business. They do it a little at a time, you know. And naturally a fellow who's having constant minor operations can't be expected to concentrate. But they've finished the business now."
"But why was it done at all? What's the point?"
"Oh, that! For safety. My safety, I mean. It's done if - if you're a 'wanted' man."
"Are you a 'wanted' man, then?"
"Yes, didn't you know
? Oh, I suppose they wouldn't advertise the fact in the papers. Perhaps even Olive didn't know. But I'm wanted right enough."
"You mean for - treason is the word, isn't it? You mean you've sold them atom secrets?"
He avoided her eyes.
"I didn't sell anything. I gave them what I knew of our processes - gave it freely. If you can believe me, I wanted to give it to them. It was part of the whole setup - the pooling of scientific knowledge. Oh, can't you understand?"
She could understand. She could understand Andy Peters doing just that. She could see Ericsson with his fanatical dreamer's eyes betraying his country with a high-souled enthusiasm.
Yet it was hard for her to visualise Tom Betterton doing it - and she realised with a shock that all that showed was the difference between Betterton a few months ago, arriving in all the zeal of enthusiasm, and Betterton now, nervous, defeated, down to earth - an ordinary badly frightened man.
Even as she accepted the logic of that, Betterton looked round him nervously and said:
"Everyone's gone down. We'd better -"
She rose.
"Yes. But it's all right, you know. They'll think it quite natural - under the circumstances."
He said awkwardly:
"We'll have to go on with this now, you know. I mean - you'll have to go on being - my wife."
"Of course."
"And we'll have to share a room and all that. But it will be quite all right. I mean, you needn't be afraid that -"
He swallowed in an embarrassed manner.
"How handsome he is," thought Hilary, looking at his profile, "and how little it moves me..."
"I don't think we need worry about that," she said cheerfully. "The important thing is to get out of here alive."
Chapter 14
In a room at the Hotel Mamounia, Marrakesh, the man called Jessop was talking to Miss Hetherington. A different Miss Hetherington this, from the one that Hilary had known at Casablanca and at Fez. The same appearance, the same twin set, the same depressing hair-do. But the manner had changed. It was a woman now both brisk, competent, and seeming years younger than her appearance.
The third person in the room was a dark stocky man with intelligent eyes. He was tapping gently on the table with his fingers and humming a little French song under his breath.
"... and as far as you know," Jessop was saying, "those are the only people she talked to at Fez?"
Janet Hetherington nodded.
"There was the Calvin Baker woman, whom we'd already met at Casablanca. I'll say frankly I still can't make up my mind about her. She went out of her way to be friendly with Olive Betterton, and with me for that matter. But Americans are friendly, they do enter into conversation with people in hotels, and they like joining them on trips."
"Yes," said Jessop, "it's all a little too overt for what we're looking for."
"And besides," went on Janet Hetherington, "she was on this plane, too."
"You're assuming," said Jessop, "that the crash was planned." He looked sideways towards the dark, stocky man. "What about it, Leblanc?"
Leblanc stopped humming his tune, and stopped his little tattoo on the table for a moment or two.
"Çala ce peut," he said. "There may have been sabotage to the machine and that is why it crashed. We shall never know. The plane crashed and went up in flames and everyone on board was killed."
"What do you know of the pilot?"
"Alcadi? Young, reasonably competent. No more. Badly paid." He added the two last words with a slight pause in front of them.
Jessop said:
"Open therefore to other employment, but presumably not a candidate for suicide?"
"There were seven bodies," said Leblanc. "Badly charred, unrecognisable, but seven bodies. One cannot get away from that."
Jessop turned back to Janet Hetherington.
"You were saying?" he said.
"There was a French family at Fez that Mrs. Betterton exchanged a few words with. There was a rich Swedish business man with a glamour girl. And the rich oil magnate, Mr. Aristides."
"Ah," said Leblanc, "that fabulous figure himself. What must it feel like, I have often asked myself, to have all the money in the world? For me," he added frankly, "I would keep race horses and women, and all the world has to offer. But old Aristides shuts himself up in his castle in Spain - literally his castle in Spain, mon cher - and collects, so they say, Chinese potteries of the Sung period. But one must remember," he added, "that he is at least seventy. It is possible at that age that Chinese potteries are all that interest one."
"According to the Chinese themselves," said Jessop, "the years between sixty and seventy are the most rich in living and one is then most appreciative of the beauty and delight of life."
"Pas moi!" said Leblanc.
"There were some Germans at Fez, too," continued Janet Hetherington, "but as far as I know they didn't exchange any remarks with Olive Betterton."
"A waiter or a servant, perhaps," said Jessop.
"That's always possible."
"And she went out into the old town alone, you say?"
"She went with one of the regular guides. Someone may have contacted her on that tour."
"At any rate she decided quite suddenly to go to Marrakesh."
"Not suddenly," she corrected him. "She already had her reservations."
"Ah, I'm wrong," said Jessop. "What I mean is that Mrs. Calvin Baker decided rather suddenly to accompany her." He got up and paced up and down. "She flew to Marrakesh," he said, "and the plane crashed and came down in flames. It seems ill-omened, does it not, for anyone called Olive Betterton to travel by air. First the crash near Casablanca, and then this one. Was it an accident or was it contrived? If there were people who wished to get rid of Olive Betterton, there would be easier ways to do it than by wrecking a plane, I should say."
"One never knows," said Leblanc. "Understand me, mon cher. Once you have got into that state of mind where the taking of human lives no longer counts, then if it is simpler to put a little explosive package under a seat in a plane, than to wait about at the corner on a dark night and stick a knife into someone, then the package will be left and the fact that six other people will die also is not even considered."
"Of course," said Jessop, "I know I'm in a minority of one, but I still think there's a third solution - that they faked the crash."
Leblanc looked at him with interest.
"That could be done, yes. The plane could be brought down and it could be set on fire. But you cannot get away from the fact, mon cher Jessop, that there were people in the plane. The charred bodies were actually there."
"I know," said Jessop. "That's the stumbling block. Oh, I've no doubt my ideas are fantastic, but it's such a neat ending to our hunt. Too neat. That's what I feel. It says finish to us. We write down R.I.P. in the margin of our report and it's ended. There's no further trail to take up." He turned again to Leblanc. "You are having that search instituted?"
"For two days now," said Leblanc. "Good men, too. It's a particularly lonely spot, of course, where the plane crashed. It was off its course, by the way."
"Which is significant," Jessop put in.
"The nearest villages, the nearest habitations, the nearest traces of a car, all those are being investigated fully. In this country as well as in yours, we fully realise the importance of the investigation. In France, too, we have lost some of our best young scientists. In my opinion, mon cher, it is easier to control temperamental opera singers than it is to control a scientist. They are brilliant, these young men, erratic, rebellious; and finally and dangerously, they are most completely credulous. What do they imagine goes on là-bas? Sweetness and light and desire for truth and the millennium? Alas, poor children, what disillusionment awaits them."
"Let's go over the passenger list once more," said Jessop.
The Frenchman reached out a hand, picked it out of a wire basket and set it before his colleague. The two men pored over it together.
&
nbsp; "Mrs. Calvin Baker, American. Mrs. Betterton, English. Torquil Ericsson, Norwegian - what do you know of him, by the way?"
"Nothing that I can recall," said Leblanc. "He was young, not more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight."
"I know his name," said Jessop, frowning. "I think - I am almost sure - that he read a paper before the Royal Society."