Алистер Маклин: Borrowed Time

‘Perhaps you have learned that in future, when an officer of the law tells you to do something, you do it at once.’

The policeman opened the sack and looked inside. The plastic bags were unmistakable. His mouth dropped open. He looked up and found himself staring into the barrel of Amrit’s gun.

‘Put down the bag, officer.’ Amrit’s voice was firm now, controlled. The policeman dropped the sack beside the motorbike. ‘Now take off your clothes.’

‘You can’t do this.’

‘I wouldn’t normally do it,’ Amrit said. ‘In the case of a rattle-snake like you, however, I’m prepared to be creative.’

‘You’ll be caught before you get to the next town.’

‘No, I won’t.’

The officer brought up his knee sharply. Amrit moved aside and tapped the end of the gun barrel on the officer’s lip, splitting it. He yelped and staggered back. Blood poured down his chin.

‘Don’t get blood on the shirt,’ Amrit warned as the officer staunched the flow with his handkerchief. ‘Get a move on.’

In five minutes Amrit was dressed in the policeman’s clothes. He took time in the procedure to use the bike’s first-aid kit to patch his leg and put an adhesive dressing on the policeman’s mouth. He put his own clothes in the sack on top of the drugs and put the sack in one of the motorbike’s panniers.

‘In other circumstances I would have done an exchange of clothes with you,’ Amrit said, getting on the bike and positioning the Ray-Bans on the bridge of his nose. ‘But I’ll need my shabby wardrobe later. Besides …’ He stared at the officer in his striped jockey shorts. ‘You could use a lesson in humility.’

Amrit kick-started the machine and drove away.

‘I suppose you could say the Security Council is redoubling its efforts,’ Philpott told Dr Arberry. ‘We never do anything precipitate. Flying off the handle can be spectacular, but it’s seldom ever right. So forgive us if we appear to move slowly, but we like to have all the facts marshalled and verified before we embark on serious action.’

They were in the drawing room at Arberry’s mansion with glasses of sherry in their hands, gazing out at the sunset across the gardens. Philpott had arrived unannounced and introduced himself as yet another Security Council fact-finder. A senior one. He was in the region, he said, to evaluate the findings of Mr Graham and Mr Trent, and thought he would call on the doctor, having heard so much about him.

‘I stand here many an evening,’ Arberry said, ‘and I look out over a scene that doesn’t, I’m sure, fall very short of perfection. And along with the joy that is generated by such beauty, I get the deepest pain.’ He looked at Philpott. ‘All this is being eroded and pulled apart by nothing more than people’s envy.’

‘Envy?’

‘Envy and the need that some of them feel to dominate their environment.’

‘Envy of what, though?’

‘Of me. I’m convinced that’s the root of most of the trouble in this area. Or most of the trouble that’s been visited on me and those who work for me. There are people who envy and lust after what I possess. Their perspective doesn’t let them see that I’m driven by my enthusiasms, they don’t see that what I have, I have made. I didn’t walk in here and take anything for nothing. I built it all. For everything this divine place gives me, I strive to give back ten times, twenty times.’

‘Yet people see you as a menace – would you say that’s accurate? You are perceived as a threat to something?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Arberry said. ‘I’m an undesirable, because what I do, what I achieve, stands in the way of some people’s ambitions.’

‘You mean you’re the equivalent of civilization, yes? And what they need, the others, is the opposite, they need chaos in order to control events and to thrive.’

‘That is exactly right, Mr Philpott.’

Philpott had compared notes with Mike and had simply handed Arberry back his own point of view, dressed as a fact-finder’s assessment.

‘So I take your point about envy,’ Philpott said. ‘But it’s incurable, wouldn’t you say? Envy is ingrained in humanity. There’s a French proverb that says, “People only throw stones at the tree loaded with fruit.” ’

Philpott glanced at the clock and decided he should move the talk in the planned direction. He was there on a genuine fact-finding mission: he believed Dr Arberry had probably received personal threats. Two of his people had been killed in an effort to discourage him, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that the man himself had been the focus of some aggression. Philpott believed that careful questioning could turn up a useful line of enquiry.

‘Can I ask you, Doctor, if you’ve been attacked yourself, or have been threatened with violence?’

Arberry frowned. Philpott waited. After a few seconds it seemed the doctor wasn’t planning to say anything.

‘Did I speak out of turn?’ Philpott said.

‘No.’ Arberry hesitated. ‘I don’t like having to be secretive, but I was warned that if I said anything to anyone …’

‘Surely they can’t know what you say in the privacy of your home?’

‘They have breached these secure grounds, Mr Philpott. In spite of elaborate security they have been able to walk in and kill my people. Who knows what they are capable of doing or finding out?’ Arberry shrugged. ‘I’m probably infected with a touch of the superstition of the region. Or I’m just too conscious that people’s lives can hang on what I do or don’t do.’

‘So you have been attacked?’

‘I have been threatened.’ Arberry emptied his glass and looked at Philpott’s. ‘Another?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Then forgive me if I have one.’

Arberry filled his glass at the drinks cabinet and came back to stand by the window. It was almost completely dark now, with only a dim trace of light along the horizon.

‘I was told that if I extend my territorial rapacity – those were the words used on the telephone, territorial rapacity – I would lose the eyes with which I take such pleasure in my works. If I remained after that, I would lose, in addition, the legs with which I walk upon my stolen territory.’

‘And have you any idea at all who made these threats?’

‘A hill bandit,’ Arberry said. ‘Which one I’ve no idea, but they’re the only ones who oppose what I do here. It doesn’t really matter which one made the calls, anyway. They have an alliance. Whatever one of them does, they all do. What one hates, they all hate.’

‘Do you feel different for having told me this?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s always good to unburden oneself, but I can’t say I’m any less anxious than before.’

Philpott was studying the array of recording and communications equipment along one side of the room. ‘I suppose you record all your telephone calls?’ he said.

‘Ordinarily I do. But on both occasions I received telephone threats, the wavelength used to transmit the calls was obscured by noise. When I played back the recordings I got only static.’

‘Perhaps there’s something there, though,’ Philpott said. ‘We have resources nowadays that can pick out slender threads of voice signal from whole skeins of noise.’

‘Oh, I destroyed the tapes in frustration.’ Arberry looked at Philpott rather sheepishly. ‘Which I suppose I shouldn’t have done.’

‘Well …’ Philpott shrugged. ‘No use wasting energy on regrets.’

‘So what is the position now, Mr Philpott? Does the UN hope to mount an offensive against the crime wave in our valley? I had the impression from Mr Graham and Mr Trent that a fightback of serious proportions was being planned.’

‘That is still the intention.’