‘Just listen to it,’ Mrs Tinker’s voice said, referring apparently to the steady beat of the rain. ‘Stair rods, cats and dogs, reservoyers. Niagara also ran. Seems they’ve bin and found Shangri-la. I could do with a spot of Shangri-la myself this morning.’
The word turned over in his sleepy mind like a weed in calm water. Shangri-la. Very soporific. Very soporific. Shangri-la. Some place in a film. In a novel. Some unspoiled Eden. Shut away from the world.
‘According to this mornin’s papers they never ’ave no rain at all there.’
‘Where?’ he said, to show that he was awake.
‘Arabia, so it seems.’
He heard the door close and dropped a little further under the surface of things for the enjoyment of those four minutes. Arabia. Arabia. Another soporific. They had found Shangri-la in Arabia. They—
Arabia!
In one great whirl of blankets he came to the surface and reached for the papers. There were two, but it was the Clarion that came to his hand first because it was the Clarion whose headlines constituted Mrs Tinker’s daily dose of reading.
He did not have to search for it. It was there on the front page. It was the best front-page stuff that any newspaper had had since Crippen.
SHANGRI–LA REALLY EXISTS. SENSATIONAL DISCOVERY. HISTORIC FIND IN ARABIA.
He glanced over the hysterically excited paragraphs and discarded the paper impatiently for the more trustworthy Morning News. But the Morning News was almost as excited as the Clarion. KINSEY-HEWITT’S GREAT FIND, said the Morning News. ASTOUNDING NEWS FROM ARABIA.
‘We print, with great pride, Paul Kinsey-Hewitt’s own despatch,’ said the Morning News. ‘As our readers will see his discovery had been vouched for by three R.A.F. planes sent to locate the place after Mr Kinsey-Hewitt’s arrival at Makallah.’ The Morning News had had a contract with Kinsey-Hewitt for a series of articles on his present journey, when that journey should be completed, and was now delirious with pleasure at its unexpected luck.
He skipped the Morning News on its own triumph and went on to the far soberer prose of the triumphant explorer himself.
‘We were in the Empty Quarter on scientific errands…no thought in our minds of human history either factual or legendary…a well-explored country…bare mountains that no one had ever considered climbing…a waste of time between one well and the next…in a land where water is life no one turns aside to climb precipitous heights…attention caught by a plane that came twice in five days and spent some time circling low above the mountains…occurred to us that some plane had crashed…possible rescue…conference…Rory Hallard and I to search while Daoud went on to the well at Zaruba and brought a load of water back to meet us…no entrance apparent…walls like the Garbh Coire on Braeriach…giving up…Rory…a track that even a goat would baulk at…two hours to the ridge…a valley of astounding beauty…green almost shocking…kind of tamarisk…architecture reminiscent of Greece rather than Arabia…colonnades…light-skinned Persian type with fine eyes…the grace and small bones of an inbred race…very friendly…greatly excited by the appearance of the plane which they seemed to have taken to be some kind of bird…paved squares and streets…oddly metropolitan…isolation due not to the difficulties of the mountain track but to lack of animal transport to carry water…desert impassable without that…in the position of a small island in an ocean of desert…as unaware what lay beyond that desert or how far it might extend as the Ancients were of what lay beyond the Atlantic…tradition of disaster, but owing to language difficulties this is surmise, being a translation of sign-talk rather than…strip cultivation…monkey god in stone…Wabar…volcanic convulsion…Wabar…Wabar….’
The Morning News had inset a neat outline map of Arabia with crosses in the appropriate place.
Grant lay and stared at it.
So that was what Bill Kenrick had seen.
He had come out of the shouting heart of the storm, out of the whirling sand and the darkness, and looked down at that green civilised valley lying among the rocks. Not much wonder that he had come back looking ‘concussed’, looking as if his mind were ‘still back there’. He had not quite believed it himself. He had gone back to search; to look for, and eventually look at, this place that appeared on no map. This—this—was his Paradise.
This was what he had been writing about on the blank space of an evening paper.
This was what he had come to England to—
To Heron Lloyd to—
To Heron Lloyd—!
He flung the News away and leaped out of bed.
‘Tink!’ he called as he turned on the bath-water. ‘Tink, never mind breakfast. Get me some coffee.’
‘But you can’t go out on a morning like this with just a cup of—’
‘Don’t argue! Get me some coffee!’
The water roared into the bath. The liar. The god-damned smooth heartless lime-hogging liar. The vain vicious murdering liar. How had he done it?
By God, he would see that he hanged for this.
‘On what evidence?’ said his inner voice, nasty-polite.
‘You shut up! I’ll get the evidence if I have to discover a whole new continent to find it! “Poor boy! Poor boy!” said he, shaking his head over so sad a fate. Sweet Christ, I’ll hang for him myself if I can’t kill him any other way!’
‘Calm down, calm down. That’s no mood to interview a suspect in.’
‘I’m not interviewing a suspect, blast your police mind. I’m going to tell Heron Lloyd what I think of him. I’m not a police-officer until after I’ve dealt personally with Lloyd.’
‘You can’t hit a man of sixty.’
‘I’m not going to hit him. I’m going to half-murder him. The ethics of hitting or not hitting don’t enter into the matter at all.’
‘He may be worth hanging for but not worth being requested to resign for.’
‘“I found him delightful,” said he, kind and patronising. The bastard. The smooth vain murdering bastard. The—’
From the wells of his experience he dredged up words to serve his need. But his anger went on consuming him like a furnace.
He flung out of the house after two mouthfuls of toast and three gulps of coffee, and went round to the garage at the double. It was too early to hope for a taxi; the quickest way was to use his car.
Would Lloyd have read the papers yet?
If he did not normally leave the house before eleven o’clock, then surely breakfast could not be until nine. He would like very much to be at 5 Britt Lane before Lloyd opened his morning paper. It would be sweet, consoling sweet, satisfying sweet, to watch Lloyd take the news. He had murdered to keep that secret his own, to ensure that the glory should be his, and now the secret was front-page news and the glory belonged to his rival. Oh, Sweet Jesus, let him not have read about it yet.
He rang twice at 5 Britt Lane before his summons was answered, and then it was answered not by the amiable Mahmoud but by a large woman in felt slippers.
‘Mr Lloyd?’ he asked.
‘Oh, Mr Lloyd’s up in Cumberland for a day or two.’
‘Cumberland! When did he go to Cumberland?’
‘Thursday afternoon.’
‘When do you expect him back?’
‘Oh, they’ve just gone for a day or two.’
‘They? Mahmoud too.’
‘Of course Mahmoud too. Mr Lloyd he doesn’t go anywhere without Mahmoud goes with him.’
‘I see. Can you give me his address?’
‘I’d give it you if I had it. But they don’t bother with re-addressing when they go for only a day or two. Will you leave a message? Or will you call back, perhaps? They’ll like as not arrive back this afternoon.’
No, he would not leave a message. He would come back. His name did not matter.
He felt like someone who has braked too suddenly and been hit in the wind. As he went out to his car he remembered that Tad Cullen would read that story in a few minutes’ time; if he had not read it already. He went back to the flat and was met in the lobby by a relieved Mrs Tinker.