The Poison Oracle Read Online Free PDF Page B

giggle as they swathed each other in the robes. Morris walked across with Dyal to the girl on the wing. Her pose was of such abject defeat that he spoke to her apologetically.
    “We’re going now,” he said. “We’ll send out men to bring in the bodies of your friends.”
    She didn’t move.
    “I’m afraid you’ll have to wear a veil till you’re in the women’s quarters,” he went on, a bit despairingly now. But she looked up and reached down her hand for the robes. Below the sunglasses her cheeks were smeared with tears. She rose to her feet, towering above him, and tossed the robe away with an arrogant gesture
    “I’m not wearing that gear,” She declaimed. “That’s one of the things it’s all about. You can shoot me first.”
    From the way she spoke there might have been a vast audience gathered on the air-strip, listening to this declaration of a basic human liberty. At any rate she spoke loud enough for the walkie-talkie to pick her words up.
    “Beautiful, beautiful,” said the Sultan. “The two male goons arrive dead, and the female one’s first act is to flout local Arab feelings. You may tell her that I have no intention of making her a martyr to fashion.”
    But the girl was already stalking down the wing towards the Cadillac, as though it had been ordered for her by some millionaire admirer. She was a bit nonplussed to find Dinah already occupying the front seat.
    Morris watched her out of the corner of his eye as the car slid towards the palace. His own nerves were completely shredded, but the other two seemed quite cool, although Dyal’s finger was on the trigger of his gun and its muzzle no more than six inches from her left breast. She seemed to relax and soften in the lovely air-conditioning, lolling against the golden silk upholstery. When she spoke her tone was adjusted to polite party conversation.
    “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “but if you’re Foreign Minister, who’s that? First Secretary?”
    She pointed at Dinah, who was playing with the radio controls. “Well, as a matter of fact I’m the zoo-keeper too,” muttered Morris.
    “That proves it,” she said. She made an elegant little gesture towards the startling shape of the palace, outlined on its hill against the ferocious sky.
    “I’d already decided that whoever built that place must be absolutely giddy bonkers.”
    Morris was so surprised by the phrase that he turned and stared straight at her. She returned his stare, lowering her sun-glasses to do so.
    Her eyes, still a bit swollen with weeping, were a pale, pale northern blue. He was too startled to speak, but his mouth twitched as though it were trying to find sentences of its own.

Two

    1

    IN A SEALED and seasonless environment, such as the palace, it was difficult to judge the passage of time. Morris used the wrecked aeroplane as an erratic calendar, judging the weeks since its landing by the amount of it that remained unstolen. Despite the three turbaned guards who sat gambling in its shade the whole machine was gradually disappearing. The baffled engineers who had come to study the problem of flying it back to civilisation would soon have no problem left—the aeroplane would simply have dissolved like an object acted upon by two powerful acids, the thieving aboriginals of the marshes and the thieving Arabs of the sands. Morris saw that another large chunk had been sawn from the tail fin: that made it about five weeks since that nightmare day. (If it has been possible for him to peer through the surface of time, instead of seeing only the reflected past he would have been able to watch a different process of disintegration, and used it to measure the two weeks and two days that remained before the murders.)
    Meanwhile the haze above the marshes had steadily thickened, as it was bound to do when the floods were at their height. Something was happening at the marsh edge, where the first reeds rose—a small body of men, mostly slaves, stood