“All right.  But don’t blame me.  Turner will give you orders.  Get a move on.”

I lowered Suliman’s head gently from my knee on to a nice comfortable corner of the stone gutter, and went up-street to interview the Sikhs.  It was rather like a New York Customs inspection, after your cabin steward has not been heavily enough tipped, and has tipped off the men in blue by way of distributing the discontent.  I showed them the safe-pass Grim had scribbled.  They accepted that as dubious preliminary evidence of my right to be alive, but no more.  I was searched painstakingly and ignominiously for weapons.  No questions asked.  Nothing taken for granted.  Even my small change was examined in the moonlight, coin by coin, to make sure, I suppose, that it wouldn’t explode if struck on stone.  They gave everything back to me, including my underwear.

A bearded non-commissioned officer entered a description of me in a pocket memorandum book.  If his face, as he wrote it, was anything to judge by he described me as a leper without a license.  Then I was cautioned gruffly in an unknown tongue and told to “imshi!” It isn’t a bad plan to “imshi” rather quickly when a Sikh platoon suggests your doing it.  I left them standing all alone, with nothing but the empty night to bristle at.

The rest of that night, until half-an-hour before dawn was a half-waking dream of discomfort and chilly draughts in the mouth of the hotel arcade, where I sat and watched the spies, and they watched me.  The third man was presumably still sleeping in the mosque, but it was satisfactory to know that the other two were just as cold and unhappy as I felt.

About ten minutes before the car came the third man showed up sheepishly, looking surprised as well as relieved to find me sitting there.  He put in several minutes explaining matters to his friends.  I don’t doubt he lied like a horse-trader and gave a detailed account of having followed me from place to place, for he used a great deal of pantomimic gesture.  The other two were cynical with the air of men who must sit and listen to another blowing his own trumpet.

The car arrived with a fanfare of horn-blowing, the chauffeur evidently having had instructions to call lots of attention to himself.  Turner came out at once, with the lower part of his face protected against the morning chill by a muffler.  Being about the same height, and in that Syrian uniform, he looked remarkably like Grim, except that he did not imitate the stride nearly as well.

He stumbled over me, clutched my shoulder and made signs for the benefit of the spies.  Then he whispered to me to help him carry out the “money” bags.  So we each took three for the first trip, and each contrived to drop one.  By the time all ten bags were in the car there can hardly have remained any doubt in the conspirators’ minds that we were really taking funds to Mustapha Kemal, or at any rate to somebody up north.