Free The Persian Price by Evelyn Anthony Page B

one wild moment she contemplated shooting the woman and grabbing the child. Now a couple were walking towards them; they had rounded a bend in the path without Madeleine seeing them. She hadn’t a chance. She waved to the little girl and walked away. When she was some distance up the path she began to run to where Peters was waiting with the car.
    â€˜We found this,’ Colonel Ardalan’s assistant said.
    It was a strip of paper about two inches long, torn from a larger piece. It seemed to be the top of a newspaper. There were six figures written on it in pencil. They were faint and the paper was very crumpled.
    â€˜It was in the trouser pocket,’ the policeman said. Ardalan smoothed the paper down with two fingers and looked at it.
    â€˜And that was all?’
    â€˜Yes, Colonel. There were a few household things, another suit of clothes and the wife’s possessions. Nothing much. They were just ordinary poor people. He was employed by the Hilton hotel as a waiter and I asked the personnel manager about him. He said as far as he knew the man did his work and that was all.’
    Ardalan was smoking a thin cigar; he looked at the end of it and then rubbed it out in the onyx ash tray.
    â€˜His wife said he was a clever man,’ the Colonel remarked. It had taken a long time to get the woman to talk beyond a frightened mumble. When she offered this information about her husband, Ardalan had been impressed. Clever in what way? He knew about politics, she said. He had tried to talk to her but he said she was too stupid and couldn’t understand. She had dropped her head in shame. These things were not for women, but he had been very angry. He went to the cafés and talked with other clever men. Three nights before he died, he had come and woken her up. He was excited and she thought he was going to beat her. But he only said bad things about the Minister Khorvan. What kind of things? Ardalan prompted her gently. Her husband had called the Minister a traitor. The Colonel had given her an encouraging smile. She was a pretty girl in her mid-twenties; the hand holding the black chador near her mouth was trembling.
    She owed her life to Habib’s appropriation of the bed. He made her sleep on the floor and so the murderer hadn’t seen her when he crept into the room. She had crouched in the darkness, too terrified to cry out, while her husband struggled and fell out of bed. She hadn’t see them cut his throat; she heard a horrible gurgling noise and then the killer slipped away.
    Ardalan gave her a sum of money and sent her back in a police car to her family who lived on the other side of Tehran. He looked at the piece of paper and the jumbled figures. Six, all running into each other.
    He lifted his telephone, pressed for an outside line and slowly dialled the figures. He heard the number ringing. It went on for some time until he hung up. He copied the figures out on a memo sheet and handed it to his assistant.
    â€˜Get someone to find the address for this. I believe Habib Ebrahimi was involved in some kind of subversion. There is to be a full investigation. Start at once.’
    Peters left the boarding house that midday. He checked into a respectable middle-class hotel in Cromwell Road, said he was staying for one night en route for New York, and booked a table in the restaurant for two friends for dinner. He spent the afternoon in his room, thinking. He had listened to Madeleine, not asking a question till she had told him everything. She had mentioned her idea of making the grab on the spur of the moment and he had frowned. ‘Thank Christ you didn’t do anything like that,’ he said. She hadn’t wanted to go back to Resnais. She wanted to stay with Peters.
    â€˜What was the kid like?’
    â€˜Oh – rather a miserable little thing. Typical upper-class child. Listen – if we don’t act immediately we’ll lose the chance!’
    â€˜We’re