Perfidious Albion: a Nat Frayne mystery

By Richard Quarry

Dismissed from the London police, Nat Frayne finds himself unexpectedly recruited by the Foreign Office to act as bodyguard for an aging diplomat. The mission: to deliver a supposedly vital letter to the head of the Egyptian government.

But Frayne finds the mission growing right dodgy when he recognizes the man in charge as an old and bitter enemy. Soon cloak and dagger vie in a bloody and intricate dance amid the twisting, sun-baked streets of Alexandria.

Set amid the steambath politics of late-19th century Egypt, Perfidious Albion will drive Nat Frayne and its other actors right to the depths of their spirits. And surprise them with what they find there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215275627

Book preview

Perfidious Albion

Richard Quarry

Contents

Perfidious Albion

About the Author

The Dread Men

Perfidious Albion

And that, concluded Julian Rancourt, is what I don’t like about men like you. He tapped his silver-headed ebony cane on the paving stones for emphasis.

I see, said Frayne.

I mean, the Foreign Service officer continued, as though Frayne had argued the point, calling someone a bodyguard is all very well. Not that I need one. But your actual stock in trade is violence, is it not?

Not exactly how Frayne liked to think of himself, though events so often seemed to bear it out. If violence if offered.

Rancourt gestured in the air with his cane like a schoolmaster rapping the blackboard. And it is remarkable just how often violence is offered, when you send professional thugs on a diplomatic mission.

They strolled along the central plaza of Alexandria’s Place des Consuls, in the shade of the twin row of acacias and sycamores that ran down one side. A similar row of trees stretched along the far edge of the plaza, opposite a line of stone pools. Lace-fingered shadows from the leaves stood out dark as if etched in ink under the Egyptian sun. The two men’s own shadows slanted behind them, for Rancourt, an old Mideast hand, timed his twice-daily constitutionals for early morning and early evening, when he extolled the coolness of the atmosphere. Frayne, a Londoner born and bred, found the coolness welcoming as a brick kiln.

The Foreign Office official was a thin, dapper man approaching sixty years, with a rounded, soft-featured face atop a slender build. His brown eyes retained something of a schoolboy fascination at the ways of the world. His lips looked like they required some effort to keep from parting over his teeth. Though the short hair poking beneath his bowler had been bleached white by suns from Morocco to the Hindu Kush, his unyielding brown tweed suit would have been better suited to Hyde Park.

Frayne, in contrast, sported a white tropical suit with a white Ecuadorian straw hat. Both of which, though practical, were Not Quite The Thing. Even below the thin fabric he could feel sweat building in his groin and armpits. His muttonchop whiskers, though close-trimmed, were prickly in the heat. Though inconvenient and beginning to go out of fashion, Frayne kept them to conceal — almost — the two razor scars on his left cheek. Small wonder Rancourt judged him a ruffian.

And apparently in need of enlightenment, besides.

With every fresh generation of younger sons, Rancourt was saying, our masters in London develop a fascination with substituting violence for actual diplomacy and meaningful intelligence work. It can appear — note I say ‘appear’ — to provide a quicker, cheaper solution to all conundrums. And much easier than thinking, which to be fair, their time at Oxford and Cambridge hardly prepared them for. So they hire hard boys like you on the open market. And said hard boys, naturally enough, start looking around for people to kill in order to justify their employment. Thus violence inevitably begets more violence. Which in turn begets disorder, which feeds on itself in a dismal downward spiral. Until the whole affair gets off-loaded onto those ultimate specialists in violence, the military. Resulting in huge drains on the Treasury and the rise of some of the worst rascals imaginable. And that, my good man, is what happens when the dagger takes precedence over the cloak.

Frayne coughed to clear his throat. The wind was slanting up from the south, and gusts carried an acrid, sour stench from Lake Mareotis, where carts carried Alexandria’s garbage to be burned.

This afternoon, Frayne said quietly, I had to do something I did not want to do.

Fortunately, said Rancourt, ignoring him, I shall soon retire. Meanwhile I will just have to bear with cosh-wielders like you and upper-crust dilettantes like Whitcomb-Drake. I tell you, Frayne, it drains the spirit from a man, to work for years with diligence, patience, and some measure of integrity, only to see all your hard work washed away in a moment by some idiot with an old school tie behind him, an OBE ahead of him, and in between a career filled with muddle and carnage.

Frayne’s mind was on other things. On both sides of the plaza five story bluff-fronted Foreign Consulates stood shoulder to shoulder. Nearly all of them featured a grandiose semi-circular marble or alabaster entrance lined with