The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett

bedroom. Beyond the bedroom, in the stern, was a bathroom.
    Sonja was sitting on a cushion painting her toenails. It was extraordinary how slovenly she could look, Wolff thought. She wore a grubby cotton dress, her face looked drawn and her hair was uncombed. In half an hour, when she left for the Cha-Cha Club, she would look like a dream.
    Wolff put his bags on a table and began to take things out. “French champagne ... English marmalade ... German sausage ... quail’s eggs ... Scotch salmon ...”
    Sonja looked up, astonished. “Nobody can find things like that—there’s a war on.”
    Wolff smiled. “There’s a little Greek grocer in Qulali who remembers a good customer.”
    “Is he safe?”
    “He doesn’t know where I’m living—and besides, his shop is the only place in North Africa where you can get caviar.”
    She came across and dipped into a bag. “Caviar!” She took the lid off the jar and began to eat with her fingers. “I haven’t had caviar since—”
    “Since I went away,” Wolff finished. He put a bottle of champagne in the icebox. “If you wait a few minutes you can have cold champagne with it.”
    “I can’t wait.”
    “You never can.” He took an English-language newspaper out of one of the bags and began to look through it. It was a rotten paper, full of press releases, its war news censored more heavily than the BBC broadcasts which everyone listened to, its local reporting even worse—it was illegal to print speeches by the official Egyptian opposition politicians. “Still nothing about me in here,” Wolff said. He had told Sonja of the events in Assyut.
    “They’re always late with the news,” she said through a mouthful of caviar.
    “It’s not that. If they report the murder they need to say what the motive was—or, if they don’t, people will guess. The British don’t want people to suspect that the Germans have spies in Egypt. It looks bad.”
    She went into the bedroom to change. She called through the curtain: “Does that mean they’ve stopped looking for you?”
    “No. I saw Abdullah in the souk. He says the Egyptian police aren’t really interested, but there’s a Major Vandam who’s keeping the pressure on.” Wolff put down the newspaper, frowning. He would have liked to know whether Vandam was the officer who had broken into the Villa les Oliviers. He wished he had been able to look more closely at that man, but from across the street the officer’s face, shaded by the peaked cap, had been a dark blank.
    Sonja said: “How does Abdullah know?”
    “I don’t know.” Wolff shrugged. “He’s a thief, he hears things.” He went to the icebox and took out the bottle. It was not really cold enough, but he was thirsty. He poured two glasses. Sonja came out, dressed: as he had anticipated, she was transformed, her hair perfect, her face lightly but cleverly made up, wearing a sheer cherry-red dress and matching shoes.
    A couple of minutes later there were footsteps on the gangplank and a knock at the hatch. Sonja’s taxi had arrived. She drained her glass and left. They did not say hello and good-bye to one another.
    Wolff went to the cupboard where he kept the radio. He took out the English novel and the sheet of paper bearing the key to the code. He studied the key. Today was May 28. He had to add 42—the year—to 28 to arrive at the page number in the novel which he must use to encode his message. May was the fifth month, so every fifth letter on the page would be discounted.
    He decided to send: HAVE ARRIVED. CHECKING IN. ACKNOWLEDGE. Beginning at the top of page 70 of the book, he looked along the line of print for the letter H. It was the tenth character, discounting every fifth letter. In his code it would therefore be represented by the tenth letter of the alphabet, J. Next he needed an A. In the book, the third letter after the H was an A. The A of HAVE would therefore be represented by the third letter of the alphabet, C. There were special