The Quest of Julian Day Read online

  THE QUEST OF JULIAN DAY

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  For His Excellency

  Russell Pacha

  In friendship, admiration, and gratitude

  for the central theme of this story which

  he gave me by telling me about the lost

  legions of Cambyses one night in Cairo

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Birth of a Vendetta

  2 The Quest Begins

  3 Death in the ‘Hampshire’

  4 Illicit Entry into Egypt

  5 Hell on the Waterfront

  6 Wanted for Murder

  7 The Egyptian Princess

  8 The Tomb of the Bulls

  9 Shock Tactics

  10 Dope

  11 A Desperate Business

  12 White-slaved

  13 The House of the Angels

  14 Heru-Tem; the Man Who Came Back

  15 The Ancient Valley

  16 Old Nick’s Own Daughter

  17 The Midnight Visitor

  18 The Green-eyed Monster

  19 The Tombs of the Kings

  20 Buried Alive

  21 Escape

  22 The Great Sea of Sand

  23 Lost and Found

  24 At Grips

  25 Death in the Sands

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duke de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ’all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  The Birth of a Vendetta

  I entered the Diplomatic Service at the age of twenty-three but was forced to resign before I was twenty-five. In view of the appalling scandal in which I was involved that was inevitable and my foolish conceit, in thinking that I could take on a far older and more experienced man like O’Kieff, undoubtedly led to Carruthers’ suicide.

  That was all eighteen months ago and I am now in Egypt. Recent events have caused me to feel that the time has come to jot down these notes whenever I have an hour to spare; but whether I shall live to complete them it is impossible to say. Either that devil O’Kieff or Zakri Bey may kill me before I can kill them—as I mean to do if I get half a chance—yet, even if they get me first, this record may, perhaps, help someone else to settle their account. But I had better start from the beginning.

  I was christened Hugo Julian Du Crow Fernhurst, but for the last eighteen months I have been passing under the name of Julian Day; and my home is, or rather was, in Gloucestershire; a lovely old place called Queen’s Acres where my uncle, an honest but unimaginative man who figures in the Army List as a Major General (retired) brought me up.

  I first met O’Kieff during my last year at Oxford. He came up for a long week-end as the guest of Warburton of Merton. Warburton was not a close friend of mine although I respected his brain, and, as our sets impinged on each other’s, could not avoid running into him a certain amount; but he was the fat and flabby type of intellectual and I never liked what I heard of his habits.

  Sean O’Kieff is, of course, well known as an occulist; and during his visit Warburton gave a couple of shows in his rooms to which, as I was rather interested in such things, I went with a few men who knew him better than I did. The first was just a social party but the second was a midnight affair for the purpose of performing certain rituals connected with the Pan cult, into which perhaps it is inadvisable to enter here. Such matters have their unpleasant side and, I am now convinced, are decidedly dangerous, but I was young and curious at the time.

  Nothing much really happened, although towards the end of the sitting there was a quite unmistakable smell of goat. It was said that Warburton’s room stank of it for days afterwards and as there was no natural explanation whatever of it, this unseen manifestation of the Dark God was quite sufficient to scare most of us.

  O’Kieff made himself very pleasant to me on both oc
casions. In the light of later events it is probable that he knew I was trying for the Diplomatic. All my friends at Oxford were aware of that and everybody prophesied that I would come through my exams with flying colours, as in fact proved to be the case, and he thought, perhaps, that I might be useful to him later on.

  However, that is by the way. It was something O’Kieff said to young Bela Lazadok, just as we were restoring ourselves with drinks after that rather shattering sitting, which put me on to the fact that he was dabbling in other things besides the occult. They were speaking in Hungarian and naturally they were not to know that I understood what they were saying. It happens that I have an unusual flair for languages which is doubtless due to my rather mixed ancestry.

  I am definitely British as far as nationality and feeling go, but my mother was an Austrian and I owe a great deal to my Austrian grandfather, with whom I have spent all my longer holidays ever since I was old enough to walk. He lost practically everything after the war but they couldn’t take his brain or charm or culture from him, or that wonderful something which comes from having inherited the outlook of an Austrian noble in a family that goes back into the mists of time. It was to please him that I really began to read after my father died and the craving for knowledge very soon got hold of me. He was desperately keen, too, that I should acquire as many languages as possible, and those jolly holidays spent in the homes of my foreign relatives were an enormous help. In consequence. I speak French and German as fluently as I do English, and can carry on a conversation in three or four other languages—Hungarian among them.

  ‘Did you manage to pick up anything worth while about the new machine yesterday?’ O’Kieff asked Lazadok.

  Now I chanced to know that the Hungarian had been out to the Morris factory the day before and that he was said to show great promise as an engineer; also that the Morris people were experimenting with a new type of tank engine. The question might quite well not have referred to the tanks at all and, unfortunately, I failed to catch Lazadok’s reply, but, for what it was worth, I tipped off a friend of mine in Whitehall.

  Apparently it was a lucky shot on my part. Lazadok terminated his studies at Oxford somewhat hurriedly a few weeks later and, when I next saw my official friend, I gathered that the Government had intimated that we could no longer extend the hospitality of Britain to the clever young Hungarian. Against O’Kieff no sort of evidence had been forthcoming and as he was a British subject they couldn’t very well clear him out. But it was this little passage of arms in my salad days that put me wise to the fact that he was mixed up, to some extent at all events, in the spy business.

  That was why, when I met him again nearly two years later in Brussels, which was my first post, I deliberately welcomed his attempts to reopen our acquaintance. I know quite well that it is against the rules for any member of our Diplomatic Service to dabble in counter-espionage but I felt certain that O’Kieff was up to no good, and I was vain enough to think that I could outwit him; so I allowed myself to be dazzled by the prospect of landing a fish that our Secret Service people had so far failed to catch.

  It is unnecessary to give particulars of the way in which I thought I was leading him on while all the time he had my measure and was only using me as a pawn. He is a strange creature, not particularly attractive to look at; tall, thin, with wavy, grey-white hair that looks rather like a wig; small, quick eyes that flash behind pince-nez, a lean chin and a hard rat-trap of a mouth. But he is immensely erudite and one of the most fascinating people to talk to that I have ever met. When I was away from him I disliked him intensely, but each time I met him again for one of the many evenings we spent together, I immediately fell under the spell of his intellect.

  As with many clever people vanity was his weak spot and evidently he was so contemptuous of my power to do him any serious harm that he allowed himself the luxury of impressing me with the secret power he wielded by boastful hints thrown out from time to time. Bit by bit I learnt that he was a very big fish indeed in the muddy waters of international intrigue and one of the seven men who controlled a vast organisation which had ramifications in every corner of the globe. How, exactly, it operated he would never actually specify, but from one thing and another I gathered that they had a hand in practically every rotten game; espionage, I.D.B., organised blackmail, dope-running and even white-slave trafficking.

  It may sound as if he were crazy to talk of such things to any presumably decent person; but he appeared to regard me as a disciple and when he got worked up he was really capable of making one forget the dirt that lay underneath it all. He always spoke of the intense excitement of the game in a way that distorted true perspective, and of the immense kick to be derived from pulling off a big coup as a result of pitting one’s wits against the whole force of the Law.

  Piling up profits did not seem to interest him; probably because he had everything money could buy already. His house in Brussels was beautifully equipped, and staffed with the sort of servant whom one hardly notices because he is so efficient; yet that was only one of many properties I had reason to believe he owned, although he was careful never to give me the actual addresses of the others.

  This cat-and-mouse game went on for about three months and then O’Kieff told me one night that the rest of the Big Seven were due to arrive the following week for their annual conference, which was to be held that year in Brussels. I thought the time had come to get in someone more experienced than myself and confided in our First Secretary, Tom Carruthers.

  Carruthers cursed me up hill and down dale for meddling in a matter that was completely outside the sphere of a promising young diplomat, but all the same he could not help showing that he was impressed by the magnitude of the thing. More, he thought that I was too deeply involved for the Secret Service people, whose real job it was, to take over from me. Like the conceited young fool I was, I imagined that I had bluffed O’Kieff and, obviously, if we were to attempt to net the Big Seven, the time before their meeting was much too short for anyone to take my place and win their confidence.

  It was, I am sure, far more with a view to keeping a fatherly eye upon me than for any other reason that Carruthers eventually consented to allow me to introduce him to O’Kieff, when I pleaded with him to allow me to do so in order that he could size up the situation for himself. Later I was to realise with bitterness and grief that by drawing Carruthers into it I had done the very thing that O’Kieff was playing for; he wasn’t interested in small fry like myself.

  There is no point in going into details about what followed. It was the talk of every Chancellery in Europe for months afterwards and everyone in my world has heard some garbled version of it, causing them to regard me as a figure of ridicule or a dirty little crook who had sold his country’s secrets.

  We met the Big Seven; Zakri, Lord Gavin, the Jap and the rest of that unholy crew. Every one of them had a name to conjure with and was far above the strata in which the police ordinarily look for criminals. They were the real Lords of the Underworld, living in affluence and power, all unsuspected by the intellectual cream of European Society into which they had been accepted on account of their wealth and dominating personalities.

  On the night that O’Kieff sprung his trap I very nearly lost my life. My function as an admiring audience was ended and the fact that he had disclosed the names of the Big Seven to me was more than enough to decide him that the time had come to put me out of the way. It was only by pure chance that I did not swallow all the dope he gave me and, as it was, the doctor had to fight for my life for days.

  What they did to Carruthers no one will ever know, but the Portuguese or O’Kieff hypnotised him, I think. That is the only possible explanation. He actually took several of them back to the Embassy with him on the Sunday night that he and I dined with them alone, and opened up the safe so that they could inspect all the documents that were in it.

  Sir George Hogan, the Ambassador, was away for the week-end and as there were certain very import
ant negotiations pending, the latest instructions from the F.O. were lying in the safe awaiting his return. As one of the senior members of the staff, Carruthers was always aware of the combination which unlocked the safe and, apparently, he gave them free access to it.

  The nightwatchman, noticing a light in the Chancellery at such an unusual hour, went in to investigate but seeing the First Secretary with, presumably, a group of friends whom he had taken to his room half and hour before, assumed they were engaged on urgent business and walked out again.

  Nothing was stolen, so they could not be charged with theft afterwards but, of course, they were able to learn a number of the most jealously guarded Diplomatic secrets regarding Great Britain’s latest policy and intentions.

  Everything was put back in the safe in apple-pie order and apart from my being picked up half-dead by the Belgian police in a disreputable quarter of the city next morning, which at first did not seem to have any bearing on the affair, the whole episode might have passed off without investigation if it hadn’t happened that Lady Hogan was an interfering old busybody who let a ready ear to ever sort of tittle-tattle. The night-porter’s wife remarked to Lady Hogan’s maid that Mr. Carruthers had been sitting up till all hours with a queer lot of people in the Chancellery the night before; the maid passed it on to her gossip-loving mistress, and Lady Hogan duly asked Sir George who the queer friends were that Carruthers had been entertaining over the week-end. When Carruthers was questioned he remembered absolutely nothing about it. The night-porter was called in and described the men he had seen sitting with Carruthers round the open safe; upon which the poor fellow quietly walked upstairs and shot himself.

  The scene between myself and my Chief which ensued when I had recovered and was called on to render certain explanations can well be imagined. For all our good intentions neither Carruthers nor I had succeeded in finding out one single fact which could be used against O’Kieff, and obviously no case could be brought against him. If the First Secretary of the Embassy cared to bring a number of strangers into the Chancellery in the middle of the night and disclose our secrets to them, the case was against him, not them, and by that time he, poor fellow, was dead and buried.