"Would you please repeat that?"

"I said I saw your friend alive and well ten weeks ago in Africa. In Zambekia to be precise.  She is there fighting for the Liberation Front"

"Is that what that bunch of murdering thugs call themselves?  My darling hated those people.  She wrote to me every day and told me loads of things about them  - how she hated them and all they stood for.  I don't believe she would ever join up with them - never in this world would she!  You can see some of her letters, if you like."

"Well, I was at one of their bases as a fraternal delegate from the world wide Liberation Front to our brothers in the fight to liberate Zambekia.  And your friend was there.  She's a lot more well-built than in that painting, and I remember thinking how  remarkable it was that someone with such delicate features should have such a powerful body.  And my God she certainly needed that body  the day I saw her!"

"Did she tell you she was fighting for them"  Gwen felt sick as she asked this question.

"I couldn't speak to her or she to me.  She was serving a twenty-eight day punishment of detention with hard labour for some offence or other - trying to entice one of the other fighters away from his wife, I seem to recollect  - and she was incommunicado until she completed her sentence.  I would have liked to speak to her to express my admiration of her  for her decision to throw in her lot with the cause of the people, but rules are rules.  They told me she fully appreciated the error of her ways and had accepted her punishment as right and just.  She was due to get her uniform back a couple of days after we were due to fly out."

"Get her uniform back?" asked Gwen, her contempt for the man growing by the second.

"Yes.  She was working sixteen hours a day, completely without clothes and with no food between dawn and dusk - just enough water from time to time in order to stop her from dehydrating.  And when I say work, I mean work - hard work, such as many a strong man would never stand up to.  She wouldn't step out of line again - not after that month of hell!  There was another  Freedom Fighter behind her all day with a leather strap at the ready - and he wasn't afraid to use it on her handsome backside, I can tell you!"

Gwendoline was growing ever more angry and  distressed with every word this creature was uttering.  He had seen Harry!  He might have been able to help her and he had done nothing!  This imbecile had accepted some ludicrous cock-and-bull story  - a story that a mentally-challenged child of three would have seen through -  and flown away, leaving her dear friend to continue her torment.  She did her best to keep her voice under control and fight back her tears.

"I do not doubt that if you visited that rebel base today,   you would certainly see my darling friend still working sixteen hours a day, naked under the hot sun, just as she has most likely been for the past ten ghastly awful months!  You might have been able to help that lovely sweet girl,  and instead you flew out and left her to be tortured by those scum until one day - maybe one day soon - she won't be able to take it any more and just lies down and dies of despair!  Come with me!"

With this she turned on her heel, telling the others that Jenkins would show them around the rest of the house,  and marched off in the direction of the library, which was upstairs on the first floor.  She flew up the stairs and,  without waiting for the panting and perspiring Arthur,  proceeded to the library door, which she held open for him, telling him to go inside.  He smelt Gwendoline's musky body scent as he passed by her upraised arm and one of her firm and ample young breasts brushed against his sleeve.

"We'll use that table over there;  hang on a second"

Gwen strode over to a plan-press at the far end of the room and pulled out one drawer.  It was a heavy drawer, made of solid mahogany and measuring six foot by four,  but she lifted it as if it had been made of balsa wood,  carried it,  her arms flexed so that her muscles stood out like cords,  and placed it on the table.

She riffled through the contents of the drawer and drew out a large-scale map of Zambekia, placing it on top of the table and smoothing it out.  She was perspiring a little and Arthur became even more aware of her body smell, which was beginning to do embarrassing things to him.  He stood at the other side of the table to Gwen.

"For Fuck's sake, don't stand over there - unless you can read upside down, that is!  Come and stand next to me - I don't have any time to waste.  Now, show me,  to the best of your extremely modest ability,  exactly where it was that you saw my lovely darling friend."

Arthur pointed to a spot, two hundred miles to the north west of the capital.

"I'd say it was there.  It was surrounded on three sides by a range of hills.  They were building a longer runway than the one our light aircraft landed on.  I recognise it because of the river which bent round in a distinctive way - you could see it from high up before the plane came in to land."

Gwen marked the spot, using a pen which she  borrowed from the luckless Arthur.  She then grabbed him by his lapels and lifted him a couple of inches off the floor, pushing her lovely face to within one tenth of an inch of his rather less lovely face.

"Listen - Fuck-Face!  You consorted with the enemies of a friendly country.  Maybe, strictly speaking,  you broke no laws, but you can very shortly expect a visit  from men in raincoats and trilby (fedora) hats.  And don't - repeat DON'T say a fucking word to anybody other than the Security Services about what you have just told me, or I will personally hunt you down wherever you are,  tear out your liver and eat it in front of your wondering eyes!  Do I make myself perfectly fucking clear?"

A petrified Arthur nodded his acquiescence.

"Jolly good!  Let's go downstairs and have a bit of lunch!"

Gwen took the party of visitors into the dining room and sat down to lunch with them.  After a few minutes of polite conversation, she excused herself and ran up to her office suite.  The tears were running down her face as she ran and she could not tell if they were tears of relief, of joy, or of sadness at Harriet's appalling plight.

One thing she did know.  She was going to move Heaven and earth to get her darling Harry out  of that hell and back home, where she belonged.

"Thank God I never had little James baptised", she thought. "My darling can still be his Godmother!"