A Prospect of Vengeance

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A Prospect of

Vengeance

ANTHONY PRICE

PROLOGUE:

Old Mrs Griffin's cottage

The children had spotted the ruin of old Mrs Griffin's cottage that very first morning, years before, and from the one place in the farmhouse where it could be seen through the trees: a little low window, cobwebby and covered with dead flies, halfway down the narrow twisty back stair to the kitchen.

And then there had been no holding them.

Rachel and Laurence had known about it already, of course.

The estate agents' man had explained that it was part of the property, as a more-or-less unwanted appendage to the farmhouse plot below the orchard, also dead on the line of the motorway and not part of the fields which had been already sold to the adjacent farms. At the time this had rather aroused Rachel's curiosity, so that when Laurence had embarked on a second tour of their dilapidated (but, as they dummy2

then thought, strictly temporary) new home, she had gone exploring for herself.

Actually, she had never quite reached old Mrs Griffin's cottage then. But she had seen enough, because what she had seen she had disliked even in the safety of the bright sunshine. Indeed, although long afterwards she maintained that her dislike — even then, even then — had been instinctive, or intuitive, it had also been something fiercer than mere dislike: it was in reality strictly practical and maternal, primarily safety-conscious. The children were still little then, but no longer restrictively little. Rather, they were adventurously active, and she knew from bitter experience that Melanie would surely follow where Christopher led; and Christopher, having once glimpsed that little brick chimney and gable-end rising up out of the mossy ruin of fallen thatch, would somehow penetrate the great tangle of brambles and briars and seven-foot tall stinging nettles which had conquered old Mrs Griffin's little garden, and which utterly barred her own progress, but had not prevented her glimpsing the pond.

It was a foul place, she had thought, even in the sunshine: foul, because she could see beastly things in the water —

rotting branches and vegetation, and even an old saucepan breaking the surface of the water with a circle and a handle, over which a cloud of insects buzzed and skittered; foul also, because, although by the standards of her town-bred, traffic-accustomed ears its silence was absolute, it was somehow dummy2

deafeningly noisy, with the low buzz and hum of all those insects hunting and fighting and dying and eating ceaselessly around her; and foul, finally, because she could smell all this activity, of plants and insects and invisible animals competing with each other, and winning and losing — a sweet-rotten smell, the like of which she had never encountered before, a world away from the carbon monoxide and Indian take-away smells which had occasionally invaded their London flat on hot evenings.

'That's a horrible place, down there, darling,' she had said eventually to Larry, when she'd found him again, in the barn beside the farmhouse, staring up at the chinks of sunlight high above.

'Just one or two displaced tiles, Dr Groom,' the estate agents'

man had been saying. The structure itself is absolutely sound

— the timbers, and so on. In fact, as I've said, it's also a listed building — Grade Three — like the house. Late fifteenth century . . . perhaps early sixteenth . . . the expert witnesses at the public inquiry argued about that.' He had given Rachel a quick smile then, acknowledging her presence, if not her words. 'In other circumstances we'd be thinking about a barn conversion, splitting the property into two, rather than about a few displaced tiles. It really is a great tragedy . . . Do you see that main beam, up there? Five hundred years old, that beam is. And — '

'What's horrible, darling?' Larry had overridden the salesman's automatic spiel.

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'The old Griffin place?' The estate agents' man had been quick then, scooping up his error with another smile which embraced them both. 'Awful, isn't it? It hasn't been lived in for years, of course. But it's amazing how quickly those little places fall to pieces once they're untenanted. And, of course, nobody wanted to live there, after old Mrs Griffin died. It's too far off the main road. In fact — in fact . . . you can't even get to it from here. You didn't actually get to it, did you, Mrs Groom?' He had paused then, but too briefly for her to do more than open her mouth. 'There was a path from here, through the orchard, I believe. But that's totally overgrown now . . . The actual access to the cottage — not that it is a cottage now, it's quite irreparable . . . the actual access is from a track on the hill above, through the spinney there. But that's pretty overgrown, too.' Another smile. 'If it wasn't for the motorway, I'd be advising you to have the whole place bulldozed into the pond, and the trees there cut down. Then you'd have superb views of the moor.' Another smile. 'But then we'd be talking about four or five times the present asking price — maybe more, if this barn was included.' The smile had saddened genuinely at that lost prospect. 'It is a tragedy, as I say . . . the motorway.'

Rachel had ignored him. 'It smells as though something had died in it.' She had addressed the bad news to Larry alone.

The children will be into the pond there for sure.'

Her husband's expression had hardened then. And she remembered too late that he was a country boy, country-dummy2

bred, and she had known then that resistance was in vain.

'Well, darling — ' For an instant he had looked up at the ancient beam above him, with a mixture of love and bitterness, because his ownership of it was to be so brief ' —

well then . . . they'll just have to do what they're told, and keep away from it. It can't be more dangerous than London, any day of the week, anyway.'

That had made it certain, even though they were a partnership of equal partners. But then he had made it easier by twisting one of his smiles at her, which she could never resist. 'I'll talk to Chris, darling — don't worry. And . . . while we're here . . . you can look for another place, without a pond

— eh?'

But with a five-hundred-year-old beam, eh? she had thought lovingly, understanding that he felt he was coming home at last, even if only temporarily here, but at least away from his hated asphalt jungle in Highbury.

But, very strangely, it hadn't been like that at all.

Or, at first, it had been —

'Mummy, Mummy!' Mel had cried, as she came down the back stair into the kitchen that first morning. 'There's an old cottage in the trees down there — ' She pointed vaguely in the fatal direction.

'What, darling?' Rachel had pretended not to hear.

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Larry looked up from his yesterday's paper, which he hadn't got round to reading in the chaos of their arrival. 'That's the old Griffin place,' he had said, matter-of-fact and ready to fulfil his promise as Chris arrived breathlessly behind his sister. 'It's part of our property. But it's only a ruin.' He had looked down at his paper again. 'An old lady named "Griffin"

was the last occupant. That's why it's called "the old Griffin place".'

Chris had sat down without a word. And, as Chris played his cards close to his chest even then, that meant that Chris had his plans worked out.

'Was she a witch?' inquired Mel. 'It looks like a witch's cottage, Daddy — it's . . . yrrch!'

Chris had considered the choice between cornflakes and muesli with ostentatious innocence. 'There are no such things as witches,' he admonished his sister. Then he had selected the cornflakes. 'Can I have two boiled eggs, Mother?'

Rachel knew her son almost as well as she knew her husband. So she had waited for his next move.

And Chris had waited too until the second egg. 'I think I'll go down and have a look at it,' he addressed no one in particular. 'Is that okay, Father?'

'What?' Melanie, at the age of six, didn't know anyone very well, but she knew her brother better than anyone else. 'Me too!'

Larry looked up from his paper. 'Not just you — all of us, dummy2

Chris.' He grinned at Rachel, then at Melanie, and finally at Chris. 'After the washing-up we'll go down and look at old Mrs Griffin's cottage. And then we'll make the rules. Okay?'

And it had been much better than Rachel had expected, after Larry had slashed his way through all the obstacles with a terrifying weapon he had acquired from somewhere, which looked as though it had last been carried by an angry sans-culotte in the French Revolution.

So, finally, they had reached the mouldering wreck of old Mrs Griffin's home: all the paraphernalia of a humble, long-lost and once-upon-a-time existence had still been there, among the nettles and fallen bricks and timbers, and the coarse-leafed growth: broken chairs and smashed furniture, the bits of an immense iron bedstead; the shards of crockery, and bottles and broken bottles — bottles everywhere — and the rusty evidence of tinned food — tins of every shape and size, mixed with rusty springs from an antique armchair mouldering on the edge of the pond.

'What's this?' Melanie held up half of a chamber-pot by its handle. 'Is it for fruit salad?'

'I'll have this, for my bedroom,' Chris, eagle-eyed, held up a pewter candle-stick. But then he'd looked at his father.

'Father — let's go back now.'

Larry looked at his son. 'What's the matter?'

'I don't like the smell.' Chris had balanced himself on a sheet dummy2

of corrugated iron. 'It smells like ... I don't know what —

drains, maybe?'

' Yyyrrrch!' Melanie threw her half-chamber-pot into the pond, raising oily circles of water, to disturb clouds of insects. ' Drains!'

'Let's go back,' Chris had repeated his demand. 'This is a beastly place.'

'Yes,' agreed Melanie. 'And ... I bet she was a witch — old Mrs Griffin!'

So they had gone back.

And it had been all right — even all right while the children ranged far and wide over the moor, and under the hill and over the hill and beyond, on foot and then on bicycle, as times had changed, and public inquiry (and government, and minister) had succeeded public inquiry, and the years had passed over the moor, and overhill and underhill, and Dr Groom's job had developed. And Rachel had been a member of the Women's Institute, and then treasurer, and then secretary. And, in the seventh year, Madam President.

And all their plans had changed, as the motorway had taken a different line, and Underhill Farm survived.

Until that day when Chris — Chris with his voice broken, out of the school choir and into the Junior Colts rugger XV, but Arts-inclined in the run-up to his A-level exams, had cycled dummy2

over to the archaeology unit which was blazing the trail for the new line of the motorway, beyond the edge of the moor —

'Mother — Rachel . . .' (Chris wasn't sure how a chap ought to address his mother: some chaps thought Christian names were OTT, some were still old-fashioned) '. . . you know the old Griffin place — ?'

Long since, Rachel had stopped worrying about the old Griffin place. It was where it had always been, more-or-less.

But after all these years it wasn't one of her problems. 'What about it, darling? The old Griffin place — ?'

'I was talking to a fellow — a Cambridge chap on the dig over the hill, where they're working on that Romano-British village . . . which they think may have some Anglo-Saxon burials . . .'

'Yes, dear?' Rachel was just beginning to acclimatize to that harsh reality of her son's greater knowledge in certain areas

— like matters Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon, as well as sporting.

'He was very interesting — what he said was, I mean.'

She must be careful not to irritate him with her stupidity.

'About archaeology?' She had driven past the excavations only the day before, and had admired the chequer-board regularity of the work in progress.

'About dustmen, actually.'

'Dustmen?' Now she really had to be careful. So ... not another word.

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'Refuse collectors — garbage men.' Suddenly he was serious.

'You know, if my A-levels go okay ... a big if, I agree ... but if they do, and I can get a place at a decent university ... I wouldn't mind reading archaeology. How do you think Dad would take that?'

Rachel felt assailed on two fronts. 'You'll have to ask him yourself. And it'll be your decision in the end. So long as you don't want to be a dustman . . .'

He looked at her seriously. 'Dustmen have got a lot to answer for.'

'You can say that again.' The weekly struggle to manhandle —

or, all too often, to womanhandle — the dustbins from the kitchen door to the roadside for collection was a sore trial to her. But at least he was changing the subject from a delicate area to a safe one. And, until she had had time to consult Larry — or at least to stop him putting his foot in it — the further away, the better. 'What's all this got to do with the old Griffin place, darling? You know more of it has fallen down since you went away for the summer term? It was in that dreadful storm we had in May — the one that brought down the old plum tree in the orchard.'

'Yes, I know. I had a look not long ago.' He brushed back his hair from his eyes, and looked the image of his father.

'Yesterday, in fact.'

'Yes, darling?' There had been a time when she would have worried about such an exploration, and when it would have been strictly Against the Rules in fact; although, in fact, that dummy2

had been one rule which the children had never broken. But now he was a big boy. But now, also, she was interested.

'Why did you do that?'

He stared at her for a moment. 'Dustmen, Mother — Rachel.

I told you — dustmen. That's the point.'

Rachel could hear her husband clumping finally from the bathroom to the bedroom upstairs. In a moment or two he would be on the back stair, coming down past the little arrow-slit window from which the surviving chimney of the old Griffin place was still just visible through the trees. 'Well, the point eludes me, darling. Because no dustman ever came within half a mile of old Mrs Griffin's dustbins, if she had such things — that's certain.'

' Yes, Mother.' He looked at her a little sadly. 'That is certain.

She didn't — and they didn't. And that is the whole point.'

Still unenlightened, Rachel took refuge in interested (if not intelligent) silence.

And her silence broke him finally. 'It's all still there. For the finding.'

That broke her. 'What is?'

'Everything. Or, anyway, everything she ever broke, or threw away. Or lost.' Suddenly his voice was eager. 'Remember that old pewter candle-stick I picked up there, years ago? That's still in my room?'

The light dawned, even blazed, suddenly illuminating all his designs. 'But . . . it's a horrible place, Christopher — a nasty dummy2

place — '

'No, it isn't, Mother. It's the ruin of an old farm cottage. And there probably has been a farmhouse hereabouts since medieval times. And . . . maybe the site of the old Griffin place was the original farmhouse, because it has its own pond — the Cambridge chap said it might be. But, anyway, because there weren't any dustmen and garbage collectors in the old days, and it's way off the beaten track — everything's still all there, you see!'

'What is all there?' Larry spoke from the open doorway of the back staircase, stooping automatically so as not to knock his head on the beam, years of practice having made him perfect.

'All the accumulated refuse of old Mrs Griffin, dear.' Rachel felt her lips compress. 'And your son wishes to dig it up.'

'Not "dig it up", Mother. Excavate it.' Christopher turned to his father. 'Archaeology isn't just Roman and Anglo-Saxon —

and prehistoric, and all that. It's anything that's in the past and in the ground. Or above the ground — like . . . like industrial archaeology.'

'It's a perfectly horrible place,' snapped Rachel.

'People excavate Victorian rubbish dumps. And they find quite valuable things,' countered Christopher.

Damn 'the Cambridge chap' , thought Rachel. 'And get tetanus, probably.'

Dr Laurence Groom considered his wife and son in turn, and came to a scientist's conclusion inevitably, as Rachel knew he dummy2

would. 'It sounds interesting.' But at least he had the grace to look at his wife apologetically. 'And . . . I've always wanted to clear that place up. That pond is undoubtedly the breeding place for our mosquitoes.' Then he smiled at his son. 'I doubt that we'll cast any fresh light on the past, to upset the experts. But you never know what we'll find, I agree.'

That, as it transpired, was an understatement. Because, as regards the past and the experts Dr Laurence Groom was wholly wrong.

PART ONE

Ian Robinson and The Ghosts of '78

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Ian knew that there was someone in his flat the moment he opened the door. And then, almost instantly (and with a mixture of relief and distaste outweighing surprise and fear), not someone, but Reginald Buller. Once smelt, the special mixture of cowdung, old tarred rope and probably illegal substances which Reg Buller smoked was unforgettable.

As he moved towards the living-room door he wrinkled his dummy2

nose again, and knew that it wasn't altogether because of the tobacco, but also because Jenny had undoubtedly conned him, he realized. Not only were they already spending good money, but with her instinct for winners and the Tully-Buller reputation for getting results, the pressure to go ahead would likely be irresistible. Even while seeming to meet his doubts she had painted him into a corner as usual.

'Hullo, Reg.' He observed simultaneously that Buller had helped himself to a beer from the fridge and that he was busy examining the typescripts on the table. 'Picked the lock, did you?'

'Would I do that?' Buller replaced the papers without haste, but not very neatly. 'You've got a nice Chubb lock, in any case.' He grinned at Ian. 'Beyond me, that is. When it comes to breaking-and-entering, I'm strictly amateur.'

'Well, you certainly didn't climb in.' There was something utterly disarming about Reg Buller, although he had never been able to pin it down. But perhaps that was all part of the man's stock-in-trade. 'The back's burglar-proof, I'm reliably informed by the local crime prevention officer. And the front's a bit public on a Sunday morning. Apart from which, the wistaria isn't strong enough — you've put on weight, Reg.'

Buller shook his head. 'Not weight — prosperity, this is. Like the Swedish lady said to me, "Much to hold is much to love."

Sheer prosperity, my lad.'

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'It looks more like sheer beer-drinking to me. How did you get in.'

'Ah . . .' Buller lifted his beer-glass. 'I hoped you wouldn't mind. It's almost sun-over-the-yardarm time, and I was thirsty. Besides which, you always have stocks of this good Cologne beer — I remember that from last time. And ... I am working for you again after all.' He drank. 'Always a pleasure, that is.'

The beer or the work? 'Have another. I'll have one too. When you've told me how you got in, that is.'

'This is the other. But I'll have a third — they are little ones ...

I used my key.'

'Your . . . key?'

'That's the ticket. You lent me a spare last time, when I was in an' out, dropping stuff off. So I had another one cut, just in case.'

Ian felt himself being shepherded towards the kitchen. 'In case of what?'

'In case I had to come calling again. Like, for a rainy day. An'

today is rainy, and I knew you'd be at church this morning, like always ... an' ... I wanted to catch you before Mr Tully arrives. An' he said 12.30. An' . . .' He gave Ian a sidelong look.

'And?' Ian knew that look of old.

'I wanted to make sure the coast was clear.' Buller studied his beer for a moment. Then drank some of it. Then studied dummy2

what remained with regret. 'What I always like about Cologne . . . apart from the art galleries, an' the museums, an'

all the culture, of course ... is that, every time your glass gets down to the last inch or so, they just automatically bring you another full one. An' that's what I would describe as a very civilized custom . . . Providing you're not driving — because the police are something cruel there, if you've had a couple.'

Ian opened the fridge door. 'Ein Kölsch, Herr Buller?' He waited uneasily while another bottle from his fast depleting stock disappeared. 'What d'you mean — making sure the coast is clear, Reg?'

Buller drank. 'You don't know you're being followed? But then, you wouldn't of course! The Lady might know better . . .

but you'd just go walkabout without another thought — I know you!'

Ian thought bitterly of the 'Lady' and her instincts. But he only thought of her for a moment. Then he started thinking of himself. 'I'm being followed?' He tried to imply a mere wish for confirmation, rather than the actual consternation he was experiencing.

'Oh yes.' Buller nodded. 'Meaning ... I wasn't quite sure. But I looked up the time of your morning service on the board outside the church. An' then I had a careful look-around . . .

using a couple of my thousand disguises, naturally . . . An' it seemed to me that you had one at the front, an' one at the back, trying to blend into their surroundings ... In fact, I nearly phoned up the local nick and tipped 'em off, to see dummy2

what would happen. But then I thought, we can always do that in future — because I'd have to do it anonymously, see?

But you can get the old girl downstairs to do it. An' then we can see whether they do anything about it or not, as the case may be. But we won't have revealed our own guilty interest, if it's official.' This time, as he drank, he rationed himself to one swallow. 'Which I'd guess it is. But it 'ud be nice to be sure, for starters. When you're ready — when you're ready, eh?'

Jenny had been right. But it was all happening too quickly, nevertheless. Which, of course and on second thoughts, made her even more right, damn it! 'What makes you sure —

now?'

'When you went out, the chap in the front called up the chap at the back. It's like he's plugged into one of these bloody

"Walkman" things — but he's two-way plugged . . . So they both met up at the corner, down the road. An' then I nipped inside.' Duller put his glass down on the kitchen table. 'Of course, they could have in-depth cover. So that could have blown me, too. But, I thought, if they've got that sort of cover, then I'm probably already blown to hell, anyway — so what the hell!' He grinned again. 'Besides which, it was beginning to rain, an' I haven't got an umbrella — ' he shrugged ' — an' I remembered about your beer supplies, too. An' I'm not charging for Sunday work. Not until 12.15. Plus travel expenses. So ... so, actually, you're still on my private time now, without the meter running.'

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Ian's thoughts had become cold and hard as he listened, like thick ice over bottomless Arctic water: it had been like this in Beirut, when Jenny had been doing the leg-work as usual in the misplaced belief that the fundamentalist snatch-squad didn't rate women (or, if they did, they couldn't handle the indelicacies of kidnapping one), and he had been holed up in the hotel.

'They're back in place now, getting nicely soaked. So you'll have to go out again later on, with your lady and my Mr Tully to draw 'em off.' Buller nodded into his silence. 'Which the three of you all together certainly will, goin' out all together

— no! For fuck's sake don't go and have a look —! ' Buller slid sideways, to block his path. 'Let's be nice and innocent for as long as we can, eh?'

Questions crowded Ian's mind. 'What made you . . .

suspicious?' It was an inadequate word, knowing Buller. But it was suitably vague.

'Huh!' Short of another beer, Buller produced an immense gunmetal lighter with which to set fire to the foul mixture in his pipe, which surely resisted conventional combustion methods. 'As soon as Mr Tully mentioned Masson's name, I thought "Aye-aye! Watch yourself, Reg!"'

'Why?' Ian remembered what Tully had said the first time he'd mentioned Reginald Buller's name: that, whatever you do, wherever you wanted to go, Buller was halfway there before you started towards it.

'I never did rate that much — a senior civil servant lost at sea: dummy2

"what a terrible tragedy!" ... I never rated that, not even at the time.' Buller shook his head. 'I thought . . . here we go again, I thought — ' A foul smoke-screen enveloped him momentarily, so that he had to wave his hand to disperse it '

— I thought aye-aye!'

'But there was nothing ever known against Philip Masson, Reg.'

'Nor there was. And that was what I thought next — quite right, when that was all there was.' This time, a nod of agreement. 'But when he turned up again ... an' miles from the sea, an' dry as a bone — ' From shake, through nod, to shake again ' — what sort of tragedy was that, then?'

That had been what Jenny had wanted to know. Or, anyway, it had been the beginning of what she had wanted to know.

'You tell me, Reg — ?'

'Hmm . . .' Somehow they had progressed out of the dining room and past the study door (and Reginald Buller would have examined all the 'Work in progress' there, too, for a certain guess), into the living room again; but Reg was blocking off the approach to the glorious bow-window, just in case.

'Well?'

'No bugger's saying anything. And you can't get near where they dug him up.' Buller scratched the back of his head.

They've got the local coppers out, both sides of the place, guarding it. There are a couple on the back road to it, never dummy2

mind the front . . . And it was two kids who found the body.

But you can't get to them, either. And the parents aren't talking to anyone.' Another shake. 'And I had to be bloody careful, because there were one or two people there I know, sniffing around, buying drinks — from the Guardian, and the Mirror . . . and so maybe from the big Sundays, too. And the Independent, could be ... But, the point is, there's a smell about it — about Masson — is what there is.'

'So you didn't get anything — ?' He knew Reg Buller better than that.

'Oh . . .' Buller bridled slightly, on his mettle '. . . there was this barmaid I chatted up, who knew someone in the coroner's office. And she said . . . that he said . . . that Masson was planted. And — '

'"Planted" — ?'

'Buried.' Nod. 'In a hole.' Another nod. 'He didn't fall out of the sky, or tip over an' hit his head, or shoot himself, or have a heart attack.' Final nod. The way some of the stories go, there was this pond, an' he was in it. So ... I thought he could have fallen into it — or maybe even jumped into it ... But that isn't the way it was, apparently. Because these children dug him up, it seems.'

'Why — how ... did they do that?' Both questions pressed equally.

'God knows! But it seems that they did. So ... someone buried him. So someone killed him first — that's what the barmaid dummy2

said. And I paid her £50 not to tell anyone else. Although it's even money that I may have made her greedy, so I can't be sure that I haven't wasted . . . your money, my lad — eh?'

Ian winced inwardly at Tully's final bill, which would pile his VAT on Reg Buller's VAT, to complicate matters even if they could finally claim it back; although Jenny's friendly accountants would sort that out for them, also at a price. But he mustn't think of such mundane things now. 'And that was all you got?'

Reg Buller looked offended. That was all I thought it safe to try and get, the way things smelt. Besides which, I rather thought I had other fish to fry, on instruction. Or rather . . .

not other fish — another fish . . . other than Masson, I mean . . .' He tailed off.

' Another . . . fish?'

'Well ... not a fish, exactly.' Buller drew deeply on his pipe.

'More like a shark, if you ask me — ' he breathed out a foul cloud of smoke ' — like, in that film: something you go out to catch . . . but you end up trying not to get caught yourself, maybe.' He drew on his pipe again.

'You mean the man Audley? David Audley?' Ian remembered Jenny's original proposition: she had come to him late at night — or, more precisely, early in the morning, after one of her socialite nights-on-the-tiles — getting him out of bed when he was at his lowest ebb —

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" Darling, I think I've stumbled onto something really quite interesting — have you got a drink?' (Jenny bright-eyed, even at that unearthly hour, happily burning her candle at both ends and only a little tousled even now, having progressed from a day's work to an embassy party, and then to an elongated dinner, and finally to some flutter 'on the tables' in some hell-hole; except that Jenny had the stamina of a plough-horse and an alcoholic capacity rivalling Reg Buller's, so it always seemed.)

' Jenny!' (At least he had been halfways respectable, face quickly washed, hair quickly brushed, dressing-gown carefully and decently adjusted: only Jenny dared to burst in on him in the smallest hours — she had done it before, and he was half-prepared for such eventualities now.) ' For heaven's sake, Jen! Couldn't it wait until the morning?' (But, strictly speaking, it had been the morning, of course.)' You shouldn 't be walking the streets now — they're not safe. I'll ring for a taxi — '

' I've got a taxi — it's parked outside. The dear man said he'd be quite happy to wait, darling — he said just the same thing.' (Running taxi-meters aside, Jenny could get round any man to do her will if she put her mind to it.) ' So ... just get me that drink. Or do I have to make it myself?'

'I'll get you a coffee — '

'Don't be such a fuddy-duddy, Ian darling! But first. . . have you ever heard of a man named Audley, Ian?'

' Who — ?' (If she was determined to drink alcohol, then he dummy2

would pour it.)

'Audley. AUDLEY — Audley? Christian name "David" — ?'

' No.' (He had recognized the sign then: those innocent eyes weren't alcohol bright, but excited; even, possibly, she hadn't had a drink since that sudden stumble-onto-something, whenever it had occurred; and all the rest of the evening-into-night-into-morning had been cold hard professional Jenny; which was why she needed a drink now.)

'No. But you have heard of Philip Masson, maybe?'

' Yes.' (That had been insulting — and deliberately so! But now he was hooked.) ' And who is ... " David Audley", then?'

'Mr David Audley — yes. Or, to give him his proper title, Doctor David Audley.' Reg Buller sniffed, wrinkling the hairs on his drinker's nose. 'But not a medical doctor — a philosophy doctor . . . Cambridge "Ph.D" — or "D.Phil", whichever it is.' The big red-and-blue veined nose wrinkled again: Reg Buller had a huge dislike-and-contempt for Oxbridge products, derived from bitter experience of Whitehall and Westminster in his policeman days. 'Only, not a philosophy doctor, either — a history doctor — ' The nose seemed to swell as its rounded blob-end lifted ' — ancient history, too.'

But Ian had progressed since Jenny's untimely descent on him. 'Medieval history actually, Reg.'

'Oh aye?' Buller accepted the correction as a further dummy2

confirmation of cause-for-contempt. 'Looked him up in Who's Who, have you? But what about his book on the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, eh? Because, in my book, "Latin" is bloody ancient — right?'

'No. "Wrong" actually. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was eleventh to twelfth century, as it happens. Not that it matters.' Compared with Philip Masson it certainly didn't matter. But a long passion for getting facts right, and for sorting the golden nuggets of truth from Jenny's loaded conveyor-belt of hearsay, rumour and gossip, forced him to react before he could stop himself. And then he had to put matters straight, into their priorities. 'He's a shark, is he, Reg?'

Buller's face worked, as he came back from what didn't matter to what did, which he had presumably uncovered during his second day of fish-frying for Tully and Jenny. And that also transformed Ian's own imagery, from dusty manuscripts in university libraries to that fearful triangular dorsal fin cutting through the water, and then submerging as the killer disappeared, rolling underwater to open its razor-sharp jaws as it came to dine on its prey.

'He could be. Or ... seeing how he's a big bugger — six-foot-two, or six-foot-three, in his stocking feet . . . and a rugger-player when he was young . . . maybe one of those bigger ones — black-and-white, and clever with it . . . not sharks, though — ?'

'Killer whales?' Black-and-white were the Death's Head dummy2

colours, he dredged the memory up from his subconscious: not only of killer whales, or of the murderous magpies which killed small birds outside his windows in the country cottage where he always put the finishing touches to each new book; black-and-white had been the colours of all those famous regiments, with skull-and-crossbones badges, like military pirates — and even of Audley's medieval Knights Templar, in his crusading Latin Kingdom; and, for that matter, the young men who squired Jenny to perdition on her late nights wore the same non-colours too, damn it!

But something had intruded into the sequence: he had heard the bell, and Buller's face had closed up as he heard it. And he cursed himself for not reacting more quickly to Buller's warning, now that Tully had arrived — or Jenny, or Jenny and Tully together — now that someone was interested in what they were up to —

' Damn!' He tossed his head irritably at Buller. 'I should have put them off, Reg! We could have met somewhere else.'

Buller shook his head. 'Wouldn't have done any good. If they're on to you, they'll be on to them . . . Just so they're not on to me.' He grinned. 'And even if they are, I can lose 'em any time. And, what's more . . . they won't even know it: they'll think they've been careless.' The grin became confiding. Then it vanished. 'Mr Tully and your lady don't know how — they'd only give the game away. Better not to tell them straight off.'

'I've got to tell them, Reg.' Ian felt increasingly uneasy as he dummy2

spoke. Because while Tully was sensible enough to be scared, this news would only strengthen Jenny's suspicion, turning it into a certainty.

'Wait! Hold on a mo' — ' Reg Buller sidled sideways to block his passage again ' — all this rabbiting on about Latin Kingdoms, and sharks — ' The bell rang again ' — let 'em ring

— hold on! '

'What?' Ian stopped. 'What — '

'Just listen.' Buller almost pushed him back. 'You've tipped me off, on occasion . . . And you've recommended me — given me custom — I know . . . So, then, I owe you — right?'

'You don't owe me anything.'

'Okay. So all the bills have been paid, for the tax-man, and the VAT man.' Buller nodded. 'And in a minute I'll be on my usual rate — okay . . . See?' He ignored the angry ringing behind him. 'But this minute I'm still on my own time. So this is for free, then — right? And just between the two of us.'

Ian frowned at him. 'You'd better be quick. Or they'll think —

'

'This bloke Audley — ' Buller overbore him. ' — I've got a feeling in my water about him. You want to watch yourself.

And don't let the Lady push you where you don't want to go

— not this time. That's all.' He stared at Ian for a moment, and then tossed his head. 'Let 'em in, then — go on!'

Ian sprinted towards the now-continuous bell, which meant that it was Jenny out there, without a doubt.

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'Sorry, Jen — ' He caught sight of Tully beyond her — '—

hullo, John.'

'I should think so!' She pulled her headscarf and shook a tangle of half-combed red hair. 'You look positively guilty, too.' She scrutinized him momentarily. 'In fact, if I didn't know you better, Ian Robinson — and if I didn't know that it was Sunday . . . it is Sunday, isn't it?' She sniffed Reg Bullet's tobacco appreciatively.

'It is for me.' He returned the scrutiny. Without makeup, but with dark smudges under her eyes, she presented a curious mixture of innocence and depravity. 'But you look like you've had your weekend already, Miss Fielding-ffulke. And lost it.'

'Very funny.' She turned to Tully. 'As I was saying . . . if I didn't know him better, I'd say he'd got a girl in the bedroom, hunting desperately for her knickers right now. But — '

'No such luck.' Buller spoke from the sitting-room doorway.

'Sorry to disappoint you, madam. But all he's got is me. And I'm only hunting for beer.'

'Reg!' The night before seemed to drop away from her. 'John said you might be here — that you'd agreed to come to our aid at short notice. It's great to see you again! And ... we do need you.'

'Always a pleasure, madam.' In Jenny's presence, Buller always took refuge in the practised insincerity of his long-lost police constable self: for some reason her charm had always been lost on him, Ian remembered from the past. Which was dummy2

all the more curious because in his case the charm was not consciously turned on, she had a genuine regard for his skill, and a huge soft spot for him to go with it. And now he himself must take account of that unrequited admiration in assessing the worth of Buller's warning.

'Don't keep calling me "madam", Reg, for God's sake!' She made a face at Buller.

'No, Miss Fielding-ff — '

'And don't call me that, either.' She cut him off quickly. 'If

"Jenny" is too much for you ... I'm not responsible for the absurdities of my ancestors ... so I'll settle for "Fielding".

Okay?' Under the soft, almost pleading tone, there was the steely ancestral Fielding-ffulke voice of command, at which generations of Bullers (and Robinsons too) had jumped to obey. 'Okay. So what have you got for us on Philip Masson and David Audley?'

'I have prepared a report, Miss Fielding.' Buller looked at Tully. 'A written report.'

'It's all right, Mr Buller.' Immaculate as ever and secure in his Winchester tie, Tully nevertheless jumped no less smartly. 'Just the salient points now.'

Jenny caught Ian's eye. 'Reg would probably like a drink, Ian.

And I certainly would. The last lot of church bells I heard, I counted to twelve.'

'No.' It wasn't just that the Robinsons no longer obeyed the Fielding-ffulkes automatically, it was also to suggest that dummy2

Buller hadn't been with him for long. 'I want to hear what Reg has to say first. Go on, Reg.'

'Right, Mr Robinson.' Buller played back to him exactly the correct note of disappointment. 'Masson was murdered —

and Audley works for the cloak-and-dagger brigade. Ours, that is.'

'But Reg ... we know all that — '

'No you don't, Miss Fielding. At least, you may know about Dr Audley — someone may have told you. But it's not written down anywhere. Officially, he's a civil servant on contract, serving on a liaison committee of some sort — no one seems to know quite what — advising various ministries on research projects. And no one knows quite what they are, either.

Right, Johnny?'

Tully nodded. 'Yes. More or less.'

'Yes. Well, I'm telling you that he works for intelligence for a fact.' Buller paused only for half a second. 'And the same goes for Masson: the rumour's all round The Street — and down Murdoch's place in Wapping — that he was murdered.

But the Police haven't said any such thing, they've been shut up tight from the top now. Believe me, I can read the signs.

So I'm just giving you what they'd be saying if they hadn't been shut up.'

'Actually, there have been quite a few rumours,' said Tully.

'There was one that he drowned — drowned himself, that is.'

'Oh yes.' Buller nodded. 'I didn't say they haven't said dummy2

anything. First off ... first off it was "probably an ancient burial". Because they're always digging up old bones round there, apparently. Then there was an old local story, that it might be some poor old bloke who'd lived there in the First World War, who'd gone missing in the trenches and laid low.

And then got influenza — there was a lot of that about in the village at the time. So his old woman had just buried him nice and quietly — it's miles from anywhere, on the edge of the marsh there, so she could have done that quite easily, and no one the wiser. But then it all blew up in their faces, of course.'

'They got an identification, you mean?'

Buller grinned. 'Someone blundered, that's what.'

'How d'you mean — "blundered", Reg?' inquired Ian. 'The Police?'

'No, not the Police. Although I think there was rather more tramping around in the first hours than they'd like to admit

— "Isolate the scene", that's Rule Number One. But then, of course, these kids dug up the body, playing about ... so they'd already made a right mess of it.' Buller shrugged. 'After that, it would have all been routine. And they'd have twigged pretty damn quickly that it really wasn't an ancient body, too

— that 'ud put 'em into gear, if they weren't in it already. Not exactly top gear, like with a fresh body, when getting quick off the mark is half the battle, often . . . but putting the forensics to work, and checking the records — B14, Missing Persons . . . Salvation Army, Alcoholics Anonymous — they dummy2

all come into it.' Another shrug. 'Bloody thousands of people missing. So it's always nice to find one.'

'Even a dead one?' Jenny frowned at him.

'Even a dead one. You ask a farmer about his missing sheep: he'd rather find one dead than one missing — leastways, if it's been long gone. At least he knows then. And maybe he can do something about it. And that's the way the Police have to think, to make the best of it.' He stared at her for a moment. '"Missing Persons" is a pretty thankless job, I tell you. And a gut-twisting one too, when you have to tell some poor middle-aged couple that their fifteen-year-old daughter

— or son now, the way things are — is probably out on the streets, earning money the easiest way.' He paused again. 'A lot of heartache in "Missing Persons", Lady.'

Tully stirred, almost as though embarrassed by this revelation of a social conscience where no sort of conscience should be, inside Reginald Buller. 'Who blundered then, Mr Buller?'

'Some civil servant.' Buller brightened at the thought.

'Probably one of your Dr Audley's colleagues, hiding his light under some committee.' He brought his lighter up to his pipe, but then thought better. 'Or maybe someone was on holiday — like Audley is at the moment. And some poor bloody clerk standing in for him didn't get to the bottom of his in-tray before the weekend. And then another load of bumpf went on the top of it on Monday morning. So he's for the chop now — ' He glanced sidelong at Jenny ' — or she is, dummy2

now that we're all equal.'

Jenny merely smiled. 'The identification?'

That's right. Teeth, most like — they're always the best ID.'

Buller returned the smile. 'If you're going to plant someone, Miss Fielding . . . take my tip: cut the hands and the head off, smash the jaw up, and drop the bits off in a few dustbins just before the refuse truck comes round. Then dig a deep hole for the rest, where it isn't likely to be dug up by the kids.' As he spoke the smile utterly vanished. 'But, whatever it was tipped 'em off ... and I don't know it was teeth . . . the identification got out before anyone could sit on it, and that's a fact.' He switched to Tully. 'And that put the newspapers on to it. Masson being in their "Missing Persons" file of course.

And then the fat was in the fire.' The smile returned, but in a thinner form. 'All just routine — getting the right file, or the right print-out. But this time in the wrong order.'

'So where did my drowning rumour come from?' Tully's pale intellectual face was expressionless. 'I thought it came from the Police?'

Buller nodded. 'So it did. But not officially. Seems like it was a "tip-off", from lower down — like one of the DCs feeding one of the local journalists, off the record, supposedly. But it wasn't that at all, of course.'

'Disinformation?' Having been disinformed many times over recent years, Jenny was quick on that particular ball.

'Disinformation — yes.' Buller liked accurate passing. 'Could dummy2

have been the same clerk, trying to shut the stable door after the horse was already meat in the knacker's yard, as best he could. Or she could.' Half-smile, half-shrug. There is a lake there ... or a pond, so they say.'

'You haven't seen the place?' Tully pursed his lips. 'Actually seen it — ?'

'Not a chance.' Buller returned slight contempt for this hint of disapproval. 'It's guarded round the clock — an' Special Branch from London as well as the locals. An' it's a bloody isolated spot, too . . . plus I'm not about to display myself, snooping around, to be photographed for the record. That wouldn't be good for business.' He looked to Ian for support.

'Yours as well as mine?'

'He wasn't found in the pond — the lake?' Ian rose obligingly.

'The children dug him up. And ... all the initial rumours were . . . digging-up ones?' Remembering what Buller had said when they were alone, it was easy.

'That is exactly right, Mr Robinson.' Buller nodded formally.

The original story was drowning — "drowned at sea". An'

then the first story was "ancient bones" dug up. An' then his name slipped out — an' then it was "drowning" again. But that won't stick for ever.' He shook his head. 'Maybe, if they'd had time to doctor the evidence ... or, at least, to confuse it ...

then they just might have made a drowning stick.' He looked from one to the other of them. 'Although, with policemen, and coroners, and all the rest . . . that's not so easy, I can tell you. But they might at least have bought more time, anyway.

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But this time . . . they didn't.' He ended with Jenny. 'He was buried, Miss Fielding. Not very deeply — not deep enough . . .

But buried, for sure.' Single nod. 'And the fact that they first tried to change the story . . . and now they've got the place, and everyone in it, buttoned up like Greenham Common used to be on Easter weekend — all that merely confirms everyone's suspicions that there's some sort of cover-up in progress.' This time, not a nod, but a sly face. 'Oh yes — the vultures are out, as you would expect: I recognized a few old acquaintances, trying to drink the pubs dry on expenses. And there were some young hopefuls, too — '

'And they recognized you, presumably?' Tully's lips tightened again. Then he sniffed. 'Or smelt you.'

Buller looked disappointed. 'Come on, Johnny — would I work for any clients of ours without a cover story? You know me better than that. Not on something like this, that's been in the papers. You're not the only one with a sense of smell.'

Ian caught Jenny's eye, and her smile. The last time Reg Buller had worked for them he had also had a 'cover'. And it had been so genuine that he had happily collected double expenses from it. But as he watched her, he observed that the smile was only on her lips, not in her eyes. And it faded quickly.

'Your old acquaintances, Reg . . . what lines are they following, do you know?' She sounded almost casual.

'I don't honestly know, Lady. I was too busy being not very interested in their business. But I doubt they've got much of dummy2

value as yet, the way things are. Not until the inquest is resumed, they won't have anything to get their teeth into.

And you can bet they'll be delayed as long as possible.' Buller cocked an eye at Tully. 'It'll be the backroom boys digging out the old cuttings on Masson at the moment, in preparation for that. So you'd better watch your step there, Johnny, if you're thinking of asking to have a look at him in your favourite newspaper library. Because they know you've worked for your present clients before.'

Tully touched his tie. 'Don't worry, Mr Buller. That's already all taken care of.' He acknowledged Jenny and Ian in turn. 'I have a very fair dossier on Philip Masson. And there won't be any comeback.'

That was going to cost them, thought Ian. Because, although Tully's own highly-computerized filing system was pretty damn good in its own right (and expensive to get into, also), it still couldn't match the better newspaper libraries. But newspaper librarians wouldn't come cheap either, those of them who could be bought. Or their assistants. Or whoever had access, down the line. But more than that, and regardless of expense, Tully was very certain of himself today: certain, although this had been contractually no more than a quick reconnaissance of a possibility, that he had Fielding and Robinson as fullblown clients again.

He examined them both with professional interest: the well-laundered, Winchester-tied Tully, very confident; and the crumpled, smelly old Buller, no less a pro, albeit in his own dummy2

distinctive style. But now, although Buller had given him the gypsy's warning, they were both equally excited at the prospect of profit and enjoyment.

'Yes.' Tully looked at him, and he realized that all three were looking at him, willing him to show enthusiasm. Even Buller, after what he'd said, was willing it. 'I don't think you need to worry too much about the newshounds at the moment, Mr Robinson.'

'Why not?' In a position of strength he could afford to be awkward.

'Well . . . firstly, because of the timing, I rather think.'

'The timing?'

'Of Masson's death. It occurred at the very end of the Wilson-Callaghan era, in 1978. So they can't pin this on the Tories, in general — or on our present dear Prime Minister, in particular. If there was a cover-up, that is . . .' He smiled thinly. 'That takes some of the fun out of it, you might say.

And the urgency with it.'

There was a flaw in that reasoning, thought Ian: pre-Thatcher shenanigans in British Intelligence could always be dressed up as 'destabilization', post-Spycatcher. But he didn't know enough about Philip Masson yet to undress that possibility.

'And none of them are on to Audley yet.' Tully bowed slightly to Jenny. 'Your ace in the hole is still safe, Miss Fielding.

You're way ahead of them all.' Then he remembered Ian. 'If dummy2

you want to proceed, that is.'

Ian was glad that he had resisted the temptation to look at Buller, whose buttocks were still firmly seated on that unpalatable information about the watchers outside, which would prick Tully's bubble of complacency explosively. But that in turn presented him with an immediate dilemma: because someone was alongside them already, if not actually ahead of them, and that was a damn good reason for exercising his veto, and proceeding with the book they had planned to write, which presented no great problems, reasonable (and certain) profits, and absolutely no Beirut-remembered dangers.

So this was that 'moment-of-truth' Jenny always made him face up to, when they had to decide to go ahead with a project after the first reconnaissance, or to cut their losses and start on something else. Only this was different from all their other investigations — and not different just because of those two men outside in the rain: it was different also because it seemed to matter personally to her, not just financially. So, if he said 'no' she'd not only never forgive him, but she might also go ahead on her own account, without his protective presence — ?

He couldn't have that, no matter how much against his better judgement, not after Beirut.

'I think I'll get that drink now. Dry sherry for you, John?' He didn't need to look at Tully.

'Beer for me.' Reg Buller beamed at him. 'One of those little dummy2

bottles of that German beer? Have you got any of them?'

He didn't need to look at her, either: for her there was their

'moment-of-truth' custom. All he saw was the pile of papers he'd taken out of the study that morning, slightly disarranged as Buller had left them. So now the future of British education would have to wait until this matter of the past of British intelligence had been resolved, he thought sadly.

It was all conveniently in the fridge — John Tally's Manzanilla, Reg Buller's Kölsch, and Jenny's celebratory bottle (even though he didn't feel like celebrating).

'Oh Ian darling!' She pushed through the door just as the cork popped, and the champagne overflowed the glasses messily. 'Thank you, darling!'

'Don't count your chickens, Jen.' He watched the ridiculously over-priced stuff subside. 'I still don't like it. And I think we could be risking our necks.'

'Of course, darling. But . . .' She swayed towards him, both hands full but still holding the door half open with her shoulder. '. . . but — ' her voice dropped to a wide-mouthed whisper, enunciated as though to a deaf lip-reader ' — I-have-got-promises-of-absolutely-marvellous-deals . . . from . . .

Clive Parsons . . . and Woodward — Richard Woodward?'

She read his expression, and nodded triumphantly.

Ian reached out to push the door fully open, knowing that that triumphant nod would have had to be the clincher if he dummy2

had been genuinely still in doubt: with Woodward controlling the serializations on the front page of his heavyweight Sunday's supplement, to coincide with publication, and Parsons' publishers' clout in the American press, they had the necessary ingredients for another best-seller before he had put one word on paper; and if Jenny's rarely mistaken nose for a winner didn't let them down they stood to make a small fortune. Or even a large one. And that was more than could be expected from British education.

'John — Reg — ' She took the two untasted glasses in with a glance ' — I've just been twisting Ian's arm unmercifully — '

She raised her own glass ' — so I think we can now drink to ...

what?' She zeroed in on Reg Buller. 'Murder, for a start?'

Buller drank without answering, keeping his counsel dry as an infantryman's powder.

Tully sipped his sherry, and from the look on his face either approved of its dryness or was thinking of his fees. 'Treason, for choice, Miss Fielding. With murder in a chief supporting role, perhaps — ?' Then (as before) he remembered Ian. ' Pro bono publico, of course . . . But it isn't Masson who is primarily interesting, interesting though he undoubtedly is ...

even very interesting, if I may say so.' He smiled his thinnest, driest-sherry smile at Jenny. 'But Audley is the one who matters.'

'Why do you say that, John?' Jenny watched him over her glass.

'Don't you agree?'

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'Back in '78-'79?' She accepted the challenge casually.

'Whenever it was, anyway . . . Philip Masson was more influential than Audley — at least, potentially, anyway.'

'Was he?' He let her steel rasp down his blade. Either, they had already rehearsed this for his benefit, thought Ian — or, if they hadn't, then they were manoeuvring to find out how much the other knew. 'I would have thought that was . . .

arguable, at the least?'

Jenny shrugged, and refilled her glass: since Tully was their employee now, at his usual rate, she was not minded to play games with him, the gesture implied. 'Philip Masson's dead and Audley's alive.'

'A very proper conclusion.' Because he had picked up her signal, Tully agreed with her. But because he was Tully he couldn't resist talking down to her. " However, dead, in precise and gruesome detail, is of no interest, now that Mr Buller has pronounced on it.' He hardly glanced at Buller.

'And by whomsoever dead — by whose actual hand . . . that is merely a police matter. And I think it exceedingly unlikely that they will ever put their cuffs on that particular hand . . .

And, if they can't then we won't.' He only had eyes for Jenny now, in proclaiming his limitations. 'But it won't have been Audley, anyway.'

'Why not?' The question came, surprisingly, from Buller —

perhaps because the emptiness of his glass made him irritable.

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'Why not?' This time Tully gave Buller his full attention. And although there was no surprise in his repetition of the question, there was a matching hint of irritation. 'I hope you haven't exceeded your brief, Mr Buller.'

'Ah! My brief . . .' Buller sucked in his cheeks slightly, and gave Tully back scrutiny for scrutiny, like a man who knows his rights as well as his place. 'No, I wouldn't say that, Johnny — no.'

'No?' Tully smiled suddenly, almost proprietorially. But then, of course, each of them knew his man, Ian reminded himself: the Tully-Buller relationship went back a long way, to the days when neither of them was engaged in his present avocation. 'Then . . . what would you say?'

For a moment Ian was tempted to suspect that he might be a potential client treated to a piece of rehearsed dialogue, to which Buller's earlier confidences had been a mere prologue.

But now that he'd as good as taken Jenny's hook (and theirs) such dramatics were hardly necessary; and Buller's thoughtful expression and elongated silence served to remind him of the watchers in the rain outside.

'What exactly was your brief, Mr Buller — ' Jenny cracked first ' — your brief, Reg — ?'

Buller kept both bloodshot eyes on Tully for another five seconds'-worth of silence before turning to her, as though the sound of her voice had had to travel across some dummy2

unimaginable distance before it had reached him. 'Just like always, madam — Miss Fielding: I take off my boot, an' then my sock ... an' I dip my big toe in the water, to test the temperature.' He gave her his ex-policeman's smile of false encouragement. 'An' of course, I do all that behind some convenient bush, so no joker can swipe my boot when I'm not looking. As a precaution, like.'

'I see.' Even when a client, Jenny was patient in the face of such stone-wailing. 'And how was the hot water, then — in that pond, where Philip Masson didn't drown . . . which you didn't actually see, you said — ?'

'Warm, Miss Fielding.' Buller accepted the sharp points of her little claws approvingly, as though not being punctured would have disappointed him.

'Warm.' Jenny had drawn blood from harder stones than Reg Buller. 'Meaning . . . warm-cooling-down? Or warm-hotting-up, Reg?'

Buller liked that too — her acceptance of his imagery. But that, by some special alchemy, was the effect she always had, even on the most unregenerate chauvinist-pig, one way or another, sooner or later. 'It may not warm up much down there, now. It could be just the place where he finished up . . .' He shrugged. 'He didn't live there. He may not even have died there.'

'But — ?' She picked up the vibration instantly.

'Somebody planted him there. So somebody knew it was dummy2

there — that's a fair bet.' Another shrug. 'All these years . . .

that may be hard to pin down usefully. But if I was running the Incident Room I'd be waiting for that to register on the computer, anyway.' Nod. 'Because, although that isn't so very far from London there, it's still country — deep country . . .

Or, it was then. And it's amazing what long memories they have, the country-folk. Like, I told you: there was this tale about the soldier who went missing in the war . . . And not Dr David Audley's war — or even his father's war, which was the same one — the '39-'45 one. But the one before that, with all the trenches and the barbed wire . . . And that is a long memory for you.'

'But that was a story, not a memory, Reg — ' Jenny started, razor-sharp as ever, but then caught herself. 'But . . . go on

— ?'

That's all. For Masson, for my money, there's still something down there. But there's no way we can get at it at this moment — not without crossing the locals, never mind whoever else is nosing around. There just aren't enough bushes you can hide behind, to drop your boot.'

'Yes. I see.' She had what she wanted there. 'But . . . you put your toe in ... I can't say "Audley's water" without seeming indelicate, Reg . . . but you did take your boot off for him too, didn't you — yes?'

'Took it off, aye. Didn't dip me toe, though.'

'Why not?'

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'Didn't need to.' Buller paused. 'Didn't want to, either.' He cocked his head slightly. 'Remember that book you and Mr Robinson did a few years back, about the Vietnam business, and all that?'

Jenny frowned. ' The Vietnam Legacy! Yes, Reg — ?' The frown cleared slightly. 'You and John did some of the leg-work for us, of course. You covered that Chicago reunion I couldn't get to — and you traced that amazing Green Beret man who ran that mission up in the mountains, out West.'

'That's the ticket. The Grand Tetons. Always wanted to see them, ever since I saw 'em in Shane when I was a lad.' The eye cocked at Ian. 'Didn't see 'em though, did I! Low cloud, there was, the whole time I was there — d'you recall me telling you about it?'

'I do, Reg.' What Ian chiefly remembered was Buller's explanation that 'Grand Tetons' meant 'Big Tits'. 'But what have the. . . Grand Tetons to do with Audley, Reg?'

'Not the Grand Tetons.' The ghost of a wink accompanied the name. 'After I'd finished with Major Kasik I had a day or two spare, so I drove up from Jackson Hole to Yellowstone, where there's this great big National Park, with all the

"geysers" spouting and fuming. And it was autumn then, with a nip in the air, like it might start snowing any moment . . . And there are all these little pools of water, clear as crystal and fresh-looking, with lovely colours — pale blues, and greeny-blues ... In the hot summer maybe they'd look cool, but when it's colder you might reckon they'd be just dummy2

nice an' warm, to take the chill off your fingers — or your toes.' As he spoke, Buller turned back to Jenny. 'But it 'ud do a bit more than that. Because it's bloody boiling, scalding hot, is what it is — one dip, and you're cooked to the bone.

And no saying "Ouch! I won't do it again!" and "Next time I'll know better", and "Now I want to go home".' He flicked a glance at Tully. 'If it's Dr David Audley you're after, then it's in for a penny, in for a pound — no half-measures, Lady.'

For a moment no one wanted to break the silence which followed this latest gypsy's warning, the truth of which Ian knew that he alone shared with Reg Buller. And, when he thought about it, the only truly curious aspect of it was that, if it was true, Buller himself had turned up at the rendezvous this morning, in spite of his own well-developed sense of self-preservation. But then, when he took the thought further, there were a lot of contradictory aspects in Buller's character and curriculum vitae.

Then Jenny filled her glass again. 'Ian — ?' She glanced quickly at John Tully's glass, knowing that it would still be half-full, before returning to Buller. 'Are you trying to frighten me, Reg?'

Buller held out his empty glass. 'Would I do that, Miss Fielding?'

'Champagne, Reg? On top of beer?' But she poured, nevertheless. ' Yes — if you thought it would do any good.'

'Any port in a storm, madam — even fizzy rubbish.' The bulbous nose wrinkled again. 'And therefore ... no ... because dummy2

I know you've already made up your mind.' He took another gulp, and spluttered. 'But you have been paying for a

"reconnaissance", and that's what I have given you.'

The emphasis on Buller's first person singular — and no one, not even John Tully, and not even Jenny herself, was a more singular first person — gave Ian his opening. 'Are you saying that we're already blown, Reg?'

'What?' John Tully was bristling, before he spoke. 'You said ... we were "already" in for a pound . . . having spent some of our pennies, Reg.' He drew Buller's attention, overriding Tully. 'Does that mean someone is on to us —

already?'

Buller concealed any gratitude he might have behind another gulp, and another hiccup. 'Well . . . maybe you've been up to something I don't know about, Mr Robinson — like having some young lady in your bedroom, and a jealous husband . . .

like it would have been in the old days.' He grinned, and then nodded at the typescript on the table. 'But with the book you're writing ... I don't see the National Union of Teachers

— or the Department of Education, and that Mr Baker —

hiring anyone to watch this place, to see who comes in, an'

goes out, of a wet Sunday morning, anyway.' He carried on the nod towards the window, out of which only well-bred, or well-heeled, or otherwise upwardly-mobile local Hampstead residents might be observed at such times, down Holly Row.

'But someone is watching you, and that's a fact.'

To their credit, nobody moved to verify this information; at dummy2

least, neither Jenny nor John Tully moved — and then Ian realized that, since he ought to be less professional as well as equally shattered by this news, he ought to move —

' Ian — ! ' Jenny admonished him sharply. ' Don't look!'

Ian halted, fixing her first, almost accusingly; and then John Tully, almost angrily; and finally Reg himself, with a mixture of emotions which he couldn't control, but which only Reg himself could guess at.

'There's one at the back, too.' Buller agreed with all the confusion cheerfully. 'They've got you nicely bracketed . . .

unless you've got another exit, up over the roof, an' down through someone else's back garden — have you?'

'John — ?' Jenny cut through Buller's cackle decisively. 'You said no one was on to us — ?'

Tully stared at her, and then clear through her, as he computed the possibilities, one after another, trying to pin a probability among them. But then he frowned. 'I don't understand it, Miss Fielding. Because ... I do know a little —

a very little — about Audley. So I was damned careful with him: only the people I can really trust, I asked — ' His face closed up tight round his mouth ' — only the people who owe me.'

'Well, it wasn't me.' Buller knew he'd be next. 'Unless anyone who appears anywhere near Masson sparks 'em off — that's maybe it. But I was careful, too. And they didn't follow me here, either — you can depend on that: they were here dummy2

already: I spotted them, they didn't spot me — you can depend on that, too.'

But that was a hard one, thought Ian — estimating the known Buller against the unknown Audley. Because his confidence was only one step away from pride. And pride was always inches away from a fall, remembering Beirut —

'It might have been me.' Jenny's total honesty was one of her greatest strengths. 'I've asked one or two questions, just recently. And I can't vouch for everyone whom I've asked — '

She embraced Tully with that admission, binding him to her even more securely with it ' — and then they'd come to Ian, of course ... So it might be me, I'm afraid.'

'Well, it doesn't matter who it was, Miss Fielding.' Delivered from all responsibility for failure, Tully became loyal again, as an employee. 'The question is ... who is on to us?' He looked at Buller. 'Not Fleet Street — ?'

'Sod Fleet Street.' Buller almost looked sad. 'I remember a chap on the old Star . . . and one or two more, on the heavyweights . . . who'd have had us by now, the way we've blundered around . . . But they're all into management, and new technology, and colour supplements — the good ones.

Or the little magazines . . . and writing books — ' The blood-orange eyes took in Ian for half a second ' — sod Fleet Street!'

'So that would make it official — ?' Tully wasn't quite certain.

'Even after Spycatcher — Peter Wright?' Neither was Jenny certain.

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Buller's mouth twisted. 'There's still a few reporters I rate.'

He held out his glass. 'If one of them was loose, then I'd be worrying. But I'd also be happy, too.' He pushed at the neck of the bottle as Jenny poured, until the champagne frothed over the top of the glass and the bottle emptied into it. 'But I ain't seen one of 'em on this lark yet.'

'So it's official?' Tully persisted, patiently.

'Oh yes.' Buller sniffed disparagingly. 'What we've got, out there in the wet, is civil servants. The only question is . . . are they ours ... or are they someone else's, who can park their cars, an' claim "diplomatic immunity", and not worry about paying the fine — eh?'

That was combining the frightening with the more frightening, rather than the absurd with the ridiculous, thought Ian: whatever heated up the water in his Yellowstone pond it was already on the boil.

'But . . . we're not safe in any case — any more.' Jenny overtook him, as she always did; and, as it always did, the degree of difficulty and danger only encouraged her, setting her on to go further. 'Is that what you mean, Reg?'

'Yes. That is just about what I mean, I suppose.' Duller gave Ian a belated guilty look. 'Except . . . you could do a book, between you, about something else — like about Colonel Rabuka, and the Fiji Islands, maybe? And Mr Tully and I could go out there . . . and you could call it The Imperial Legacy — ? And we could maybe take in the French nuclear programme as well, that you've always wanted to do, which dummy2

no one else has done properly — right from the Sahara trials, in the old days, when they had those Germans working for them on the rockets . . . the ones they wouldn't talk about?'

Buller tossed his head. 'Either road, we'd be a bloody long way from here for a few months, anyway, Miss Fielding. An'

out of the rain, too.'

Jenny had long waited to do that. But Ian had always been against it because he was scared of the French; and, after the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, they had both been right and wrong; and Buller knew it too. But he also knew more than that, unfortunately — both about Jenny and about David Audley, so it seemed.

'Yes. That would certainly be agreeable, Reg — you're right.'

She smiled at him. But then she smiled at Ian. 'But . . . the French will wait for us, darling, I think. And David Audley obviously won't wait, will he — ?'

The sort of time-span she was thinking about would produce an indifferent book, he thought — even if it would also divvy up a hefty newspaper fee, for pre-publication of extracts, as well as a whopping advance, and a good transatlantic deal.

And, as she was always reminding him, they were only in the business of 'non-fictional ephemera', anyway.

'So do you want to go ahead — in spite of Reg?' Tully wasn't chicken: either for honest financial reasons (to keep his children in their private school, and his wife at that standard of living to which she was accustomed), or for the noble freedom-of-information, freedom-of-publication, freedom-to-dummy2

fcrtow reasons, John Tully was a fearless investigator. 'Right, Miss Fielding — Mr Robinson?'

'No.' Ian saw the ground opening up before him. What he couldn't bring himself to admit straight off (or not quite yet) was that whatever John Tully might be, Ian Robinson was no longer at heart a journalist, nor at any time a fearless one.

And, of course, they all knew that (they hadn't even bothered to ask him whether it might be anything that he'd done which had alerted someone: they knew him better than that, by heaven!).

'Yes, darling — ?' Jenny checked herself suddenly, substituting patience for enthusiasm. For a guess, she was reminding herself that she needed him just as much as he needed her — and never more so than now, when they had to work fast if they were to stay ahead of the pack. And there was the rub.

But he still couldn't admit to his fear of what the rub meant, not openly. 'We don't know who they are.'

'No, Ian. We don't.' Her patience stretched. 'But that doesn't matter. Mr Tully ... or Mr Buller . . . will take care of that.'

She smiled at him reassuringly, as to a Bear of Very Little Brain whose special skill was limited to assessing the different varieties of honey she delivered to him. 'The point is, darling, that they're there. And that means ... we really are on to something. So we've all got to get our skates on now.'

He had delayed too long. 'I'm not sure I want to get my dummy2

skates on, Jen. It's been a long time since ... I did this sort of thing. I'm a bit rusty.'

She couldn't conceal the flicker of contempt which he had hoped he wasn't going to see. 'Ian — ' Then the flicker clouded, as she remembered Beirut, and couldn't reconcile past experience with present observation ' — you're not scared, are you — ?'

Tully coughed. 'Mr Robinson hasn't been . . . out much, these last two or three years, Miss Fielding. You have rather kept him chained to his word-processor.' He drank the last of his sherry fastidiously. 'And to good effect, if I may say so.

But . . . one does get rusty, you know.'

That was surprising loyalty (or male solidarity, equally surprising), coming from John Tully, thought Ian. Or, it might just be that he, unlike everyone else, had not misunderstood the Beirut episode.

'No.' Reg Buller sidled towards the window, choosing a place where there was a slight gap between the frame and the curtain, where a sliver of light showed. 'The Lady's right.' He put his eye to the gap, without touching the curtain. 'Because he's not stupid, you see.' He turned back to them, past Tully and Jenny, and nodded to Ian. 'Welcome to the club, Mr Robinson.'

'Reg!' Jenny sounded almost accusing. 'You're not scared, are you?'

This bloke Audley . . . Dr David Audley . . .' Buller took out dummy2

his pipe from his pocket and studied it. And then thought better of lighting it again, and put it back in his pocket. 'Mr Tully's right, too: it won't have been him, that actually topped Masson — he's getting a bit long in the tooth for digging his own holes, when he needs 'em. If he needs 'em — '

' When.' Jenny emphasized the word coldly.

'We don't know that, with Masson.' Buller shook his head.

'All we've got is a bit of gossip you picked up, that you weren't meant to hear. And there's one or two people he's crossed, you can bet, who might like to fasten something on to him, Miss Fielding.'

'But you said "when", nevertheless, Mr Buller.'

'So I did.' He studied her for a moment. 'But before I went out West that time, to the Big . . . Grand . . . Tetons, you said to me, "Keep an open mind, Mr Buller: no matter what they say, or what they did, or why they did it ... or what it did to them . . . keep an open mind, Mr Buller", is what you said, as you put me on that Greyhound bus.'

Jenny smiled at him sweetly. 'We were economizing at the time, Mr Buller. And you still said "when".'

Buller gave her another long look. 'And you may have been talking to someone who's talked to someone I talked to.'

'That could be.' The sweet smile vanished. 'You tell me, Mr Buller.'

Reg Buller sighed, and touched the pocket in which his pipe lay. 'No names this time, Lady.' Then he nodded. 'All right, dummy2

then. There have been one or two times, over the years, when there's been some unpleasantness involving Mr David Audley, so they say.'

'Not "unpleasantness", Mr Buller.' Jenny was Miss Fielding-ffulke now, with all her ancestors behind her. 'And not just

"one or two times". David Audley has a long string of deaths behind him, so I am informed — reliably informed.' Then she weakened deliberately, as she remembered that they were both on the same side. 'Come on, Reg — you've been trying to frighten us out of our wits all along. . . even with the boiling water in Yellowstone National Park! So don't bullshit us now.' She brushed back the tangle of inadequately-combed hair. 'According to my source he presided over an absolute bloodbath, somewhere down in the West Country, a couple of years ago — ' She shifted to Tully ' — right, John?'

'Possibly.' Not for the first time as Ian looked at John Tully he was reminded of Clive Ponting, whose face was also designed for very dry sherry as well as distasteful revelations.

'But nothing in 1978 — or 1977. And he was in Washington almost the whole of '78, into 1979.' Buller looked to Tully for support. 'He's got a lot of friends in the CIA ... so I am reliably informed — eh?' Then he registered Tully's expression. 'And that wasn't because I was "exceeding-my-bloody-brief" — I got that for free, as it happens.'

' All right!" Jenny called them all to order. 'So, then . . . I will take him right now, and see how the land lies at the moment.'

She embraced both Tully and Buller together, but chiefly dummy2

Tully. 'John ... I think I'd like to know who is out there, getting wet at the moment, if possible.' She came to Ian.

'And, as you are the historian among us, darling . . . and as Audley wasn't doing anything naughty then ... do you think you could dig up 1978 for us, Ian — ? And, if you like, you can take Mr Buller with you, for protection.'

2

The possibility that he was being followed aroused in Ian what he assumed to be the classic symptoms of paranoia: a feeling of unaccustomed importance, verging on pride ('Better put a tail on Robinson: he needs watching!'), moderated by a much less comfortable disquiet, which might easily develop into a persecution complex.

Of course, he'd been followed before, almost certainly. But that had been in Beirut, which hardly counted, because everyone who was anyone was followed there, by someone or other, and it would have been an insult not to be followed; in fact, he'd probably been followed by the Syrians, who had been protecting them both, who had been shadowing other and nastier followers, like the lesser fleas on the bigger fleas on the proverbial dog, and so ad infinitum.

Only, he hadn't much liked the possibility then, and he liked it no better now, with Reg Buller's final patronizing and belittling words of wisdom echoing in his ear —

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'No good looking for 'em, because you won't see 'em — not if they know their job. So no good tryin' to be clever, peerin'

into shop windows. An' whatever you do, don't try an' lose

'em — that's Rule Number One. 'Cause, when you do need to slip 'em, it's gotta seem like by accident, an' all nice an' slow.

An' I'll stage-manage that, there's a taxi-driver I know who'll fix it. . . An' anyway, your job today is to draw 'em off to let me get off. So you just walk round to the Lady's flat for your Sunday lunch like always. An' phone me tonight at seven — from a public pay-box. Okay?'

Not okay. Because now, with the Sunday streets emptied by rain, and the Sunday pubs filled, the temptation to look over his shoulder at every corner was like an itch in his brain. And all the little antique shops, the contents of whose windows had never much interested him before, seemed full of intriguing objects . . . which he mustn't stop and look at, just in case someone might think he was trying to be clever. And as there probably wasn't anyone, that made him feel like a right prick.

But then ... if Reg Buller was right . . .

He decided to concentrate on it, partly to help him to forget that itch and its accompanying incipient paranoia, and partly because Reg Buller usually was right, when it came to such mundane matters. Which cleared the way in turn for the consideration of the more important matters with which Jenny would hit him during her version of Sunday lunch —

yuk!

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Because Jenny, too, had been right this time — and not in any mundane matter, either: her little shell-like ears (sensitive appendages, always attuned to items of scandal and indiscretion, as sharp as the diamonds which customarily adorned each of them) had picked up a winner this time, like a blip on a high-tech radar screen which registered not so much 'Friend or Foe?' as 'Profit or Loss?'

unfailingly —

'What about Masson, then?'

'A turn-up for the book, you mean?'

'Not a turn-up. I never did believe that story. It was too neat.'

'Which story? The official one — ? Or . . . ?'

'Neither of them. But I tell you one thing: David Audley won't like it.'

'David Audley? You don't mean — ?'

'I don't mean anything. Except . . . people who don't suit his book have a way of being safely written out of it. And Masson was a front runner then . . . remember?'

'Yes . . . But, surely, you don't think — ?'

'Not aloud I don't — no! But I think . . . if I was Audley . . . I might be remembering the banquet scene in that play the actors don't like naming — eh?'

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'You're sure you've got it right, Jen — ?'

'Don't be a bore, Ian. Of course I've got it right. I was listening to them.'

'To whom?'

'To these two men. And don't ask me who they were, because I don't know — yet.'

'They didn't introduce themselves to you?'

'Now you're being thick. They weren't talking to me. I overheard them. And the play's "Macbeth", of course — '

'Oh? Not "Hamlet", then?'

'Not— what?'

'You overheard them. But I can't think they wouldn't have noticed you. Because you're quite noticeable, Miss Fielding-ffulke. So presumably you were hiding behind some arras, like Polonius in "Hamlet". That's all.'

I see. So now you're being clever. So at least you're awake . . . Well, for your information, I was partly behind an arras, actually. Or a curtain, to be exact. . . And Victor Pollard and Nigel Gaitch were regaling me with inane Palace gossip about Charles and Di, which I really didn't want to know, but which they thought was just up my street. So I stopped listening to them . . . and there must be some sort of acoustic trick just there, because of the alcove there, and the curtain — I don't damn well know. All I know is what I heard. And it's "Macbeth" — the one the actors won't ever mention. And the banquet scene, too. And you dummy2

know what that's about, do you, Ian?'

'Yes — '

' It's about a murder that's gone wrong, is what it's about — '

So maybe Jenny was right. For certainly Jenny was clever, and she was very often as lucky as she was clever, which was an unbeatable alliance.

But that still left them with the Unnamed Play expert, who had been unlucky, as well as indiscreet, beside the curtain at the embassy party; he sounded clever too, and maliciously so perhaps. But just how clever had he been with that throwaway Macbeth reference?

Just generally clever, with Macbeth's hired murderer reporting back on the bodged killing —

— Is he dispacht?

— My lord, his throat is cut; that I did for him.

Or exactly clever, with Philip Masson as well as Audley in mind, after Banquo's grisly ghost had broken up a pleasant dinner —

— the time has been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would dummy2

die,

And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools

Was that it?

Had Banquo/Masson risen again, in order that Jenny Fielding and Ian Robinson should push David Audley from his stool — ?

Well . . . Jenny Fielding's castle was now just across the wet road, and he could hear no footsteps behind him, only his old tutor's warning against preconceived ideas which fitted so well that one bought them too easily, without feeling the quality of the shoddy material.

The road was safe, anyway — as safe as suburban East Berlin on a wet Sunday, never mind Hampstead; and he was probably as unfollowed here and now as he had been there and then — and Jenny could have simply heard two malicious Civil Service tongues chatting imaginative gossip

—

He skipped the last few yards, from the road and across the glistening pavement, to the refuge of the flat's entrance, and stabbed the bell with a sense of anti-climax, feeling foolish because he was simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

Because, if Jenny and Buller were right, it might well be that dummy2

they didn't even consider him worth following —

'Yes?' The cool, disembodied voice was haughtiest Jenny.

'It's me. Who did you think it was?' He heard his own voice too late, as squeakiest Ian.

'Are you alone? Or already in durance vile, with the cuffs on and a gun at your back?' Now she was stage-Jenny, making fun of all the painted devils of his imagination.

'For heaven's sake, Jen — let me in!' He couldn't stop himself protesting. 'My feet are soaking, damn it!' He managed to lower the squeak to a growl.

Click!

'Darling — I'm sorry — I am sorry . . . But John Tully and dear old Reg insisted — remember?' She patted him like a child after relieving him of his raincoat and umbrella. 'Of course, John wanted my taxi. And he said we'd got nothing to lose, anyway . . . And Reg wanted you to lead the opposition away, so he could do his own thing.' She brushed ineffectually at the huge bird's-nest tangle of hair which she'd pinned up, but which was falling down on all sides. 'I do love Reg — don't you, Ian?'

'No.' He could smell an unfamiliar smell. And it was as far removed from the usual smell of her flat as what he felt for Reg Buller was separated from love. 'Reg Buller is not lovable.' He sniffed again. 'Have you been cooking?'

'He is so. Come and have a drink. And he's also one very smart operator. Did you read his report? You did bring it dummy2

with you?'

'Yes.' He had to sniff again. 'Is that what I think it is?'

'Eh? Well, I don't know what you think it is. But the man in the butcher's shop said it was his very best Scotch beef. And he gave me all sorts of advice about what I should do with it

— he seemed quite worried that I might not treat it with proper respect. I almost asked him to come and roast it for me . . . only I was afraid he might take me up on the offer.'

She smiled her Scarlett O'Hara smile at him. 'But then he said it needed a good Burgundy with it. Only, I know you like claret, so I asked the other man, in the wine merchants', who sells me my usual plonk . . . and he said this would be about right — ' She swept a bottle off the sideboard ' — he said it had the body ... which really sounded rather gruesome . . .

But I do remember the name — it has to be named after an Irishman really — "O'Brien"? Because none of that area is

"haut", it's all flat as a pancake. But it was one of Daddy's favourite tipples, so it can't be bad — can it?' She jerked the bottle to her nose. 'I think it smells rather fun — it reminds me of Daddy, actually. He used to make me smell all his bottles. Here — have a sniff! Is it okay?'

Ian clamped his hand on the bottle. What he had to remember was that he was almost certainly being taken for a ride, as better men before him had been, and others after him would be. Because Daddy had been a power in the land (and that was part of Jenny Fielding's stock-in-trade, and his also by their literary alliance). And also because she was his dummy2

only-and-favourite daughter, and a conniving chip off the same block.

It was Haut-Brion, and he had been in short trousers when it had been in its grapes. This'll do just fine, Jen. It's . . . okay.'

'Oh — good!' She turned away from him. 'I have to take the little man's beef out of the oven — if I don't, I think he'll come and demonstrate outside, or haunt me when he's dead . . . And there are the vegetables — but they're just out of the freezer, so they're no trouble . . . But I have also made a Yorkshire pudding, according to that recipe the man gave us in Belgium — remember? The one who said that the people in Yorkshire had got it all wrong, after the battle of Waterloo — ? But you must come and help me, Ian — '

He followed her, towards the smell, with his arm and shoulder frozen, as though it was a bottle of Château Nobel, from the Nitro-Glycerine commune, of an unstable year —

Waterloo was right, though: the kitchen resembled nothing so much as the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte towards the end of the battle, after the French had stormed it, and Wellington's troops had re-taken it at the point of a bayonet.

And, quite evidently, the ex-freezer vegetables were already casualties, and the Belgian-Yorkshire pudding had suffered the same fate as the unfortunate Belgian regiments which had been exposed to the fire of Napoleon's artillery for too long —

'Jen! Let's eat the beef — ' There was just enough space to bestow the Haut-Brion safely on the table. But then, as he dummy2

rescued what looked like the better part of an Aberdeen Angus from her, he met her eyes ' — all this on my account, Jen — ?'

'Well. . . you don't eat enough, do you? All those fast-foods —

junk foods — and take-aways?' She looked down at the beef, and then back up at him. 'The way to a man's heart is supposed to be through his stomach, that's all.'

She really wanted Audley's scalp. Or someone's scalp, anyway. Or, one way or another, she wanted some more Beirut-style excitement, anyway. And (more to the point) she'd expected him to cast his vote against the enterprise.

'But all a bloody waste of time?' Having already got what she wanted, she was perfectly happy, and the irritation was hardly skin-deep. 'Shall we throw it away, and go round the corner to the pub, Ian?'

'Certainly not!' As always, the pain was his as he was reminded for the thousandth time of the difference between her need and his desire. 'I'm not going to let this beef — and that plonk of yours — go to waste. Get the carving-knife, Fielding-ffulke! And lay the table — go on!'

'Yes, master — at once, master!' As always, she was his humble and attentive servant in her moment of triumph, and never more beautiful. 'So what about David Audley, then?

Isn't he something, eh?'

'The devil with Audley.' Predictably, her carving-knife was blunt. But the beef was superbly tender. 'Were you followed?'

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'Don't ask me, darling. But if Reg says we're being, then I'm sure we were. And — don't you think it's fun?'

'No. I don't think it's fun ... Is that enough for you, Jen?'

'No?' She peered over his shoulder, and the smell of her and the beef aroused different carnal desires simultaneously. 'No, I'm absolutely ravenous . . . and look at all that lovely blood, too! God, I must take up cooking, I think — evening classes in cordon bleu, and all that — and nouvelle cuisine — that'll do, darling. What d'you think?'

What he thought was that she now had a heavy-manual-worker's plate of roast beef, which would make a nouvelle cuisine chef quite ill to look at. 'What I think, Jen, is ... that being followed scares me. And David Audley terrifies me ...

since you ask.' He offered her the plate.

'Can I have a little more of that . . . sort of gravy-stuff.'

'Blood, you mean?' He accepted the spoon she was holding out to him in anticipation. 'Well, at least you have the right appetite, I suppose.'

'What?' Greed deafened her for a moment. 'Do you want some of my Yorkshire pudding? I did put cheese in it, like the recipe said.'

Ian's memory of the outcome of that experiment enabled him to concentrate on his carving, while pretending similar deafness.

'What d'you mean — "the right appetite"?' She had heard, after all.

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'People involved with Audley end up dead, according to Reg Buller.' He might as well match her greed: what wasn't eaten here and now would probably be thrown away, and it would be a sin to waste this noble animal.

'Ah! I see what you mean — ' She cleared a space for them on the kitchen table simply by throwing everything into the sink, higgledy-piggledy ' — and that's what this friend of Daddy's I talked to said, actually.'

'And doesn't that frighten you?' He watched her fish cutlery out of a drawer, and glasses from a cupboard. The cutlery was beautiful bone-handled antique, tarnished but razor-sharp, and the glasses were the thick and ugly petrol-coupon variety, and none-too-clean. But he was past caring about that now.

'I don't see why it should.' She let him pour, and then raised her glass high. 'Here's to us — and crime paying, anyway!'

Then she drank. 'Mmm! It is good — trust Daddy!' Then she attacked her beef. 'Mmmm! So's this!' She grinned and munched appreciatively. 'I mean ... if you look at what Johnnie and Reg dug up about him . . . it is all rather vague . . . sort of gossip, I mean . . . There were inquests. But there was always a perfectly reasonable story of some sort —

like that young man who blew himself up, during that cavaliers-and-roundheads mock-battle — '

'After someone else had got murdered, at another mock battle?' The need to concentrate on what she was saying detracted cruelly from the paradisal meat and wine. 'And dummy2

that case has never been closed, Reg says.'

'But Audley wasn't there, that time — '

'So far as anyone knows. But he was there the second time —

'

'But nowhere near the explosion — ' All the same, she nodded as she cut him off ' — I do agree, though: he is rather accident-prone . . . Except that he's never been summoned to give evidence, or anything like that.'

'Or anything like anything.' He swallowed, and disciplined himself against eating and drinking for a moment. 'And the year before last, when that visiting Russian general died —

Tully says he didn't have a heart-attack — that he was shot by someone.'

'But not by Audley, Ian.' Jenny didn't stop eating, but she had somehow become a devil's advocate. 'He's a back-room boy, not a gunfighter. He's too old for that sort of thing.'

'But he was there, somewhere — Tully also thought that — '

'No.'

Thus flatly contradicted, Ian returned to his food. Whatever crimes Audley had, or had not, connived at, there was no reason why he should compound them by letting his meat congeal on his plate. If Jenny thought Audley was innocent of the Russian general's death, so be it. And if he'd never come out into the limelight, so be that, too. Because Jenny quite obviously thought there were other things he had to answer for.

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'No.' She pushed her plate away and then filled her glass again, like Daddy's daughter.

'No?' He pushed his own empty glass towards her.

'Johnnie didn't think that. I told him that. But then he did some checking, and he says there was one hell of a shoot-out, somewhere down there in the West Country. Only it was all very efficiently hushed-up. And the Russians helped with the hushing, apparently.' She nodded at him. 'And Audley was probably mixed up in that.'

'Probably?' Jenny had a prime source — that was both obvious and nothing new: Jenny had more sources than she had had take-away dinners (or expensive restaurant dinners, for that matter). But, what was more to the point, it would be easier to excavate a two-year-old scandal than a nine-year-old one. 'Probably, Jen?'

'Maybe. But who cares?' She shrugged. 'It's Audley-and-Philly-Masson we're after, not Audley-and-General-Zarubin, darling.'

'But Zarubin sounds more promising.'

'I don't agree.' She savoured her wine, as though she was thinking of Daddy again. 'Zarubin was just an effing-Cossack, by all accounts — not one of dear Mr Gorbachev's blue-eyed boys. Which presumably explains all the friendly co-operation.' Then she was looking at him, and she very definitely wasn't thinking of Daddy. 'I don't say that isn't interesting. And maybe we'll find a place for it eventually.

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Because once we start turning over stones then I expect all sorts of creepy-crawlies will start emerging and running for cover — that's the beauty of it. Because Audley goes back a long way. Long before poor Philip Masson. So God only knows what we'll turn up.'

Now it was poor Philip Masson. And just now it had been

'Philly'. But that could wait. 'And yet no one's ever heard of him, Jen.'

'Of Audley?' She shook her head. 'That's not quite true. In fact, it's entirely untrue: lots of people have heard of him.

Lots of people know him, actually . . . and he seems to know a lot of people, putting it the other way round. They just don't know what he does, exactly.'

'But you think you do know?'

'No — not yet. But . . . it's like, he's often in the background of things, so far as I can make out so far. Like, with a collection of people in group photographs, when you keep seeing the same face somewhere in the back . . . Or, you're not quite sure, because he's always the one who's partly obscured by someone else — or he's moved just as the photographer pressed the button, so he's blurred.' She shrugged. 'Like Reg said, he gives advice to people — to committees, and suchlike. But his name never appears.'

'That isn't so, according to John Tully. He's listed in quite a few places — in Who's Who, for a start. With a CBE in the early 1970s. And an honorary fellowship at King Richard's.'

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'Oh yes.' She wasn't put off in the least. 'But it's all so vague

— isn't it? An "assistant-principal" here, in one place —

Home Office, was it? Then a transfer to the Ministry of Defence. And writing those books . . . But, darling, it's all got nothing to do with what he really does, of course — it's all flumdiddle. Dear old Reg said it all, didn't he? "Cloak-and-dagger", is what he is. Only this time it was more like "dagger-and-cloak", maybe.'

'Reg also said "research".' There was something in her voice he hadn't heard before, and couldn't pin down now; almost a hint of underlying passion, of malevolence even. All he knew was that he had to argue against it. '"Advice and research", was it? And the man must be close to retirement, damn it, Jen!' But that hadn't been all Reg had said, he remembered.

And that weakened his resistance to her will. 'If they retire in his line of work.'

'Yes. And that's interesting too.' Her voice was back to normal: maybe he had imagined that hint of genuine feeling under the twenty-four-hour insatiable curiosity which powered her normally, without commitment to any cause other than the truth. 'And particularly interesting to you, as it happens, Ian.'

'To me?' What he was going to get now was one of the arguments she had intended to use in support of the Scotch beef and the Chateau Haut-Brion (which she had surely known for what it was), in the event of his welshing on the deal.

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'Uh-huh.' She gestured towards the Haut-Brion. 'I think I may have some idea of what he does, actually.'

This was that source of hers again: a source she would never mention even as a source, unlike Reg Buller's vague 'There's a bloke I know, in The Street/in the Met/ down the nick/

down the pub/in the business', or John Tully's notated references to 'Contact AB' and 'Contact XY' in his reports, whose identities would all be in a little black book somewhere.

'Go on, darling — don't mind me. I've had more than my share.'

'So you have.' So she had. And if she'd been his, and he'd been hers, he might worry about that; though, as they never would be (which was the old familiar spear in his heart, twisting but never killing), and as she never seemed to change, no matter how much she'd drunk, except that she burned more brightly still, he had no right to worry.

'I've got more — I bought a whole case, darling. And the little man gave me what he called a "case-price", so our bottle was absolutely free — '

'Jenny! For heaven's sake — !' He had to move, to block her passage towards her Aladdin's cave. 'Just sit down, and tell me about Audley, there's a good girl — sit down!'

As he restrained her he thought . . . and that's another thing: when it comes to money, she's got no bloody idea! 'Just tell me — eh?'

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She sat down. 'Oh . . . you are a bore, sometimes . . . Don't you ever let your hair down — ?' To match the words, she tried ineffectually to recover some of the hair which was coming down all around her face.

He waited until she had done the best she could. 'Audley?'

'Yes — all right!' She abandoned the pushing-and-poking process. There was this man Daddy knew, who was just incredibly high-powered ... I mean, Daddy is high-powered

— he is like God — ' She saw his face, and tried to rescue herself from the blasphemy ' — I mean, he's kind, even though he knows everything . . .' She trailed off, grimacing at him.

That was half her trouble — or maybe all of it: no one could compete against such opposition. And that was also his problem, too. But not just at this moment. 'I don't think I'm quite with you, Jen. This man ... he was Audley?'

'Good God, no! He was an acquaintance of Daddy's, I'm trying to tell you. He's dead now — but quite naturally, I think.'

Maybe she had had one glass too many. 'I see. And high-powered with it. But not as high-powered as your father, eh?'

She frowned at him. 'What?'

'I was always taught there was only one God.' It was odd to speak so lightly when one meant what one said. 'So ... like St Peter, say? Or St Paul — he was rather high-powered.'

She stared at him for a moment, then made a face. 'Very dummy2

clever.' Then the face became serious. 'Maybe a bit of both of them, actually. Although Daddy just called him "Fred", as I remember. When I met him.'

'"Fred"?' At least this wasn't one of her unacknowledged, unnamed sources, anyway. 'I don't think there is a "St Fred"

in the calendar of saints. But never mind . . . You met this

"Fred" — ' It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what Fred had to do with Audley. But then he looked directly into her eyes and caught himself just in time, knowing that he had been wrong just a minute before.

'Yes, I did.' The eyes were stony, not stoned. 'I was eighteen

— I was just going up to college. And he frightened me.'

'Frightened you?' It was so unexpected that he repeated the words. 'How?'

'He quizzed me. No — he interrogated me, more like . . .

What I thought, what I was going to do ... at Oxford, after Oxford . . . Why I thought what I thought — why I was going to do what . . . what I thought I was going to do.' She stared at him. 'He really took me apart. It was quite frightening.'

From her that was also quite an admission. Because there wasn't much that frightened Jenny Fielding-ffulke. Or, anyway, nothing that wore trousers. And there was also something else that didn't fit. 'Your father didn't stop him

— ?'

'Daddy had a phone-call. He told me to entertain his guest —

Mummy was at one of her meetings.' Her eyes glazed slightly, dummy2

as though she was no longer looking at him. Then they focused on him again. 'He was sharp — not interrogated, more like dissected: I felt like a poor bloody frog in a biology practical.'

'Fred' had been nothing if not memorable. And a faint whiff of her original fear travelled across the years in her imagery.

'When Daddy came back ... he said — he said, not Daddy —

"We've had a most interesting chat, Jennifer and I".' She cocked her head slightly. 'And then the bastard told Daddy what a clever daughter he'd sired, and bullshitted him so that I couldn't decently have hysterics, or burst into tears ... In fact, he even gave me his card, and told me that if I didn't want to go on with my biochemistry when I'd graduated then I could always come to him for a job. And poor old Daddy positively glowed.' She sniffed. ' Fat chance!'

It was getting more interesting by the second — just as she'd promised it would do, although in another context. 'So what did you do?'

She sniffed again. 'I couldn't say anything then — now, could I? Not to Daddy — not without appearing to be a wimp, anyway.'

'But. . . what was on the card, Jen?'

'God — I don't know! I went to the loo, and had a good cry —

and tore it up, and flushed it down the pan — ' She stopped abruptly. ' Clinton, though — that was the name: Frederick Joseph Clinton.' Now she looked at him. ' Sir Frederick dummy2

Clinton — ?'

That rang a bell from somewhere. But he couldn't place it.

But ... the way she was looking at him, she expected him to place it. 'Clinton?'

'Yes.' She nodded. 'I found him in an old Who's Who, but there wasn't much about him.' She drained the last dregs of her Haut-Brion. 'He retired from the army as a brigadier in

'47 — no mention of any regiment. . . But the DSO was from 1940, Daddy said. So that fits in with a book he wrote, about Dunkirk, when we ran away from the Germans, and made a great victory of it.' She almost banged her glass down. 'And he got his "K" in '58, when he was supposed to be a permanent something-or-other in the Home Office — or one of the other ministries they had then, before it was the Ministry of Defence. But, of course, it's just like Audley — all flumdiddle.'

Dunkirk, of course: there had been that very curious book on Dunkirk, way back . . . with all sorts of elliptical references to high policy, both British and German, which the military historians had taken with a pinch of salt; he had bought a copy in a second-hand shop in Charing Cross Road as a schoolboy, for his grandfather (who had been there) because it had been signed by the author, with a great flourish (or, rather, because it had been dead-cheap, anyway). ' The Dunkirk Miracle — of course!'

'What?' She frowned at him again.

The book he wrote — The Dunkirk Miracle, Jen. But . . . how dummy2

does he fit in with Audley?'

'Audley?' The name made her demote Frederick Joseph Clinton, so it seemed for an instant. Then she concentrated on him. 'If what I've been told is right, Audley was his blue-eyed boy — his pupil, and his beneficiary . . . Only, it didn't quite work out like that, apparently.' The frown came back.

'What d'you mean?'

'I'm not quite sure yet.' The concentration became almost disconcerting. 'But I think we could — just could — be on to something rather interesting in its own right, even apart from Dr David Audley . . . although he is part of it — very much part of it, in fact . . .'

She trailed off, and this time he waited patiently, because he recognized that look from old. Normally, in their strange symbiotic partnership, she was the one who brought in the new information which could not be obtained by conventional and straightforward means, which she scavenged from all sorts of unlikely and — to him —

inaccessible places and people; and it was his job not only to combine it with his own research and render it presentable and saleable, but also to crack its bones and extract the marrow within. But sometimes — rarely, but sometimes —

she could do a lot more than that.

She looked at him suddenly. 'Quite a lot of people know David Audley — and about him, too ... in a way. And you know what they say, Ian?'

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He knew what Reg Buller had said. But that had been private. 'No— ?'

She nodded. They say ... "Oh he's something in Intelligence, isn't he?" Or even just "Old David, darling? In one of those MI-somethings — always popping down to that awful secret place at Cheltenham, with all those initials."' She paused, closing her eyes. '"But he does have the most delightful wife and daughter — both perfect sweeties, darling. Whereas, he's a great bear of a man — a perfect Caliban, compared with them, don't you know".'

That sounded more like one of 'Mummy's' friends than

'Daddy's'. But that, of course, was exactly what 'they' had said, word for word, from memory. Given a notebook, Jenny would have either broken the lead in her pencil or supplied herself with a dead ball-point pen; or, if she hadn't, then she wouldn't have been able to decipher her hopeless handwriting. But the gods, to make up for that deficiency, had given her total recall of anything that was said to her, down to the last emphasis.

But she was looking at him again.

'He was connected with that fearful man Clinton.' The concentration was back. 'That I know. And Clinton was "in"

Intelligence — very much in. But he was never one of the directors of any of the big departments — MI5, or MI6, and all that. Because everyone knows who they were . . . Yet he was a bloody-big wheel — a power in the land. That's for sure, too.'

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Was that 'Daddy', being indiscreet long ago with his little darling? Or that source, being infinitely more indiscreet, for some other reason? But he could see that there was more to come.

'Clinton got a successor, at all events. Name of Butler.

Christian name James, but always known as "Jack". Ex-career soldier in some little line regiment. And not too successful even in that, because he went on the General List as a major when he was quite elderly. Then he was made up to half-colonel, and in — in — Intelligence, apparently. But not military intelligence: "one of Fred Clinton's lot", thereafter.' Her face seemed to sharpen as she spoke. '"Nice chap, but rather dull".' Sharper still. 'Which just could be an unreliable assessment, because he's just got his "K" — Sir Jack now . . . Just like Sir Fred, before him.' She nodded wisely. 'Like you're always saying, darling — pattern: "Look for the pattern" . . . okay?'

She wanted to be jogged — or maybe reassured? 'So now he's Audley's boss — ?'

'Yes. But boss of what?' Now she was really there. 'So . . .

remember what old Reg said — "research and advice"? And when Reg picks up vibes, then they're usually right, aren't they?'

She had asked him to remember. So, once again, he remembered what Reg Buller had said out of her hearing.

'Reg is good — yes.'

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'But not quite accurate this time.' Scoring a point always pleased her. 'Because I think the official title of the Clinton-Butler organization is "Research and Development" .

Although, of course, that doesn't really mean anything — it's just a useful bit of jargon, to put you off. Because everyone's got an "R & D" section now — it's like having a "computer facility", with a "systems manager", even if you're putting beans into tins — all flumdiddle, darling.'

'Flumdiddle' must be a new word in Jenny's circle. But.

nevertheless, he was beginning to smell the marrow from the broken bone. 'So what does it mean, then?'

'Well . . . I'm by no means quite sure, darling — as I keep saying.' Knowing him, she was properly cautious still, in spite of all her certainties. 'But suppose — just suppose . . . that alongside all the little old secret services that we know and love by their initials and numbers . . . alongside all of them, there was another one, that we didn't know was there. Like, say, a sort of parallel world, in those science-fiction stories, almost — ?' She cocked an eye at him. 'Not very big — really rather small — ? But more secret, more exclusive — ? Say . . .

just responsible to the Prime Minister — the Cabinet Office?

Of the Intelligence Sub-Committee of the Joint Chiefs? Or —

'

She wasn't beginning to frighten him. She was frightening him. 'Doing what?'

She shrugged. 'Doing whatever it was told to do. Doing what comes naturally — I don't know ... I tell you, I'm not sure dummy2

yet . . . Trouble-shooting? Or maybe trouble-making.' She blew a strand of hair which had fallen across her face.

'Because ... as well as being very secret, I do rather get the impression that it may not be too popular in certain circles, whatever it is — whatever it does, exactly — ' She seized the fallen strand and tried to push it back on top, releasing a whole cascade in the process ' — damn!'

Ian accepted the diversion gratefully. That last revelation at least told him something about her source. Indeed, it fitted into the original dialogue she'd eavesdropped on to make a familiar pattern. In any investigation, the enemies of the subject of the investigation — or even, if the subject was an organization of some sort, any disaffected members within it

— were prime sources of information. And . . . although this source sounded more like an outsider than an insider ... it was hardly surprising that the 'Clinton-Butler' organization had its enemies, even on its 'own' side, never mind among its proper and official opponents.

'Well?' Jenny abandoned the wreckage of her bird's-nest.

'What do you say to all that then, Ian?'

Its opponents! he thought, staring suddenly at the window with a stab of disquiet. He had somehow taken it for granted that those watchers (if they were there — ?) would be Special Branch, if not MI5. But they could be — who?

'Yes.' She grinned happily. 'It does account for our sudden popularity, doesn't it, darling?'

'That's not the word I was thinking of.' At least he hadn't dummy2

betrayed his fear. 'Is this what you told Woodward? Or Parsons?'

The grin twisted. 'Oh, come on, darling! As our Reg might say, "Would I do that, Mr Robinson?" Of course not.'

'So what did you tell them?'

She sighed. 'What did I say to them? Well, I said to Dick:

"Richard, darling ... do you recall that nice Civil Servant named Philip Masson, who was tragically lost at sea, when he fell off his yacht in the Channel nine or ten years ago?" And he said: "Jenny darling, that wouldn't be the same fellow whose body has just turned up in a wood somewhere, without his lifebelt?"' She smiled. 'I was very circumspect, you see.'

'Get on with it, Jen.'

'All right, all right! So I said: "Yes, darling — the one all your chaps are running around in circles trying to find out about, to no avail . . . How would you like the serial rights for our book on what really happened, darling? Or shall I go to Rupert Murdoch instead — ?" And that was when he patted his cheque-book. Plus, of course, darling Clive will put his cash up front, as usual.' The innocent face vanished. 'So what do you say to that, then?'

She was too damn sure of herself. 'I'd say he's wasting his money. And so are we — and our time, too.'

She frowned. 'What d'you mean?'

The trouble was, he wasn't at all sure of himself. 'If what you dummy2

say is true ... if there is a Clinton-Butler operation of some sort, on the level you suggest . . . and if the man Audley was somehow involved with Masson's death ... for heaven's sake, Jen! It's going to be buried deeper than we're likely to be able to dig — that for a start — '

'The hell with that!' She snapped at him. 'Who said we can't?

Who's better than us — you and me?' The Fielding bosom inflated angrily, and pointed at him. 'Besides which, as you well know . . . once you know there's a secret, there's always a way of uncovering it — ' She caught her anger as she observed his face. 'We've done it before, Ian. We did it in Beirut — didn't we?'

'Yes.' And it was a commentary on her that she still didn't understand what a damned close-run thing that had been —

and how much the memory of it still scared him. And how much the same memory ought to frighten her. 'But this is different.'

'How — different?'

'For a start . . . because they won't let us publish. Even if Dick Woodward is willing to stick his neck out. Which he won't be.'

'Oh — come on!' The fire kindled again. 'Just because of Peter Wright, and all that ... We haven't signed the Official Secrets Act — we aren't going to publish secret documents — at least, not unless we can get hold of any, that is — ' She smiled grimly at him through the flames. The Peter Wright thing doesn't stop us: he's made it Open Season, more like — don't dummy2

you see, Ian?'

'No. I don't see. There's still the law, Jen — '

'The law?' She stopped for an instant. 'Well, I don't know . . .

But I've talked to Simon Lovell about that. And he says that practicalities are going to come into that now — or im practicalities, where they're dealing with people like us: he says that "acquisition" can't be an offence, otherwise they'd have prosecuted other people long before. And then, if we're just the teeniest bit careful . . . and he'll vet every line you write, Simon says he will . . . then there's a hell of a lot we can get away with, under "Public Interest" — Pro bono publico, as John Tully would say.' The grim smile showed again, quite different from her more mischievous grin. 'Audley won't sue.

Because they won't let him — they never defend their own.

Not like the KGB . . . But, if we're right, he won't anyway —

will he?'

They were back to one of his earliest thoughts. 'You know him — ? Do you know him, Jen?'

'Never met him in my life, so far as I know.' She frowned, as though running memories backwards. 'Big ugly fellow, apparently.' The frown cleared. 'That's a pleasure in store, darling.'

For her, anyway: 'big ugly fellows' couldn't very well thump young lady investigative-writers, certainly — not without the direst consequences. But this time, with time so short, she needed her Ian up there with her, in the forefront of the dummy2

battle. And that wasn't reassuring. 'So why are you so hell-bent on nailing him, Jen?'

'I'm not.' No smile, no grin, now: she looked as neutral as Switzerland. Yet there was a cold glitter in her eye he'd never seen before. 'But this is one book I really want to see published.'

It couldn't be avarice, surely? 'We don't need the money, Jen.

Not that badly.'

'The money?' Sudden anger replaced the coldness. 'Don't be silly, Ian. You're the one who likes money. I don't need it —

remember?'

That was hurtful — and all the more so because she intended it to be. And that wasn't really Jenny. 'I'm sorry — '

She closed her eyes for an instant. 'No! I'm the one who should be sorry. That was dirty. And you weren't being silly

— you just don't know, that's all. It was before your time —

our time.'

'Our time?' Whatever it was, it had hurt her. And whatever it was she wanted, he was going to do it for her, he realized.

'What was, Jen? 1978 — ?'

'Korea.' She produced the name like a rabbit out of a top-hat.

'Korea?' One of their future possible subjects (which, now he heard himself repeat it, Jenny herself had floated) had been the Korean phenomenon, in anticipation of all the Olympic coverage, and the possible political nastiness which might attend the event.

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Jenny nodded. 'Philip Masson was a lovely man. And he was also a Royal Marine, long ago, in Korea.'

'A Royal — ?'

'In the war — the Korean War.' She seemed to lose patience with him, where the moment before she had conceded that he couldn't know what she was talking about. 'Philly Masson carried Daddy for miles, on his back, in the middle of winter, with the Chinese shooting at them all the time — Daddy wouldn't have survived without him: he would have frozen to death before he'd died of wounds, if the Chinese hadn't finished him off, he said. Philly saved his life.' She looked at him. 'So, you could say, he saved my life, too. Because I wouldn't have been born if he hadn't done that. And ... he was my godfather, Ian. And I loved him.'

3

It was Reg Buller who put his finger on it. And he put his finger quite literally on it (and slightly drunkenly, slurring his words a little), as he stabbed the protected enlargement of the microfilmed newspaper page.

'Thish ish it! You mark my wordsh, Ian lad! Thish ish it!'

Ian had spent three good hours in the library by then, dissecting the anatomy of an almost perfect murder, albeit without ever getting close to the victim. Because, if there was dummy2

one certain thing about the death of Philip Masson, it was that he'd never actually been on board the Jenny III on the evening and night of Friday/Saturday, November 17/18, 1978.

But, equally certainly, somebody who knew his job had been on the Jenny III instead of him.

The reliable Daily Telegraph had done its own job well, in reporting the eventual inquest at length on page three.

Maybe there hadn't been a good murder trial that day, to lead the page. Or perhaps some smart editor had calculated that there might be a great many yachtsmen among the Telegraph readers, who would study every line of three columns thinking all the time this could have been me!

Time: 3.35 P.M., Saturday, November 18; Wind: South-West freshening; sea: moderate to rough —

The yacht Jenny III (no prizes for guessing why she had been so named) had been found by a fisherman, adrift ten miles south of the Needles.

There had of course been no one on board, but (or because of that) the fisherman had been observant: the mainsail had been sheeted hard home, as for close-hauled sailing, and reefed down; the working jib had been set, but was flapping; the jib sheets were lying on deck, shackle in place, but pin dummy2

missing; the tiller was lashed amidships; the navigation lights and the instruments were switched on, but the battery was almost flat. And the inflatable dinghy was rolled up and still in its locker.

He hadn't understood a great deal of that, but it had become clearer as the experts and the friends of the missing man had added their evidence and their theories bit by bit.

The Jenny III had evidently been Philip Masson's pride-and-joy ('Mr Masson, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and former Royal Marines Officer, who had won the Military Cross in Korea' — as an ex-Marine, it was no surprise that he had the smell of the sea in his nostrils, of course).

He had kept her at Lymington during the summer. She was an old Folkboat (overall length 25 feet, waterline 19.68, beam 7.22; displacement 2.16 tons), built in the '50s in traditional style, and made to last. Probably, he could have afforded something better (or so said Elwyn Rhys-Lewis, his grieving friend and a fellow yachtsman) —

'But she suited him. He often sailed her single-handed, you see, and he had her fitted out accordingly, with all the halyards led aft to the cockpit, a downhaul on the jib, and a system of cleats to hold the tiller in place if he had to go below. But she was a good sea-boat — she'd stand up to dummy2

anything the sea would throw at her. After all, Blondie Hasler sailed a Folkboat in the first single-handed race, back in 1960

— '

Elwyn Rhys-Lewis had been a good witness; maybe even a bit too good, in building up the picture?

So he had underlined Elwyn Rhys-Lewis in his notebook, for possible further consideration.

But this pride-and-joy had been kept in immaculate order, anyway — with a fair amount of help from old George White, over at Hamworthy. George was apparently a shipwright of the old school, and what he didn't know about wooden boats wasn't worth knowing. So that was why Philip Masson always laid the Jenny III up at Poole during the winter, said Mr Rhys-Lewis.

'We shall never know exactly what happened. But, thanks to the evidence which we have heard, a fair reconstruction of what may have happened is possible,' the coroner had concluded at last.

That Friday evening, the deceased went down to Lymington, for his Rover car was found in the car park. He must have gone straight on to his boat, though no one remembers seeing him. But we have heard that he made no secret of his intentions to sail her round to Poole as soon as possible, having already left it a little late in the season owing to pressure of work in London.

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'There was, we have heard, a stiff south-westerly wind blowing that Friday, with the threat of worse forecast. These were not ideal conditions for the passage he planned to take, but nothing that he and his boat could not handle. At all events, he probably heard the late night forecast of a low pressure area building up in the Atlantic, and he must have decided to make a night passage.

'In that event, he probably motored her down from Lymington to Hurst Point. Or (as we have heard) may have sailed, even though he would have had to tack all the way.

But he would have had an ebb tide under him, at all events.' (This coroner sounded as though it hadn't been his first sea tragedy, Ian had noted there.)

'Mr Rhys-Lewis and Mr White are both agreed that he would then have hoisted sail, prudently putting a tuck in the main.

And once round Hurst he would have proceeded on the port tack, taking the inshore channel to pass north of the Shingles. With a south-westerly wind he would have made good progress for two or three miles, and gone over to the starboard tack once he was sure of clearing the Shingles.

'It is at this point, one may suspect, that something went wrong, and we must attempt to recreate the situation from the little evidence we have.

'The deceased would most probably have been intending to head out to sea on a southerly course, and once clear of the Shingles to have gone about, and sailed across Poole Bay until he picked up the Fairway. By then the tide would have dummy2

turned, so he would have had a fair run into Poole entrance.

Daylight would then not have been far away, so he would have timed it exactly right to arrive at Poole Bridge for the early morning opening. With a mooring waiting for him in Holes Bay, he would have intended to go ashore at Cobbs Quay, and then taken a taxi back to Lymington, as he had done before on such occasions.

'But this he never did. We must surmise, rather, that when he went on to the starboard tack, probably somewhere off Barton in Christchurch Bay, the jib sheet shackle came adrift.

It is significant that when the boat was found the jib was flogging and the sheets lying on deck, with the pin gone from the shackle.

'That, for an experienced yachtsman, would have been only a minor annoyance. All he had to do was to find a spare shackle, clamber up to the foredeck to fit it, return to the cockpit, and then sheet in and carry on.

'Being perhaps a little further inshore than he cared to be, he would have lashed the tiller and sailed towards open sea under mainsail alone as he hunted out a shackle and fitted it to the jib.

'It is at this moment, also, that he should have taken those precautions which should have been second nature to him —

'

(This was where the coroner had ceased to be a yachtsman, dummy2

and had become all-coroner, sad and solemn and wise-after-the-event. But it had been good old Elwyn Rhys-Lewis who had been more convincing earlier.)

('Yes, of course he should have put on a lifejacket, and a safety-harness — or both — before he went up on the foredeck. But there are times when you just go ahead and get the job done . . . And how long would he have lasted in a cold sea on a November night — dangling over the side and unable to climb back? I remember chaps in the navy who didn't want to learn to swim — they said it only prolonged the agony.')

(The coroner had reprimanded him at that point!) ('Yes, sir — that may be. But a single-hander's motto is

"Don't go over in the first place", sir.') So there it was: at that point Elwyn Rhys-Lewis and the coroner had both agreed on the 'freak wave' theory. Which Rhys-Lewis had more vividly described as 'the Sod's Law of the Sea' — 'when wind-and-water hit you in that single unguarded moment, groping around to catch a flogging sail

— and then you're over the side and alone, with your boat sailing on without you, to the Port of Heaven — '

'We may be somewhat surprised that the body of the deceased was not recovered in the search next day, or that it dummy2

never came ashore as others have done. But we have also heard an expert witness from the RNLI testify that the ebbing tide would have carried it several miles into the bay.

And if it finished up in the Needles Channel, in the shipping lane, then it may have been hit by a large vessel well before daylight.

'So, before I record my verdict, it is more than ever necessary for me to emphasize that, however experienced one may be, the necessary and prudent precautions must be paramount.

One witness has spoken of what he called "the Sod's Law of the sea". But — '

That had given the Telegraph sub-editor his arresting headline ' "Sod's Law" killed yachtsman' .

But that had been a 'Sod's Law of the sea'. And it had been a quite different Sod's Law — a 'Sod's Law of the land' which had finally brought Philip Masson into the light, all these years afterwards; which, in his neat little report, Reg Buller had pounced on smartly:

'Why did they plant him there? It's a good question, because bodies have a way of turning up. HM prisons are full of people who believed otherwise. But these chummies weren't so stupid as that, they just had very bad luck. Because that old ruin, where they planted him — and the nice old farmhouse on the hillside above, where the kids came from

— was all due to go under the line of the motorway. So the machines would have cut through the hillside above there, dummy2

and piled the soil on top of the ruin and buried him deep.

And what must have given the chummies the idea was that it was about that time that the "Motorway Murders" came to light: this bulldozer driver was murdering women in his spare time, and then covering them deep next morning at work. That was a year or two before, but it was a big talking-point. Only then the Government fell, so there was a new Minister. And they found a lot of rare flowers on the moor there, which didn't grow anywhere else. So they finally re-routed the motorway by a couple of miles in 1980, and left that bit out. This is what's called "Green Politics"

today, I believe. But I'd call it "bad luck" . . . for chummie.'

More like very bad luck, Ian had mentally added there.

Because the alleged drowning of Philip Masson had otherwise been perfect. There had been no dangerous carrying of bodies (always a risky business; and, presumably, Masson had been intercepted and murdered close to where he'd been buried, in the middle of rural nowhere). And then a false Masson had taken his car on, and slipped aboard the Jenny III in the gathering dusk, either taking another inflatable on board to get ashore, or (in view of the weather) rendezvousing with one of his confederates just north of the Shingles.

But, otherwise ... it had been damn-near perfect, with no tell-tale body (bodies also were a risk, however neatly killed; and with Philip Masson the autopsy would have been very thorough, for sure); but, for the rest, it had been utterly dummy2

professional — plausible and detailed, but not too detailed . . . just basically ordinary.

Those three hours hadn't been wasted; the deceptive half of Philip Masson's death would eventually make a good detailed chapter in the story — and if Elwyn Rhys-Lewis turned out to be as good-and-true a friend as he sounded; which, on mature reflection, he probably was; but even then he would supply more good copy, as he gnashed his teeth about the way he had innocently helped his friend's murderers. So it was already shaping up nicely — it would make a fascinating contrast even ... the false inquest, before the real one —

And then the door had banged, and Reg Buller had made his entrance.

'I've lost my bloody pipe.' He patted all his bulging pockets, ignoring the 'No Smoking' notice, and the worried hovering of Ian's favourite assistant librarian until she got round in front of him. 'It'sh all right, love — I wasn't going to smoke it.

I was only going to suck it. An' . . . I know how to work the machine — an' how to wind the film back afterwards. Don't worry, love.'

'It's all right, Miss Russell.' Ian didn't think it was 'all right'.

But Reg Buller had also been at work on 1978 elsewhere this afternoon, and he desperately wanted to know what had come out of that latest foray. And, in any event, since Reg was in no case to look after him, he must look after Reg. 'I know this gentleman. And I'll vouch for him, Miss Russell.'

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Miss Russell gave him a disappointed-fearful look. 'Just so he doesn't make any noise, Mr Robinson. You can talk here — '

She could smell Reg now, and didn't find him reassuring. ' —

but no noise, if you please.'

'No noise!' Buller put his finger to his lips. 'If you hear a noise

— it's him, not me. Trust me!' He almost knocked over a chair, watching it rock without trying to rescue it before he sat down in it. 'No noise!'

Miss Russell had fled then. And Reg Buller hadn't made a sound, as he went about his business, after he had briefly explained where he'd been.

But now his chair scraped back noisily.

'Thish ish it. You mark my wordsh, Ian lad! Thish ish it!'

Ian looked up from his notes, but past Buller, not at him, to make sure that Miss Russell (never mind her boss) was not within earshot of this over-loud pronouncement. His credit was good in this library, as it needed to be with all the work he did in it because of its excellent range of microfilmed newspapers; and, at a pinch, it might survive the brewery-fumes Reg was exhaling. But it would never survive that deadliest of sins, noise.

Buller sat back, staring at him. 'Well, c'mon an' shee — '

' Sssh! For heaven's sake, Reg!'

Buller looked around. 'It's all right — ' The slur disappeared magically but the voice was still far too loud. ' — there's nobody out there. I made sure of that. We're okay.'

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'Nobody', of course, excluded librarians in Reg Buller's dramatis personae, and until John Tully came up with the answers, that was the best they could hope for. But he had worked too hard here to obtain his special privileges to let Buller queer his pitch. 'I meant you, man — ' He pointed at the other printed legend on the wall ' — that means "No piss-artists and dossers-coming-in-from-the-cold", Reg.'

'There's no call to be offensive. An' inaccurate — ' Buller adjusted his upper dentures with a calloused thumb and index finger ostentatiously ' — I've been having trouble with this new set of choppers. And it isn't cold. And anything I may have imbibed this fine Monday was strictly in the line of duty, as I carefully explained to you — ' His voice fell nevertheless, from jubilant conversational to a penetrating stage-whisper. ' — you just look at this, Ian lad. An' then I may accept your apology.'

Ian steeled himself against disappointment as he got up. It was just conceivably possible that he had done Buller an injustice, but unlikely — at least, so far as the imbibing was concerned. What he had remembered from previous occasions was that Reg's 'necessary disbursements to contacts', which figured substantially in his expense account, chiefly related to alcohol, rather than to old-fashioned back-handers (although these figured also, in nicely round multiples of five in sterling, and of tens and hundreds in foreign monopoly currencies). But then, of course, 'contacts'

— 'contacts' back-handed when necessary, but alcoholically-dummy2

oiled invariably — were the very stuff of Reg's modus operandi. And in this case it had been 'a bloke I know in the Street, who's a sub on The People now — but he was a young reporter on the Northern Gazette back in '78, and he's doing shifts now, to keep his ex-wife in gin-an'-tonic', and 'I had to fill him up in the Stab before I could get him to talk, and not remember what I'd asked him about afterwards'. And because of all of that, it had seemed quite depressingly possible that Reg had been enjoying himself at Fielding and Robinson's expense, just for starters.

'All right, Reg — ' But then he remembered also that Reg got results. And that Reg, in spite of his warnings, seemed to be excited by this one (false teeth or alcohol notwithstanding) '

— let's have a look, then.'

Buller shifted obligingly, to allow him to peer under the canopy at the magnified projection of the reel of microfilm.

'I can't see a bloody thing, Reg — it's all out of focus.' It occurred to him insanely that Buller, seeing everything out of focus already, had had to de-focus it in order actually to see it. But, even out of focus, the main headline was still just readable.

'Oh — sorry!' Reg adjusted the focus, first swimming it into pale grey infinity, and then sharpening it into readability.

' There—eh?"

DEATH OF A MAD DOG, Ian read again obediently. And was again repelled by the crude simplicity of the message in its tabloid form, however eye-catchingly true it might have dummy2

been (he remembered also reading similar proclamations of this same event, in smaller type and more sober words, in The Times and the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, not an hour ago, on this same machine; but Reg had naturally chosen his favourite newspaper).

'So — ?' Twisting back towards Buller, he caught the full reek of Reg's share of those 'necessary disbursements'.

'"Mad Dog O'Leary" — ?' At close quarters Reg Buller's eyes were like nothing so much as two halves of the same blood-orange. 'Christ! I suppose you were a fucking student at the time, demonstrating because your grant didn't keep you in beer-money! Or what was it — Rhodesia? Or bleeding Watergate, an' poor old Tricky-Dickie — ?'

'Watergate wasn't '78.' Having just been all through the papers of the time, Ian felt safe now: he could even place Michael 'Mad Dog' O'Leary in his brief nine-days' horror context. And he was not about to admit how little of what he had read had struck any chord of memory, even though he had lived through that November and had presumably read in the original what he and Reg Buller had now re-read on this machine. Truthfully, except for a vague recollection that those had been The Last Days of Labour, Before Thatcher, with threatened bakers' strikes, nurses' strikes and car workers' strikes, he could remember very little of that

'Winter of Discontent', in which 'Mad Dog' had been just another horror story among many. 'Actually, I was just beginning to panic before my final examinations, Reg. But I dummy2

do remember we weren't doing too well in Australia.'

'Australia?'

'In the cricket, Reg.' Knowing that Buller despised all sports, he felt he was somehow reasserting himself. 'It was rather depressing, as I recall.'

'You can say that again! That whole bloody winter was depressing — '

'I meant the cricket.' Quite deliberately, he decided to keep the man in his place by ignoring 'Mad Dog' for the moment.

'What did your chap on The People have to tell you, then?'

'Huh!' Buller licked his lips, as though he had just remembered that the pubs were open again (in so far as they ever closed in Fleet Street). 'He'd just seen his gaffer —

Robert Maxwell in person — comin' down from on high en route to his helicopter pad . . . An' 'e looks around — Captain Bob looks around — an' sez: "Ah! probably the largest electronic newsroom in Europe!"' He grinned at Ian. 'Which is what he always says, apparently. An' no one takes the slightest notice of 'im — ' The grin congealed suddenly, as he realized what was happening. 'You don't remember "Mad Dog" O'Leary, then?'

'Of course I do.' Ian attempted a superior Tully-expression.

'He tried to blow up the Northern Ireland Secretary in Yorkshire, at some university ceremony. And then they cornered him, and shot him. So what?'

'So what? So what — ?' Reg Buller spluttered slightly. Then dummy2

he pointed at the brightly projected headlines. 'It's all there, damn it!'

Ian had to study the words again —

Cornered at last in a remote Yorkshire beauty spot, 'Mad Dog' O'Leary died as he lived yesterday afternoon: in a hail of gunfire —

The only thing odd about that, it seemed to him, was there were too many words in the first sentence, including a subordinate clause, for good tabloid journalism.

Tipped off by informants, British Secret Service agents gunned him down without mercy. But he killed an innocent girl before he died —

Nothing odd about that, either. Except another subordinate clause, anyway. 'I don't see what's all there, Reg. You tell me

— ?'

'Christ, man!' Reg Buller started rewinding the microfilm at break-neck pace, stopping and starting with other arresting headlines — BREAD: PANIC BUYING — HOME LOANS

SHOCK . . . and OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN SPEAKS OUT —

swearing all the while. Then he stopped rewinding and swearing, and adjusted the focus. 'There, then!'

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They were back to the abortive bombing of the University of North Yorkshire, when the Mad Dog had failed to kill the Northern Ireland Secretary, and half the university faculty with him, ' thanks to the selfless heroism of a British Secret Service agent masquerading as a professor, in mortar-board and gown' .

'So — ?' For a guess, it was the same reporter — or the same rewrite man, and the same sub-editor, acting on the same instructions from an editor or proprietor who had either decided that the Security Service needed a bit of favourable PR, or had been successfully lobbied to the same effect; but, either way, that repetition of the legendary 'British Secret Service', with all its nuances of James Bond, was a dead give-away. Because no one on the spot would ever have used that description. And now, in the post-Peter Wright era, it wouldn't have been fashionable: most likely, it would have been 'SAS marksmen', if not the Special Branch's anti-terrorist squad.

Buller was shaking his head, though. 'You haven't really looked — have you?'

'At the papers?' He had read more responsible accounts than this one, of the same event. There's more in the Guardian, Reg— '

'This is the one that matters. This is my man, who was there before any of the big ones.' Buller grimaced at him. 'But you're also forgetting what I told you yesterday, before Johnny and the Lady disturbed us — an' afterwards, when dummy2

they'd gone off.'

More accurately, when Buller had ordered them off, thought Ian: Jenny through the front door, to take off one watcher; and then John Tully, through the back way, to draw away his comrade. And then, after Reg had lunched on bread-and-cheese and a bottle of Pere Patriach (the Cologne beer being exhausted), Ian himself had been ordered into the rain ('although I don't reckon they'll have put anyone on you, seeing as you don't do much at the sharp end anymore . . .

But, just in case, anyway — ?'); and, although that had been insulting, he had obeyed; but now he must remember what had passed between them before he had done so.

'About David Audley, you mean, Reg?' Buller had talked with

'a bloke I know', was what he remembered: with Reg Buller there was an inevitable succession of 'blokes', from dukes to dustmen, via policemen and journalists, all of whom seemed to owe him one favour for another; but in this instance it had been almost certainly ('No names — right?') one of his old Special Branch mukkers —

Buller nodded, only half mollified by such a simple correct answer. 'Look how it stacks up: "masquerading as a professor", eh? And "mortar-board an' gown" — ? Who'd they choose for that — that's got the balls to do it, as well, in cold blood?'

There was more here than either Reg himself or his favourite newspaper had said. 'In cold blood?'

Another nod. 'Somebody carried O'Leary's bomb out of that dummy2

building — the new library they were opening, or whatever it was . . . When they didn't reckon they could get the people away from it, before the bugger pressed his remote control button.' Buller tapped the 'selfless heroism' passage. 'Who better than Audley? One of his mates was running that show, on the security side, apparently. An' Audley's the professor-type — looks the part. Wouldn't need to play it, though.

Because he's already a visiting fellow at that Oxford college, see.' Buller gave him a sidelong look. 'Wouldn't need a cover story to be there, either . . . An' no shortage of guts, so they say.'

It was all hypothetical, thought Ian. Or, alternatively, Buller knew more than he was saying. 'Who's "they", Reg?'

'Friend of mine.' Buller grinned.

'The one on The People?'

'No. The one I told you about yesterday — the one that tipped me off about him being tricky — Audley . . . remember?'

What Ian remembered was that Buller had been characteristically vague about his Audley-source. But what was more immediately important was to uncover the foundations on which this hypothesis was built. And those seemed to involve his other friend, the sub-editor on The People, rather than the Audley-source.

'So what was it that your chap on the newspaper told you, Reg?'

Buller tapped his nose. 'He was there. That's what.'

dummy2

Ian looked down at the Yorkshire university bomb story. At a ceremony like that — a routine academic event until 'Mad Dog' O'Leary had singled it out for attention — there might or might not have been one or two education correspondents from the London papers, depending on whether they'd been tipped off that an important speech was going to be made.

There would certainly have been reporters from all the local Yorkshire papers, taking down all the speeches whether they were important or not, and probably taking down the names of all the local dignitaries too — that was to be expected anywhere, and especially in Yorkshire, with its fierce local pride. And as Buller's Fleet Street friend had then been a reporter on one of those papers — which was it? But it hardly mattered, anyway — his presence at the ceremony was quite unremarkable. So why was Buller looking as though he'd made some great discovery?

Suddenly the light dawned. 'You mean ... he was at — the other place — where O'Leary was shot — ?'

' My man was there before any of the big ones' he remembered belatedly.

'Your chap . . . who's on The People now?'

'That's right.' Buller stared at him. 'He was at Thornervaulx.'

So there was more. 'And — ?' He tried to look intelligent.

That's right.' For once Buller was deceived. ' He was there —

right?'

'He — ' This time the light was blinding. ' Audley — you're dummy2

sure — ?'

'Near enough. "Big ugly fellow — bit like a boxer . . . or a rugger player. Broken nose — that sort of thing." Pretty accurate description, actually. Because he did break his nose playing rugger, as it happens.'

'I thought you said he looked like a professor.'

'That's when he opens his mouth.' Buller amended his own description without shame. 'Take it from me, that's him right enough. No mistake.'

And that, of course, validated the bombed-university hypothesis, via the O'Leary connection. The security service must have been tipped off that O'Leary intended to assassinate the Northern Ireland Minister at the opening of the new library and the degree ceremony. They had foiled the bomb attempt, but it had been a close shave. And O'Leary himself had also escaped, only it had been a damn close shave for him, too: in fact, he hadn't really escaped — he'd simply broken out of the inner ring — ?

'How far is Thornervaulx from the University of Yorkshire, Reg?' He couldn't place Thornervaulx on his mental map: it was one of that famous concentration of ruined abbeys in the North ... Rievaulx, Jervaux, Byland, Fountains, Kirkstall and Thornervaulx: originally they'd all been in the wilds, and most of them still were, including Thornervaulx no doubt.

'Not far, as the crow flies. But you've got to go round the little roads, and up over the dale to reach it.' Buller had the facts at dummy2

his finger-tips, as usual. 'Takes a bit of finding.'

That fitted, too. With all the main roads blocked, O'Leary would have been forced off the beaten track, and had then been hunted down like the wild animal he was in the wilds.

'And your man was actually there.'

'Not at the shoot-out.' Buller nodded nevertheless. 'But within minutes of it — aye.'

Again, that wasn't impossible: a smart local reporter (and Reg Buller's contacts were always the smart ones) would have his friends in the Police, and could often be so well in with them as to be just behind them. 'And he saw Audley there — actually saw him?'

'He saw more than that.' Buller started winding the film forward again from the North Yorkshire bomb to the Thornervaulx gun battle, compressing the last long hunted hours of the 'Mad Dog' to ten blurred seconds. 'Or, rather, there were things that he didn't see, you might say.'

'What d'you mean — "didn't see"?'

Buller stopped the microfilm, and then adjusted the focus with maddening slowness until DEATH OF A MAD DOG

shouted at them again. Only then did he turn to Ian. 'It wasn't like that. That's not what happened.' He shook his head. Terry — let's call him "Terry". Because that's his name

— Terry didn't write it like that. He flogged 'em the story —

and for a small fortune too. Because he was the only one that was there. So all the other stories are based on his — or, dummy2

rather, what was made of his ... and the official statements, of course.' The big mouth twisted cynically. 'Which just happened to tally exactly, you see — the official statement . . .

and his edited story.' An eyebrow lifted in support of the mouth. 'Is that plain enough for you?'

'All too plain.' So somebody had got at the editor, Reg was saying. But that was a risky thing to do, they both knew.

Because contrary to left-wing received wisdom, the D-Notice people couldn't give orders. 'You're sure?'

'Oh yes.' Nod. 'He put that story out twice, Terry did. To his own paper first — the Northern Gazette ... an' then he re-wrote it, an' flogged it to them — ' He tapped the projected front page. ' — for the equivalent of two months' wages an'

the promise of a job with them.' Buller paused. 'So that story went to two newspapers independently, the way Terry wrote it ... just with a few slight differences. And it came out not how he wrote it, but with the same amendments. Okay?'

'Yes.' So it hadn't been some re-write man, or some sub-editor: someone had got at two editors. And that meant that someone had been very persuasive indeed, at the highest level. Because editors weren't nearly as easily persuaded (or bullied, or blackmailed) as the people also liked to think. 'So what really happened, Reg?'

'Ah . . .' Having at last arrived where he had always intended to be, Buller relaxed. And, having learnt a thing or two over the years about stage management, and man-management, Ian understood what was happening to him. But knowing dummy2

that was at least a quarter of the battle, if not half of it.

'I've read all this.' He gestured into the machine dismissively.

'And I'm thirsty. D'you know a good pub round here, Reg?'

'Round here?' Although it was an almost-insultingly silly question, Buller pretended to consider it briefly. 'I think . . .

yes, I think . . . there may be one just round the corner — ' He looked round the Newspapers and Periodicals room as though it might be conveniently signposted ' — just round the corner — yes. I think.'

'Yes?' It was time to assert himself — even though he was also actually thirsty. 'You bloody-knew, Reg — come on,then

— '

'So . . . what really happened, then?' As he drank thirstily he registered caution. Because this was Abbott beer, and more than two pints would put him into orbit round the planet, while Reg Buller wouldn't even have lift-off, never mind escape-velocity. And, judging by the barmaid's greeting, Reg Buller was an old and valued customer here, too.

' Ahhh . . .' Most of that was genuine satisfaction-and-relief, as Buller downed half his pint: the distant swirl of the pipes at Lucknow, the first sight of the sails of the relieving fleet before they broke the boom at the siege of Londonderry, the thunder of the hoofs of the US cavalry — all that, and Mafeking too, and Keats opening Chapman's Homer, and stout Cortez getting his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean ...

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all that historic experience was relived when Reg Buller opened his throat at Opening Time. But that wasn't the end of Reg, it was only his beginning.

'It was accident, of course.' Buller wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

'Accident?' It wasn't that the man ever lied, when he was on the payroll; it was just that he always doled out the truth bit by bit, to keep the client eager for more. But then (and what made the technique bearable), more was usually worth the extra money in the end.

'Yes. Because . . . after that bomb went off, at the university, they didn't know their arse from their elbow. An' it wasn't this bloke who was a friend of Audley's — Colonel Butler . . .

Apparently, he was a good sort, even if he was foisted on them at the last moment. All the coppers liked him — said he wasn't at all like the usual run of Sandhurst-types, an'

superior Oxford-and-Cambridge civil servants . . . aye, an'

the cloak-and-dagger brigade, making 'em feel like peasants at a big party . . . No, he was civil to them, an' efficient with it, an' knew his job. But he only arrived at the last minute, to take over. An' there was lots of new surveillance equipment

— all high tech stuff . . . half of which was on the blink, see

— ?'

'But they knew O'Leary was there, somewhere — ?'

' Oh yes.' They knew — someone had double-crossed O'Leary, somewhere down the line.' Nod. 'All these different IRA off-shoots . . . O'Leary was "ILA" — Irish Liberation Army . . .

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which was a short-lived splinter-group no one ever seems to have quite sussed out. But not to be confused with the INLA

— the Irish National Liberation Army — see?'

After Beirut this was peanuts. But, nevertheless, he had always steered Jenny away from Irish entanglements —

whenever that possibility had arisen; and (probably because of her divided family loyalties) he had never had any trouble there. So heaven only knew what she would make of this complication, then.

'But he was IRA — ultimately, Reg?'

'God only knows! When you get far out, on the edge . . . you don't know who you're really dealing with: it could be the really top IRA boyos, with their big cars parked outside their big houses in Dublin ... or it could be the Marxist-Leninists, pure in thought — an' put a bomb in an orphanage, if they reckoned it could further the workers' cause, long term ... Or it could be the Mafia or the KGB, doin' what comes naturally

— ' Buller shrugged. ' — if you want to know what Michael O'Leary was for ... then you'd best ask Colonel Butler — or maybe David Audley. But don't rely on whatever they tell you. So don't ask me, for God's sake!' Grin. 'But somebody peached on him — O'Leary — anyway. Yes.' Out of the shrug, and the grin, came recovery. 'The point is, O'Leary missed his target — all he got was half-a-dozen ducks, on a duckpond, when the bomb went off.' Genuine grin. 'So fuck him, then.'

'But he got away.' Deep inside Reg Buller, within the cynicism, there was a core of old-fashioned patriotism, like a dummy2

Falklands Factor, thirsty for victory after years of defeat.

'Didn't he? Until Thornervaulx, anyway.'

Buller shook his head. 'No. He got clean away. He was a pro, was O'Leary: he had his escape route all mapped out — they didn't get a smell of him, not a smell.' Shake became nod. 'He was a real pro.'

There was something not right here — something which did smell. 'What are you trying to tell me, Reg? He did get away, at first . . . But they did catch him — '

'No. That's just the story in the papers.'

And you never ought to believe what's in the newspapers.

And Buller had already told him that, anyway. So that was the end of the questions: he would wait now, for the answers.

Buller tossed his head, accepting his silence. 'Accident, I told you . . . Terry was driving down this road, in the rain . . .

Actually, he was goin' to interview this CND Vicar he knew, who was refusing to have a Remembrance Service, the next day. Because it was a Saturday — November 11. An' the next day was when they were all going to have the services, an'

Terry reckoned there might be a demonstration against the Vicar, an' he might be able to flog a story to Fleet Street. So he was just sewing up the loose ends, in his spare time.

Because he wasn't covering a football match, that Saturday afternoon.'

Ian drank another careful measure. It was now Saturday, November 11, 1978 ... on a wet afternoon, somewhere near dummy2

Thornervaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. And that was still a week away from Philip Masson's own last journey, to his shallow grave far to the south, anyway.

'So he was driving along, minding his own business — ' Reg Duller drained his glass, and lifted it towards the barmaid, catching her eye instantly, as Ian himself never could ' — an'

he heard this Police siren, in the distance — ' Down went the glass, but not the eye, which was fixed on the stretched black silk, and 40D-cups which barely restrained the advance of those splendid breasts towards them, past less favoured customers. Thank you, love. And my friend too, love.' Buller encompassed her, over-hanging-bosom and all, as she swept away his empty glass and replaced it with a full one, leaving Ian's unfinished one contemptuously, and was gone. 'An'

then he heard another bell ... so being Terry — or Tel, as we always used to call him . . . an' being properly brought up ...

he turned his car round, an' followed 'em.'

That was right: that was the old-style journalist, of Reg Buller's vintage, who followed the sound of the policeman's siren and the fireman's bell in the same way as the old-fashioned captains had steered their ships towards the sound of the guns, in the hope of bloodshed.

'Of course, the Police 'ud been out, all that weekend, running about like blue-arsed flies, after any word of O'Leary.' Buller shrugged. 'But the word was, they reckoned, he was long gone — Liverpool, or Glasgow, or Manchester . . . But long gone, anyway. But there was always a chance.'

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That was the old style: the best stories were always the ones that came out of nowhere, very often. The trick was to pretend that they were no surprise, and that you'd expected them all along, sooner or later, having your finger on the pulse of events.

'So he followed 'em — round the roads over the top, down in the Thor Brook there, over the narrow bridge, where you have to back up if you don't get halfway across, an' some other car has just got there before you — it's the original old bridge, that the monks built, there.'

More and more, the picture was emerging: like, out of the original 1978 mist-and-rain, in darkest and most back-of-beyond North Yorkshire, under the dripping overhanging trees in the deep valley of Thornervaulx Abbey, with the Police sirens shrieking anachronistically, to sound alarms which had not been heard there since the times of the wild Scottish raiders.

'So he got there with the Police, anyway.' Buller nodded. 'An'

as they were hardly there before him, an' they didn't know who the hell he was ... at first they didn't stop him — when he pushed his way in.'

That was also the old style: look like you belong there—

plainclothes policeman, special branch man, doctor (serious-faced, bag-in-hand if you can find a bag) — John Tully always dummy2

simply looked like himself, and waved an impressively embossed card with his photograph on it, which testified that he was a Count of the Holy Roman Empire; and that, with his superior manner, had passed him into all sorts of unlikely places. And, when it came to unlikely places, Thornervaulx Abbey —

He stopped in mid-thought as he realized simultaneously that Reg Buller was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak, and that he'd been following the wrong line of thought, from the wrong angle — Buller's Terry's angle. And Buller had told him all he needed to know about Terry, of course —

And then it was easy —

'It wasn't an ambush, of course — of course!' All the thrust of the newspaper stories had been that O'Leary had been

'cornered' — like the 'Mad Dog' he was: Reg's favourite newspaper had started its subordinate clause with that word, and two of the quality papers had used the word 'ambush' in their headlines. But siren-shrieking police cars coming from afar didn't attend ambushes. They would already have been there, or nearby, unmarked and tucked away unobtrusively.

'Right.' Buller leered at him for an instant, then raised Ian's empty glass for the barmaid to see, and then came back to him. 'Or, rather . . . wrong.'

'Wrong?' He covered his own beer with his hand to stop her getting the wrong idea.

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'It was an ambush all right.' Buller reached across him to surrender his glass for refilling. 'But it was O'Leary who was doing the ambushing, not Audley's lot.'

This time it was stronger than hypothesis. But it was still no better than circumstantial. And good old-fashioned incompetence could yet turn those circumstantial elements on their head. 'What makes you so sure?'

Buller waited until his glass was returned to him. 'Terry talked to someone there — there's two or three houses by the ruins. One of 'em was the custodian's . . . Ministry of Works, or National Trust, or whatever it was then. An' he said there was a police car parked in the car park, large as life, on the forecourt, where the coaches and the day-trippers off-load —

blue light on the top, day-glow orange-and-red strip along the side — from midday onwards. Plus other cars, that looked official. Not toufist cars, anyway . . . apart from the fact it was a November day — November 11 to be exact. . . An'

that was why old Terry was round there: he was goin' to interview this CND Vicar, who was saying he wasn't goin' to encourage the British Legion in their militaristic practices —

huh!' Reg Buller tossed his head derisively. ' Anyway ... it was a wet November Saturday — it 'ud been pissing with rain earlier, but it was down to a fine drizzle when Terry comes on the scene, just behind a couple of police cars. And there were several big home matches that weekend, too. So there weren't any tourists sight-seeing, to complicate matters.'

That was typical Buller understatement, after he had just dummy2

enormously complicated what had seemed before to be a neatly open-and-shut episode of counter-intelligence anti-terrorist operations.

'Except the one girl, who was killed.' All this made the poor little thing's death even more poignant: her presence there, late in the afternoon on a wet November day, had been against the odds; and maybe the only target O'Leary had seen when he had failed to find his proper target for the second time in succession. But that raised a much more important question. 'So . . . who was he after, Reg — O'Leary — ?' He frowned at Buller, as the more important question suddenly offered an answer which was dangerous because it was also much too quick, much too simple.

'Yes.' Buller had been there before him, and had also seen the same dangers. 'If it was Audley he was going for — if Audley was at the university, just before . . .' He cocked his head.

And then straightened it to get at his beer. And then came back to Ian. 'A bit too easy — eh?'

Ian drank the last of his own beer. All this was following on their established technique: in any investigation, one had to start somewhere.

Sometimes it was easy, and one started at the beginning. But more often than not there was no clear beginning: the more one researched, the further back the beginning went, in that first month's careless gadarene rush at the subject, open-minded. And out of that their line would come (usually out of Jenny's greater gathering of fact, and rumour, and fiction . . .

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and his own final interpretation of all that).

'What d'you think, Reg?' He mustn't let the man go off the boil.

'I dunno . . .' Buller stared down into his glass. 'But . . . even without that bugger Masson ... we could 'ave a good one 'ere, y'know . . .'

That was another sign: Reg only dropped all his aitches either deliberately or in extremis with clients — at least, apart from when he also deliberately did so to annoy John Tully.

'A good one?'

'Aye. An' thass the truth.' Buller slurred again. 'We do O'Leary . . . and maybe we've got O'Leary gunning for Audley, an' Audley gunning for O'Leary — an' that's bloody good.' He cocked an eye at Ian again. 'But if we add Masson to it ...

O'Leary versus Audley — that's simple. But Audley versus Masson . . . that's bloody complicated, I tell you.'

Suddenly there was no contest, no choice: always, and forever, doing the easy thing — dating the girl who'd say 'yes', in preference for the other girl, who'd already said 'no' — was never worth doing. 'Was Masson involved in the O'Leary killing?'

Buller shook his head. 'God only knows.' Then he looked at Ian sidelong. 'Old Johnny'll maybe answer that, when he comes in out of the cold. Because when that bomb went off, an' killed those ducks on the duck-pond ... he was just a dummy2

senior civil servant, Masson was. An' then, three days for O'Leary, an' a week for Masson . . . an' then they've got something in common, see?'

Then they were both dead, Ian saw. (But that had not been apparent at the time, except by eventual inquest verdict long afterwards. But that, also, was what had started all this now.) He cast around for further objections, taking his accustomed role with Jenny, of Devil's advocate. 'In common with the girl

— ' He fished for the elusive name in his memory, from the follow-up newspaper reports ' — Sandra — ? Marilyn — ?'

'Marilyn.' Buller set his empty glass down on the table. Then he looked up, directly and disconcertingly at Ian, challenging him. 'You know why I started with Thornervaulx — an' the bomb that killed the ducks — ?'

No ducking that challenge. 'The timing.' They both knew the rules. 'We have to start somewhere.'

The challenge remained in place, like a gauntlet thrown down which he somehow hadn't noticed. 'The bloke I talked to first, about Audley — he said "Look for anything that doesn't quite fit — anything that's somehow out of the ordinary, an' doesn't quite have an easy answer . . . An' then take another look at that ... if it's Audley you're after. Because he doesn't fit, either."'

The challenge was still there. 'How . . . doesn't Audley fit — at Thornervaulx?'

The corner of Buller's mouth twisted. 'Thornervaulx doesn't dummy2

fit — in the bloody back of beyond.'

'But he was there.'

'Aye. And one or two others with him, that Terry remembers.'

The mouth tightened. 'And Marilyn.'

Now the poor girl herself was a challenge. 'Marilyn — ?'

' "Marilyn Francis" — "shorthand typist".' Buller nodded.

'Little slip of a girl — Terry actually saw her, stretched out like a little drowned rat, when they put her in the ambulance.' Another nod. That was just when they twigged who he was — an' bloody-near thumped 'im, one of 'em did ...

an' then they tried to arrest him, before the top brass came up an' threw him out.'

Ian waited.

'"Marilyn Francis".' Buller repeated the name.

Ian waited.

There's no such person,' said Reg Buller.

4

Ian felt pleased with himself as he left the churchyard: pleased, first and foremost, because he was not being tailed (if he ever had been); but pleased, second and professionally, because it was just like old times, with the wind in his hair and the rain on his face; and he hadn't lost all his own skills, when it came to the crunch (or, anyway, it wasn't only Jenny dummy2

who was lucky as well as smart!).

Although, to be honest with himself (and he could afford to be honest now, with all the hot-bath luxury of certainty), he had to give Reg Buller his due: Reg had not only zeroed-in on

'Marilyn Francis', but had added hard investigative graft and shoe-leather to his intuition to come up with British-American Electronics.

Odd though (he thought) that it had been British-American's

'Research and Development' centre, of all its factories, which had recruited 'Marilyn Francis' as a temporary secretary all those years ago, out of nowhere: odd ... or maybe not so odd now — ?

Not so odd. And not out of nowhere — or, not quite nowhere, even after Reg had tracked down the agency which answered Brit-Am's Rickmansworth factory's temporary needs (Reg passing himself off as the pushy manager of another agency, offering his own 'well-qualified young secretarial persons —

we are registered with your local job-centre as a non-sexist, non-racial enterprise' — at competitive rates; and then Reg, having gleaned the name of Brit-Am's favoured agency, suborning its personnel clerk somehow to let him look at her records . . .).

That had been a dead end, in more ways than one: if she had ever lived (which she hadn't), 'Marilyn Francis' would have dummy2

been long dead, and quite reasonably purged from what were once the agency books, and now the agency computer. But, in any case, that had been more than offset by his outrageous (though deserved) bit of luck, in uncovering the single newspaper reference to 'the dead girl, who worked for an electronics company in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire'; which, significantly, had appeared only once ('Someone didn't get the message — some copper who'd looked in her bag like, early on, an' didn't know no better . . . See how it becomes just "A clerical worker on holiday from London"

later on? I'll bet they came down on him like a ton of bricks, poor bugger!'). And that had been enough for Reg (although anyone could have carried on from there, given time; just, Reg was quicker on the ball, as well as off the mark), and then, while he had still been acclimatizing to the prospect of having to dig out information for himself again, at the sharp end, instead of sitting in his ivory tower and putting it all together, Reg had automatically taken charge —

'That inquest, up in Yorkshire, must 'ave been fucking dodgey — evidence of identification, an' getting the paperwork done, an' the right documents and the release for the body, after the post-mortem — somebody took the woman away, an' somebody buried her. So, most likely, somebody passed himself off as next-of-kin . . . That 'ud be the simplest way, if the Police were in on it, an' smoothing things, rather than asking awkward questions . . . Coroners dummy2

aren't so easy — they can be right little Hitlers when they've a mind to ... But the local Police, they wouldn't have liked it, if that was the way it was. An' that's what went wrong with Philip Masson, when they found him . . . But up at Thornervaulx, the top brass were already on the spot —

Audley an' his friends — so they were able to call the tune right from the start — '

Pattern, once again. But not history repeating itself in Philip Masson's case: in Philip Masson's case too much had been revealed too quickly when he'd turned up at last; whereas, in the case of 'Marilyn Francis' . . . apart from Audley's presence on the battlefield, she had seemed to be only a poor innocent bystander, and everyone's attention had been focused on

'Mad Dog' O'Leary —

'So who do you think she really was, Reg?'

'No sayin' yet, Ian lad. But she's got to be one of three things.

Like she could 'ave been just what she seemed: a little nobody — say, a girl that 'ud run away from home years before, an' got herself another identity to keep her nearest an'

dearest off her back. But then, as there weren't any pictures of her in the papers, it couldn't have been them that claimed her. Which leaves . . . either she was there with Audley ... or she was there with O'Leary — and maybe it wasn't him that shot her. Although, again, maybe it was: maybe he reckoned she'd put the finger on him, when he'd thought she was dummy2

fingering his target for him. But it's early days — '

Early days, indeed! All they had known then, just twenty-four hours earlier, was that 'Marilyn Francis' and Michael 'Mad Dog' O'Leary had been killed on November 11, 1978, almost (if not actually) in the presence of David Audley, and that Philip Masson had been dead within a week after that; and that, while those deaths might or might not be linked, they had to start somewhere with their part of the investigation —

'So, if it's all the same to you, Ian lad, after I've had another little talk with old Terry, an' got a few names an' contacts up north from him . . . an' checked up one or two more things down here . . . then I'll just take a little trip up to Yorkshire an' see whether they maybe didn't bury this 'Marilyn Francis'

any deeper than Philip Masson. 'Cause it could be that it was a bit too easy for 'em. In which case they might 'uv been careless round the edges. And as for you, Mr Robinson sir . . .

how would it be if you went an' had a word with British-American Electronics down at Rickmansworth? See, I was thinkin' you might be a solicitor, or something legal like that, tryin' to trace 'Marilyn Francis' to give her a bequest? You could blind 'em with all that legal jargon you learned at college? That was how you used to do it, in the old days, the Lady told me — ?'

Early days indeed! And, indeed, he had more than half-dummy2

suspected that Reg only had the faintest hopes of anything surfacing down at British-American (who quite properly were unprepared to discuss matters relating to former staff over the telephone 'as a company policy rule'); though, to be fair, Reg might also have thought that a gentle wild goose chase within easy reach of London would serve to blow away the cobwebs from those long-unpractised foot-in-the-door skills of those 'old days', and prepare him for sterner tests to come.

But then, quite suddenly, the early days had become interesting.

'Mr Robinson — ?'

'Of Fielding-ffulke, Robinson, Mrs Simmonds.' Her door had boasted the legend 'Mrs Beryl Simmonds, Administrative Personnel Office', so he'd reached the right person in British-American at last. He just hoped that his old nicely-embossed card (Ian D. Robinson Ll. B (Bristol), plus ' Fielding-ffulke, Robinson' with a legal-sounding accommodation address in Chancery Lane) would work its magic again. 'I telephoned from my office, Mrs Simmonds. It's good of you to spare me your time.' He adjusted the small gold-framed spectacles which Jenny thought made him look so absurdly young that he must be what he said he was. 'As I explained then, I am inquiring about a former employee of yours.'

'Yes.' Frowning came easily to Mrs Simmonds: the years had grooved her forehead for permanent disapproval. 'I had dummy2

expected you to write, Mr Robinson. That is the customary practice with such inquiries.'

'Yes, I know.' An instinct suddenly contradicted her appearance: she was frowning, but she didn't want to frown.

Perhaps she had a nephew, or even a son, in the law; or maybe she simply had a weakness for very young men trying to make their way in the world. But, whatever, instinct whispered hard shell, soft centre, so he touched his spectacles again, and gave her the ghost of what he hoped was a disarming smile. 'I am . . . rather trying to cut a corner, Mrs Simmonds. You see, we have a very demanding client from overseas. And ... I also have a demanding senior partner. So I am rather depending on your help — in strictest confidence, of course. And I will send you a confirmatory letter, naturally: I do appreciate that there must be company policies in these matters.' He allowed the ghost to materialize more visibly for an instant, and then exorcized it with a dead-serious-pleasing expression.

'I see.' She was holding the frown now only with considerable effort. 'And about whom, among our former employees, do you wish to inquire, Mr Robinson? How long ago?'

'About ten years ago — ' Even before he observed her expression harden again it occurred to him that if she had any sort of weakness for young men she probably had the reverse for the young women who preyed on them. And that decided him to add doubt and embarrassment to what was coming ' — my inquiry relates to a certain Miss Francis, Mrs dummy2

Simmonds. Miss — ah — Miss Marilyn Francis — ?' Would she remember the papers, from 1978?

The hardness became granite. 'But . . . Miss Francis is . . .

deceased, Mr Robinson.'

Deceased? Or, more likely, dead — and bloody good riddance! — this time instinct shouted at him. So she knew more than either he did, or what the papers had said. 'Yes. I do appreciate that also.' He tried to imply that he also knew a lot more than that, even as he prayed that she wouldn't ask him why, if he knew so much, he wanted to know more.

'Why do you want to know about her?'

He hadn't really expected his prayer to be answered. 'I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. Because, quite honestly, I'm not at liberty to say. But ... all I can say ... is that I would appreciate frankness — and I will respect it, so far as I am able.' All the old Rules of Engagement flooded back. 'What I do promise, is that nothing you say here will be attributed to you, Mrs Simmonds. I simply want to know about Miss Francis — that's all.'

She was on a knife-edge. So it was the moment to lie in what he must hope was a Good Cause. 'I have spoken to others before you.' Whatever he said, it mustn't sound like a threat.

'I'm sorry to sound so mysterious, but I have to respect confidences and I do respect confidences. It's just that I do need reliable confirmation of what I already suspect.' As he delivered this flattery he screwed up his face with youthful embarrassment.

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'Yes.' She pursed her lips. 'You do appreciate, Mr Robinson, that Marilyn — Miss Francis — was a temp. . . . That is to say, a temporary secretary, supplied by an agency. I did not appoint her.'

'Of course.' He decided not to congratulate himself on the return of his old skills: although she liked him, and believed him, she was more concerned to exculpate herself from the Marilyn Francis appointment. 'But you do remember her

— ?'

'I do indeed.' The purse shut tightly.

Marilyn Francis had been memorable. In fact, even assuming that Mrs Beryl Simmonds had a good personnel manager's memory . . . Marilyn Francis had been very memorable. 'She was incompetent, was she — ?'

Sniff. 'On the contrary. Miss Francis was highly competent, actually.'

Ouch! thought Ian. For a man who knew all about Marilyn Francis, that was a mistake — even allowing for the fact that Auntie Beryl would shy away from speaking ill of the dead, which he should have reckoned on. But the rule was to capitalize on one's mistakes. 'Well . . . you do rather surprise me, Mrs Simmonds. But I'm extremely grateful for being corrected — '

'As a secretary, she was competent.' She had done her duty.

But now she didn't want him to get her wrong. 'Her shorthand was excellent — she must have had over 140

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words per minute. Even with Dr Cavendish, who had no consideration for anyone. . . This was before we went over to full audio-typing, you understand — and when we still had old fashioned typewriters . . . But her typing was also excellent — quite impeccable.' Duty still wasn't done, the nod implied. 'And her filing. And her paperwork in general: she had been well-trained . . . and she was . . . an intelligent young woman — of that I'm sure. Appearances to the contrary.' Something approaching pain twisted her displeasure at the memory. 'I blame the schools: they have a lot to answer for — doing away with the grammar schools, and letting children run wild — especially the girls.

Especially girls like Miss Francis, in fact.' Nod. They can't even spell these days. But, of course, we have a spell-check now, so they don't have to.' Sniff. ' Rarefy, liquefy, desiccate, parallel, routing — and the Americanisms we have to cater for: focused, protesters, advisers . . . But Miss Francis could spell, I will say that for her. Except those dreadful Americanisms. And she only had to be told once, even with them, when Dr Cavendish was writing to America . . . No, as a secretary she was perfectly competent. It was her behaviour

— and her appearance . . . both absolutely disgraceful, they were.'

'Yes?' Ian's heart had been sinking all the while she had lectured him: poor little Marilyn's defects were personal and moral, and she had been an innocent bystander at Thornervaulx, by whatever unlikely chain of events. So this dummy2

really was a wild-goose-chase.

'It was so tragic — how she died. We all thought so.'

Curiously, she was on his own wavelength. 'But, the truth is ... and I'd be a hypocrite not to say as much . . . she was quite man-mad, was Marilyn.'

All he wanted to do now was to get away, back to London.'Yes

—?'

'Anything in trousers.' Nod: duty done, now the truth.

'Deluged in the most revolting perfume . . . tight skirts, and transparent blouses — I spoke to her about her blouses. But, of course, there were those who encouraged her — just like they always look at the Sun and the Star in the common room, even now.' Ultimate displeasure. 'Df Page, and Dr Garfield — Dr Page is at Cambridge now . . . and Dr Garfield is in America . . . they thought she was quite wonderful. And even that dreadful Dr Harrison, who ended up in prison — '

She bit her lip suddenly, catching herself too late.

'Dr H—?' He started to repeat the name automatically, still acting his part, because honest curiosity was perfectly in order. But then it echoed inside his memory, attaching itself to British-American in its proper context; and in that instant he knew that he hadn't finished with Marilyn Francis — and also that he too had caught himself too late, because Mrs Simmonds was already registering her surprise. So now he had to extricate himself from his self-betrayal. 'Harrison?

Harrison — ?' Better to pretend to be halfway there first, with a frown. And then embarrassment, for choice? ' Harrison dummy2

— ?'

'He had nothing to do with Miss Francis.' Faced with two unhappy names, Mrs Simmonds chose not to repeat the more offensive one. 'His . . . what happened to him . . . that was some long time after she left our employ.'

He let his frown deepen. Had it been some long time after?

Marilyn Francis had been killed in November, 1978 — the beginning of his final year at university. And the Harrison Case . . .? But, whenever it had been, now was the time for embarrassment. 'Oh! That Dr Harrison — of course.'

Surprised embarrassment. 'But . . . you do a lot of Ministry of Defence work — of course!' What had it been that the

'dreadful' Dr Harrison had betrayed? The guidance system to the Barracuda torpedo, was it? But now he had to let her off the hook. 'No . . . no, of course, Mrs Simmonds.' Smile. 'You wouldn't have given any of your secret work to a temp to copy out — no matter how well she typed!' As he broadened the sympathetically-understanding smile he felt his pulse beat faster. It had been the celebrated Barracuda. And it had not been very long afterwards — weeks, rather than months, for choice.

But meanwhile he mustn't lose Mrs Simmonds. 'I don't want to know about him, anyway — Dr What's-his-name . . .

But . . . Miss Francis had a — ah — a weakness for the male sex, you were saying, Mrs Simmonds.' Losing her fast, in fact.

'Did she have a particular boyfriend?'

'I have not the least idea of Miss Francis's private life.' She dummy2

broke eye-contact, and picked up one of the files on her desk at random. Which was a sure sign of his impending dismissal.

Damnation! 'But... is there anyone who might know?' Not losing: already lost, damn it! So now he had to extemporize.

'We think she may have had ... a fiancé in this area, Mrs Simmonds.'

The eyes came back to his, as blank as pebbles. 'I said that I have no knowledge of her private life, Mr Robinson. And as she has been dead these ten years, I really cannot see that any useful purpose can be served by relaying tittle-tattle about her.'

God! The old battle-axe did know something! So now was the moment for the Ultimate Weapon in this line of extemporization. 'Mrs Simmonds — '

She started to get up, file in hand. 'I really do not have any more time to spare, I'm sorry.'

'Mrs Simmonds — ' He sat fast ' — now I must betray a confidence — '

She stopped. Betrayal of confidences usually stopped people.

'We think ... we think . . . that there may have been a child.'

This time he broke the eye-contact, to adjust his spectacles.

And that gave him time to decide the imaginary child's sex and appearance. 'A little boy. Fair hair, blue eyes . . . He'd be about ten years old now. And his uncle, who is ... very prosperous . . . and childless . . . would like to find this little dummy2

boy.'

The blank look transfixed him, and for a moment he feared that he had gone over the top with a scenario she must have read in Mills and Boon more times than Reg Buller had said

'Same again' to his favourite barmaid. But having gone so far the only direction left to him was to advance further on into the realms of melodrama: if not Mills and Boon, then maybe a touch of Jane Eyre . . . except that Marilyn didn't sound much like Jane. So perhaps the hypothetical 'fiancé' would be a better bet to soften Mrs Simmonds' heart and put her off the scent.

'It's really the father we're trying to trace, Mrs Simmonds.

Because we think he looked after the child. Because . . . Miss Francis doesn't appear to have been very . . . maternal — ?'

He looked at her questioningly.

'No.' She blinked at him. ' That doesn't surprise me.' Then she sighed. 'I'm afraid we don't keep files on our temps, Mr Robinson — certainly not going so far back, anyway. And, of course, Miss Francis lost her life in that dreadful business up north, with that IRA murderer — we read about that. And it was a terrible shock. But that's why I remember her so well, even though it is something one would like to forget.'

She was implying that, if there had been a file, it would have been purged. So there probably had been a file. And she had purged it.

She blinked at him again. 'As I recall, Mr Robinson, she left our employ in November, just before Armistice Day. And I do dummy2

remember that because I was working with her in the same office: I was acting as Dr Garfield's secretary at the time, and she was temping for Dr Cavendish's secretary, who was on leave of absence.'

He observed her lips tighten at the memory. And it was 'tittle-tattle' that he wanted. 'Yes.'

'Yes.' Slight sniff. 'I remember that because when . . . when the person selling the British Legion poppies came round she insisted on his pinning her poppy on her blouse. Which was . . . quite improper. But quite typical, also.'

Tittle-tattle. 'Typical, Mrs Simmonds?' He cocked his head innocently, deliberately forgetting Mrs Simmonds' earlier reference to Marilyn's blouses.

Half-sniff, half-sigh. 'One of Miss Francis's affectations was to wear as little as possible. I could never understand why she didn't get pneumonia.'

Ian opened his mouth. 'Ah . . .'

'She left us shortly after that. She received an urgent telephone message . . . apparently her mother had been taken ill. So she left us immediately. And I remember that too, because it was mid-week, and I let her have £5 from the petty cash as an advance on the money due to her, for her fare home. Which I never saw again, of course — though I suppose I can hardly blame her for that, in the circumstances . . . Although what she was doing up in Yorkshire a few days later I'll never know — I thought her dummy2

home was in London.'

'But you don't know where?' Instinct stirred: she didn't know, but something had occurred to her, nevertheless. 'Did she commute back home every day?' That would have been easy enough from Rickmansworth. But London was a big place.

'No.' She shook her head. 'I believe she had digs somewhere down here.' Slight frown. 'She never minded working late, I will say that for her. But that may have been because she was trying to ingratiate herself with Dr Cavendish, in case Miss Ballard didn't come back. And she'd stay to cover for anyone else — Dr Page, or Dr Garfield, or — or anyone else.'

Like Dr Harrison, maybe?

'She said she needed the money, so the extra hours were useful.' Mrs Simmonds pressed on. 'But she was a nosey young woman. Always chatting the men up, trying to insinuate herself where she had no right to be — ' She snapped her mouth shut on herself suddenly, as if she'd heard herself. 'But there, now: I'm being unkind, aren't I — '