Colonel Butler's Wolf

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Aldous Huxley and Chatto & Windus for lines, used on page 52, from "To Lesbia" published in Collected Poems.

To A. E. Houseman and the Society of Authors for lines, used on page 165, from "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries".

To Michael Alexander and penguin Books for lines, used on page 181, published in The Earliest English Poems.

COLONEL BUTLER'S WOLF

by ANTHONY PRICE

The Master's Lodging,

The King's College,

Oxford.

My dear Freisler,

I know you will remember our conversation in the Fellows' Garden during last summer's Rhodes House conference.

At that time you ridiculed my fears as the nightmares of a suspicious old man. Nevertheless you agreed to pass on my message to those whose duty it is to investigate nightmares, and I have reason to believe that they did not reject it.

In that belief I have held my hand (if not my tongue) during these last months. But now something has occurred which makes further action imperative.

I have heard this day of the death of one of my former students...

BUTLER LISTENED TO the sound of the nurse's quick step recede down the corridor until it was lost in the nursing home's silence, an expensive silence as far removed from the National Health Service as a dummy2.htm

Rolls-Royce was from a five-ton lorry.

For a moment he stood looking at himself in the mirror on the back of the door. Presumably its function was to enable Matron to check her uniform and her expression before leaving her office to patrol her kingdom; old RSM Hooker had had just such a mirror on his office door in the regimental depot. Likely it was still there, even though Hooker was bones on the Imjin. Some things didn't change.

But others did, like the reflection before him. It wasn't the hard face and the clashing reds of skin and hair which bothered him. They were only a little more out of place over a civilian suit than they had been over a uniform. He had always looked a bit like a prizefighter; now he looked like a retired prizefighter. But where had that air of defeat come from?

He sighed and turned away. Possibly it came from too many errands like this one, small and nasty errands that he scorned to escape. And which were being given him more and more often, he suspected.

It had even been an errand very much like this one which had started Hugh Roskill on his way to this place.

The thought of Hugh directed his eye to the steel filing cabinets beside the window. Hugh's case history and progress report would be in there and it would take him ten seconds to pick the silly lock and see for himself how far Hugh was swinging the lead.

He scowled with disgust: so far down the slope he had come that the exercise of his petty thief's skills was almost instinctive even when unnecessary. This was all mere routine and Hugh had undoubtedly been telling the simple truth—it wasn't the sort of thing a man would lie about, even one who enjoyed being fussed over by pretty nurses drawing twice the pay of their overworked sisters in the public service.

Again he halted his line of thought angrily as he recognised it for what it was: a half-baked, unsubstantiated, left-wing line. He hadn't the least idea what nurses in exclusive nursing homes earned, and the nurses he had seen so far had been if anything less attractive than those who had looked after Diana in the cottage hospital at home.

His glance softened as it settled on the three little girls playing on the gravel parking lot outside the window. It wasn't often that he could combine business with pleasure, but bringing them had been a minor stroke of genius. It had won him a rare extra afternoon with them, and their pleasure in the adventure had been, as complete as Hugh's in their goggle-eyed hero-worship. There was even a chance that Hugh would never realise the real reason for their presence.

Yet there had been a cloud for Butler in that meeting which he recognised as a just reward for his duplicity. Inexorably, remorselessly, they were growing up. Today they were delightful kittens, and tomorrow and for a year or two to come. But their little claws would grow and their furry coats would become sleek, and they would be tigresses in the end. One day he would find their mother in them.

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As he felt the knot tighten in his gut he heard the distinctive click-tap quick step—the hospital step—

rapping towards him down the passage. With relief he shut his daughters and his late wife out of his mind and turned back towards the door.

"Major Butler—I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. Do sit down." Matron's voice was as crisp as her step. "You have an inquiry about Squadron Leader Roskill, I believe?"

There was the merest suggestion, a primness about the inflexion of the question, that Matron wasn't certain he had any right to pry into the exact condition of Roskill's thigh bone. As if to emphasise her doubt she allowed the palm of her right hand to rest flat on the folder she had taken from the cabinet and placed on the desk in front of her.

"Squadron Leader Roskill is a colleague of mine at the Ministry of Defense, Matron." Butler allowed his official tone to trickle into the words gradually. "We are a little short-handed at the moment. We'd like to know when we can expect to have him back with us."

"I see."

Butler met her gaze with obstinate innocence. In an establishment like this it was reasonable that the fees purchased a measure of loyalty as well as treatment, apart from the simple mathematical fact that the longer Hugh stayed, the louder the final ring on the cash register would be.

"Well..." the hand resting on the file relaxed a fraction "... you must understand that the original injury sustained by Squadron Leader Roskill was a serious one, Major. There was considerable damage to the bone. Whatever is done, there is bound to be a limp. What we are doing is attempting to minimise it."

Are doing. That meant that the sawbones was still at work and Hugh wasn't going back on to the active list for some time yet.

Butler nodded sympathetically, wondering as he did so just how much Matron knew or guessed about the nature of that original injury. Probably not too much, since Hugh had been taken to one of the Ministry's own nursing homes in the first place, and they would have passed on only the information they couldn't possibly conceal.

The hand opened the file at last.

"Now—let me see—" she began.

"When I'm grown up I think I'll marry Uncle Hugh."

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Sally's childish treble came through the open quarter-window with startling clarity. The three children had moved gradually across the gravel until they were playing directly beneath the office.

Matron swung round in her chair with a rustle of starched uniform to examine the source of the interruption.

"Don't be silly. You're far too little for him."

Diana's emphasis indicated that she was also in the running for Roskill's hand, and as the eldest of the three had a much better chance of reaching the winning post first.

Matron turned back towards Butler. "Your daughters, I believe, Major?"

"I'm sorry, Matron. I'll send them back to the car at once—"

"There's no need for that." She smiled at him. "They won't bother anyone here."

"Well, you'd both better wait until he gets better from his accident. He might only have one leg."

As always, Jane represented reason and calculation. At nine she was already estimating the odds with a coldness that sometimes worried Butler.

"They are delightful, Major—quite delightful."

"He didn't have an accident, stupid— he was shot."

"I know he was. But Daddy tells people it was an accident."

"And he shot all the people who shot him."

"Only one person shot him, Sally."

"Well, he shot lots of them"

The smile on Matron's face had turned sickly with unbelief. It struck Butler that she was probably mirroring his own expression.

"Only three, there were."

"Four."

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Butler rose from his chair and reached for the window-latch.

"Three. I heard Daddy say three to that man."

The latch stuck maddeningly as Sally groped for a riposte to Jane's irritatingly factual claim. How the devil had they heard anything when they should have been safe in bed and long asleep?

The latch yielded, but one catastrophic second too late : short of a rational reply, Sally took refuge in an irrational one—

"Well, Daddy's shot hundreds of men— hundreds!"

For a moment Butler stared at the three upturned little faces, little round freckled faces. At the start of that moment he had wanted to tell them that it wasn't so and that of all things death was not the measure of manhood.

Then he saw beyond them the great frozen lake north of Chonggosong, and the Mustangs he had summoned up sweeping down on it in front of him . . . they had been wearing white parkas, the Chinese, when they'd come streaming down over the Yalu, but sweat and dirt and grease had turned the' white to a yellow that stood out clearly against the snow. . .

"Hallo, Daddy," said Sally.

"Go on back to the car, darling," said Butler carefully. "Here—catch the keys, Diana. You can turn the radio on."

He watched her shoo her sisters safely away from the window before turning back into the room. He had been lamentably careless in forgetting that little pitchers had large ears— it had never even occurred to him.

Only when he was settled comfortably in his chair again did he lift his eyes to meet Matron's, and then with unruffled indifference. The damage was done, but like the absence of the notes on Roskill's operation it was of no importance. It might be hate and anger she felt, or even horror. Or only distaste and contempt.

But it was all one to Butler. He had his instructions and she had her proper duty, and he would see that she fulfilled hers as correctly as he carried out his, one way or another. It was always more pleasant if it could be done with a smile, but he no longer expected that luxury.

"Now, Matron," he said unemotionally, "just when is Squadron Leader Roskill likely to be on his feet again?"

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It was enough, and had always been enough, and always would be enough, to be on the Queen's service.

II

"J. DINGLE—TWO RINGS" was inscribed on a piece of plain cardboard in a cellophane holder on the left of the door.

Butler sniffed, picking up the faint tang of sea air, and scrutinised the inscription. The letters were spidery and slightly shaky, which fitted in with what the lodge-keeper at Eden Hall had told him : "old Mr Dingle" had been in both the World Wars, which placed him well into his seventies at the least.

He sniffed again. It seemed unlikely that J. Dingle would remember anything useful about the late Neil Smith even if he lived up to the lodge-keeper's assertion that in the matter of old pupils of Eden Hall

"old Mr Dingle was bound to know". Smith had likely been an inky fourteen-year-old when Dingle had last seen him, and that not less than nine years before. The real pay-dirt, whatever dirt there was in Smith's short career, would be in the more recent levels. This visit to Westcliffe-on-Sea was no more than routine.

But that thought, once weighed and evaluated, pleased and invigorated Butler, and he reached forward and rang the bell, two firm, decisive rings. Routine action generally proved fruitless, and was normally boring, but it could never be regarded as wasteful. Rather, it was proof that whoever was co-ordinating an operation was leaving nothing to chance, and that was how Butler liked things to be.

Beyond the red and green glass panels of the door someone was stirring : J. Dingle, summoned by his two rings. It was a comfortless, solid house, redbrick and bourgeois, dating from the days when Westcliffe-on-Sea tradesmen could afford to tuck a servant or two in the attics under the eaves. And now, built just too far from the sea to decline into a boarding house, it had turned into a respectable nest of small flats for single retired people whose private pensions or prudently invested savings enable them to scorn state aid.

Among whom was J. Dingle: the door swung open and Butler and J. Dingle considered each other in silence for a moment.

"Mr Dingle?"

A small nod. Butler drew his identification folder from his breast pocket and politely offered it to the old man. With the elderly, courtesy was their right as well as his duty.

"I,wonder if I might have a few words with you, Mr Dingle?" Dingle stared at Butler over his half-glasses with eyes that seemed much younger than the rest of his face— bright, birdlike eyes set in wizened and folded skin which reminded Butler of the brazils that had appeared in his home every dummy2.htm

Christmas to linger on in their bowl for months because no one had the patience to crack them.

The eyes left Butler's face at last in order to examine the folder, flicking back to compare the face with the photograph, then lowering again to decipher the small print.

At length the examination was complete and the eyes returned, still without expression—it was as though Dingle's three-score years and ten had exhausted his ability to react outwardly to any event, no matter how unlooked-for.

"You'd better come inside then, Major Butler," the old man beckoned abruptly with a mottled, claw-like hand into the dark hallway in which the light from outside picked out the highlights of polished woodwork and linoleum.

Butler waited for him to close the door, and then followed him down the passageway, stooping uneasily, to avoid a ceiling which he guessed was far above his head. Now that he was inside it, the house seemed to press in on him.

He was not prepared for the room into which Dingle finally ushered him, a high, well-proportioned room, full of leather-bound books and photographs in silver frames jostling each other on small mahogany tables. There was a fire bright with smokeless fuel in the hearth and a smell of good tobacco.

The pity he had begun to feel for Dingle was transmuted instantly into something close to envy—"poor old Mr Dingle" became "lucky old Dingle".

The old man pointed to a chair on one side of the fire, waiting until Butler had sunk himself into it before settling in one on the other side of the fireplace.

"Just what is it that you want of me?"

"Some information."

"Tck ! Tck !" Dingle clucked pettishly. "Of course you want information. I may be ancient, but I'm not senile. And I recognise one of those signatures on that little card of yours— though he was only a junior civil servant when I knew him."

Butler frowned, momentarily at a loss, and Dingle pounced on him.

"Not done your homework, Major?" The lipless mouth puckered briefly and then tightened again.

"Perhaps I am leaping to a false conclusion about your arcane purposes. But there was a time in the Second War when I ran errands between MID and NID, and I recall him perfectly—I never forget a name or a face. Not yet, anyway."

Not senile, thought Butler, certainly not senile—even if he had jumped to a conclusion. It was, after all, dummy2.htm

a reasonable conclusion in the circumstances, however coincidental those might actually be.

But it was strange to think of this skeletal old gentleman striding down corridors which he himself used.

Butler's eyes strayed involuntarily to the framed photographs on the table beside him. Individuals in cap and gown, team groups in the comically long shorts of yesterday's sports or immaculate in striped blazers and white flannels; Dingle had been a sportsman in his faraway youth. There was even a group of officers and men dating, by their moustaches, Sam Brownes and puttees, from the '14-'18 war.

"You will not find it easy to recognise me there."

Butler engaged the bright eyes again. It was time to assert himself. "Not at all, sir," he snapped. "You're third from the left in the cricket picture, second row, on the far right in the rugger one and in the centre of the infantry group."

Lashless shutters of skin descended half-way across Dingle's eyes in what was presumably an expression of surprise. Which was gratifying even though there was no mystery in the identification: if none of those youthful faces in any way resembled this wrinkled mask there was still one nondescript young face that was common to all the groups and which must therefore be yesteryear's Dingle.

"I'm here rather by accident, sir," Butler continued stiffly. "I had intended to call on the headmaster, but it seems that the school is shut up for half term. I was told that you might be able to help me."

Dingle remained silent.

"I am interested in one of your former pupils, Mr Dingle. I believe you may be able to help me."

Still the old man said nothing. Butler sensed rather than noticed a wariness in him.

"The name of the man—the boy, that is—was Smith. Neil Smith."

At last Dingle spoke. "Smith is not an uncommon name, Major Butler. The Christian name is not significant, I have never addressed a boy by his Christian name. Neil Smith means no more to me than any other Smith, and I have taught a great many of them."

"I think you may remember this Smith. He was a clever boy."

Dingle regarded him coolly over his half-glasses.

"Five per cent of all boys are clever, Major. Apart from the wartime interruptions I have been teaching for over half a century. Now, how many clever boys. . . how many clever Smiths... do you think I have dummy2.htm

instructed in Latin grammar and English grammar in half a century?"

Butler sighed. It always had to be either the hard way or the easy way, but with a man like this, with this background, he had a right to expect it to be easy.

"You taught him from 1957 to 1962, Mr Dingle," he said. "In 1962 his parents emigrated to New Zealand—he went from Eden Hall to Princess Alice's School, Hokitikoura. Have many of your pupils gone to Hokitikoura?"

Dingle's mouth pursed with distaste: there was no need for Butler to remind him further that on his own testimony he never forgot a name or a face. There could be no doubts now in his mind as to the exact identity of Neil Smith among the five per cent of the clever Smiths.

To soothe his own irritation Butler allowed his eyes to leave Dingle's face and range for a moment over the room: there might be more to be discerned about the man there.

The bookshelves were as he would have expected: seried ranks of Loeb Latin and Greek library classics and the chaste dark spines of Oxford and Cambridge University Press volumes. On the mantlepiece, of course, the well-stocked pipe-rack and tobacco jar, and one silver-framed photograph in pride of place.

"Good lord," Butler murmured. "Isn't that Frank Woolley?"

He stood up to look closer, although he knew immediately that his identification was correct: no mistaking the tall lefthander playing forward—making mincemeat of a short, fast ball. A legend caught for posterity.

On the bottom of the photo was written carelessly: "Best wishes from Frank Woolley to Josh Dingle, who clean bowled him." There was a date, but it was lost under the edge of the frame.

"Bowled him!" Butler repeated in awe. "That would be something to remember, by God!"

"Surely you are too young to remember Frank Woolley, Major?" exclaimed Dingle. "He retired well over thirty years ago—before the war—and he was no chicken then."

"1938 he retired," said Butler. "My Dad took me to see him every time he came anywhere near us—he was past his prime then, but he was still great—Dad always called him 'Stalky'."

"You're Lancashire, then? That was their name for him wasn't it? I thought I recognised it in your voice."

"Aye."

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For one sybaritic half-second Butler was far from the isle of Thanet, out of Frank Woolley's own Kent, and away to the north, sitting beside his father on the edge of the ground at Trent Bridge on a hot summer's afternoon, knowing that he had twopence in his pocket for a big strawberry ice ...

"He played his first innings for Kent against Lancashire, Frank did—in 1906. Or maybe 1907," said Dingle reflectively. But he could be that old, thought Butler. "Johnny Tyldesley flogged him all over the ground."

Johnny Tyldesley! It was like hearing someone casually remember the Duke of Wellington—or King Arthur!

"Lancashire scored over 500 in five hours. Frank missed him twice—and then scored a duck." Dingle's face suddenly cracked in an unmistakable smile. "That was the first innings though. In the second Frank flogged Walter Brearley just the way J.T. had flogged him—64 in 60 minutes. That was the start of it."

Dingle nodded at him happily, and Butler realised that he had allowed his own mouth to drop wide open.

"And just what was it that you desire to know about Smith?" said Dingle. "A dark-haired boy, rather stocky. I wouldn't have said he was quite as clever as you have suggested—if I have the right Smith. In the top ten per cent, perhaps—beta double plus rather than alpha. What has he done to offend the Ministry of Defense ?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that, sir."

"Hmm... I rather expected that. But if he's become one of these student revolutionaries I must tell you that I don't approve Government action against them. It's the Government and the Press and television that has made them what they are, or what they think they are. Publicity is like power, Major Butler—it's a rare man who isn't corrupted by it. Better to leave them alone."

"What makes you think he's a student revolutionary? Have you met him recently?"

"Not since he left Eden Hall. That would be ten years ago this July. But we like to keep in touch with our old boys, particularly the ones who do us credit later on. Their names are inscribed on the honours boards. Your Neil Smith—that would be Smith N. H. ?"

"Neil Haig Smith."

"That would be he. In his time at Eden Hall he was known to his fellows as 'Boozy' because of that

'Haig', though I'm sure he had never drunk any whiskey in his life then. But he subsequently won an exhibition to the King's College, Oxford—in English. I recall being somewhat surprised by the news. It was not his strongest subject when I taught him. He should have graduated by now though. Did he fulfill his promise?"

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Butler was conscious that the crafty old devil was attempting to approach his earlier question from a different direction. But now he had thawed out it might be unwise to call a halt too abruptly. In any case there was nothing of value to let slip—nothing known to Butler, anyway.

"He was awarded a First."

"Indeed!" Dingle's creased forehead crinkled even more "I would have judged him a safe Second, and there's nothing further from a First than that. One must assume that he was a late developer!"

He nodded to himself doubtfully, then glanced up at Butler. "And you say he was involved in student protest of some sort?"

"I really don't know, sir," said Butler—the words came out more sharply than he had intended. Perhaps if Roskill had been well enough to take this job they would have told him somewhat more, but as it was it was the exact and humiliating truth.

"But you do know enough to know what it is you want to know?"

"We wish to know everything you can remember about Neil Smith, sir. What he did, what he said. What foot he kicked with. Which hand he bowled with. What he liked to eat and what he didn't like. If he had any illnesses, any scars. Everything, sir. No matter how trivial."

Dingle considered him dispassionately, "Scars," he murmured. "Scars—and the past tense. Every time you refer to him you use the past tense. So he is dead ... or rather someone is dead—that is more logical

—someone is dead, and you have reason to believe that it is Smith, our Smith of Eden Hall. Is that it?"

Butler took refuge behind his most wooden face. It was at such moments as this that he missed his uniform. In a uniform a man could be stolid, even stupid, with a suggestion of irrascibility, and civilians accepted it as the natural order of things, not a defense. A uniform meant orders from above and blind obedience, too, and British civilians of the middle and upper classes found this comforting because they took the supremacy of the civil power over the military for granted. It was a long time since Cromwell and his major-generals after all!

But better so, he reflected, mourning the mothballed khaki —doubly better so. Better that civilians should patronise the uniform—despise it if they chose to—than worship it or fear it as they did in less fortunate lands over the water. If this was the very last service the British Army did for its country, it would be a mighty victory.

He squared his shoulders at the thought.

"Don't equivocate with me, Major Butler," said Dingle severely. "Is Smith dead?"

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Butler gave a military-sounding grunt. A few moments before the old man had been almost on his side, but he was slipping out of reach again now. The wrong word would ruin everything.

He gestured to the photographs on the table. "You are forgetting your own experience, sir—"

"I'm an old man now, Butler. To forget some things is one of the privileges of old age. And I'm remembering that I have a responsibility to my old pupils. Before I remember any more about Smith you must set my mind at rest."

"I can't do that for you, sir," Butler shook his head.

"Can't—or won't?"

"Can't." Butler's eyes settled on the big leather Bible on the shelf beside Dingle's left hand. "Remember the centurion in St Matthew—'I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth'."

"Under whose authority are you, Major?"

"Under Her Majesty's Government, Mr Dingle, as we all are. But you miss my point. I'm not the centurion—I'm just the soldier he gave the order to."

Dingle's lips, the double line of skin which served for lips, compressed primly and then relaxed. "Very well, Major. But there's little I can tell you about him. What I can do is to tell you where to look."

III

EXCEPT FOR A pedestrian fifty yards ahead of him and an empty van parked at the far end of it, the road was empty. Butler counted off the lamp-posts until he came to the fourth, dawdled for a moment or two playing with his shoelace to let the fellow turn the corner, and then ducked smartly into the evergreen shrubbery.

Beyond the outer wall of leaves he stopped to take his bearings. It was quiet and gloomy, and the light was green-filtered through the canopy above him, but it was the right place beyond doubt—he could see the path beaten in the leaf-mould at his feet. He followed it noiselessly, twisting and turning through the thicket of almost naked branches, until he saw the garden wall ahead of him.

It was, as Dingle had said, an incomparable piece of bricklaying: a craftsman's wall, as straight and solid as the day it had been built out of the fortune old Admiral Eden had picked up in prize money back in Nelson's time.

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"... to keep the locals out—Eden never trusted the lower orders after the Spithead mutiny. And that was what attracted the first headmaster when the house became a school back in '28; only he was more concerned with keeping boys in of course ..."

Butler ran his eye along the wall. It was all of ten feet high and crowned with a line of vicious iron spikes which reminded Butler of the chevaux de frise barricades of spiked wood he had seen round the government villages in Vietnam four years before. Again, Dingle had been quite right: it seemed unclimbable without artificial aids.

"... Except such a barrier only serves as a challenge to a particular sub-species of boy. It only looks unclimbable: in reality I believe there are three recognised points of egress and at least two well-used entrances ..."

He followed the track along the foot of the wall until he reached the rhododendron tangle.

". . . Young Wrightson's favourite place—I beat him for using it too obviously back in '35—the boy was a compulsive escaper. I believe the Germans found that out too. I've no doubt the branches there will be strong enough now to bear your weight..."

Like the pathway, the rhododendron limbs bore the evidence of regular use—the appropriate footholds were scarred and muddy—but the top of the wall was lost in the luxuriant foliage of a clump of Lawson cypresses growing on the other side of it.

Butler wedged himself securely in the rhododendron and gingerly felt for the hidden spikes in the cypress.

Once again the old man's intelligence was accurate: one spike was missing and others were safely bent to either side or downwards, presenting no crossing problems. And on the garden side the cypress offered both cover and a convenient natural ladder to the ground.

It was all very neat, ridiculously easy, thought Butler as he skirted the evergreens on the neatly-weeded path which led towards the school buildings. True, if the lodge-keeper had been prepared to let him into the school in the first place, in the headmaster's absence, it would not have been necessary at all. But then he would never have known where the old school records were kept, and that in itself justified the encounter with Dingle.

Except that the whole business smacked of the ridiculous : to be required at his age and seniority illegally to break into a boys' preparatory school like some petty burglar in order to trace the childish ailments and academic progress of one of its old pupils! It might be necessary. His instruction indicated that it might even be urgent. But it was not exactly dignified.

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He sighed and squinted up at the tiny attic windows, each in its miniature dormer. At least he. knew where he was going.

And at least, thanks to Dingle, he would be entering rather than crudely breaking in. Here was the wood-shed beside the changing room; and here, reposing innocently on the rafters, was the stout bamboo pole with the metal loop on the end which generations of late-returning masters (and possibly boys too) had used to gain entry.

He pushed open the tiny window: sure enough, it was possible to see the bolt on the back door six feet away. He eased the pole through and captured the knob of the bolt with the wire loop.

The changing room contained an encyclopedia of smells: sweaty feet and dirty clothes, dubbined leather and linseed oil and linament—the matured smell of compulsory games on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Through the changing room into the passage. The smell was subtly altering now, from athletic boy to scholastic boy: chalk and ink and books and God only knew what—floor polish maybe, and feet still (or perhaps the feet smell was the characteristic boy smell). It was a combined odour Butler remembered well, but with elements he could not recall nevertheless. Obviously there would be ingredients in a private boarding school, which opened its doors when money knocked, different from those in his old state grammar school. David Audley and young Roskill would know this smell better— perhaps that was why they had wanted to put Roskill on this scent.

Butler shook his head angrily and cleared his thoughts. Turn right, away from the classrooms, Dingle had said.

Abruptly he passed from an arched passageway into a lofty hall, with a sweeping staircase on his left.

This was the main entrance of the Hall itself—and there, where the staircase divided, was the Copley portrait of Admiral Eden himself still dominating it—the old fellow's grandfatherly expression strangely at odds with the desperate sea battle being fought in the picture's background. Perhaps he was attempting to compute his prize money. . . he was likely happier presiding over middle class schoolboys here than being gawped at in some museum by the descendants of the men he had so often flogged at the gratings.

Butler's footsteps echoed sharply as he strode across the marble floor and up the staircase. On the left the battle honours of Eden Hall.. . Capt. S. H. Wrightson 1934-38— the compulsive escaper— DSO, MC . . .

and on the right, among the academic honours... N. H. Smith 1957-62— Open Exhibition, The King's College, Oxford. That was under the 1967 list. And there was Smith again in the 1970 names— First Class Honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. So Smith had changed subjects, from English to P.P.E.—a proper radical subject grouping if Dingle's suspicions had any foundation to them .. .

Cautiously Butler climbed higher. From marble staircase to mahogany parquet flooring; from mahogany floor to the solid oak of the second floor stairway. Next the polished oak of the dormitories—and there, dummy2.htm

on the left, the door to the attic stairs.

This one was locked, as Dingle had said it would be. But he had also said that the door was a feeble one, secured with a cheap lock and opening inwards on to a small landing of its own. So for once brute force seemed to be the proper recipe. Butler examined the door briefly, to pinpoint the exact target area. Then he took one pace back, balanced himself on his left leg and delivered a short, powerful blow with the flat of his heel alongside the doorknob.

Beyond the door there was another change of atmosphere, not so subtle and unrelated to the school itself: the varnished woodwork was cruder and the plaster rougher under the dust of ages. This was the entrance to the servants' world, the night staircase by which they had answered calls from the bedrooms below. And somewhere at the other end of the house would be a second stair leading from the attics directly down to the kitchen and the other half of their life of fetching, cleaning, carrying and cooking.

And this, thought Butler without any particular rancour, would probably have been his world in the days of Admiral Eden and his sons and grandsons—not Major John Butler, late of the 143rd Foot, but perhaps at best Butler the butler to the Edens. In his arguments with Hugh Roskill about the good old days he admired and regretted so deeply Butler had been struck by that quaint irony: Roskill, the liberal, always saw himself among the masters, while Butler, the conservative, could never imagine himself on the gentleman's side of the green baize door leading to the servants' quarters.

And here (though without the green baize) were those quarters in their cobwebby reality: a rabbit warren under the eaves—though now the warren was jammed not with housemaids and footmen and pantry-boys, but with all the accumulated and discarded paraphernalia of years of prep, school life: piles of fraying cane-bottomed chairs, rolls of coconut matting, strange constructions of painted wood and canvas which Butler recognised at second glance as the stage furniture of "HMS Pinafore", or maybe

"The Pirates of Penzance".

It was a mercy that Dingle had been precise in his directions and that the slope of the roof itself made it easy to follow them: the records should be at the very end of the warren.

Just why they were located so far from easy access perplexed Butler to begin with, for the passageway between the objects was narrow. But perceptibly the school debris thinned and in the last room but one—

he could see the light of the end window ahead—gave place finally to objects which likely dated from the Eden family era: cracked Victorian pots, an elephant's foot stool and a pile of rusty, but still nasty-looking native spears, the relics of some colonial trophy of arms that had once graced the walls below.

And the end room itself explained the location of the old records. The big round gable-end window, nearly a yard in diameter, let in plenty of light and two long framework shelves crammed with files ran at right angles to it. Beside the window was an old card table and one of the cane-bottomed chairs placed for the comfort of anyone who wished to consult the records. Evidently no one had desired to do that for a long time, thought Butler, running his finger through the thick dust on the table top.

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But someone had done the filing nevertheless, in big, old-fashioned box files—parents' accounts, heating, lighting, kitchen ... he ran his dusty finger across them. Visits (Educational), Visits (Foreign exchange), Masters (Assistant)—the boys' records must be on the other side.

BOYS (Medical)

Butler's eye flashed down the lines of years—Smith's would be well down towards the end—'54, '55, '56

—'57 was fourth from the last. Presumably the head kept the most recent decade ready to hand in his study, banishing one old year annually to this attic.

A small cloud of dust rose from the table as he set the box on it.

Andrews B. J., Archer C. W., Ashcroft-Jones D. F. . . . he thumbed quickly towards the back of the file . . . Pardoe E.B. —a sickly boy, Pardoe, with a sheaf of notes from matron to testify to his ailments

— Trowbridge D. T. —he had overshot the mark . . . Spencer G. I. —

Smith N. H.

Butler smoothed down the pages. Outside he could hear the wind whistle past the window beside his face. It had been still in the garden below, shielded by the tall trees, but up here there would generally be a breath of wind. He could hear the rumble of the traffic on the road outside and somewhere near there was a tree branch rubbing against the house. He fancied he could even distinguish the distant roar of the sea on the pebble beach away over the treetops.

"Boozy" Smith's vital and fast developing statistics were all here, anyway, measured and recorded: the puny eight-year-old had been transformed by Eden Hall's stodgy pies and puddings into a plump thirteen-year-old.

Measles without complications at nine and mumps when he was still too young for complications at ten . . . what was needed was some nice distinguishing scar, at the very least an appendix scar. Or a broken bone.

But scars and breaks there were none. And apparently no dental records either—that was a disappointment. The O positive blood group was something, but not much—if it was a positive identification they wanted he would need something much better than this juvenile information. Sore throats and athlete's foot just weren't good enough.

He pushed the file to one side. It was likely that these would be even Jess, eloquent than the medical material, in which case this whole farce would be unproductive.

BOYS (Academic)

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He knew better now where to reach Smith N. H.—it was pleasant to discover in passing that Pardoe's poor health was offset by singular academic brilliance.

He cocked his head: by some freak of sound he could hear the sea quite distinctly...

But Smith's academic record was, as he had feared, undistinguished by special aptitudes. Dingle's memory was, as usual, exact: better at maths on the whole than English— essays lacking in imagination. . . . They were never going to identify Smith's remains by the condition of his youthful imagination.

BOYS (Sport)

A useful opening bat (right-handed). . .

Suddenly Butler sat bolt upright: Christ! It was impossible to hear the sea from here—not that steady roar.

That was not the sea—

Four strides to the door. Try as he would Butler could not stop the next strides from turning into a panic-stricken gallop as he burst through the second door.

Smoke!

The sight of it seeping under the third door hit his brain one second before the smell confirmed his fear.

He stared hypnotised by it for another second, cursing the slowness of his reactions. The sea had always been much too far away, too far to be heard.

This time he had his feet under control. Under direct command they marched him to the door. Under the same orders, his hand grasped the latch and opened the door. And then, under some older and more instinctive direction, the hand instantly slammed the door as the flames reached out towards him from the inferno in the room beyond.

Butler found himself facing back the way he had come, towards the round window, his shoulders set against the door as though the fire could be held back like a wild animal.

And that had been exactly what it had been like, or almost exactly: not a wild animal, but something demonic: the Fire Demon in "The Casting of the Runes" reaching out to seize him!

He shook his head, but the image remained. And yet even Fire Demons were sent by men against men, and all that tinder dry material had not burst into flames spontaneously because of his passing. It had dummy2.htm

been fired—and fired against him.

The anger in him drove out the panic, cooling him even as he felt the warmth in the door under his hand

—cold anger against himself for being such a fool as to despise a job because it had seemed humble and routine—and so easy that the possibly convalescent Roskill was first choice for it.

—Jack, Fred wants you to swan down to Tonbridge Wells and see whether Hugh's on two legs again. If he is, then just give him this envelope.

—And if he isn't?

—Then be a good chap and take it over yourself. It's just a bit of background digging at a posh prep, school down on the Isle of Thanet—nothing difficult, but there's a bit of a rush on it...

Christ! Nothing difficult! There was a rumble and a crash behind him and he felt the door shiver as something fell against it. There was no getting out that way, anyway: even if the way wasn't physically blocked already he could never run the gauntlet of those flames—they would lick him and take hold of him and bring him down screaming before he was halfway to the stair-head.

He stared back through the doorways at the round window. Fire was a bad way to go, so that would be the way at the last if there was no help for it: given a choice between frying and jumping people always jumped.

But was there an alternative? Butler looked round his cage quickly. The pitch of the roof was steep—if he could break through he would only have found a quicker way to hard ground below—a slither, a wild grab for the guttering, a shout of fear and a thud on the paving stones!

He clenched his teeth, and looked around him again. He had to do something, even if it was only to shout for help.

That thought drove him suddenly towards the round window. He swung the cane chair from the floor and convulsively jabbed it through the glass. The blast of cold air caught him by surprise; he felt runnels of hitherto unnoticed sweat cooling on his cheeks as he leaned out.

No sound of distant sirens—his heart sank at the utter unconcern of the world outside and far beneath him, the distant everyday sounds. And the ground below was terrifyingly far away—

There was a man looking at him out of the shrubbery!

Instinctively Butler started to shout and to wave, but both sound and movement froze as their eyes met dummy2.htm

across the unbridgeable hundred feet which separated them : he knew he was eye to eye with the instrument of his death, the master of the Fire Demon which raged behind him.

The moment passed in a flash and he was looking at the empty shrubbery. It was as though the face had been something out of imagination.

Rage swelled in Butler's throat, almost choking him: the swine had been standing out there watching his handiwork— watching the dumb ox that had walked to its own roasting!

He turned back into the attics. There was noticeably more smoke in the further of them now; before long he would have to retreat behind the last door, and might as well try to hold back the tide with a sandcastle as hide behind that. He had to get out.

He looked around helplessly, hope oozing from him. The irony of it was that there was no shortage of weapons; there was a whole pile of spears on the dusty floor. But there was nothing to attack with them

—

Or was there?

Butler stood still for five seconds, collecting his thoughts. He had always prided himself on his calm self-discipline, the Roman virtue of the British infantryman. Others might be cleverer, quicker to charge—

and quicker to fly. But he had conditioned himself over the years to do within himself what the redcoats had so often done in tight corners: to form square unhurriedly and without panic.

Ever since he had seen those flames he had been acting like a child. Now he had to act like a man.

He walked over to the pile of spears and began to sift them. There were long, light throwing spears; slender fish spears, with cruel serrated edges—the delicate weapons of East Asia and Oceania. He wanted something cruder and stronger than those.

His fingers closed over the shaft of a short, heavy spear that had a familiar feel to it—the weight of it, the broad blade and the balance (or lack of balance) told their own story : this wasn't for throwing at all, but for stabbing. This was the deadly assegai, the close-quarters weapon of the Zulu impis.

And this was more like it. He stood up, testing the point and trying to gauge the strength of the steel. It was still surprisingly sharp, not only the point, but the edges too, but the tempered iron was of poor quality native work. What had proved itself against red coats and white skin might not do so well against seasoned oak. But it would have to do nevertheless .. .

He retired to the end room, closing the last door for the last time but forcing himself to move methodically; for this was no longer a retreat, but a strategic withdrawal to a final line.

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And the documents must come first. He undipped the metal fasteners, abstracted Neil Smith's records and folded them into his coat pocket. Then he pushed the table to one side and began to examine the floor.

Two bonuses at once met his eye. The edges of the floorboards were pock-marked with worm holes for an inch or two on each side of the edges and at one point a section of deal had been spliced into a heavily-infested area. That was the point to attack.

With powerful but controlled strokes he began to demolish the length of spliced wood until he had splintered off enough to give him a handhold.

As he had expected, the new section came up easily, with hardly a protest. In the cavity below he could see the lath and plaster of the ceiling of the room below. Using the piece of floorboard as a battering ram he smashed a hole through the ceiling, sending the plaster pattering down: it was a lofty room below, perhaps twelve feet high, but that was nothing. It was the way to safety.

But first, somehow, he had to raise the oak floorboards on each side of the hole—boards which ran the whole length of the attic and would have to be cut in half at this point to give him leverage. And for that he had only the assegai—and the fire at his back.

He worked with the hot fury of anger, each blow striking the planking a quarter of an inch from its predecessor. And as he worked he felt the salt sweat running down his face into the corners of his mouth

—it dripped off his face and made little puddles in the dust-grimed wood, or fell through the hole in the ceiling into the room below among the empty iron bedsteads.

And then the first floorboard was defeated—he smashed through the last two inches with a tremendous blow of his heel.

Now to lift it. It was hard to get a proper grip on the splintered end, especially as a huge blister had appeared from nowhere on to his palm. In the end he stripped off his waistcoat and wrapped it round the splinters, straddling the board to get the greatest leverage.

He took a deep breath and slowly began to exert his strength.

Easy does it—the nails are big, but they are old and brittle —slow does it—listen to the roar of the fire—

steady does it— and don't forget that swine in the shrubbery—

The board came up with a crack like a pistol shot, catching Butler a blow in the balls that knocked him sideways against the files. A shower of old medical certificates cascaded over him.

He rolled away from the shelving, scattering the papers and gasping with pain and triumph. He hadn't realised that the original old floorboards were far wider than modern boards. With the hole he'd already dummy2.htm

made there now might be enough room, just enough room, for him to squeeze his way between the joists to safety.

But he'd have to hurry even so, for the volume of sound beyond the door, the continuous roar of the flames, was loud now: the demon was still reaching for him.

He staggered to his feet, immediately bending almost double as the injured testicles protested in agony.

But in the circumstances he could ignore their protest: self-preservation in the short term outweighed doubts about their future performance.

He grasped the smaller floorboard and began to enlarge the hole in the lath and plaster. By the grace of God it presented a piece of open floor below, between the beds; a bed might indeed break his fall, but under the force of 196 pounds of plummeting human being it would more likely collapse and injure him further.

Now the hole was as big as he could make it. He knelt down and threw first his coat and then his waistcoat through it, and then as an afterthought the faithful assegai, before easing himself into it.

It was a tight squeeze. His hips went through easily, but the oak pinched his chest and his shoulder blades cruelly. He could feel his feet kicking impotently In the air of the room below, like those of a hanged man in defective scaffold. He was stuck!

In the distance, clear through the broken window of the attic, he heard the siren of a fire engine.

Christ! To be caught like this would be almost as bad as frying! The siren triggered his own muscles into a paroxysm of effort: he felt his shirt bunch and then rip as he scraped through the gap. For a moment his hands took the strain, and then, as his body straightened, he allowed himself to fall with a crash into the pile of ceiling debris on the floor below.

There was no time for reflection, only for the few seconds he needed to repair his appearance: torn shirt covered by dirty, crumpled waistcoat; dirty, crumpled waistcoat covered by jacket; grimy sweat wiped hastily from face. As he raced past the adjoining dormitory he saw gobbets of burning material dropping into it from above—the firemen would have to work fast to save Eden Hall for posterity!

That was their concern—as he crashed out of the changing rooms and through the back door he heard their siren shrill much nearer, to be echoed by another in the distance. His concern was not to be caught on the premises, out of the fire into the frying pan.

At least the siren told him that they were approaching the hall from the front, so that the way was still clear for him to escape over the wall beside the cypresses. All the same it would be advisable to move cautiously, he thought: there was nothing like a fire engine to draw spectators from all sides. It was a miracle the place wasn't crawling with them already . . .

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The awkward point would come when he left the protective shadow of the outbuildings; there was a twenty yard gap between them and the evergreens when he would be clearly visible to anyone standing in the junior playing field. Cautiously he peered round the angle of the last of them, pressing himself against the brickwork.

Damn! There was someone out there—there was—

God damn! The fellow wasn't gawping at the fire: he was striding away quickly towards the wooden doorway set in the wall at the bottom of the field!

Butler's reflexes had him out of cover, across the path, over a low hedge of lavender and into the flowerbed beyond before he had properly computed the odds.

There was no mistaking that short, belted driving-jacket, even though he had only had one brief glimpse of it from the attic window.

His feet sank ankle-deep into the soft earth of the flowerbed, slowing him, and a rose bush plucked at him. Then he was through the bed and over another path, on to the turf of the playing field, running noiselessly towards the unsuspecting enemy.

He was reminded insanely of the game he played with his girls every weekend, "Peep the curtain" they called it. Any moment the man would turn round, and if he was caught moving he would have to go back to the beginning again— and any moment the swine must turn round!

It was as though it was that thought, rather than the sound of his footfalls, that gave him away: the man half glanced over his shoulder, jerked the glance further in sudden panic, and then bounded forward across the last few yards to the doorway, slamming the door behind him.

Butler was by then only a dozen strides behind him. There was no time to test whether the door was locked or merely on the latch. There wasn't even time to stop : there was only time to turn his shoulder into the door like a battering ram, with every ounce of his weight and speed behind it.

The door burst outwards with a crash and Butler hurtled into a muddy lane beyond, his legs skidding from under him. By the time he had gained his balance and his bearings the quarry had won back precious yards and was far down the lane.

Gritting his teeth, Butler rose from the mud and drove himself down after him. But the undignified sprawl in the mud had taken some of the steam out of him, leaving room for caution.

He had already left an elephant's trail of damage behind him, but there was at least a good chance the fire and the firemen between them would obliterate that. At the bottom of this lane, however, must be dummy2.htm

the side road from which he had approached the Hall: civilisation started again there, and to pursue his man further, assegai still in hand, would be to invite awkward attention. It looked as though he'd announced his escape without catching his man—without even getting a proper look at him.

As he laboured the last few yards the slam of a car door backed his worst fear, and as he turned the corner an engine fired.

It was the plain-looking van he'd seen parked in the distance earlier—with a burst of exhaust and a snarl that suggested there was more under the bonnet than had ever left the factory it shot away from the curb, leaving him panting with breathless rage.

He'd made a right bloody dubber of himself and no mistake—his dad's favourite phrase rose in his mind.

The ache came back to his crutch and to the blistered hand clutching the useless spear.

The van roared out of sight at the corner. Then, as he stared at the empty road, there was a shriek of brakes, one heart-stopping second of silence, and an explosive crash of metal and glass.

IV

"AND YOU THINK he said nothing? Nothing at all?"

Butler looked from Sir Frederick to Stocker. He had qualified his statement because from the back of the crowd he had not been able to make absolutely sure. But he was satisfied in his own mind that the fire engine had done a thorough job.

"They had to cut him out and they didn't bother to give him morphine first. If he was alive when he went into the ambulance it was touch and go."

"He was alive," Stccker said. "But only just—they never admitted him to hospital. The ambulance driver called out the casualty officer to have a look, and then they took him straight to the morgue. I believe it saves a lot of paperwork that way. So I think we can rely on Major Butler's assessment there."

Sir Frederick nodded. "Hmm . . . And you haven't got anything on him, Bob ? Is that so ?"

"Absolutely nothing, Sir. No name, no address, no next-of-kin. Nobody's lost him and nobody's claimed him. And no prints on record—as far as we're concerned he never existed. He's definitely one of theirs."

"And his car?"

"Much the same applies. Its documentation's totally false. It was stolen two years ago in Hendon. And Major Butler was right about the engine too. We'd have had a job catching him once he got going."

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"And you have no doubt he was the one who set light to your tail-feathers, Jack?"

Butler demurred. "He was the man I saw from the attic. And the man I chased—unless there were two men wearing that make of driving-jacket. Whether he started the fire behind me, that I can't say."

Sir Frederick smiled thinly at him. "I think it reasonable to presume so, Jack. And in that case I think we have emerged, thus far, more satisfactorily than we deserved—wouldn't you agree?"

It was plain to see what he meant even if it didn't make much sense yet, thought Butler bitterly. The dead man must have had a watching brief on Eden Hall—a brief to wait and see if anyone came to check on Neil Smith. Only then, when it was clear that the authorities were interested in Smith, was he empowered to obliterate the evidence.

But if that was how it had been, then things hadn't turned out as planned. Thanks to the freak accident between the van and the fire engine—a truly accidental accident—the enemy would not know what had happened exactly in the Hall. They would know that something had occurred, but not whether the Smith documents were destroyed. Nor would they know the identity or fate of the British agent involved.

But all that, in Butler's book, was no cause for satisfaction. His own carelessness and then his unsuccessful pursuit of the dead man provided greater cause for dissatisfaction.

And that had to be faced.

"I cocked it up," he growled.

"My dear Jack—" Sir Frederick held up his hand—"you do yourself an injustice. You might say equally that we should have warned you that there might be complications. But I do assure you that they were not expected. And if we'd sent young Roskill hobbling down to Thanet things might have turned out far worse. So you mustn't blame yourself; under the circumstances you did very well—you made the fellow put his foot down on the pedal too hard!"

It was odd that he seemed to rate the harrying of the man to his death as more important than the crumpled records of Smith's career which he had delivered to Stocker a couple of hours earlier. Except that Butler had long ceased to be much surprised about his superiors' order of priorities. He confided that they knew better than he did even though they seemed to rate luck a more desirable quality than diligence.

"So I think we may proceed to the next matter," Sir Frederick continued suavely. "Carry on, Bob."

Stocker shuffled the papers in front of him, straightened their edges, and then brought his palms together under his chin in an attitude of prayer.

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"Major Butler—what do you think of the younger generation?"

Butler stared at Stocker. A bloody stupid question deserved a bloody stupid answer, but Stocker had already been a brigadier when he exchanged a promising military career for this thankless task, so rank protected him from insult now.

"I don't think I'd care to generalise," he replied carefully.

"The question isn't as silly as it sounds, Jack," murmured Sir Frederick. "We really do have to know where you stand."

"I don't stand on questions like that, Sir Frederick. Young people, Jews, Catholics, Frenchmen, blacks—"

"How do you feel about blacks, Major?" cut in Stocker.

Butler smiled then, but inwardly, and it was a smile of pure malice. The technique he recognised, for it was a favourite one of his own. But it was not that which gave him pleasure —it was that Stocker had unwittingly walked into a trap.

"When I was a lad I used to follow Lancashire League cricket, the way lads follow football today. That was real cricket, too, not what they play today. When the Australians had a young chap who was a test match possible they used to send him over here for a couple of seasons of Lancashire League, to get a bit of polish."

"I don't see—"

"There was a black man, Veejy Rao, who scored a thousand runs and took a hundred wickets in one season in the league. I'd rather have been him—and he was black as the ace of spades—than any man alive."

He held up his hand to stop Stocker breaking in.

"The only prejudice I've ever had was against people who'd rather spend the afternoon playing tennis on the other side of Alexandra Meadows when they could be watching East Lancashire play Nelson. Once I'd learnt to tolerate them I never had any trouble with anyone else."

He ran his hand through the red stubble on his head and sat back, embarrassed suddenly at having said just a bit too much.

Stocker grinned. "Not even with students?"

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"They get too much press coverage for their own good." (That was Dingle talking—but there was no disgrace in agreeing with a shrewd old bird like Dingle.) "But I doubt they're any worse or any better than they used to be."

"You wouldn't object to taking an assignment involving you with students, then." Sir Frederick spoke gently. "It's rather out of your line, I know."

"It's not for me to object, sir," replied Butler stiffly. "If you think I'm suitable—"

"Hah! The spirit of the Light Brigade: there are the enemy—and there are the guns! No, don't get angry, my dear Jack! The service is so full of specialists who can't turn their hands to anything, or prima donnas who won't, that your old-fashioned attitude always comes as a refreshing surprise."

Not so much old-fashioned as archaic, thought Butler; he had sharp hearing and the habit of using it, even in the corridors of the department, and he knew very well what the younger generation of Sir Frederick's bright young men called him behind his back: the Thin Red Line.

It would have galled them to know that their nickname was a source of great pride to him, indifferent though he was to their half-baked opinions. And now it was a simple matter of pride to continue with what he had started, without making any more mistakes.

But that, of course, could not be admitted publically; his decision must be explicable in terms that both Sir Frederick and Stocker could accept. For them it would be enough to show a professional interest.

"I wouldn't refuse the opportunity of going on with this," he said. "Not after what happened at Eden Hall. Nothing personal, naturally. But there has to be something damned important at stake to make anyone behave like that."

"You're quite right, Jack. It is important."

"Then naturally I accept."

Sir Frederick and Stocker exchanged glances, with an almost imperceptible nod built into Sir Frederick's glance. It was time, surely, to tell him just what was so important that he'd already nearly died for it.

"Well, Colonel Butler—" Stocker began. Colonel Butler. Sir Frederick's expression was too bland for it to have been a slip: they were promoting him. Just like that!

No! Not just like that—never just like that. On a real battlefield merit on occassion might receive its reward, but not on this battlefield. Here it was only a necessary step in whatever design they contemplated. A means, not an end. Colonel Butler frowned suspiciously.

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"He knows us too well, Bob!" Sir Frederick laughed. "It's a genuine promotion, Jack—well deserved.

My congratulations. But I admit it does have a use on this assignment you've accepted."

Butler remained silent.

"Colonel," Stocker began again, slowly this time, "you must understand that ever since the Rudi Dutschke affair we have had to move very delicately in the academic world. You may remember that there was a petition circulating in the universities not long ago—they seem to find it quite intolerable that the security services should keep an eye on them. Apparently they consider themselves above suspicion."

"We had nothing to do with the Dutschke business, of course," murmured Sir Frederick. "If they'd asked me I should have told them that Balliol was just the place for him." Butler held his peace. The Dutschke affair had been handled abominably—and Sir Frederick was a Trinity man.

"We're not going to put you into Oxford—or Cambridge," said Stocker hurriedly, as though those ancient seats of learning had become lions' dens in which security men might be privily eaten. "But we do need to give you some sort of cover where you're going—sufficient cover to last for a few days, anyway."

"I don't think I could persuade anyone that I am an academic for more than a few minutes," said Butler.

"I don't talk the language. And I don't look the part."

"You look like a soldier, Colonel—and you talk like a soldier. That's understood. So we're going to capitalise on that. You see, you have a namesake in the Army List. He'll be going, on to the retired list very shortly—a certain Colonel John Butler. Your proper Christian name is John, isn't it?"

Butler winced. The first twenty years of his life had been lived under the name John—a decent, unexceptional name. It was a source of constant sadness, if no longer actual irritation, that he had been forced to abandon it for a diminutive he disliked. But now he had even learnt to think of himself as Jack.

"I was christened John. When I joined my regiment my first company commander happened to have the same name. To avoid confusion my commanding officer renamed me."

"And the name stuck?" Stocker's left eyebrow lifted a fraction. "How singular!"

"By jove!" Sir Frederick flipped open the file in front of him. "It might very well be the same man—let me see—you were in the Royal East Lancashire Rifles, weren't you?" He ran a slender finger through the page of typescript. "Here we are! 'R.E. Lanes. R'. The very same man! Now that is singular—and most convenient. Do you suppose he knew that—" He stopped suddenly, staring at Stocker with a smile on his lips.

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Stocker was examining a similar file. He looked up at Sir Frederick. "I think it's very likely, sir. It's much too convenient to be a coincidence. But in any case it does give the confusion an extra dimension.

Very few people will be likely to know both of them."

"Now wait a moment!" Butler strove to keep the anger out of his voice. "If you are proposing that I should try to pass myself off as Major—I mean Colonel—Butler—" He spluttered at the notion of it.

"Why, it's ridiculous."

The man, that senior Butler, had been a thin, taciturn officer, pursuing the minute faults of his subalterns with pedantic zeal. He had not liked the man who had stolen his name.

"I fancy there are very few people outside your regiment who know what he looks like, Jack," said Sir Frederick reassuringly. "He's been out of England these seven years. He was with the UN in Cyprus first, and then he was attached to the Turkish Army. And he spends all his leaves in—where the devil is it, Bob?"

"Adana, sir. Extreme south-eastern Turkey. He keeps very much to himself."

Butler looked questioningly from one to the other of them.

"But he does happen to be an acknowledged authority on Roman siege warfare, Colonel," Stocker went on smoothly. "In fact what he doesn't know about—ah—Byzantine mechanical weapons really isn't worth knowing. He's written quite a number of papers on the subject. We have them all here"— he patted a despatch box—"including the proofs of an unpublished article on the siege train of Belisarius which you may find very useful."

The drift of their intention was all too clear, and Butler didn't fancy its direction.

"We'll see that you don't make a fool of yourself," said Stocker quickly, moving to cut off objections.

"I don't give a damn about that," said Butler harshly. "It won't be the first time. I don't mind risking that provided I know what I'm up to."

Sir Frederick nodded. "You shall, Jack—you shall. The object of this rigmarole is quite simple, you must see that: the people with whom you're going to mix for a few days mustn't question what you are, and they'll be far less likely to do that if they think they know already."

"In a couple of days' time you're going up to a place called Castleshields House. It's up north, not far from the Roman wall—Hadrian's Wall, that is. It's a sort of study centre for Cumbria University, just the sort of place your namesake would go to if he came home."

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"So you can read 'em the paper on Belisarius and then you can potter around to your heart's content.

What's he supposed to be studying, Bob?"

Stocker consulted the file again. "The rotation of cohorts on Hadrian's Wall, sir."

"The rotation—urn-—yes! You're studying that, so you don't have to know anything about it. That part's not important, anyway. You can swot it up in a day or two."

Butler resigned himself to the inevitable. Half a lifetime earlier he had been well down the Sandhurst list in Military History—it had been Economics and Map Reading and Military Law that had lifted him into the top twenty. But that half lifetime had also taught him not to be surprised at the jokes duty played on him.

"And just why am I going to Castleshields House, Sir Frederick?"

And come to that, Sir Frederick—just what is the significance of Neil Smith's measles and progress in Latin ? And why did Eden Hall burn for those ?

"You must be patient for a little longer, Jack. You have my word that we won't hazard you again without explanation— you shall have them all in due season. But first we have to put you into circulation.

You've got that in hand, Bob, haven't you?"

Stocker nodded. "There was a paragraph in the Evening Standard at midday. And there'll be another in The Times diary tomorrow—it'll be written as though the visit was arranged long ago."

There was nothing surprising about Stocker's pull in Fleet Street, where so many good turns were always being sought and done. But what would have happened if he had refused? The answer followed the question instantly: of course they knew him as well as he knew them, so they had confided from the start that he would do his duty.

"But tonight?" Sir Frederick persisted, prodding Stocker.

"Yes—well tonight, Colonel, is the quinquennial O. G. S. Crawford lecture at the Institute of Archaeology in Gordon Square. It's organised by the Society for the Advancement of Romano-British Studies and everybody who is anybody will be there. Just the thing for you, Colonel."

Butler frowned. "Just the thing I should avoid, I would have said."

"Absolutely the contrary, my dear Butler. We have arranged a chaperone to protect you from outrage.

And to see you are introduced to the right people. Believe me, it's all laid on. And there's more to it than just showing you off—you must wear your uniform, incidentally, so everyone will notice you—"

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"Damn it! But I never—"

Stocker overbore him. "This once, Colonel, this once! I know it's not the done thing, but there's a very particular reason why you must be there."

Clearly there was no further point in questioning even small details of the operation; it had been all worked out by the experts, and there was some comfort in knowing that with Sir Frederick looking on the experts would be doing their best. But oddly enough there was something about this planning that struck a chord at the back of his mind—he couldn't quite place it, but in time it would come to him. And somehow it was not quite reassuring . ..

"What exactly do I have to do then?" he said carefully, purging the resignation from his tone.

"Tonight, Colonel—nothing. It will all be done for you."

"Sit back and enjoy the lecture, Jack," Sir Frederick smiled. "You never know your luck—it may be quite interesting."

V

SOMEWHAT TO HIS surprise, Butler found the details of the excavations of the vicus at the Roman fortress of Ortolanacum uncommonly interesting.

This was all the more unexpected after he had discovered from his chaperone, a gaunt Ministry of Works man named Cundell, that a vicus was not a formation of the Roman army, but their camp-followers' village.

Butler had encountered similar holes outside British Army cantonments in India, and did not cherish the memory. It was a sad commentary on the continuity of military life that the Romans had also had a hard core of deadbeats determined to get blind drunk, if not actually blind, and to catch whatever exotic venereal diseases the local native British girls were willing to sell. But to hear about such beastliness in archaeological jargon was an uninspiring prospect, so it seemed.

And yet despite himself he was caught both by the speaker's enthusiasm and by the agreeable absence of bullshit in his thesis. It seemed that Roman forts were not only dull—the rustle in the audience there suggested that some backs were being rubbed the wrong way; that might be the reason why the hall was so packed—but also only fit for unskilled labour. When you'd dug one, you'd apparently dug the lot, and those concerned with adding real knowledge must turn to the humbler sites.

It might be arrogant, but it made sense, thought Butler. And more, as he listened it seemed to him that the archaeologist mirrored the virtues he admired most in his own calling— virtues of patience and dummy2.htm

objectivity that were far more desirable than courage and daring.

That train of thought was brought unexpectedly on to the main line at the end of the lecture, when the speaker stepped from the rostrum and made directly for him.

"Colonel Butler!" he exclaimed loudly. "I'm delighted that you were able to come tonight!"

Whatever was up tonight, this wicked-looking prematurely-grey young man was part of it, evidently.

Butler rose from his reserved seat in the front row of the lecture theatre, deliberately presenting his profile to the entire audience. It went against the grain, but it was half the object of the evening—to print name and face together in the right memories.

"A great pleasure, Dr Handforth-Jones," he bellowed. "Most interesting paper, most interesting. Very glad to be here. Time someone said what you've said—most interesting!"

Their meeting in front of the rostrum suddenly became the focus of the People Who Mattered, with introductions flying. Butler found himself shaking hands with Professor Hookham, the president of the society, like a long-lost friend, and then with the celebrated Miss Sidgewick, in quick succession.

Professor Morley—Colonel Butler , . . Dr Graham (watch out for him Colonel—he's the author of a fat book on the Roman army)—Colonel Butler ... Sir Mortimer Wheeler . . . Professor This . . . Doctor That. . . Mister The Other!

He had never met any one of them before, but if any one of them recognised his false colours there was no indication of it; either the other Butler—he refused to think of the man as the real John Butler—was totally unknown outside his written work, or there were more in the plot besides Handforth-Jones. It was not important, anyway; all that mattered for him was that the onlookers should see what was happening.

This deception must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

"Charles, come and meet Colonel Butler," he heard Professor Hookham exclaim beside him. "Colonel, if you're planning a descent on the Wall, as I gather you are, then Charles Epton's the very man for you—

he runs Cumbria's study centre at Castleshields. Perhaps he could put you up for a week or two—"

Remember Charles Epton, Butler. There've been Eptons at Castleshields for over 500 years, as many a Scottish raider learnt to his cost. They used to hang 'em in droves, the Eptons did. But there's been a radical streak in the last few generations: Hunt and Corbett used to stay there, and young Charles was in the International Brigade on the Jarama. You tread carefully with him, Butler.

Butler stared at Epton doubtfully, wondering what a radical was in the 1970s. Vietnam was old hat now, so maybe it was Ulster and South Africa.

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Epton returned the doubtful stare with interest. Maybe it was the uniform that stuck in his throat. To good radicals khaki always meant repression first and defense second— until the enemy were knocking at the gates.

"Could you spare Butler a bed, Charles?" said Hookham, deliberately leaving the unfortunate man with no room in which to manoeuvre. "There must be a corner in that place of yours. Maybe not a dry one, but I expect he's used to roughing it!"

"I couldn't possibly impose on you," exclaimed Butler harshly, carefully making matters worse.

"You could earn your keep," said Handforth-Jones grinning mischievously. "Belisarius's siege train in exchange for bed and board sounds fair enough, eh? Of course there isn't much of the Wall to see near Castleshields, it's all been swallowed up by the house. Not until you get to High Crags, but it's superb there. And you're well placed for Ortolanacum."

"I think the Society might even rise to a presentation copy of the new guide to Ortolanacum," said Hookham, producing a booklet from his briefcase. "In return for whatever comes of the visit, of course."

They had effectively and unashamedly by-passed Epton's defenses, leaving him no opportunity to put off his uninvited guest—or even to invite him. All that was left was to acknowledge his own hospitality as though it had been offered from the start.

"It will be a pleasure to have you with us, Butler," he said quickly. "You can stay as long as you like—

and I assure you there's nothing wrong with our guest room, as Professor Hookham well knows. In my father's time it might have been different, I admit; but now the university pays the bills you have nothing to worry about."

It was done, whatever it was they intended to do: you have nothing to worry about.

Tonight that might just be true: anything else seemed unreal in the midst of these men of letters who fought their fiercest battles in learned journals, shedding only ink. But Neil Smith, whoever he was, whatever he had done, was dead. And so was the unknown man who had so nearly made an end of him, the real Butler, in the blazing attics of Eden Hall.

So there were other demons loose beside that one he had given the slip.

"Your taxi, Colonel Butler."

A hand touched his shoulder. It was his chaperone, steering him out of the crush in a flurry of good-mannered farewells before the inconvenient questions started. He was glad, in the midst of them, that he was able to take more formal leave of Hookham and Handforth-Jones, who had performed so admirably dummy2.htm

—the professor maintained a straight face to the last, but there was a glint of curiosity in the younger man's eyes and a twitch of sardonic amusement on his lips.

"I hope you have a profitable time on the Wall, Colonel," he said, grinning. "I may see you up there. But in any case, keep an eye open for the Picts—and the Winged Hats!"

Butler grunted and nodded non-committally, his gratitude evaporating. This was where the whole thing became ridiculous—the Picts were the aboriginal Scots, but who the Winged Hats were he hadn't the least idea. They sounded mythological.

He shook his head as he followed the Ministry man up the stairs and out into the long hallway. He had been a fraction slow answering to his new rank several times, and that too was bad—the sort of small error which aroused suspicion. The fact was that he operated better on his own, away from chaperones who did his thinking for him.

As if divining his thought Cundell did not follow him into the taxi which rolled out of the London half-light and drew up at the curb beside them, outside the Institute.

"This is as far as I go, Colonel. Goodbye—and good luck to you!"

The door slammed and the taxi pulled away before he could answer, or give any instructions to the cabbie.

He slid back the glass partition. "You know where I want to go, do you ?"

"Yes, guv'—once round the square an' left an' right an' left again, an' pick up y'friend, an' Bob's y'r'uncle!"

He couldn't quite decide whether the fellow was trying to be cheeky or simply repeating what he'd learnt by heart— probably a bit of both. But evidently someone was still doing his thinking for him, and all he could do was to hope that this "friend" round the corner would lighten his darkness.

He shrugged and stretched—the grip of the tunic as well as the faint lavendery odour of mothballs reminded him how long it had been since he had worn it last—and sat back into the darkness.

Then the taxi decelerated sharply and cut in towards the kerb. The door was jerked open—

"Good God Almighty!" Butler barked. "I should have known!"

Audley rapped on the driver's window and sank back into the seat beside him.

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"Should have know what? That it was me? They didn't tell you, then?" Audley sounded satisfied rather than inquisitive.

Butler nodded his head, but more to himself than to the man at his side. The armed truce between them was no special secret so perhaps they'd reckoned that even his celebrated obedience might have baulked at this.

"And why should you have known?" Audley repeated mildly.

They would have been wrong, of course. Personal likes and dislikes didn't come into it. Only a man's capabilities mattered, and no one doubted Dr David Audley's capabilities. If anything, Audley was just a shade too capable for his own good.

But there was a question to answer-—

"It had your mark on it, what little I've been allowed to pick up so far," he said.

Audley gave a short laugh. "I'm complimented!"

"Don't be! It's another damned devious concoction you've mixed up!" Butler gestured in the darkness.

"Even this."

"Ah—now you must understand that I'm not supposed to be in London at all. As a matter of fact I'm in a cinema in Carlisle at this very moment, watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I believe—an excellent film. The RAF kindly gave me a lift in a Harrier trainer—they do enjoy showing it off still—"

"For God's sake, man!" spluttered Butler. "What the devil are you up to ? And what are we up to ? I tell you, you may be having great fun—I'm sure you are—but I was damn near burnt alive this morning!"

Audley's head nodded soberly. "Yes, so I hear. And I'm sorry about that, Butler. But it wasn't on the cards I do assure you,though."

"So did Sir Frederick, but—" Butler checked the run of tongue. Apologies and assurances of sympathy were the last things he wanted of Audley. "Damn it, I don't object to the risk—it was my own fault.

What I dislike is being in the dark."

"Naturally. My dear chap, that's exactly why I'm here. Fred could have put you in the picture, but I wanted to do it myself. Tell me first though—did things go well this evening?"

"I've been invited to Castleshields House, if that's what you mean. Or Colonel John Butler has, if that's what you mean."

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"Hah—very good! That's exactly what I mean! And my congratulations on your promotion, Colonel."

Butler snorted bitterly. "I presume that I've Hugh Roskill's game leg to thank for that. He was your first choice, wasn't he? Were you going to put him up to Group Captain?"

He despised himself for the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. The plain fact was that Roskill's public school accent would have gone down better in academic circles than his own bark. It was childish to object to being second choice, when the first choice was self-evidently correct. As usual he was letting Audley nettle him, and if they were going to work in tandem that was something he would have to curb.

Starting now—with no excuses.

"No—I'm sorry, Audley," he forced the words out carefully. "That was a half-baked thing to say."

"It was rather," Audley replied ungraciously. "In view of the fact it isn't strictly true. We were sending Hugh down to Eden Hall because we thought that was routine—and thank God it was you who went, because Hugh might have bought it with his leg. But Castleshields House is all yours. You have to admit, Butler—your namesake makes you the obvious candidate."

"That was your idea?"

"It was. I met the man five years ago, when I was getting material for my book on the kingdom of Jerusalem—he took me through the Cilician Gate. And I tucked him away in the back of my mind for the future."

It had the ring of truth, for that was the sort of man Audley was; a man who filed names and faces and facts in his prodigious memory, marking them for future use as Wellington had marked the ridge at Waterloo long before Napoleon had set Europe ablaze again.

"Besides—" Audley paused, and then continued with a touch of diffidence—"I need a man I can rely on with me up north now Smith's dead."

Butler frowned. "He was one of ours?"

"He wasn't. . ." Audley sighed. "Indeed he wasn't. But it rather looks as though he might have been in the end. It's a damn shame—a damn shame!"

He fell silent for a moment.

"Just who was Smith, then?"

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"Who indeed!" Audley gave a sad little snort. "He was a junior lecturer in Philosophy at Cumbria, and a good one too."

"How did he die?"

"He was drowned—or we think he was drowned. He rode his motor-cycle into a little lake—no more than a pond really. But deep enough to die in. He rode off into the night and eventually they found him floating face down among the weeds. Accident, they say—and maybe it was an accident, even though he was floating face down."

"I beg your pardon?" What was the man driving at? He seemed almost to be talking to himself.

"Eh? Oh, yes—face down! Men should float face up—so Pliny says, according to Huxley."

My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)

Would drift face upwards on the oily tide

With other garbage . . .

Aldous Huxley, that is of course, not T.H.—and the female floats the other way—

Your maiden modesty would float face down

And men would weep upon your hinder parts.

"I do assure you there may be something to it, Butler. I had thought it nonsense, but a doctor I know says it may relate to physiology. Something to do with the relative density of fat and muscle—those "hinder parts", I suppose. But he was afloat in the feminine manner, and there may be something in that. It's one of the things I'd like you to check for me."

"The official verdict was accidental death?"

Butler did not quite succeed in curbing the impatience in his tone. If he let Audley tell the tale in his own way they'd be travelling the long way to the truth, no matter how interesting the scenery. Poetry, for God's sake!

"That's probably what they'll call it." Audley nodded. "He was drunk, you see, very drunk. No doubt about that: there were two hundred and something milligrammes of alcohol in his blood—way over the limit. I wasn't at the inquest, of course. No one of ours was, naturally, because we didn't know about him then ..."

"Didn't know about him? What didn't you know?"

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"We didn't know who he was."

"He was disfigured? Or had the fish been at him?"

"The fish? No, he hadn't been in long enough for that—" Audley stopped. "I'm sorry! I keep forgetting how very little you do know."

Butler balled his fists and counted— one, two three, jour— "Audley, I do not know a little"— five, six, seven, eight—"I know absolutely bloody nothing beyond the fact that I was sent to Eden Hall to get Smith's records. And having seen them I can't see what use they are to you if you already know you've got his body."

As Butler turned to stare at the blur of Audley's face in the darkness the taxi pulled in to the side of the street. He caught a glimpse of stone steps and a stucco pillared portico.

Audley moved forward to the edge of his seat, waving his hand vaguely at the window.

"I've borrowed a flat for an hour or two—more comfortable than riding around in a taxi." He turned back towards Butler. "Yes—well, I'm afraid there never has been any question of whose body we've got, Butler. It belongs to our Neil Smith. But probably not to yours."

"Not mine?"

"It rather looks as though your little Eden Hall boy was Neil Smith right enough. But our Neil Smith was actually a man by the name of Zoshchenko—Paul Zoshchenko. Somewhere between Eden Hall and the King's College at Oxford, the KGB appear to have slipped a ringer on us."

VI

"HELP YOURSELF TO a drink," said Audley generously, pointing to an alcove in the corner of the room. "My invitation covers incidental hospitalities."

Butler stared around him. Conceivably this was another of the department's properties, ready like the taxi to serve when the need arose. On the other hand, department flats were rarely so elegantly furnished and never kept their alcohol on view in cut-glass. And Audley was notoriously chary of using official facilities.

In the end he carried a medium-sized brandy and soda over to the fireplace. When it came to scoring off life it was hopeless to attempt to outdo Audley.

"Zoshchenko. Do we know him?"

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"No." Audley shook his head. "There's never been a mention of him."

"Then how do you know who he was?"

"He told us himself." Audley took several folded sheets of paper from his breast pocket. "Strictly speaking he didn't tell us, we really don't know what he intended to do. But it looks as though he was in some sort of trouble and he turned to the only man he trusted."

He passed the sheets to Butler.

Anonymous, greyish photocopying paper; the reproduction of a letter written in a small, meticulous hand, but with the leopards and lilies of ancient royalty on its crest—

The Master's Lodging, The King's College, Oxford.

Dear Friesler—

"Who is this Freisler?"

"A German scholar who lives in London."

"How did we get hold of the letter?"

Audley regarded Butler silently for brief space.

"He happens to be a friend of mine."

"Has he a security rating?"

"You read the letter, Colonel. I'll worry about where it came from."

Butler noted the slight lift of the big man's chin and the sudden coolness of his manner. So this German was one of those friends, one of that private network of strategically placed people Audley had charmed or bullied (the man could do either as he chose) into keeping their eyes and ears open for him. Young Roskill had spoken of it half ruefully, half admiringly.

He lowered his eyes to the letter again.

. .. I have held my hand (if not my tongue) during these last months. But now something has occurred which makes action imperative.

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I have heard this day of the death of one of my former pupils, Neil Smith, a graduate of the college who was awarded the Mitchell research fellowship at Cumbria last summer.

Smith was apparently killed in a road accident after he had lost control of his motor-cycle. I have been informed— unofficially—that although only evidence of identification was taken at the preliminary inquest the final verdict will undoubtedly be "accidental death".

As it happens, however, I am in possession of information which casts doubt not only on this expected verdict, but also on the finding of the preliminary hearing.

On the night of Smith's death, shortly after dinner I was informed of a long distance telephone call which the Porter had finally decided could not be kept from me. The line was poor (as it often is) and I confess that I was irritated at having to leave my guests, the more so because the butler informed me that it was an importunate Mr Zoshchenko who was asking for me. I was not aware of knowing anyone of that name.

Also, I speedily formed the opinion that Mr Zoshchenko was drunk, for he insisted on declaiming passages from Plato—mostly from the Apology and the Phaedo—interspersed with parts of what I took to be the American Declaration of Independence. It was most confusing; he was confused and so was I.

And then he said, with perfect clarity: "Master, you think I'm Neil Smith, but I'm not—I'm Paul Zoshchenko. But if I've got to die I'm damn well going to die Neil Smith, not bloody Paul Zoshchenko. I don't even like bloody Paul Zoschenko, even if I have to die for him."

Now, having taught Smith I recognised his voice as soon as I heard his name—I had no doubt about that either, slurred though it was. So I naturally tried to dissuade him when he said that he was coming to see me that very night, for he was clearly in no position to be abroad. But he took not the slightest notice of me.

Then the pips went—he had put additional coins in twice before—and he said: "No more money, Master,no more time. If I don't get wet on the way I'll be with you for breakfast—"

"Wet!" whispered Butler. "God Almighty!" "Finish the letter," Audley commanded.

"—but if I don't make it, Master, pay the cock to Aesculapius for me."

So there you have it, my dear Freisler: if this call was from Smith, then Smith was not what he seemed.

And his references to death and wetness clearly suggest suicide, rather than accident.

As to paying the cock, I do not believe he intended me simply to deliver these facts to the coroner.

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Therefore I am taking the liberty once more of passing on this information to you to act on (as I know you will) in the interests of those to whom we owe our obligation.

"God Almighty!" repeated Butler. "Wet! Do you think that's really what he said?"

Audley shrugged. "We've no reason to doubt it. Old Sir Geoffrey was pretty well oiled himself that night

—that's what he means by all that detail about his guests—they do themselves well at King's and Sir Geoffrey enjoys his port and brandy. But there's nothing wrong with his memory. He just didn't know what he was remembering. But then you wouldn't expect him to know KGB slang."

Butler nodded. That was the whole thing in a nutshell. The Master of King's College, Oxford, would know Ancient Greek and how the Court of the Star Chamber worked—but he wouldn't know that the Russian slang for Spetsburo Thirteen was Mokryye Dela—"The department of wet affairs". Only "wet"

in their context meant "blood-sodden", and to get wet was the feared, inevitable fate of traitors pursued by the special bureau.

The irony, if that had been Zoshchenko/Smith's fate, was that he had got wet literally as well as metaphorically, and the Master had added two and two to get five.

"What was all that about paying a cock?" said Butler.

"Ah—that was another bit from the Phaeda, the last words of Socrates as he was being executed. You see, Aesculapius was the god of healing, and people who were sick used to sacrifice a cock to him before they went to sleep in the hope of waking up in good health again—or sometimes simply as a thank-offering for having recovered. As Socrates was dying he asked his friend Crito to make such an offering."

"As he was dying? Wasn't that a bit late?"

Audley smiled sadly, as though Socrates had been a friend of his too. "It was a sort of a joke—a typical Socratic joke. It's rather complicated, but he thought the soul mattered more than the body, so maybe he meant that by killing his body they were curing his soul."

Butler frowned. "Hmm! And that means maybe Zoshchenko rode into the lake deliberately after all!"

Audley pursed his lips thoughtfully, then shook his head.

"You'll have to sort that one out. But I wouldn't get in the habit of calling him Zoshchenko. As far as we're concerned he lived Smith and he died Smith. That's one wish of his we can grant."

He paused, rubbing his chin. "We want to know how he died, Butler. But even more we want to find out what brought him to the boil."

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"And what he was doing here in the first place," said Butler harshly. He held out the photocopied letter.

And come to that, he thought, it would be interesting to know just what Audley had been doing too these last few months. But he'd have to fish for that.

"Let me get things straight," he began innocently. "Hobson first spoke to Freisler some time ago. And did Freisler get in touch with you then?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact he did," Audley replied a shade guardedly, as though he wasn't quite sure that Butler had the right to ask the question, never mind be granted an answer.

"So what was this nightmare of his? Reds in the University?"

Audley blinked unhappily at him. "Not so much that, no."

"What then?" Pinning Audley down gave Butler a perverse but undeniable pleasure.

"He rather thinks they're framing his lads."

Butler allowed his jaw to drop. "You're joking!"

Audley regarded him malevolently.

"You're not trying to tell me that the KGB has come down to organising student protest?" Butler gave a scornful half-laugh.

"I'm not trying to tell you anything, Colonel. I'm telling you what the Master of King's thinks. Which is something you will have to check for yourself in due course, so I shouldn't laugh too much. He may not be quite the man he once was, but he's still a crafty old bastard, I can tell you."

He eyed Butler coldly. "And just in case you feel disposed to forget that, Butler, you may care to remember instead when you meet him that he commanded the column that drove Panzer Lehr's Tigers out of Tilly-le-Bocage in Normandy on D plus six."

Butler kicked himself for letting Audley ambush him just as he seemed to be on top. He should have known that the man would defend the academics; that deep down inside he identified with them, especially with the Hobson-types who had proved themselves in the jungle beyond their ivory towers.

"He pretends to be a simple old man, with an old man's fancies," Audley went on. "But he isn't simple."

"Yet he has nightmares."

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Audley puffed his cheeks. "The trouble with the Master is that he's always been a violent anti-Communist, so much so that he was tarred with the appeasement brush as a young don back in '38. Last summer wasn't the first time he'd seemed to cry 'Wolf! Wolf!'. He's been spotting subversive influences for years."

"Then what was different about last summer?"

"Ah, well, we had—something else to go on at the time, so it seemed. But I'd rather not go into that just now." Audley smiled apologetically. "The fact was, they'd been having a fair bit of trouble at the universities as well, and the Master's not without influence. It all added up."

"To what?"

Audley laughed. "Why, to my going back to university to see if there really were any wolf-prints round the fold."

"And were there ?"

The laugh faded quickly. "You decide that for yourself in due course, Butler."

Butler stared at the big man speculatively. There were quite a number of things he hadn't passed on. Or maybe couldn't pass them on because he didn't know them. But asking wouldn't make him change his mind. In any case, however fanciful Sir Geoffrey Hobson's nightmares might be, Eden Hall had been no fancy.

"Very well. But I can't see how I can achieve anything that you can't do better. You're already accepted in the academic world."

"That's just it: I am accepted. And believe me that's worth a great deal. My position is just too valuable to compromise just yet."

He bobbed up and down as though agreeing unexpectedly with himself. "Didn't Fred and Stocker warn you that we have to go very carefully?"

"They did—yes," growled Butler. "Stocker mentioned Dutschke. And there seems to be a petition of some sort floating around."

"Ha! You can say that again!" murmured Audley. "I've signed it myself. And I'm a member of the Cumbrian branch of the Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy too— a perfectly worthy institution. But unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of clever friends of mine who can't distinguish between wolves and sheepdogs when they set about protecting their flocks—and there are some who dummy2.htm

think there isn't any difference anyway. They shoot on sight, and some of 'em are pretty good marksmen, I warn you, Butler."

He gazed at Butler quizzically. "Did Stocker ask you what you thought about the younger generation ?"

"Yes."

Audley sniffed. "Load of nonsense! He talks about the younger generation as though it was a political party with lifelong membership. And I think he's frightened of it."

"Whereas you aren't?" murmured Butler. There might be something in what Audley said, but it went against the grain to agree with him when he was laying down the law like this.

"They're too inexperienced to be dangerous at the moment. And by the time they've picked up the know-how, then life has moved them on, poor devils. As a rule they're no match for the terrible old men on the other side."

"You're sympathetic to them, then?"

"Sympathetic? My dear Butler—the girls are delicious, with their little tight bottoms, and the boys are splendid when they're arrogant—and when they've washed their hair. But when they forget they're individuals and try to be the Youth of Today I find them extraordinarily tedious and self-defeating."

"I was under the impression that they were giving the university authorities a run for their money."

"Oh—quite often they do. That is, when the authorities make mistakes. And it's just like our business, my dear fellow: only the mistakes get the headlines. That's part of the reason why Stocker and Fred are sweating—what happens in the universities is news. The other part is that there's still a lot of influence in the universities as well as a lot of brains. And they know how to use it too. We're an example of that."

"We are?"

"My dear Butler, we're here because the Master of King's knows which string to pull. Take my advice and forget about the younger generation. Think about the older one instead: think about the Master of King's."

He gave a little admiring grunt. "The Hobsons have been a power in Oxford for a century—you can see them planted in rows in St Cross churchyard. It'll be like a family reunion when the last trump sounds there. And our Sir Geoffrey's the second Hobson to be Master of King's. They say the first one had a niece who was Beerbohm's model for Zuleika. They also say old Hobson was the model for the Warden of Judas. There's also a story that Old Hob once made a guest at High Table take the college snuff, and when the poor chap fell dead of apoplexy (King's snuff being fearful stuff) all the old villain said was 'At dummy2.htm

least he took snuff once before he died!'."

Audley chuckled, savouring the anecdote, and then checked himself as he caught Butler's disapproving look. "Yes . . . well, Young Hob, as they call the present Master—he's nearly 70, actually—he's a man who likes to work indirectly. That's why he approached me through Theodore Freisler."

"He intended to get through to you?"

"No shadow of doubt about it. To me through Theodore and then to Sir Frederick through me. I tell you, he prefers the indirect approach."

And also the approach that protected him best from any awkward questions if things went wrong, thought Butler. Except that that meant the Master was a worried man as well as a careful one, a man who truly believed his own warnings of doom. And as Stocker and Sir Frederick were disposed to take him seriously it might be that this business could suddenly turn into a very hot potato indeed.

The conclusions presented themselves to Butler one after another in quick succession, last of all the most daunting one: hot potatoes were objects to pass on as smartly as possible.

"Why hasn't the Department handed over all this to the Special Branch?"

"The Special Branch is not involved," Audley snapped. "And we damn well want it to stay that way—

uninvolved."

His prickliness took Butler aback. If there was one thing the Department prided itself on, it was those hard-won cooperative relations with the Branch.

But the reaction wasn't lost on Audley. "I know it's not how we usually go about things. But the Branch has its sticky fingers in student politics, and we don't want any part of that. The young blighters can sit-in or sit down as much as they like. They can lie down for all we care, if that's what turns them on.

Provided it's all their own idea, not something somebody else wants them to do to further some other idea."

"Somebody being the Russians."

"Russians, Martians—it doesn't matter who. But in this case the Russians, yes."

Butler scowled. "What the hell do they hope to get out of it?"

Audley maintained a poker face. "Perhaps the Master of King's will be able to tell you. But I can tell you what we stand to lose."

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"What?"

"Just suppose the Press got hold of Comrade Zoshchenko. It's bad enough the way the public feels about the students as it is. But what price the Council for Academic Freedom if someone came up with a genuine subversion story? Christ, man—it'd set higher education back years. And then we'd have a real student problem on our hands."

Butler nodded slowly. There might or might not be a plot of some sort, though he found it hard to believe even now, after Eden Hall. But there was the makings of a spectacular scandal, that was certain.

And from such a scandal one might expect a fierce anti-student backlash.

If that was the aim it was clever, but not new. Indeed, it was no more than another version of the technique being used at the very moment by the IRA gunmen in Northern Ireland: Make your enemy repressive. And if he isn't so by nature, make him so by provocation.

"Then why haven't they blown the gaff on Zoshchenko already?" he asked suddenly, as the thought struck him.

Audley shook his head. "That's what really scares me, Butler. Because it means that scandal isn't their objective, it's just something extra we've got to worry about. I've a feeling that they must be playing for much higher stakes than that. And I can tell you—I don't like the feeling one little bit."

VII

IT WAS A very small gap through which Neil Smith had broken into Pett's Pond, and thereby from Earth to Heaven— or to wherever would give houseroom to Paul Zoshchenko.

Indeed, it had hardly been a gap at all, more the sort of dog-eared hole small boys made at their natural break-in point where the hedge and the council's road safety fence met. Even now, when it had been enlarged and trampled, it was insignificant: a very small gap.

Butler retraced his steps carefully along the soggy bank, ducking under the spindly alder branches, and heaved himself back to the roadside. As he steadied himself on the splintered end of the fence he felt the post move under his hand. Either it had been already loose, or maybe Smith had given it a passing clout on his way to the pond: it was impossible to say, because every mark of his passage had been overprinted with other people's slide and slither.

But he had expected no less, and it had not been for any tangible clues that he had broken his journey at Pett's Pool. If there was anything to be had here it lay in the trained memories of Charon's assistants, the local constable and the police surgeon.

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The first of these stood waiting for him beside the Rover, well-built, fresh-faced, stamping his boots on the gravel like a young carthorse impatient at having to stand still when the day's work still lay ahead of him.

"Not much to see there," Butler said gruffly, brushing down his overcoat ineffectually.

"Too much, sir. Half the village was there before me!"

No apologies, that was a good sign. When Smith's body had been spotted by schoolchildren taking their short cut along the far margin of the pond the Constable had been measuring up an early morning collision two or three miles away. Now he was making no bones about it, trusting Butler to know that a man couldn't be everywhere, and was therefore seldom at the right spot.

"They had him out and they tried to give him the kiss of life, sir. And they spotted his motor-cycle in the water—it's not very deep anywhere and there was a big patch of oil on the surface—so they looked to see if there was anyone ridin' pillion."

Butler looked at the stagnant pond with distaste. One public-spirited soul had stripped off and groped among the weeds, while another, even braver, had set his mouth to those cold lips, an act as admirable as it had been useless.

With a shrug he turned his back on the pond and stared up and down the empty road. From this point on to the bend he had a clear view in both directions for two hundred yards or more. Ahead of him the road ran straight into the open countryside and to his left the first of the cottages of the village was tucked among the trees perhaps fifty yards beyond the further tip of the crescent-shaped stretch of water behind him.

"Nobody heard anything?"

"No, sir," the Constable shook his head. "Old Mr Catchpole in the last house there—he's half deaf anyway, so he has his television switched on full. He was watching Match of the Day until about 11 and then the midnight film until 12.55, so he wouldn't have heard it."

"That was when it happened?"

"Dr Fox said it might have been about then. If you want to have a word with him—"

"All in good time, constable." Everything pointed to the young fellow's efficiency—he had taken the trouble to talk to the occupant of the nearest house on the off-chance of evidence, even in an open-and-shut road accident. So perhaps an off-chance lay in him too—"What do you think happened?"

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The constable looked at him doubtfully. Open-and-shut it might have seemed, but it wouldn't seem like that to him now, with a mysterious Colonel Butler nosing about, armed with exalted Home Office credentials and authorisation from the Chief Constable himself. But an outsider nonetheless, and it would be dead against his training and inclination to hypothesise to such a person, colonel or not.

Butler assumed the interested expression of a seeker after wisdom. Evidently the marrow would have to be coaxed from this bone.

"Has there ever been an accident here before?"

The constable relaxed slightly. "About ten years ago there was a bus went off the road. That was long before my time of course, but I've heard tell of it enough times. He was going too fast, the driver—that's the reason for nine out of ten of the accidents I've seen, when you come down to it, sir—but it's true the bend's much sharper than it seems, more a corner than a bend, and the camber's not good at all. So it seems like he just drifted into it gradually—went into the pond down there—" he pointed towards the village.

"And that was when the council put up the fence and the reflectors—you can't rightly miss 'em as you come into the bend-—and the Ministry put up the warning signs too. So there's been nothing gone amiss since then. I wouldn't say it was dangerous at all."

That was the thing in a nutshell: the bend was at worst a minor hazard, but no killer. The moment a driver began to go into it at night those red reflectors would glare back warningly; even the ill-fated bus had almost managed the unexpected curve successfully.

"But young Smith found it dangerous, didn't he?" murmured Butler.

"Sir?" The constable frowned.

"The motor-cyclist," began Butler patiently. "If he came down the straight and went through the gap just there ... it looks as though he never even started to turn into the bend . . ."

"Ah . . . well now . . ." It was not so much a conjecture as a problem when put like that, and the constable's reluctance to tackle it was weakening ". . . it does look a bit like that when you think about it."

And he was thinking about it now. He looked up the straight and then to the gap, eyes narrowed, and finally at the pond itself. Then back up the straight again. "You see, sir, there was no brake mark and no skid mark. Yet he came down fast—that's sure enough, for the motor-bike was well out in the water. And

—" he paused "—and now I come to think of it, well, it wasn't quite where I'd have expected it. . ."

"Indeed?"

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The constable nodded judiciously. "If he was taking the corner, or just beginning to, it should have ended up further to the right—the right, that is, as we're lookin' at the pond from here. But it was two, maybe three yards to the left of that... So it's like you said, sir—if you asked me I'd say he came directly down the road and straight across through the hedge like there was no corner at all—"

He stopped suddenly, glancing at Butler nervously again as though expecting a reprimand.

"I think you're quite right, constable," said Butler encouragingly, ignoring the glance. "We have the two fixed points—the gap in the hedge and the position of the machine in the pond—and if we imagine a back-bearing from them we ought to have his angle of approach. You're absolutely right!" He paused to let his praise sink in. "But how would he come to do a thing like that?"

"That 'ud be hard to say, sir. Even if he was riding dead straight his headlight 'ud pick up the first of the reflectors. Even my bicycle light picks 'em up."

"Could he have mistaken it for the rear lights of a car?"

"Oh no, sir. There's no mistaking them."

"Then supposing a car came round the corner as he was approaching it—could it have cut off the reflectors and then blinded him?"

"Mmmm ... it could have, I suppose—but it would have lit 'em all up first and warned him there was a corner here." Emphatic shake of the head. "I doubt it, sir. I doubt it very much."

Butler doubted it too. But if a car was already waiting on the bend in the darkness, all its lights out—

then all switched on suddenly, high beam, to dazzle the oncoming motorcyclist ? Or if there had been a prepared obstacle in the road?

Butler shook his head to himself just as emphatically. It was all too providential, too elaborate and too theatrical, and far too-clever, involving exact knowledge and preparations— a daunting risk of bringing down the wrong man anyway. Altogether not a bit like the Spetsburo Thirteen.

"Not unless he was riding like a maniac, anyway," concluded the constable. "I heard tell he'd taken a drop too much—have you considered that, sir? Dr Fox 'ud be able to tell you that for sure."

Like a maniac who'd taken a drop too much: Neil Smith roaring through the night with the fear of the Spetsburo behind him—or maybe simply trying to shake Paul Zoshchenko from his tail! On a high-powered bike that was a better formula for disaster than any far-fetched plot.

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In the last analysis the shorter, simpler answer always made the best sense, disappointing though it might be.

"Yes, Colonel Butler—the powers-that-be warned me to be ready for you."

Dr Fox examined Butler's credentials suspiciously, and then measured Butler himself against them with equal distaste. "It seems I must answer every question you put to me to the best of my ability."

Medium hostile, categorised Butler. Or if not actually hostile, then somewhat nettled at being leaned on by those powers-that-be to divulge information properly reserved for the coroner's court. And of course no hardpressed general practitioner gladly suffered unscheduled calls on his time.

"I'd be grateful for any help you can give me, doctor."

Nod. "I've no doubt. The trouble is, Colonel, that answers—medical answers—are not always amenable to words of command. You'll be wanting 'yes' or 'no' from me and I shall be giving you 'maybe' if you're lucky—that's my experience, anyway. But we shall see, shan't we!"

Butler watched him without replying. Dr Fox was evidently used to opening the bowling, so bowl he must be allowed to do, at least for the time being.

Fox indicated the close-typed form on the desk between them. "I take it that you've seen a duplicate of this report, Colonel? What more do you require? Conjecture off the record?"

"I'll settle for that, doctor."

"Hmm! Well I can't say it seems exceptionally complicated. To put it bluntly, he rode his motor-cycle under the influence of drink, did your Neil Smith—or as we have to say now, he exceeded the permitted level of alcohol in his bloodstream. No conjecture there, certainly—the actual figure was 230 millilitres

—that's about six and a half pints of beer, or 13 whiskies, as near as I can estimate. All on an empty stomach, and I wouldn't have said he was a drinking man."

So the false "Boozy" Smith had not been a drinking man, whatever the real one had been. But that was hardly surprising in his line of work.

"In fact he wasn't fit to be on the road at all, and if it hadn't happened at Pett's Pond it would assuredly have happened somewhere else very soon," went on Fox unemotionally. "It was just beginning to hit him hard. I suppose we should be thankful that he only killed himself."

"Would you consider the Pond a dangerous spot?"

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"Every inch of every road is a danger spot when there's a drunk on it. The pond corner's no worse than a dozen others within this parish. As a matter of fact it could have been the safest place for him to have gone off the road, seeing as he wasn't wearing a crash helmet. The water could have saved him."

"But it didn't."

"No, it didn't. But there's nothing very surprising in that."

"You mean for a grown man to die in four feet of water doesn't surprise you, doctor?"

"I mean exactly what I have said. Grown men have drowned in much less than four feet of water, Colonel. When it comes to drowning, some people find a few inches of bathwater quite sufficient." Fox lifted his chin and gazed at Butler with a hint of scorn. "I don't know what your experience of death is—

I suppose you peacetime soldiers haven't seen so much of it—but I have always found life much more surprising than death."

Butler clenched his back teeth. "Is it of any significance that he was floating face downwards? Would you have expected him to float that way?"

The corner of Fox's mouth twitched. "Oh, come now, Colonel—Butler was it?—if the object of this interview is to bandy old wives' tales, then we shall both be wasting our time. If you want to create a mystery where there is none, nothing I say is likely to prevent you doing so. But you must try not to ask stupid questions."

Butler cursed Audley and his clever little bits of verse as he felt the situation slipping from his grasp. He had plainly bodged things to the point where they were doing little more than fence with each other.

Only a flag of truce could save him now.

He bowed his head. "I'm sorry, doctor—you are the expert and I'm a pig-headed layman. The plain truth is that this man Smith died very inconveniently for us, and very conveniently for someone else, so we have to be sure about his death. We're not looking for a mystery, but if there is one we daren't overlook it. And—well, surely you must have had some reservations if you felt a post-mortem was necessary?"

Fox stared at Butler thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded slowly. "Not quite a layman, colonel—

it's true that I considered a post-mortem necessary. But when there are none of the classical signs of drowning, and no visible injuries either, then it's perfectly normal."

"Would you have expected such signs?"

"Not at all. Minor injuries or the absence of them aren't significant. In a case like this it's merely a question of drawing deductions—a process of exclusion, really."

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"And you concluded—?"

Fox shrugged. "Vagal inhibition is my guess—sudden shock mediated through the vagus nerve, the

'wanderer'. I won't bore you with technicalities, but it's a very expeditious way of dying. Sir Bernard Spilsbury proved that, when he damn near killed a nurse by way of demonstrating it in a murder case."

"Spilsbury?" Butler frowned. "Would that have been the brides-in-the-bath case?"

"That's right." Fox smiled grimly. "Up with their heels— and it was all over!" He paused. "And now I take it you'd like to know whether somebody upped with Smith's heels and then dumped him in the pond?"

"That would be helpful, doctor."

"I'm sure it would be! But I'm afraid I can't help you that way at all." He leant forward, elbows comfortably on the table. "You see, the difficulty with most drownings is that the actual process is the same whether it's accident or suicide —or murder. And that's why I keep all my wits about me when I meet this sort of case. And why I do a p.m. so often."

"In this instance there was very little water in the lungs, which is what I'd expect. But it was definitely pond water, with enough weed fragments to prove it. No doubt at all. In fact there was nothing there incapable of rational explanation; add the alcohol and you can call it either accident or involuntary suicide. Myself I'd prefer to call it waste and stupidity, whatever he'd done that brings you here."

"Except, of course, I can only tell you what the state of his body tells me. What you want—and what I can't give you, colonel—is the state of his mind."

VIII

BY THE TIME the train reached the outskirts of Oxford Butler had worked himself into a fairly irascible frame of mind.

Having to abandon his comfortable, convenient Rover at Reading and surrender himself to British Rail had not helped, even though he had seen the force of Audley's argument that the false Colonel Butler ought not to launch himself in the real Colonel Butler's car.

Yet he recognised that the true cause of his disquiet was the outcome of the Pett's Pond visit. For Dr Fox's conclusions fitted his own instinct far too well to be ignored: all the evidence pointed to the purely accidental nature of Smith's death. And although there was no consequential reason to doubt his Zoshchenko identity, his connection with the KGB or any other of the Soviet overseas agencies now dummy2.htm

seemed to rest solely on a chance word embedded in the memory of an aged don who had wined and dined well before he put his ear to the phone.

True, that was exactly the sort of intelligence fragment that Audley relished—and in fairness to Audley (however much it hurt) it had to be admitted that the blighter had a nose for such things.

Also, the fact that Smith's parents were conveniently dead and all those who knew him conveniently far off in New Zealand certainly made him a likely candidate for such a substitution. So the pros and cons seemed to balance in an annoyingly inconclusive fashion, and there weren't really very many solid facts either.

He glared down at the printed page on his lap : there was no shortage of facts there. Oldchesters fort—

Ortolanacum according to the Notitia Dignitatum, or Ortoligium if one preferred the later Ravenna Cosmography—measured 200 metres by 130, enclosing rather more than five acres, and had variously housed 500 mounted men or a thousand infantry. In the reign of Severus it had housed the 1st Lusitanians for a time and had then been the undoubted home of the 7th Dacians, a crack cavalry regiment drawn from one of the great horse tribes the Romans had conquered.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to be transplanted from the plains of the Danube to the wild north-west frontier of the Empire.

It was not really so far from his imagination at all: in their day the East Lancashire Rifles, drawn from the smoggy cities of industrial England, had frozen on the rim of the world above the Khyber Pass on another north-west frontier. That was fifteen hundred years later, but the price and obligation of empire, no matter whose empire, was still the same: some men must live and die far from home without questioning their fate. Indeed, it was the natural order of things, natural for the Dacians as it had been for the East Lanes.

Butler sighed. The Ala Daciana was certainly not to be pitied, serving its years on the Great Wall, but rather to be envied for drawing such clear-cut and honourable duty. There would be precious little call for "aid to the civil power" on the Wall.

The train gave a sudden convulsive jerk and then stopped again. For some reason that escaped Butler it had stalled just short of the Oxford platform, alongside a somewhat tatty cemetery—obviously not the last resting place of the Hobsons —as though to remind him and the other passengers of the final destination of all journeys.

The real Oxford would be on the other side, of course. His gaze followed his thought across the carriage.

The clutter of the railway sidings along the main line was dominated by a pair of enormous cranes. But beyond them he could see the famous vista of towers and spires, clustered like so many rockets on their launching pads.

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Butler frowned and shook his head. The image was altogether too fanciful for his liking: it reminded him that this was a dangerous territory for simple men, with too many private lines linking it with the centres of power and influence. Sir Frederick and Stocker had both warned him to tread carefully in it, and even Audley himself, who was a product of such a place and at home in it, had treated it with uncharacteristic respect.

But there was still no reason why he should let it throw him off balance before he had even set foot in it.

Caution and respect were one thing, but superstitious fear was another.

I can be dangerous too, in my fashion, thought Butler, tightening his regimental tie.

All the same he watched warily through the windows of the taxi which bore him towards the King's College, as though the nature of the hazards would be immediately apparent.

But at first it seemed a dull, provincial town like any other —if anything even duller, with its dingy, lavatorial station, jammed car parks and anonymous shops stacked with electrical goods and soft furnishings. Nor did the inhabitants seem any different—no flowing gowns or flowing student hair —

from those of any other provincial city.

The only distinctive thing was the number of chalked slogans, which ranged from somewhat banal appeals for action against Greece and South Africa, and support for the NLF, Women's Lib and Black Power, to the rather more intriguing contentions that Proctors are Paper Tigers and Hitler is Alive and Living in— the traffic surged forward just too quickly for him to discover where the Führer had been hiding all those years.

Then abruptly brick and plate glass gave way to mellow stone and towers and crenellations and pinacles and porticoes. Butler craned his neck and twisted in his seat like any tourist to catch the famous views, absurdly pleased that the place wasn't going to let him down after all, that the distant glimpse of spires had not been a mirage.

"Dick's, sir," said the taxi-driver.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The King's College, sir—you're looking at it."

It looked like a king's college, certainly—the richly painted escutcheons over the gatehouse gave it a properly royal appearance, and one of the shields bore the golden leopards and lilies he had seen on the Master's notepaper.

Butler fumbled for the fare—Dick's?—damned little newfangled coins already losing their freshly dummy2.htm

minted shine—had the fellow really said "Dick's"?

He stepped out on to the pavement, squared his shoulders —only a yokel would be overawed by huge, iron-bound gates and gold leaf—and strode under the archway.

"Can I help you, sir?"

The voice issued confidently from what looked like a booking-office window beside a thickly papered notice-board: the Porter's Lodge—even a yokel knew that every college had a Porter.

"My name's Butler. I believe the Master is expecting me."

The Porter lowered his eyes for a moment to a pad in front of him. "Colonel Butler, sir—yes, sir—Sir Geoffrey is expecting you, sir—he said for you to go straight to his lodging, but I don't believe he's there at the moment, sir—"

"Saw 'im go into the Chapel coupla minutes ago," another voice sounded from the bowels of the lodge.

"I think he's in the Chapel, sir," continued the Porter unfalteringly. "I'll have him told of your arrival, sir."

"No, that's not necessary," replied Butler quickly. All this was the Master's territory, but the Chapel had a neutral sound to it. Besides, in his own lodging the Master would probably want to ply him with sherry or madeira, neither of which he could abide at any time. "If you can just direct me to the Chapel—" he stopped as it occurred to him suddenly that the Master might be attending some obscure late-morning devotions "—unless, that is—"

"Oh, nothing like that, sir!" The porter hastened to reassure him. "I think Sir Geoffrey'll be looking at the East Window—I think he's a bit worried about it-if you go to the far corner of the quadrangle,sir, through the archway, and you can't miss the Chapel on your left."

Butler nodded and set out, carefully skirting the well-disciplined square of grass. This, too, was how he had imagined Oxford: this positively medieval calm. It was as though it had all been laid on for him, and because of that he ought doubly to beware of it.

He passed under the archway, one side of which was given over to Rolls of Honour of the two world wars—the first name was a Royal West Kents subaltern but the second, impossibly, was a lieutenant of Brandenburg Grenadiers. He shook his head too late to expel the thought that a Zoshchenko might not be out of place now in a foundation which had been home to a Von Alvenslaben in 1913.

The Porter's direction had been an understatement: it was quite impossible to miss the Chapel, which had clearly been built in the days when the health of the students' souls was of more consequence than dummy2.htm

the comfort of their bodies. Even to Butler's uninformed eye its proportions were noble, tower and spire, choir and transepts, stonework flowering into intricate images and patterns as though it had still been soft and malleable when the craftsmen set their hands to it.

The interior was surprisingly bare at first sight and Butler resolutely blinkered his eyes against any second look : he had not come thus far to be seduced by the architectural glories of Oxford in general and any college chapel in particular—he had come to see a live Englishman about a dead Russian, no more and no less.

And the live Englishman was standing directly ahead of him, arms folded, gazing fixedly upwards and ahead, presumably at that east window.

"Sir Geoffrey Hobson?"

Tall, grey, slightly stooping. Tired, washed-out, droop-lidded eyes. And the suggestion of a once formidable physique which had not run to seed but had simply been overtaken by the passage of time.

"My name is Butler, Sir Geoffrey."

"Ah, Colonel Butler! Delighted to meet you."

The voice too was a disappointment, high-pitched, almost querulous. But this was the voice nevertheless which had given the orders for the attack on Tilly-le-Bocage, which the official war history had called "a classic lesson in the employment of Sherman tanks against Tigers".

"I regret having to disturb you like this, but I'm afraid my business is somewhat urgent."

"Not at all, Colonel Butler. I have been expecting you, but I had no idea of your exact time of arrival so I took the opportunity of having another look at our east window. I fear its violent history is catching up with it at last, but after over three centuries I suppose we mustn't grumble."

In spite of his resolve Butler could not resist staring down the choir at the mysterious window. But like its Master's voice it was a disappointment, with plain glass filling the elaborate stone framework.

"It wasn't always like that, Colonel," said the Master, sensing his disappointment. "In its day it was one of the glories and curiosities of Oxford—it purported to illustrate the Lord God welcoming St Edward the Confessor into Heaven, but the artist was said by some people to have deliberately confused the Confessor with King Edward the Martyr, who was assassinated a century before. Not that our Royal Founder minded, of course—he always intended that it should be generally associated with his own great-grandfather, Edward II, who was in his view more of a saint and martyr than either of the other Edwards."

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"What—ah—happened to the stained glass then?" asked Butler, resigning himself to an inevitable period of small talk.

"Ah, Colonel, that was what you might call a war casualty. We've had our troubles here in Oxford, you know, down the centuries, and some of them make today's problems seem trivial."

"You see, back in the 17th century we expelled from the college a certain young man named Bradshaw—

Deuteronomy Bradshaw—for his repulsive Puritan practices. But instead of emigrating to North America,as most of the drop-outs did in those days, he turned up again at the end of the Civil War with a company of soldiers at his back. Captain Bradshaw he was by then, and he used our East Window for target practice — Musket in hand I rattled down Popish Edward's glassy bones is how he recalled the deed in his diary."

"Unfortunately his men seem to have hit the stonework as often as the glass, and I fear it will cost us a lot of money now!" He smiled ruefully at Butler. "I'm afraid we nursed a viper in our bosom in Deuteronomy Bradshaw."

"And in Neil Smith."

The Master stared at Butler in silence.

"That may be," he said softly at length. "Yes, Colonel Butler, that may be." He paused again. "Except that Smith was no more Smith than Butler, I take it, is Butler?"

Butler reached inside his pocket for his identification folder. "I am Colonel Butler, Master—" he passed the folder across "—though perhaps not the Butler you expected. Let's say that I'm a friend of a friend of Dr Freisler's. But if people think I'm an expert in Byzantine military history, then so much the better."

"I see," the Master murmured. "Or I see a little, anyway. And I must say that I'm relieved—for more than one reason, too ..."

"More than one?"

"I'm heartily relieved that you aren't the other colonel, Butler. I took the precaution of obtaining one of his—er— treatises from Blackwell's this morning, and I found it quite excruciatingly pedestrian. But chiefly I'm glad that Freisler has acted promptly on my information . . . which I presume the authorities are taking really seriously now."

"We took it seriously from the start, Master. But I'd like to hear just what aroused your suspicions in the first place— absolutely off the record, of course."

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"You mean what I told Freisler at Rhodes House last year? I've no objection to repeating that, Butler—

off the record, as you say. But let us get out of this infernal draught first—go and sit in the back of the choir stalls over there. I'll just go and lock the door to make sure we aren't disturbed!"

Butler made his way into the body of the chapel. It was obvious where the Master intended them to sit—

the back stalls were sumptiously furnished with velvet cushions and padding, enough to make the dullest sermon bearable, as well as being tucked away from prying eyes. Except that with the doors locked there could be no eyes to pry: despite the false Butler cover the Master was taking no chances that anyone should see them talking together. It might even be that he was not quite so taken by surprise by his visitor's identity as he had indicated—that he had deliberately chosen this place for their meeting and that the tale of Deuteronomy Bradshaw was no more than a cue which he had obediently taken.

He leaned back on the soft velvet and fixed his gaze on the intricate fan vaulting of the ceiling far above him. Those terrible old men, that was how Audley had described this species, admiration balancing his fear. But Audley would have welcomed this confrontation because in a decade or so he too would be just such a terrible old man himself.

"That's better!" The Master sank into the pew at right angles to where Butler was sitting. "Now we shall not be interrupted under any circumstances!"

He turned to Butler. "And now, Colonel Butler—you know we've had our little troubles here—students are news these days, and Oxford always has been news, more's the pity. Not so much this year—I fancy it is a little out of fashion for the moment—but I expect you read about it last year, eh?"

Butler nodded. He had seen the stories of sit-ins and demonstrations, for the most part ineffably tedious, as Audley had observed—except the affair of the Springboks cricket tour, which had mightily angered him, and the disgraceful insults offered recently to the Portuguese military delegation. He raked in his memory—and there had been much trouble about secret files allegedly kept on students and available to would-be employers, which was in his view a perfectly reasonable precaution.

"There was some business about files, wasn't there?"

"Files?" The Master smiled a thin smile. "A good case in point, Butler—a very good case! My anonymous friend Mercurius Oxoniensis dealt with that most admirably in one of his letters in the Spectator—it showed how appallingly naive the dissidents were. As if we had the time (never mind the inclination) to bother ourselves recording undergraduates' petty misdemeanours! Anyone who knows Oxford would know that lack of files would be far more likely. But I'd like to come back to that later."

"No, Butler. What alerted me was when one of my most promising students was arrested in London during the vacation—there was a demonstration against the odious Greek regime and he was taken in for assaulting a policeman."

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"Was he guilty?"

The Master held up his hand. "All in good time, Butler. He was arrested, and when they searched him they found a very considerable quantity of the drug LSD on him—far more than any one person could reasonably be expected to consume. So naturally the prosecution's case was that he intended to distribute it, and he was lucky to escape with a large fine and a suspended sentence. The point is that he denied it."

"Of course!"

"Pray don't jump to conclusions. He denied assaulting the policeman—he said he was pushed—and he denied possessing the drug, which he claimed had been planted on him."

"By the police?"

"That was what he thought, inevitably. I'm afraid the younger generation does not think our police are as wonderful as you and I do. Very few of them have had much experience with other police forces on which to build any sort of comparison. But I happened to know this young man very well— a brilliant boy. He would have gone a very long way."

"Would have—but not with a drugs conviction?"

"I'm not sure that he wants to go far now. He is somewhat —disenchanted, shall we say? He disapproves of the system, and I can't say that I blame him. Because in this instance I believe he spoke the truth."

"Master, are you saying that the police framed this boy? Because if you are—"

But of course that was precisely what he wasn't saying. He might have thought that at first, because for all his contempt for dissident undergraduates they were nonetheless part of his life and very much his responsibility. And a man like the Master of King's would know just where to apply his influence to find out whether some bent policeman was framing one of them.

Besides, it was written in that heavy-lidded stare: not the police either, therefore—

"So somebody else planted the drugs on him," said Butler, "and somebody else pushed him. You're sure of that?"

"It was not the police, of that I'm confident. And it was not the boy himself—he's idealistic and politically unsophisticated, but he's not belligerent and he's never been interested in drugs. And, Colonel

—he's not a fool."

That was a point Butler could have argued. For though only an idiot would attend a demonstration with a dummy2.htm

pocketful of drugs, high common sense did not automatically accompany a high I.Q.

"I take your point, Master. But one swallow doesn't make a summer. So there's more, I presume."

"There have been other incidents. Not always drug cases, but always nasty ones—the sort of thing that ruins a career and sours the victim. And always involving particularly able young men. I was talking to Dr Gracey, of Cumbria, just recently, and he told me he'd lost two very promising people last autumn."

He shook his head to himself at the enormity of it. "And there have been others. Too many for my liking. And too many for coincidence."

Butler rubbed his chin doubtfully. This was substantially what Audley had said. But Audley had not radiated his usual confidence.

"Let me get this straight, Master," he began slowly. "You believe the Russians are deliberately taking advantage of student unrest. But, you know, I find it very hard to believe they'd bother themselves with such a trivial enterprise. They're very hard-headed as a rule."

The Master regarded him in silence for a time.

"Hard-headed . . . Yes, I would be inclined to agree with you there, Colonel," he said at length, with more than a touch of frost in his voice. "As it happens, I am not without experience of them myself. And I have never subscribed to the foolishly tolerant views of some of my colleagues. In fact, I fancy I understand the nature of the beast—the true nature of the beast—better than most people."

The nature of the beast. Now Butler understood the origins of Audley's uncertainty: an obsession was an unreliable starting point for any investigation.

"But first—" the frosty voice cut into his doubts—"I would quarrel with your assumption of triviality."

"I'm sorry. The word was ill-chosen."

"But the word reflected the attitude nevertheless, Colonel Butler—what's a dozen or two students between friends, eh?"

Butler shrugged.

"Then I differ from you, Butler. These were a dozen or two of tomorrow's foremost men in their fields, in industry and government and politics. I'd be inclined to call that a fair return for very little outlay—

much better return than some expensive spy ring set up to obtain a few petty secrets. And secrets are soon outdated; this would be in the nature of an investment, don't you think?"

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Or maybe a pilot project, thought Butler, impressed a little despite his misgivings. If such a thing could be done successfully in Britain, where conformity and a clean sheet was not yet an absolute key to high advancement, what might not be achieved in the far more vulnerable and sensitive upper levels of American society?

To pinpoint the best men—the coming men—and make sure they never arrived . . .

Sir Geoffrey was watching him narrowly now.

"Well, Colonel Butler?"

"Hmm!" Butler cleared his throat. "We'll look into it, Master. But in the meantime—tell me about Zoshchenko."

"Zoschenko?" The Master's expression saddened. "Zoshchenko ... I still find it hard to think of him as anyone other than Neil Smith. Indeed, if it was not my own testimony— if you were now telling me what I told Freisler—you might find me hard to convince."

"You knew him well?"

"Well? Not well, perhaps, but I liked what I knew. He was a likeable fellow, good-humoured but mature in his way. He seemed older than his years—"

"He probably was older."

"Yes . . . yes, I suppose he might have been. But he was still young—a jolly young man, if I may use a somewhat archaic word."

"Convivial?"

"A drinker? No, hardly that. I rather think it was part of the joke that everyone called him 'Boozy' when his friends relied on him to drive them home."

"He was popular, then?"

"He joined in the social life of the college certainly. Rowed bow in the second eight, and played a bit of rugger I believe. And he was president of the college's de Vere Society, which prides itself on balancing culture with athletic pursuits."

"And he was a scholar."

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"An exhibitioner. He had a good mind, but steady rather than brilliant—if he'd been less clever one might put him down as a plodder. But he was no plodder—plodders don't often get first-class degrees, you know. But I rather think teaching was more in his line than research."

"That was why I had no hesitation in recommending him to Gracey at Cumbria—Gracey is one of the few provincial vice-chancellors who are determined on quality rather than quantity in his student body, and I believed that Smith . . . that is, Zoschenko . . . was just the man for him."

The Master sighed heavily, though whether at his own error or at Zoschenko's betrayal of his confidence it was impossible to judge.

"And you never for one moment suspected that he might have any hand in the—ah—plot you suspected?"

Sir Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. "I never came upon him singing the Red Flag if that's what you mean,"

he murmured drily.

"I mean—" Butler began sharply and then blunted the anger in his voice as he saw the glint in the Master's eye "—I mean did he take part in politics here?"

"His politics were to the left of centre. He wasn't a communist—" The Master stopped abruptly. "I should say he gave no indication that he was a communist. I would have described him as a liberal socialist, equally anti-communist and anti-fascist."

Butler snorted. "Do you find that surprising?"

"Not in the least." Sir Geoffrey regarded him equably now. "It's fashionable to be a political animal up here. Not all the best of the young are left-wingers, but some of the cleverest certainly are. So he was neither extreme nor unusual."

"It wasn't as if he was going into the government service either. He had an academic career ahead of him and a moderate left-wing involvement wouldn't have damaged his chances. More likely it would have made him a more useful senior member later on."

Butler nodded. Deep down Sir Geoffrey still could not quite believe in Smith's duplicity, or was unwilling to believe in it in spite of his own knowledge. But in fact Zoshchenko's political cover had been simple commonsense.

"How did he come to you—to the college?"

"Through UCCA in the normal way. That is, through the University Central Council for Admissions.

The only complication, as I remember, was that the last years of his secondary education had been in dummy2.htm

New Zealand. But that was no great problem really, his parents were dead, but they'd left him enough money to put himself through one of the cramming establishments over here. He had a letter from his headmaster in New Zealand and another from an Anglican bishop out there."

"Forged, naturally. Or stolen."

The Master shrugged. "He had enough 'O' levels, and when he'd taken our scholarship examination we jumped at him. He was a promising man, as I've said."

It was too easy, all too easy: it was like taking candy from a baby. Audley had mentioned that UCCA was about to computerise itself, but as it was the checking was minimal. Up here the good brain validated the credentials: nobody really cared about a man's origins, but only about his potential. After all, it was a university, not a top security establishment.

That had been Audley's final comment—and it didn't seem to worry him very much either. But it made Butler shiver as he remembered Sir Geoffrey's contemptuous dismissal of the student files controversy : rather was there a near-criminal lack of guards at the gates of these ivory towers. Small wonder they had enemies within!

And yet—damn and blast it—these were British ivory towers, Butler told himself angrily. Freedom from the interference of bureaucratic snoopers ought to be part of a Briton's birthright: it was only the lesser breeds who were hounded by their ever-suspicious masters.

Butler cocked his head as the thought developed inside it: that might even be near the heart of this part of the problem ... it might very well be the heart itself.

A good mind, a steady mind—Hobson would not be wrong about that. And a good, steady mind which had been exposed to three years of Oxford.

"Would you say he was a young man of independent mind?"

"Sm— Zoshchenko?"

"Perhaps we'd do better to call him Smith." He was forgetting Audley's exhortation already. "Was he a man of independent mind?"

"Independent . . ." The Master examined the word. "No, hardly that. He was too young to be truly independent, whatever he may have thought."

"Isn't that what you teach them to be here?"

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"Teach them?" Sir Geoffrey almost chuckled. "We don't teach them. They have to reach their destination under their own steam—we merely point them in the general direction of truth."

It was difficult to tell whether he was joking. But then, as he stared at Butler, the meaning of the questions came home to him, and the sparse eyebrows raised in surprise.

Butler nodded.

"God bless my soul!" muttered Sir Geoffrey. "You mean to imply that we succeeded with him ?"

It wouldn't have been a sudden blinding flash on the road to Damascus, thought Butler. With that good, steady mind it might have been no more than a small nagging doubt at first —a small thing compared with the pleasure of pulling the wool over the eyes of all these clever old men. But what he would not have known was that the clever men were working on him too: that the tiny doubt was a poison working and spreading inside him, working and growing as he was admitted to their ranks until—

Until what?

Never mind that for the time being. Whatever it was, it had been just that bit too much for him; he had become one of them, the man with his own Cause—or at least the Cause of Holy Russia, buried deep inside him, and the division of loyalties had split his Slav temperament right down the middle . . . Wasn't it Hamlet that the Russians so enjoyed, with its dark vein of self-destruction?

Butler himself had no time for Hamlet, who seemed to him to have been in a fair way of doing damn all in cold blood until his uncle's stupid treachery had given him the hot-blooded excuse for action.

But that was how the thing might have happened, with some final dirty instruction pushing poor Zoshchenko-Smith to resolve his dilemma with a drunken motor-cycle ride through the night—a sort of motorised Russian roulette.

Certainly, everything he had found out so far, from Pett's Pond to King's chapel, bore out that theory.

"And that would mean that in effect he committed suicide ?" said Sir Geoffrey, staring at him.

"I seem to remember that you suggested as much in your letter. Does it surprise you now?"

Sir Geoffrey gestured peevishly. "So I did, so I did! But in retrospect I felt that it was not wholly in character. It was— how can I put it—an inexact way of approaching the problem. Not like Smith, at all."

"But perhaps like Zoshchenko, Master. You must remember that we're dealing with two men now, not one. And neither of them was quite himself." Butler paused. "Besides, if it was like that it wasn't truly dummy2.htm

suicide—at least not when he set out. It was more like daring fate to settle things for him— maybe he had his own people on his tail by then and he knew he was on his way to betraying everything he'd worked for."

"His own people? You mean the KGB or something like that?"

Butler shrugged. "Something like that."

"Could they have been responsible, Butler?"

"Honestly, Master—I think not. There's no evidence of it as yet. But to be sure of it I'd need to talk to someone much closer to him than you've been. Do you know of anyone who fills that bill ? He had friends, you say?"

"Hmm . . ." Sir Geoffrey frowned heavily into space. "I do indeed, Butler—I do indeed."

He raised his eyes to Butler's, still frowning, and then fell silent again.

Butler thought: the old devil started this business and now he doesn't like the way the wind's blowing—

the more so because it's blowing down his neck.

"I know this must be distasteful to you, sir," he said aloud, desperately trying to stop obsequiousness from seeping into his voice. "But we have to know, one way or another—"

"I don't need you to tell me my duty, Colonel Butler. Or to threaten me with your one way or another.

It's simply that the person who fills your bill exactly happens to be the daughter of a very old friend of mine. It seems—though I wasn't aware of it until after the man's death—that there was an engagement in the air."

"With Smith?"

"So it seems." The words came out with reluctance. "Is it possible that you can . . . speak to her without revealing the man's true identity?"

"I'd prefer to do it that way."

"I'm relieved to hear it." Sir Geoffrey relaxed. "I wouldn't like to see Polly Epton hurt again—and not like that."

Epton.

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They hadn't suspected Smith and they didn't know much about him—Audley had admitted as much, and that was nothing less than the truth, by God !

"Epton?" Butler repeated casually. "Would that be the Castleshields Eptons?"

"That's right. Charles Epton's daughter. She's an occupational therapist here—I suppose that's how she met Smith. And then she must have met him again up north."

That changed things, thought Butler. They had been convinced that something had tipped Smith over the edge, but it had never occurred to anyone that the thing might be a woman.

He hadn't bargained on a woman.

Damned women!

He was jerked back to reality by Sir Geoffrey's voice, its tone edged with bitter complaint.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said 'what a waste', Colonel Butler."

"Of Miss Epton, Master?"

"No, man—of Smith. He had a good mind. What a waste!"

"I couldn't agree more." Damned women.

IX

HE RECOGNISED THE symptoms only too well.

To start with he had had trouble making up his mind, and then, when he had belatedly come to a decision, he had consciously made the wrong choice.

Although his usually healthy appetite had suddenly deserted him (and that was another symptom too) he knew very well that in the field it was always best to eat when the opportunity presented itself. So reason decreed that he ought to stoke up with the hot sausages the pub was serving, or some of the serviceable veal and ham pie, or even the bread and cheese and pickled onions.

Yet here he sat, staring sourly into his second whiskey and soda, knowing that it wasn't doing him the least good.

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It wasn't that he was a misogynist, he told himself for the thousandth time. It was patently irrational to hate them all because of the gross betrayal and infidelity of one.

It was simply that he knew he didn't understand them. Or rather, he knew that understanding women was a skill given to some and not others, like the ability to judge the flight of a cricket ball instinctively. Or maybe it was like tone deafness and colour blindness.

But whatever it was, he hadn't got it. And without it he feared and distrusted himself, and was ashamed.

He looked again at his watch. Sir Geoffrey had seemed confident that he could arrange a rendezvous for this place and time, and his duty to interview her was inescapable: if the rumour of that unofficial engagement were true she ought to know more about Smith's state of mind than anyone else, though he was hardly the best man to extract her information.

He snorted with self-contempt and reached out for his glass.

"Colonel Butler."

Whatever Polly Epton was, she was certainly no slip of a girl; she was a well-built, well-rounded young woman—the American term "well stacked" popped up in Butler's mind. Indeed, although not conventionally pretty she glowed with such health and wholesomeness that the Americanism was instantly driven out by women's magazine images of milkmaids, butter churns and thick cream.

It was ridiculous, but he felt himself praying enviously I hope my girls grow up like this.

"Colonel Butler?" she repeated breathlessly, and this time a shade doubtfully, as though a certain identification had let her down.

"Hah—hmm ! That's right!" he replied more loudly than he had intended, rising awkwardly, his knees tilting the low table in front of him. "Miss Epton, is it? I beg your pardon— I'm forgetting my manners."

"Thank heavens—I thought for a moment I'd made a mistake—please don't get up, Colonel Butler."

But they won't grow up like this, he thought sadly.

"Let me get you a drink, Miss Epton. And something to eat too."

"That's kind of you but golly—nothing to eat here. I'm much too much of a fattypuff to dare to eat stodge at lunch-time. But if I could maybe have a half of bitter—I shouldn't have that really—but just a half."

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From the bar he watched her fumbling with the buttons of her shiny raincoat as she sat down, shaking her thick mop of light brown hair. She was truly a little too plump for the mini-skirt she was wearing, even allowing for the fact that it was a fashion he'd never quite learnt to accept. But then he'd never quite learnt to accept any such fashionable extremes, and at least it was more becoming on her than the Bulgarian peasant outfits he had observed in London. Indeed, on her the mini looked surprisingly innocent, no denying that.

And no denying that it was nevertheless a long way from any sort of mourning. Yet he fancied that even this apparent cheerfulness was less than her natural high spirits; there was a restraint to it, a shadow almost.

"Uncle Geoff said on the phone that I couldn't mistake you—thanks awfully—but I thought I had, you know. You didn't look as though you were expecting me."

"I was—ah—thinking about something else I'm afraid, day-dreaming," he began lamely, unable to bring himself to ask her to reveal what had been so unmistakable about him. The red hair, no doubt, and the prizefighter's face!

She sipped her beer, watching him over the rim of the glass, and then set it down carefully on the table between them. "Uncle Geoff said you wanted to talk to me about Neil," she said with childlike directness. "Is that right?"

"That's quite right."

"He said that I must answer all your questions, but I mustn't ask any of mine—is that right too?"

"More or less—yes, Miss Epton."

"It sounds a bit one-sided to me." She looked at him with frank curiosity. "He made me promise I wouldn't split on him—or on you. And he made you sound rather like the Lone Ranger."

"The Lone Ranger?"

"Your mask is on The Side of Good."

"My mask?"

"Well, he said if anyone asked about you I'm to say you're an old friend of the family. I didn't quite twig whose family. Mine I suppose—Neil didn't have much in the way of relatives, apart from a dotty aunt in New Zealand."

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He looked at her, trying to see through the veil of flippancy. Apolitical, Sir Geoffrey had said—not intellectual, but not stupid either. A nice, ordinary girl, even a little old-fashioned by modern standards—

it would be a mercy if that were true!

"I think we'd best leave it vague, Miss Epton. Say just a friend, never mind whose."

"But are you a friend?" She paused. "Except that's a question, isn't it. It is asking rather a lot, you know—

answers but no questions."

It was asking rather a lot, he could see that. And there was nothing so corrosive of discretion as unsatisfied curiosity— that applied to men and women equally. But how much to tell, and how much to leave untold?

"Suppose you wait and hear the questions. Then you can decide whether or not you can answer them."

He tried to speak gently, but as always it came out merely gruffly. It would have to be the usual mixture of truth and lies, after all. "But I tell you this, Miss Epton: I think Neil would have counted me a friend—

and I promise you he would have answered if he'd been here now."

"If he'd been here now . . ." She echoed him miserably, the shadow across her face suddenly pronounced. "If only he could be here! I still can't quite believe that he's never going to be here again, that he's never going to come in through the door—" She looked past him into nowhere, her flippancy altogether gone. "Did you ever meet him?"

Butler shook his head sympathetically. This way might be the wrong one, but it might get some of the answers without questions.

"He was a super person, more fun to be with than anyone. And everyone liked him because there was no pretence about him—" She looked at him again.

Butler felt his face turn to stone. This child would have married the fellow—it was true.

And where would it have ended then? In the maximum security wing? Or in a dacha outside Moscow?

And for sure across the pages of the News of the World and with hurt and bitterness. He longed suddenly to be able to tell her that of all the inevitable unhappy endings this was the happiest she could have hoped for.

"I'm sorry, Colonel—I'm not usually emotional like this." She looked at him sadly, misinterpreting his expression. "I can see that you are a friend after all now."

"Polly!"

A huge, mop-headed fair-haired young man in a patched and shabby sports jacket loomed at his shoulder.

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"Come on, Polly—have a beer and to hell with the calories!" exclaimed the young man cheerfully.

"Hullo, Dan," she replied with equal cheerfulness that was ruined by a single mascara-stained tear which rolled down her cheek. "Colonel Butler—meet the white hope of the black Rhodesians, Dan McLachlan."

"Joke over," the young man groaned. "Glad to meet you, sir—so, long as you don't believe anything Polly says." He glanced down at Butler's glass. "I don't rise to short drinks, but if you'd like a beer—?"

"Stingy," said Polly brightly. "I'll have that beer, Dan. But you must excuse me while I put my face back on. I'll only be a second."

The fair-haired man watched her disappear into the Ladies before turning back to Butler.

"I wondered when it was going to hit her."

Butler looked up at him. "It?"

"Poor old Boozy—Neil Smith running out of road." McLachlan shook his head. "She's been bottling it up."

Butler grunted neutrally.

"She should have got it off her chest." McLachlan nodded wisely. "Stiff upper lip doesn't become girls, anyway—did you know old Boozy?"

"Hah—hmm!" Butler cleared his throat. "Friend of yours?"

"Boozy? Hell, Boozy was a great guy, even if he was a bit of a lefty. He wasn't my year, actually—

haven't seen him since he was made a baas in Michaelmas Term. But I was at prep school with him years ago."

At school.

"Indeed?" Butler swallowed. "Where would that have been?"

"Little place down in Kent."

"Eden Hall?"

"That's it—do you know it?"

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Grunt. "And you were a friend of his there?"

"That would be stretching it a bit. Boozy was always a year ahead of me—I was a domkoppe in the Fifth Form when he was a prefect in the Sixth. I didn't even recognise him when we met again at Dick's a couple of years ago. Not until he told me who he was—then I knew him of course. Only one Boozy—

more's the pity!"

Of course—only one Boozy! And what a gift to be remembered by young McLachlan of the Fifth.

McLachlan looked at him seriously. "But if you're a friend of Polly's, sir, it'ud be a good thing if you could keep an eye on her—at least until the day after tomorrow. She's taken this thing harder than she's let on, and she drives like a maniac at the best of times."

"What happens the day after tomorrow?"

"Oh, I can handle it after that. We're both going up to her old man's place in the north. And she'll be OK

once she gets home."

Steady the East Lanes, Butler told himself. "You mean you're both going to Castleshields House?"

"Surely. Do you know that too ?"

"I rather think I'm supposed to be talking to you there, young man. If you're interested in Byzantine military organisation, that is."

"Well—" McLachlan grinned disarmingly "—I'm a PPE man myself, with the emphasis on the middle P.

But say, have you come down to collect Polly? Is that it?"

"Not exactly," replied Butler cautiously. "But tell me, Mr McLachlan—"

"Dan—"

"Hmm—Dan, then—what exactly takes you to Castleshields House? I thought it was attached to the University of Cumbria."

"So it is, sir. But Dick's is by way of being a shareholder in it. Young Hob and the high-powered Dr Gracey cooked it up between them, didn't you know?"

Butler made a great play of consuming the last of his whiskey. This was where Audley's cover plan began to look decidedly thin, when his institutional knowledge was shown to be deficient in such small dummy2.htm

matters as this. "Dick's" was evidently the King's College, and "Young Hob" was Sir Geoffrey, as distinguished from his long-dead grandfather and predecessor in the Master's chair at the college. But the relationship of the college with Castleshields House was still beyond him.

Yet it would be a pity, a great pity, not to take advantage of Daniel McLachlan's unexpected appearance.

Apart from what the young man might know about Neil Smith, his acquaintanceship would give substance to Butler's own false identity at Castleshields House in much the same way as the enemy had obviously intended it to do for Smith at the College.

Indeed, he might even be more useful than that if the scornful reference to Smith's left-wing politics meant anything. But he needed to know more about the lad before that could be considered seriously.

"Hell!" exclaimed McLachlan. "Here's Polly and I haven't got the ruddy drinks."

Butler followed his glance gratefully. She was smiling again now, but her face had a scrubbed, make-up free look.

"Made a fool of myself, haven't I!" she apologised breathlessly. "I've had a good weep in the loo, too—

and I promise not to do that again." She caught sight of McLachlan attempting to catch the barmaid's eye. "Hey, Dan—don't bother about those drinks. It's time I was going home for lunch, and if I have another beer I'll have had my calorie quota, darn it."

McLachlan detached himself from the bar. "I'll stand you lunch, Polly. Just this once."

"Or you can lunch with me, Miss Epton," said Butler quickly. "We've—hmm—still quite a lot to discuss, remember."

"You can't afford it, Dan. And thanks, Colonel Butler, but I'd rather eat at home—I've got the rest of the afternoon off."

"In fact you can both come back with me and eat pounds of rabbit food. And I'll make you both omelettes

—it'll do you good."

McLachlan looked uncertainly at Butler. Then he shrugged. "I suppose we could do worse," he said ungallantly.

Butler drummed impatiently on the top of the coin box and watched McLachlan through the grimy glass of the phone box. It had been a stroke of luck to find an unvandalised telephone complete with directory, but then the switchboard at King's had at first obstinately refused to concede that anything could be more important than the Master's untroubled enjoyment of his lunch, and in the end had moved only after the direst threats Butler could summon from his imagination.

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"Colonel Butler?"

The prim voice did not appear to have room in it for irritation.

"I'm sorry to have to disturb you again so soon, Sir Geoffrey."

"Once more, not at all, Colonel. You are on duty and I don't doubt it is necessary—salus populi suprema est lex— and I am becoming accustomed to disturbance, anyway. I trust Miss Epton kept her appointment?"

"She did. But we met another of your—ah—students. A fair-haired young fellow named McLachlan. Do you know him?"

"Yes, I do." There was no hesitation in the reply. "Daniel McLachlan. A scholar of the college in his third year—he takes schools this summer. A mere formality in his case, though."

"A formality?"

"Short of some unforeseen abberration, yes—he's very bright indeed. One of the three best brains we have in college at this moment. The other two are chemists."

The primness was momentarily accentuated, as though chemistry was some form of physical handicap.

"He was a friend of Neil Smith's."

"Indeed?"

"You didn't know?"

"They weren't in the same year." The Master shrugged at him down the line. "Smith was a gregarious fellow, of course. But their politics were poles apart."

"McLachlan's a Tory, you mean? I had the impression he was a Rhodesian liberal."

"He doesn't love apartheid, that's true. But he's a politically cautious young man. I think that is because he has been provisionally accepted by the Civil Service, and he's very ambitious. Very ambitious. In fact he should go far, unless . . ." Sir Geoffrey trailed off.

It was easy to see in which direction that "unless" pointed.

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"Unless he found something in his pocket that he hadn't put there himself?" Butler completed the sentence.

"Y—es. That's about the size of it. A prime target, McLachlan might be. I had my doubts about letting him go to Castleshields this vacation."

"What's wrong with Castleshields?"

"Nothing I can put my finger on. Except that Smith was there, of course. But I'm uneasy about it. And young McLachlan doesn't need any polishing, in any case."

"But you're letting him go."

"He has no home in England, and no relatives over here. Castleshields is probably safer than London, in any case."

"He doesn't sound the sort of man to get involved in trouble."

"He isn't. He's ambitious, as I've said—he has a remarkably pragmatic mind for one so young. He knows what he wants and he's not inclined to make artificial difficulties for himself. But then in some ways he's more experienced than the usual run of undergraduates—and I fancy he may not be so conservative when he reaches a position of power."

"In what respect is he more experienced?"

"As you've discovered—he lived in Rhodesia for some years. Left shortly after UDI, with which he very decidedly doesn't agree, so I gather. His father is still there and there's no great love lost between them, which is to young McLachlan's credit."

"You know the father?"

"I was instrumental in having him sent down from the college just after the war—for invincible idleness, among other things. Fortunately the son doesn't in the least take after the father. In fact I'd esteem it a favour if you could keep an eye on him, just in case. He's very much worth protecting."

Well, maybe. But maybe if the brighter-than-bright Daniel McLachlan needed to be wet-nursed, then he wasn't fit to be one of tomorrow's bosses. No one had ever protected Butler from the working of natural selection, that was for sure. Except that this whole business was a glorified wet-nursing operation.

Butler chewed his lip. There was something funny about that: he didn't see Audley as a wet-nurse. On the other hand it could be that Audley was simply doing a favour for his influential university friends.

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With Audley there was usually a personal angle somewhere.

A sharp tapping on the window glass of the phone box roused him. McLachlan was gesturing wordlessly towards a decrepit-looking Volkswagen at the road's edge. So now there was no time to even consider that unanswerable question about him: how far can he be trusted ? And no time, damn it, to pursue the status of Castleshields House either.

"Thank you, Master." But those questions could be answered by the Department's researchers, anyway.

"I'll try not to bother you again."

"It is no bother—I shall be in your debt if you can resolve this business, Colonel Butler. Just make sure no harm comes to McLachlan." The dry voice paused. "My next meal commences at 7.30, incidentally . . ."

McLachlan was holding the door of the Volkswagen open for him.

"If you'd care to sit in the back, sir—it's no more uncomfortable than the front, but a lot less dangerous.

I'm used to Polly's driving, but she'd have you through the windscreen the first time she noticed any obstacle in her way."

Butler hunched himself up and stepped gingerly into the little car. What room there was was further reduced by the quantity of objects already stowed within, ranging from an immense sheepskin jacket to a bulging box of groceries.

"Daniel McLachlan, that's a rotten slander!" Polly Epton's spirit had obviously recharged itself. "I have never hit anything in my life. I can't understand why you've become so nervous all of a sudden."

"Nothing sudden about it," replied McLachlan, contorting himself into the front seat. "It's the number of things you've almost hit that frightens me. You can sink a ship with near-misses, you know."

"Oh—bosh!"

"Not bosh. You drive too fast, that's all—hold on, sir!"

The force of gravity pressed Butler back as the little car took off. There was something odd about the suspension, but there was evidently nothing wrong with the engine that howled just behind the small of his back. Wedged between the sheepskin coat and the groceries, with mud-flecked windows on each side of him, he felt blind and powerless. All he could see was McLachlan's powerful shoulders and the coarse, tight curls at the back of the neck—the young man's fairness was the variety that often went with fierce ginger whiskers.

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He levered himself forward, grasping the front seats, and peered at the road ahead. It was hard to gauge the car's speed, but he had the impression that McLachlan hadn't exaggerated much.

"Where are we going?"

"Polly's got a cottage at Millford. Not far, thank God!"

"From Millford Steeple to Carfax Tower

The Devil can run in half an hour"

Polly recited in a broad Oxfordshire accent. "There used to be a famous running race on May Day.

That's as the crow flies. It won't take us half the time."

"More's the pity," said McLachlan nervously. "For heaven's sake, Polly—cool it a bit."

"Hah—hmm !" Butler growled. The nervousness was catching. "No need to hurry, Miss Epton. Tell me about Castleshields House."

"Hideous old place," said Polly, slowing down perceptibly. "And it was falling down when Uncle John had his bright idea."

"Uncle John?"

"Dr Gracey, vice-chancellor of Cumbria," McLachlan cut in. "Gracey and Young Hob are Polly's two godfathers. They hatched up this plan to restore Castleshields and provide a nice, isolated prison for likely lads during the vacations—they don't hold with us earning an honest penny during the vacations."

"You mean it's compulsory?"

"Oh, no—they couldn't force us. But they're a crafty pair, Gracey particularly. For a start it's free—

which is useful with the starvation grants we get. And they lay on some really high-powered lecturers.

And the grub's bloody good, Gracey being a proper wine-and-food man. So they don't have to twist anyone's arm, I can tell you!"

"And Daddy runs the place," said Polly. "We've still got the west wing for the family, but all centrally-heated now, and the rain doesn't come in through the roof. So everyone's happy."

Understandably, too, thought Butler waspishly. The old boys' network had functioned once more—at the taxpayer's expense.

"It isn't a new idea, actually," went on McLachlan, lurching with the car as Polly turned it sharply down dummy2.htm

a minor road. "They used to do the same sort of thing in Victorian times— sort of academic house-parties. Slow up, Polly. They did it at Dick's—Old Hob used to—"

"Why Dick's? Who is Dick?"

"Who was, you mean. Our Sovereign and Stupid Lord King Richard II, our illustrious founder. We're supposed to spend half our time saying perpetual masses for the souls of his equally stupid grandfather Edward II and for his queer friend Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford—for God's sake, Polly, slow up! This little railway bridge is a deathtrap—"

There was a sharp crack and the whole windscreen went opaque. The little car lurched and bucked, the tyres beginning to slither on the loose gravel on the edge of the road.

"Hold her steady!" McLachlan shouted, instantly swinging his fist and whole left forearm into the window in a blur of action, shattering the glass and sweeping it outwards in thousands of fragments. The brick parapet flashed into view, horribly close. "Don't brake—hold her steady, Polly—"

There was a clang on the nearside, turning into a rending metal screech as the car shuddered along the brickwork. Then the bricks were gone like a dream and the car was bumping and tipping to the left—

tipping—and crashing into branches—

Everything stopped suddenly, with a last convulsive jerk that rammed Butler forward against the front seats. There was a single long moment of incongruous silence which was broken by the clatter of a whole section of the fragmented windscreen on to the bonnet.

Butler drew a deep breath and sat back thankfully in a confusion of tea packets, cornflakes and lettuce leaves. He had been lucky for the second time in two days.

"The bastard, the bastard," McLachlan was muttering thickly, "—the mad, blerrie bliksem!"

He wrenched fiercely at the car door, found that the hedge held it firmly closed, and turned savagely on Polly, who sat gulping air. "Get out, Polly—get out—move!"

"Hold on, McLachlan," snapped Butler. The boy had kept his nerve admirably at the moment of danger

—indeed, it had been his reflex action which had saved them from disaster. But now he was behaving badly. "We're quite safe now."

"Safe!" McLachlan spat the word angrily, reaching over Polly to get at the door handle. "Get out, Polly—

the mad bastard—get out—"

He practically pushed the shaking girl out of the car, and wriggled furiously after her.

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"McLachlan !" Butler commanded. "Get hold of yourself."

"It's him I'm going to get hold of, Colonel—by God I am!"

"Him—?"

"The bastard with an air rifle on the edge of the cutting." McLachlan started to move off towards the bridge, back the way they'd come. "I'll teach him to use us for target practice."

"McLachlan—stop!" Butler pushed the seat forward frantically and stumbled out of the car, scattering groceries left and right. Five minutes earlier he had disdainfully agreed to watch over this angry boy, and now, damn it—it was Eden Hall all over again: he'd been slow as well as careless this time, though.

"McLachlan—get down!"

The young man was standing at the beginning of the brick parapet, searching the far side of the railway cutting.

"Get down!"

He turned back towards Butler, an angry, puzzled frown on his face. "What the hell— ?"

Another crack, sharper and louder, cut off the question. A bullet chipped the brickwork just ahead of McLachlan and whined away over their heads. Butler swept an arm round him and dragged him down into the shelter of the curving end of the parapet.

A .22 rifle, thought Butler: sufficient for the job as it had been planned, and still sufficiently lethal.

But the rifleman had missed his chance and he would now know that there were two men between him and the girl. Nor could he dare assume the men were unarmed; the bridge and cutting that divided them protected each side equally from direct attack.

"What the hell's going on?" McLachlan whispered.

"I would have thought that was obvious enough," Butler murmured crossly. "Just keep your head down."

"But—"

"Ssh!" Butler looked around for inspiration. "You don't think he missed you by accident? You're just surplus to requirements—if it'd been Miss Epton or me it would have been very different. But don't try your luck twice."

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They were safe enough where they were. It might even be possible to creep back to the car unseen, for the road was embanked up to the bridge and if they kept down and on the road they would probably be out of the rifleman's sight. But he couldn't risk the skin of Sir Geoffrey Hobson's most promising scholar on that probability, and equally he couldn't leave him here alone.

Besides, it had been true about that aimed-off shot most likely, so McLachlan had unwittingly saved his skin not once, but twice in the space of so many minutes . . .

"Look here—" he tried to sound reassuring—"we're all right here. He's not going to try and cross the bridge while we're here—"

"Why not? He's got the ruddy gun!"

"But he doesn't know that we haven't got one."

McLachlan frowned at him. "What would we be doing with a gun? We're not—" He stopped abruptly, staring in dismay at Butler. "Oh, my God!" he whispered." You were expecting something."

"Not expecting it, no."

"But you know what's happening."

"I've got a pretty shrewd idea."

"I'll bet you have!" McLachlan said bitterly. "And who's he after—you or Polly?"

"Could be either—or both. But in this case more likely just Polly."

"Poor old Polly!" McLachlan looked down the road towards the Volkswagen, which lay half off the grass verge with its nose buried in the hedgerow, like some squat animal which had gone rooting for shoots and had found something so juicy that it was no longer interested in its surroundings. The girl was leaning against it, staring white-faced towards them.

McLachlan raised his hand to wave to her. The back of it was smeared with blood from a long, jagged gash along the knuckles.

"Hadn't we better do something about her?" Before Butler could answer the sound of an engine echoed across the bridge to them. McLachlan lent on his elbow and craned his neck round the edge of the parapet. Then he turned back to Butler with a faint grin on his lips.

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"Well, I never imagined an Oxford bus would come to my rescue in a tight corner," he murmured. "But I think this is one we really ought to catch, Colonel, sir."

X

BUTLER BENT DOWN and peered through the grubby little window of the pantry, still listening with half an ear to the conversation coming from the kitchen behind him.

"—If only British cars had American windscreens—hold still, Dan—I want to make sure there's no glass in the wound —this wouldn't have happened."

The back yard of Polly's cottage was hemmed in by the walls of the neighbouring houses, leaving no room for an inefficient assassin to finish the job from that direction.

"It was a German car, actually," McLachlan said mildly. "And I thought it stood up to that bridge pretty well. Anyway, I shall live— ouch!"

"Baby. Now go and hold it under the tap and let the water clean it."

The front of the cottage overlooked the Village Green. There were enough people dawdling on it to discourage assassins there too.

"Polly, it's only a scratch. Or it was until I let you get at it."

They were safe enough here until the taxi arrived, anyway.

"Go and wash it."

McLachlan was crossing obediently towards the sink as Butler came back into the kitchen.

"Besides," the young man continued, "if he hadn't known how that windscreen was going to behave, then there might have been something a lot nastier waiting for us. Or for you, rather."

Butler looked hard at McLachlan's back. If it was a guess, then it was a damn good one, even allowing for the fact that he'd said a bit more than he'd intended in the heat of the moment beside the bridge.

Something nastier. But there was still something not quite right about this situation. The KGB did not resort to violence willingly these days, but when they did they seldom made quite such a pair of balls-ups as he had encountered at Eden Hall and Millford bridge.

"Now, will someone kindly tell me what the hell's going on?" Polly regarded him accusingly. "Someone dummy2.htm

shot at us, didn't they?"

"Twice," said McLachlan. "Jesus—this water's cold. Once at the windscreen and once by the bridge."

"But why? And who?"

McLachlan dabbed at his hand with the towel, also watching Butler. "At a guess that first shot was intended to cause a tragic accident. Would that be right, Colonel, sir?"

The boy was trying to needle him. But under the circumstances the boy had every right to needle him.

"An accident?" Polly's brow creased. "I may be dim, but—"

"You are dim, Polly. The speed you go, if I hadn't been there to do my heroic Gaius Mucius Scaevola bit

—" he held up the injured hand.

"Dan, what on earth are you gabbing about?"

"Why, Polly, if I hadn't been there you'd have gone slam into the bridge or splat into the cutting. And if that hadn't finished you, there was a chap with a rifle to make sure."

Polly stared at him, white faced.

"And when they found the pieces of you and your little car they wouldn't have gone looking for any bullets. No, they would have remembered you drove like a malkop, and they would have shaken their heads sadly and said: 'She had it coming to her, silly girl'."

Dan's eyes switched to Butler's face. "Do I get alpha for that, Colonel?"

There could be no lingering doubts about Sir Geoffrey Hobson's assessment of Dan McLachlan. He was inconveniently bright.

"But Dan, why?" Polly bit a knuckle. "And how do you know it wasn't some yob shooting at the first car to come by?"

"I don't know why, Polly. But I'm damn sure it wasn't some yob." McLachlan pounced on the word

"Why not?"

"Because when he knew it was a shot, not an accident—" McLachlan stabbed a finger at Butler—"he wasn't one bit surprised, not one bit."

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Not by that second shot, thought Butler hotly, that was true. But by that first shot he'd been surprised, almost shocked.

"But not to worry," McLachlan went on coolly. "The Colonel's going to tell us what it's all about."

Butler raised an eyebrow. "Indeed?"

"Indeed." McLachlan nodded to the girl. "Remember how he told us not to say anything when we caught the bus—about the shooting? Soon as I sat down it really hit me how topsyturvy things were getting—

positively mind-bending."

"How do you mean, Dan?"

"Why, when somebody shoots at me I get mad. But he doesn't get mad. And when somebody shoots at me twice I get the feeling I ought to be dialling 999 and shouting for a policeman. But he just wants us to keep quiet. And that means one of two things, Polly dear—" he swung accusingly towards Butler "—

either he's the wrong side of the law—or he is the law."

Polly shook her head suddenly, as though she was at last coming awake. "The Lone Ranger!" she murmured.

"The lone—?" McLachlan frowned.

"He is the law, Dan. Or something like it."

"Well—maybe. But he's still got a hell of a lot of explaining to do if he wants me to stop dialling 999."

Polly shook her head again, only more vigorously. "No, Dan—leave it. He's a friend, honestly he is."

"A damn dangerous one, if he is!" The young man eyed Butler more obstinately and aggressively than he had done before. "You've thought of something, haven't you, Polly? I've got nothing against the cops, or the Special Branch, like our dim-witted lefties, but—"

He stopped dead, and Butler knew instantly that he had made the final connection. It had been a wise move to let him run on, working things out for himself as he went, instead of reading the riot act over him and then relying on his political caution and his ambition for a Civil Service career to stop his mouth thereafter.

"Well?" Butler growled. "So you've got nothing against me?"

Wiser too because even bright, pragmatic young men might under pressure lapse into half-baked dummy2.htm

idealism, and he would have enough to contend with at Castleshields without that.

"I'm the dim-witted one." McLachlan nodded at him slowly. "The whole thing's too similar, isn't it... too much of a coincidence?"

"What is?" Polly cut in.

"The tragic accident, Polly. That's what we said about Boozy."

But wisest of all, reflected Butler, because only age and experience gave him the edge over this boy, who probably far surpassed him in intelligence. And experience told him that it was desirable to know just how much intelligence could make of this situation.

"About Neil?" Polly's voice strengthened as the implication of the words clarified itself in her mind. "Do you mean Neil's crash wasn't an accident?"

She looked at Butler appealingly, as though hoping for a denial. And for once he could allow his face to show his feelings, to speak of the regret and sympathy he felt, just as though she had been one of his girls.

Then he saw the opportunity, the damnable, dirty little trick that would do the work of persuasion for him. It was working for him even as he looked at her, without a word being said.

"Oh, God!" she whispered. "They—killed—him!"

It was as easy as that. Butler raised his chin. Duty absolved him, nevertheless—duty and need: he needed the information these children might have, and then their silence. And possibly even a measure of their help. In an earlier age he could have called on patriotism to supply all that, but that age was dead and gone. All he could rely on now was outrage and anger.

"We can't be absolutely sure, Miss Epton," he said soberly. "Until now we've only had our suspicions.

But after what has just happened—well, it's too much of a coincidence."

The girl stared at him, paler now but also more composed. "Why?" she asked simply.

"Why should anyone want to kill you?"

"Not me. Why Neil?"

She had come straight to the point, rightly assuming that her own brush with death was merely incidental to that answer. There were reserves of strength in adversity there as well as common sense: dummy2.htm

she might need the one, but he must beware of the other.

"I can't tell you. I'm sorry."

"Because I mustn't ask any questions?"

"Partly that."

"But that was before—before my car was wrecked. I've more right to ask now."

"That's true. But there are such things as Official Secrets—" he raised his hand to silence her "—which means there are some things it's safer for people not to know. No point in increasing the risk, eh ?"

He knew as he spoke that he had suddenly struck the wrong note with them. Secrecy had somehow become anathema to young people, an evil in itself, even though a moment's thought should have convinced them that it was inescapable, and that openness was either a meaningless playing to the gallery or a dangerous snare and delusion.

"I should have thought Polly's risk was about at the limit already," McLachlan said drily.

"That's precisely why you must answer my questions about Neil, Miss Epton. What he knew became a risk—and now what you know has become a risk. But now you have the chance of passing that risk to me." He looked from one to the other, hopefully. "It's what I'm paid to carry, after all."

It was true again. But evidently it still wasn't quite the right key with which to open their suspicious young minds to him, and bend their wills to his purpose. It was a situation Audley would have enjoyed, but which he found sickening.

Before he could stifle that thought an answer came back, undesired and undesirable: Audley would have lied more smoothly and enjoyed the game of lying more, and he would also have pretended to take them into the heart of his confidence and would have sought their help.