Gunner Kelly

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GUNNER KELLY

A NOVEL

by

ANTHONY PRICE

© Anthony Price 1983

PART ONE

How Colonel Butler’s breakfast was spoilt

I

Colonel Butler loved all his three girls equally, but (as he was accustomed to tell himself when they presented their problems to dummy1

him) differently. Because, notwithstanding the identical red of their hair, they were entirely different people.

And that was why Jane had his attention now across the breakfast table, absolutely but unequally with the disquiet which he might have diverted from his Times to Sally or Diana.

“I said, Father,” she repeated, “I think I have done something rather silly. ”

“Yes.” Butler nodded gravely, just as he would have done for Sally or Diana, but without the pretence which paternal gravity would have required for them. “I heard you the first time, Jane.”

He stopped there, and the difference widened with his silence and hers. With Sally and Diana he would have added some soothing verbal placebo. But then, with Sally it would have been merely something to do with horses, and with Diana merely something to do with men; but it was the horse that Sally loved, not (in spite of temporary infatuations) any particular horse; and Diana, whose physical resemblance to her late mother went disturbingly more than skin deep, seemed to feel much the same way about men; and in both cases Colonel Butler and his money had together proved more than a match for any emergency in the past.

But Jane was different.

“Tell me—” Butler overcame his Anglo-Saxon reticence with a conscious effort “—darling.”

With Jane it was different: with Jane, from the moment when she had ceased to be a thing and had become a person, life had been reason and calculation, not emotion. With Jane, Butler had never dummy1

been sure whether she was the least loving or the most loving of his children—whether, because she felt most deeply, she had armoured herself most carefully against feeling, or whether, because she felt nothing, she was impervious to life’s shot and shell. And so, because he loved her equally, he had found himself worrying about her more, because she brought him fewer problems, and those almost purely academic, balancing one relative benefit coldly against another: Mathematics or English (she excelled at both)? Oxbridge or Bristol (mathematician or barrister, and no serious question about entry, but a faint sympathy in Butler himself for other mathematicians or prisoners at the bar eventually . . . just as his ultimate sympathy in her sisters’ cases was not truly with them, but with the horses and men they chose to ride into the ground, which were the animals with which—with whom—he himself could identify, having been similarly ridden in his time)?

But she was still his daughter—his flesh and his red hair and his responsibility and his equal love; and now—his instinct and experience both told— she was in deep trouble at last, who had never been in such trouble before.

The realisation of that, cold as the shrill, distant sound of Chinese bugles blowing the charge against the last handful of his company in Korea, stripped all Butler’s worries away from him momentarily (the true leak at Cheltenham, which was not the one the Russians had so carefully let them have . . . Mitchell and Andrew could only handle that at a pinch; but the problem with the Americans could only be dealt with by David Audley, whose own private links with dummy1

the CIA would have to be cashed in when he got back from leave .... So he would have to give St John Latimer carte blanche at Cheltenham—the more he disliked Latimer, who hated Audley, the more he inconveniently needed both of them to do what had to be done—even though Audley coveted that job . . .).

But for the moment it was Jane who mattered—

“Tell me, darling.” This time he managed something close to encouragement, if not sympathy.

“Yes . . .” Some other process of reasoning, very different in content, but equal in duration and sufficient to nerve her to answer him, animated Jane “... Father, you remember when I took the little car last week . . . ?”

As though summoned by the memory, Sally breezed out of the kitchen into the breakfast-room, carrying her enormous horsewoman’s breakfast.

“I remember. It was last Saturday, to be exact,” Sally agreed.

“Because I had to get a lift to the gymkhana the other side of Winchester that day—”

“Go and eat in the kitchen, Sal.” Jane looked up at her sister uncompromisingly. “I’ve got business to transact with Father.”

Sally gave her younger sibling one quick, sharp glance, and then picked up the plate again and was gone before Butler could say a word. And that, if anything had been required to consolidate Butler’s disquiet, confirmed it beyond question: however much they might be at odds on day-to-day matters, they never failed to decode each other’s Most Urgent signals in an emergency.

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Silly was what worried him now. Because, where Sally and Diana were given to hyperbole, Jane’s weakness was understatement, so that she would not admit to being unwell until she was too ill to walk.

Suddenly, he found himself simultaneously suppressing reasons for panic while discounting them: she was only nineteen years old, but hard-headed and sensible with it. . . but she was still only nineteen years old—

The Mini was still in pristine condition—he had washed it himself on Sunday, and it bore no marks of any chance encounters—and Jane wasn’t the hit-and-run type— Or ... No—No. Butler had staked his life on several occasions when the odds were better not computed, but he was quite happy to stake it again this morning across the breakfast-table that his youngest daughter wasn’t pregnant. All the known facts of circumstance and character were against it, apart from the cheerfulness of her greeting only a few minutes before—

Only a few minutes before? Butler’s eyes dropped to the table, to beside her plate on it: one letter, but hand-written, not official—

just a few lines on a single sheet of paper, without even an address so far as he could see at the distance and upside-down—hardly more than a brief scrawl, but signed with a flourish—

He raised his eyes to meet hers, with his imagination up against a blank wall of incomprehension.

“I went to see David, Father.”

“David?” Jane had no boyfriend named David. In fact, Jane had no dummy1

boy-friend, full-stop.

“Uncle David, Father.”

Butler was there as she spoke. David was David Audley—and, somewhat to his surprise, that in itself was reassuring: no matter how eccentric, even maverick, Audley might be in professional matters, when it came to Jane he had no doubt that the man would behave responsibly. Even . . . with the untimely death of Jane’s godfather, Audley rather quaintly regarded himself as an unofficial substitute for that role, for which only one other parent had regarded him suitable, to his chagrin.

So, for once at least, and in this instance in particular, Audley could be trusted, surely—

Surely? He looked at Jane. “You went to see David Audley?”

“About Becky, Father—Becky Smith.” Jane nodded.

“Becky Smith?” Butler repeated the name blankly, aware that he might have registered any young man’s name for future reference, but that no female from school or university would have fixed herself in his mind unless he could add a face to a name. And there was no file in his memory on any Becky Smith.

“Rebecca Maxwell-Smith—you don’t know her, Father, but I’ve mentioned her. She’s reading Law with me—we live the same hall of residence ... I had dinner with her in grandfather once—you remember, I told you, Father.”

Something faintly registered now, but only faintly. “So?” He was ashamed to admit the faint registration.

“So she had this hare-brained idea—more than harebrained, bloody dummy1

mad . . . But she was hell-bent on it, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her—absolutely bloody mad . . . But I thought I had to stop her somehow ...” She tailed off, and the very imprecision of her account of what Rebecca Maxwell-Smith was hell-bent on re-animated Butler’s concern, for all that it was safely one step away from her now; because if there was one thing that Jane Butler was—apart from being nineteen and hard-headed and sensible—it was to the point. And at the moment she was circling the point like a mongoose round a snake.

Even Butler himself was infected by her caution. “Why didn’t you come to me?” She would come to the vital answer in her own good time, with no need for the question.

“You didn’t come home on Friday.” She excused herself by accusing him. “Becky phoned—I was going to ask you, but you weren’t there . . . And you always said, if there was a problem Nannie Hooker couldn’t solve, and you weren’t here, we could phone Uncle David.”

True, thought Butler. But that was for you—and your problems.

And the odds on this one are that you probably wouldn’t have asked me anyway.. . . Yet, at the same time, it was the old fatal error he had made, of giving a precise command imprecisely, so that she had been able to obey him in circumstances he had not envisaged, disobediently.

“So what did he say?” This time, as he phrased the indirect question with false sincerity, leaving Rebecca Maxwell-Smith’s as-yet-unrevealed madness even further behind, he felt that little frisson of excitement he always did where David Audley was dummy1

involved: no one could ever be quite sure what Audley would do in any situation, including Audley himself.

“He said he’d help—of course.” Jane’s expression indicated that she had only just discovered what her father and others had learnt by experience. “But now I’ve received this from Becky—!”

She pushed the letter across the table towards Butler.

There were only a dozen or so words on it, with no sender’s address, as he had already noted, and no date either. Jay— Thanks a million for sending us your David.

Now we really have a chance of pulling it off-—

Love, Becky

Butler looked at his daughter interrogatively.

“He wasn’t meant to help them,” said Jane. “He wasn’t meant to help them pull it off—he was meant to put them off.”

She was coming to it now, at last, thought Butler. But, whatever

‘it’ was, at least she wasn’t directly involved in it.

He concealed his overwhelming relief behind a frown.

Jane frowned back at him. “They’re planning to murder someone, Father,” she said.

Colonel Butler closed the door of his library behind him, shutting out the sound of the girls’ argument over which of them was going to drive the Mini, and went over to the huge mock-Tudor window.

One of Sally’s horses was cropping the grass right up against the white fence on the other side of the forecourt. As he stared at it, the dummy1

animal seemed to sense his presence and looked up towards the house incuriously for a moment. Then it lowered its head again and the grass-tearing sound re-started. On the far side of the paddock, the other two horses were similarly engaged in their endless breakfast-lunch-tea-dinner, and beyond them, the field by the road was dotted with cows which at this distance reminded him of Brittain’s farm toys with which the girls had played when they were little and untroublesome.

Butler turned his back on the scene. It had served its purpose, because now he no longer wished to commit a murder of his own, both to pre-empt that which was allegedly in train and to punish the would-be murderers for the ruination of the quiet weekend with his girls, to which he had been looking forward.

Now commonsense and reason, disciplined by duty, had reasserted themselves. There were even books there on the shelves to remind him— there, high up on the left—that the rebellious American colonies had been supposedly lost because of the devotion of King George III’s ministers to carefree weekends . . . and there, two shelves down and to the right, that ‘lose not an hour’ had been Horatio Nelson’s watchword.

His eye travelled along the shelves, down to the other end of the long room: and there, also, was the gazetteer in which he could pinpoint the village of Duntisbury Royal, to direct him in turn to the right inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map from the shelf below, on which he could pin the gazetteer’s point exactly, if necessary.

The Mini’s engine roared outside. (Whichever of them was at the dummy1

wheel, she would take the drive too fast, and the corner at the entrance too dangerously, with all the reckless immortality of youth, untainted by experience and protected only by youth’s split-second reflexes.)

(David Audley had the experience, and to spare, and a rare quality of intuition. But he also had his blind spots, and he no longer had the reflexes for field-work, unescorted.) He listened to the engine-note, gauging the car’s exact position until it finally snarled away in the distance, on the main road, holding his breath until then. (There was nothing he could do about the girls: they were their own women now, for better or for worse, and he could only come to them when they called him. But there was a great deal he could do—and must do—about David Audley.) If necessary.

No certainty animated him yet, as he moved round the big desk, and sat down behind it, and reached decisively for the red telephone, with its array of buttons. Others, more gifted with that wild Fifth Sense than he, might be able to move from the known via the unknowable to the most likely. But he could only advance by experience and the map references of information received.

He lifted the red phone and pressed two of the buttons simultaneously. Two red eyes lit up, one steady, one blinking insistently. He watched them until they both turned green.

“Duty officer? I wish to speak with Chief Inspector Andrew. When you get him, patch him through to me on this line, please.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Thank you.”

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He replaced the receiver, so that one of the green eyes went out while the other turned red again, holding the scrambled line. Then he reached out, almost reluctantly, for the other phone—the ordinary humdrum Telecom instrument, beloved of Diana, Sally and Jane to his great quarterly cost, and dialled his required number, for all to hear who wanted to hear.

“The Old House.”

The childish treble rendered his next question superfluous. “Cathy

—are either of your parents home?” It pained Colonel Butler’s super-ego that he was glad his little god-daughter had been closest to the phone.

“Uncle Jack! Yes—Mummy is.” The breathlessness of her evident pleasure turned the pain into a wound. “Are you coming to my birthday party next Saturday?”

“Your birthday party?” Butler feigned surprise. “Have you got another birthday? How many birthdays a year do you have? Are you like the Queen? Is this your official birthday—or your real birthday? You can’t expect me to keep track of all your different birthdays—I’m much too busy for that, young lady!”

“But I haven’t—” The child caught herself a second too late, birthday-excitement betraying intelligence “—if you’re too busy . . . then that’s your hard luck— you don’t get any of the cake

— and you don’t come to the dinner afterwards, with Paul and Elizabeth, and pineapple Malakoff and Muscat de Beaumes de Venise in the funny bottle— okay?” Cathy added her special birthday pudding and its attendant wine to her other favourite grown-ups like a visiting Russian nobleman and his exquisite dummy1

French mistress, joining in the game. “But Daddy’s not here, anyway—he’s in Dorset, digging up Romans and looking at tanks . . . but Mummy’s here, if you want her—”

Conflicting emotions warred in Butler’s breast: his much-loved and super-intelligent god-daughter had given him what he wanted

—Audley was in Dorset, digging up Romans and looking at tanks, whatever that meant, if it was true—even though he hadn’t asked for that information, and though he had intended to play foully to get it, hoping it would come from her mother without his asking for it—

“Here’s Mummy, anyway—” The rest was lost in the surrender of the receiver, from daughter to mother.

“Jack?” Faith Audley was matter-of-fact, as always. “If you want David, he’s not here.” Then the ever-defensive and slightly-disapproving wife asserted herself. “But he’s on leave, as you well know.”

“In Dorset, digging up Romans and tanks?” Butler chuckled deceitfully at her.

“Yes.” The matter-of-fact disapproval crystallised itself. “You can get him at Duntisbury Royal 326—but only if you have to, Jack.”

Duntisbury Royal 326

“I haven’t the slightest interest in Duntisbury whatever— and even less in Romans and tanks, Faith dear—” What had Romans and tanks got to do with Duntisbury Royal and General Maxwell, lately deceased? “—and least of all with your husband ... I am at home, attempting to enjoy my weekend, if you can believe that ... I was dummy1

merely calling about next weekend, as a matter of fact. Your daughter’s birthday, remember?”

There was a pause. Butler’s eye ranged over his desk, and as it did so one of the blank red eyes on the console of the red telephone started to blink at him redly, off and on, on and off, to inform him that the duty officer was back on that line, holding Chief Inspector Andrew for him, from another ruined weekend somewhere.

“I’m sorry, Jack. Of course! But . . .” It started as an apology, then the voice became edged with doubt “. . . he is on leave, isn’t he?”

There it was, thought Butler with bleak sympathy: the bomber pilot’s wife’s question, redolent with uncertainty about the actual whereabouts of her husband, who could be drinking in the Mess with his crew this morning, but then Flying Tonight: that, even after a dozen years’ safe landings, and in spite of his age and seniority, was the nightmare with which Faith Audley lived, on her pillow in the dark, in her washing-up bowl in the light, and everywhere she went in-between when he was out of her sight, and nothing would change that.

“If he isn’t, it’s news to me.” That at least was true! “I was just calling to confirm next weekend—” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, covering the untruth of a phone-call he would not have needed to make if Jane had not spoken to him with the truth of what he had already done in honour of his goddaughter’s birthday “—I’ve got her a first edition of Kipling’s collected poems, and a signed copy of Little Wars, plus something for her bottom-drawer, which she can put into her savings account.”

“Jack—” Her voice trailed off, and he heard her despatch Cathy dummy1

out of ear-shot “—Jack, that’s much too generous—”

“Nonsense. She’s my god-child. Just don’t tell David that I’ve called—” Butler’s eye strayed from the winking red light on the red phone to the gazetteer, wedged blue-black in its shelf: Duntisbury Royal—Faith and Jane both agreed on that, and Cathy had added Dorset—and Romans, and tanks—

What the hell was David Audley up to, adding General Maxwell to all that—?

And murder—?

Faith was mouthing good-mannered platitudes at him and he had to get rid of her gently and circumspectly: Diana was well, and enjoying her job . . . and Sally’s horses were well, and appeared to be enjoying what Sally made them do ... and Jane was enjoying Law at Bristol University, together with all the other things that Law students did—

In the end he managed to extricate himself from her convincingly, if without the luxury of honour, and returned to the red phone.

“Hullo, sir,” said Andrew cheerfully. “Trouble?”

“Wait.” There was a red eye still, next to the green one. “Thank you, Duty Officer—that will be all.”

The red eye closed abruptly.

“Andrew.” Weekend or not, Andrew had been accessible. And—

what was better than availability—Andrew could be trusted.

“Maxwell. Major-General Maxwell—in the newspapers recently . . . and there was a routine circular on him.”

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“Yes, sir.”

“What do you know about him?”

There was only a fractional pause. “Not a lot, sir. You want the Anti-Terrorist Squad for him.”

“If I wanted them I’d be talking to them.”

Another pause: as a detective-inspector, Andrew had been one of the brightest sparks in the Special Branch, but it still sometimes took a moment for him to adjust to the eccentric politics of Colonel Butler’s service. “Right, sir.”

“Very well. It was a car bomb in Bournemouth, about a fortnight ago, as I recall. We accused the IRA Proves or the INLA, with the odds on the INLA. They both denied responsibility. Go on from there.”

“Yes, sir.” Only the very slightest South London whine betrayed Andrew’s Rotherhithe origins: for some people he turned it on full, complete with rhyming slang, as a tactical device, but with Colonel Butler he never tried it on, it was the Honours graduate in Law who spoke. “It was an Irish bomb, undoubtedly, Inertia-type—pop the parcel under the seat, and just withdraw the pin . . . Good for soft, unsuspecting targets: off they go, and the first time they slow down up they go ... It’s one they’ve used before—not too difficult to put together when you know how, but not crude.”

“Professional?”

“Professional—yes ... to the extent that there are three known training-schools in the Soviet bloc which include it in their syllabuses—schools which handle foreign trainees . . .one in East dummy1

Germany, one in Czechoslovakia . . . and the KGB one, naturally.”

“So it doesn’t have to be Irish?”

“It doesn’t have to be—no. Except that they’re the only ones who’ve used similar devices, so far . . .”

“Yes?” Was that uncertainty in the man’s voice?

“Yes . . . well, there is an element of doubt on this one, it’s true. In fact. . . doubt is about all there is, apparently.”

“Doubt?”

“About it being Irish, sir.”

Butler’s heart sank. David Audley was not an Irish specialist, and notoriously avoided any involvement with the Irish problems which came their way even peripherally. He had pinned most of his hopes on that, he realised now.

“Why?” And why, come to that, was Andrew so well-informed about the case, in spite of that ‘not a lot’ disclaimer?

“No motive, sir.”

“Since when did the INLA need a motive?”

“No connection, then. General Maxwell never served in Ulster—he wasn’t remotely Irish . . . and he was ten years into his retirement—

more than ten years . . . before this lot of Irish ‘troubles’, anyway.

The nearest thing he had to an Irish connection was his servant, Kelly, and he hardly qualifies as Irish within the meaning of the word, any more than Maxwell himself does—did.”

“Kelly?” Butler could recall no mention of any Kelly, either in the newspapers or in the intelligence circular. But as a name Kelly was dummy1

Irish of the Irish.

“Gunner Kelly.” Andrew emphasised the rank. “Irish for the first seventeen years of his life, until he joined up at Larkhill in 1938, like his father before him—father went through the ‘14-’18—DCM

at Loos, bar at Ypres . . . son went through the ‘39-’45—Dunkirk, Tunisia, Italy—Maxwell’s regiment . . . Peace-time soldiering afterwards, then drove a taxi up north somewhere. . . . Came back to the General about four years ago—totally devoted to him. . . .

What they say is, if he’d known the General’s name was on a bomb, he’d have scratched it out and put his own in its place, most likely.”

Butler thought for a moment. “Could he have been the target, then

—a lackey of the bloody British?”

“A 60-year-old lackey?” Andrew echoed the idea scornfully.

“Since when has the INLA been choosy?” It was too feeble though

—even for the INLA. Much too thin.

“If they’re going to start blowing up all the Kellys, then they’ll need a nuclear bomb, not a pound of jelly under the seat . . .sir.”

Andrew paused. “But they did check him out. Because it’s true he could have gone up with the General—in fact, if the General hadn’t sent him off on some errand, he would have gone up. . . . He was going to drive, but the old boy wanted a parcel of books collected—all above board and kosher, in front of witnesses. . . .

But that isn’t the point, you see.”

“So what is the point?” For Kelly to be a non-starter there had to be a point, of course: that was implicit in Del Andrew’s scorn.

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“They weren’t expecting this bomb, sir—neither the Provos nor the INLA—that’s the fact of it, the word is ... It caught them both with their trousers down—right down by their ankles.”

“How so?” ‘Not a lot’ was indeed turning out to be quite a lot. So now he also needed to know why Andrew had done so much more than read the circular on General Maxwell’s assassination.

“Well, sir ... after the Hyde Park bombing there was a lot of recrimination—killing Brits was one thing, but killing horses was another—that was bad medicine on the other side of the Atlantic . . . like, in the cowboy films you can have the Indians bite the dust, and the cowboys, and the horse-soldiers . . . but you can’t have the horses with their guts blown out, or trying to stand up on three legs—that’s the unacceptable face of terrorism . . . And if there’s one thing the Irish themselves are soft on, it’s horses—they can put their shirt on them, and lose it, but they can’t blow six-inch nails into them and then stroll away whistling about Donegal and Connemara, like nothing has happened. ... So we got more mileage out of those pictures of dead horses, and Sefton in his stable, than we did from Airey Neave and Earl Mountbatten being killed, you see.”

“Yes.” That was another plus for Chief Inspector Andrew: he saw life as it was, not as it ought to be, with a hot heart but a cool head.

“Yes. So they weren’t planning anything for the rest of this summer. And after the heat had gone off, when things had settled down a bit, they started to reorganise quietly—both the Provos and the INLA . . . But then, out of the blue, General Maxwell’s bomb goes up in the middle of Bournemouth, and all hell breaks loose dummy1

again when they weren’t battened down—as they would have been if they’d planned it, sir.”

Butler waited, although he already knew what the point was now, from the recent circulars which had passed across his desk as a matter of routine.

“So as a result the Squad picked up three of them who were out in the open—the Provo bagman who was delivering funds in London, and the girl who was setting up that new safe house . . . and the INLA hit-man—a real bad bastard we’ve been after for a long time, that the West Germans wanted too.” Andrew paused. “Which our contacts in Dublin and Belfast both confirm—that the boyos there would like to get their hands on whoever did for the General quite as much as we would, and probably even more.”

That made sense . . . even if the sense it made was the mad and bad illogical sense of terrorism the world over, thought Butler bleakly.

But now was the moment for a straight question.

“So how did you come into this, Andrew?”

This time it was a longer pause. “Ah ... I heard a whisper, sir—that it maybe wasn’t an Irish job at all ... But the bomb was a pro job, like I said.” Pause. “And there was that paper of Wing-Commander Roskill’s on bombs, not long ago ... So I thought this one might end up on our plate— on your plate, sir . . .” Modesty disarmed Chief Inspector Andrew “. . . and I dropped in on the squad anyway, to talk about old times . . . just in case.”

Intelligent anticipation: another plus for the man. “Could you go down there again?” Pause.

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“No, sir. If I go down there again . . . they’re much too fly for that: they’ll know it won’t be just curiosity this time—especially as they’re looking for someone to take it off their hands. They’ve already tried to unload it on the Dorset locals.”

“With what result?” If Audley hadn’t been involved, Butler might have smiled: the experience was not unknown to him of having intractable problems left at his official door like unwanted babies, lusty and demanding.

“The Chief down there—the Chief Constable—he wouldn’t have it. And quite right, too!” Andrew grunted sympathetically. “He said there was no one on his patch who could set a bomb like that—

and if there had been they’d never have set it under the old General. He was the last person anyone would want to blow up. So it had to be political.”

“And you go along with that, do you?”

“I don’t go along with anything . . . sir,” replied Andrew cautiously. “I don’t know enough about it—this was just what I picked up over a few beers. But they certainly didn’t have any local prospects down there with any sort of motive, never mind the know-how, apparently.”

“You mean he had no known enemies down there?”

“That’s right. In fact... no known enemies anywhere, would be more accurate. He was a decent old stick—‘much-loved local figure’, as they say . . . only this time that was the exact truth: they couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have a good word for him. What the local vicar said, was that he disproved the parable about the dummy1

rich man having difficulty getting into heaven: he’d get through the eye of the needle with plenty of room on both sides.”

“He was rich?”

“Rolling in it. Landed money, too—the sort that’s gone through the roof the last few years.”

“Next-of-kin?” He knew part of the answer to that already. But there might be more.

“Just one grand-daughter—who adored him. And most of his wealth was already in trust for her anyway, apart from that.

Nobody stands to gain from his death, if that’s what you’re after.

Most people think they lost by it.” Andrew sniffed at him down the line. “Too good to be true, eh?”

“I said no such thing!” snapped Butler. One thing the years had convinced him of was the existence of pure evil. Fortunately, whatever the hell-fire preachers thought, it was very rare; but its corollary was the existence of pure good, though unfortunately that was even more rare.

“Well, that’s what some of my old mates down the nick thought, having had some disillusioning experiences in that direction.”

Andrew chuckled. “This turned out to be equally disillusioning in its way—for them, actually.”

“How so?” Butler frowned.

“He wasn’t as good as he seemed, was General Maxwell—

‘Squire’ Maxwell—Major-General Herbert George Maxwell, CBE, DSO, MC . . . and Grade VII on the piano, and heaven only knows what else . . . and clever with it, sir.”

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Andrew was clever too, Butler noted. But maybe he needed slapping down. “Don’t waste my time, Chief Inspector. Get to the point.”

“Yes, sir. He wasn’t as good as he seemed—if anything he was better.”

“Better?”

“Yes, sir. No secret mistresses. No strange perversions. All they dug up was a lot of good he was doing by stealth—and a lot of good he’d done in the past, that no one had known about.” Andrew allowed an edge of incredulity into his voice. “You know, there was even a letter—there were two letters—from his official enemies. . . . They intercepted all the letters to his grand-daughter

—”

“His enemies?”

“His official ones. One was from some branch of the Hunt Saboteurs—in his younger days he was a great one for foxhunting . . . there’s a Duntisbury Chase Hunt—saying how courteous he’d always been to them, even while he was outsmarting them . . . and how he’d always listened to them, and stopped the locals beating them up, and so on—that was one of the letters.”

Good Gracious! thought Butler.

“And the other was from Germany, with money for a wreath—

from some German Old Comrades’ associations, from the war. . . .

They’d read about his death in the papers, and they remembered how well he’d behaved—how he’d looked after their wounded dummy1

somewhere, and cheered them up by congratulating them on making a great fight of it, and fighting cleanly, and all that—which they’d never forgotten.”

Colonel Butler stared at his bookshelves, and remembered his own war, and the waste and the pity of it. And he could remember a German too, as they had remembered an Englishman—

“Sir?”

Colonel Butler blinked at his shelves, snapping free from the memories which for a moment—or for more than a moment—had taken him outside time, into a past which had had no future.

“Yes.” Only the present mattered now. “Right!” And the first question to be resolved concerned Chief Inspector Andrew himself.

“Now . . . you tell me exactly why you became so interested in General Maxwell, Chief Inspector. Right?”

“Yes, sir.” Andrew was satisfactorily ready for the question.

“Well... I heard this whisper—like I told you—that it wasn’t an Irish job . . . what I heard was that they didn’t know what the hell it was, to be exact, sir.” The returned emphasis came back to Butler smugly, like a cool return to a hard service. “So I had this feeling that we might get it, you know.”

That was a good and complete answer, even though it ignored the importance of their current preoccupation with the Cheltenham centre.

Or did it? The possibility that someone else might know about David Audley, never mind Jane Butler, chilled Butler.

“Just that? Nothing more?”

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“No, sir. Nothing more.” The reply was stoutly delivered, with a very slight colouring of outrage at the suggestion that its honesty had been considered questionable.

“Right.” Butler refused to let himself be embarrassed. Loyalty in exchange for trust, trust in return for loyalty, was what he gave and expected to receive in his appointments, but in this wicked world nothing was certain. Yet in this officer’s case the risk was worth taking. “You’re busy setting up the Cheltenham operation at this moment. I want you to drop that for twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, sir.” The faint red of outrage changed to the amber of expectation.

“I want you to get back in there somehow and pick up everything you can steal on General Maxwell, Chief Inspector.” Butler studied his books, looking for something which might inspire him, and felt belittled by them: there were so many clever men in those volumes, much more clever than he was, but many of them had come unstuck in spite of that. “And I mean steal—and I don’t want anyone to know that you’ve done it. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.” It was understood—but could it be done? Butler waited while the Chief Inspector reconsidered the chances of doing successfully what he had already said he couldn’t do. “There is a way that I can maybe do that—indirectly.”

“All right.” Butler didn’t want to know about the nuts and bolts of the deception. But it was time now to give the carrot of trust to make the whip-lash of loyalty more bearable. And he had already burnt his boats, in any case! “You know where David Audley is at this moment?”

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That stopped the Chief Inspector in his tracks, by God!

“He’s on leave, sir. Writing another book. Do you want him?”

“No!” Butler recognised his mistake in that instant: it was no good blaming Jane—it was no good blaming Audley, even—no good telling himself that Audley ought to have behaved differently; that he ought to have behaved better, with his age, and his seniority, and experience, and intelligence—ought to have behaved best, not merely better.

David Audley had been born into the wrong age—that was what the man himself thought, and had never pretended otherwise: he always saw himself as a prince-bishop from his beloved middle ages, mediating between God and man, and meddling happily in the affairs of both to their discomfort.

Bletchley Park in the war would have suited Audley best— better than the Middle Ages, even—when he would have been safely bowed down not only by the responsibility and the importance and the challenge of the work, but also by the sheer volume of it, so that he wouldn’t have had either the time or the energy to get up to mischief.

That had been his mistake: he had let Audley free-wheel for too long, while Cheltenham matured—the cleverest man he knew, whom he (of all people) should know was also most capable of behaving irresponsibly when he was bored with lack of responsibility. Jane had only lit that fuse—and perhaps he was lucky that Jane (of all people) had lit it!

Chief Inspector Andrew hadn’t said a word this time. He had dummy1

waited patiently for the next bomb-shell, with his head down.

“Audley’s in Duntisbury Royal at the moment. I don’t want him disturbed until I know what’s happening down there.”

More silence from the other end of the line. It would be fascinating to know what Andrew thought of Audley: whether he knew enough yet to be as certain as Butler himself was that it could not be murder that Audley was contemplating. It would be something very different.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to find out: all he had to do was to recall the man and ask him what the hell he was up to—

the easiest thing, and all the easier because it was in his own nature to do exactly that, to secure good order and discipline through common sense . . .just as it was in Audley’s maverick nature to pursue his own insatiable curiosity in his own way, regardless of good order and discipline and common sense.

Colonel Butler looked down at his desk, at the note-pad near his left hand, and drew a deep breath. During his military career he had lived very happily by the book, being led and leading others, both of which conditions were as natural to him as breathing. But now the book was gathering dust . . . and Audley was a man who could be neither led nor driven, but whose unique value to Queen and Country lay in that restless free-ranging intuition. So it was his own plain duty to ensure that Audley functioned to maximum efficiency, however eccentrically, even if it meant temporarily ignoring the easiest thing in the world.

So that was it: he had to leave Audley alone, but not leave him alone; to show confidence in him while lacking confidence; to trust dummy1

him while not trusting him; to do nothing while doing quite a lot; above all, to let him know none of that . . . somehow . . .

As the silence on the other end of the line lengthened, Colonel Butler moved the note-pad to his right, transferred the phone to his left hand, picked up a pencil, and started to write down names, and then to cross them out one after another, as the alternative to the easiest thing in the world became harder and harder.

PART TWO

Foxes in the Chase

I

Beside the ford there was a crude plank footbridge with a single guard-rail, and on the rail was perched a little blonde child in a very grubby pinafore dress.

Benedikt stopped the car at the water’s edge and leaned out of the window in order to address her.

“Please. . . .” He let the foreignness thicken his voice. “Please, is this the way to ... to Duntisbury Royal?”

The child stared at him for a moment, and then slid forwards and downwards until her toes touched a plank, without letting goof the rail.

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Benedikt smiled at her. “Please—” he began again. But before he could repeat the question she ducked and twisted, and scuttled away like a little wild creature into a shadowy gap between the bushes on the other side of the water and an antique-looking telephone box.

Well, it was the way to Duntisbury Royal—it had to be, Benedikt reassured himself. “Up the road about three miles” , the man at the petrol station had said, and the map said so too. “There’s a turning on your left by a dead tree. Down the hill— and stay in low gear, because it’s steep— and over the water-splash in the trees there, at the bottom, and it’s a long mile from there, what there is of it. You can’t miss it.”

That was what they always said, You can’t miss it, to reassure you at least for a time, until you had missed it.

“There are road-signs, yes?” He could read a map and find his way as well as any man, and better than most. But he had bitter experience of the irrationality of English directions and was suspicious of the man’s confidence.

“No. Leastways . . . there were . . . but there aren’t at the moment.

But you turn by a dead tree, and just follow the road. There ain’t nowhere else to go once you’re on it, see?” The man had begun to regard him curiously then.

“Thank you. And there is an hotel there?” Curiosity, in Benedikt’s experience, was the father of information.

“There ain’t a hotel, no. There’s a pub— they might have a room, I dunno.” The curiosity increased. “They’re a queer lot there.” The dummy1

man spoke of the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal, who lived no more than five miles from his petrol pumps, as though they were an alien race hidden behind barbed wire and minefields.

“Queer?” All the same, Benedikt rejoiced in what he guessed was the old correct meaning of the word, the use of which he had been cautioned against in modern polite speech: it was good to know that here, deep in the Wessex countryside, the natives still guarded the language of his mother, Shakespeare’s tongue.

“Ah ...” The garage man’s face closed up suddenly, as though he had decided on second thoughts that the queerness of his neighbours was no foreigner’s business. “That’s £16.22, sir—

sixteen-pounds-and-twenty-two-pence.” He adjusted the speed of his diction to that which the English reserved for the presentation of bills to foreigners, so that there could be no possible misunderstanding, let alone argument.

“Ach— so!” Benedikt played back to him deliberately. This might be the only garage for miles around, and if this man was both a gossip and the local supplier to Duntisbury Royal, then so much the better. “I may pay by credit card, yes? Or cash?”

The man looked doubtfully at the card, and then at Benedikt, but then finally at the gleaming Mercedes and its CD passport. “Either of ‘em will do, sir.” He bustled to find the correct form, and then squinted again at the card. “’Weez-hoffer‘,” he murmured unnecessarily to himself, as though to indicate to Benedikt that he would have preferred cash from a foreigner and was noting the name just in case.

“Wiesehöfer,” said Benedikt. “Thomas Wiesehöfer.”

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The man filled in the card number painfully. But his curiosity rekindled as he did so. “On holiday then?”

“On holiday.” Benedikt nodded at the garage man and pretended to search for the right words and not find any. “On holiday. . .ach so!” It galled him when he prided himself on being able to pass almost for English ... or British, as Mother always insisted, who had been half-Scottish herself.

He studied the water-splash out of the driver’s window, just a metre beyond his front wheels. The stream rippled across the tarmac in a patch of sunlight where the road crossed it, but it didn’t look very deep. All the country hereabouts was open and empty, and he had dropped down from the high ridge in the low gear which the garage man had advised; but now he was on the miniature flood-plain of a little valley, and at this point, where the road crossed the stream, trees and bushes grew luxuriantly, making a secret place of it.

He looked up from the sun-dappled water, and caught a glimpse of the little girl watching him from her hiding place between the telephone box and the summer tangle of leaves. Of course, she would have been told not to speak to strange men in cars, so he couldn’t rationally fault her behaviour. But he liked children, and was used to them, and prided himself on being good with them and was accustomed to their trust, so that— however irrationally—he recoiled from the role of strange-man-in-a-car and was disturbed by her fear.

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Yet there was more to it than that, his momentary irrationality told him: the very young were innocent, and gullible and inexperienced with it, but they sometimes knew more than the very wise, picking up vibrations of danger with senses which atrophied as their experience of life increased; and now he was about to enter her secret little English valley—

But that was absurd fantasy! He broke contact with her and shifted the gear-lever into drive. It wasn’t her valley, and it was only secret for the lack of a proper signpost—the busy main road almost within earshot, and it was only the foreignness of this small-scale countryside which he was foolishly letting himself be upset by, as he might be upset by some unpalatable local dish or custom to which he was unused, but which was unpalatable only because it was different from what he was accustomed to.

He felt the solid force of the water resist the forward thrust of the wheels, and then the Mercedes pulled free of the stream and surged ahead effortlessly into the dark tunnel formed by the overhanging trees. Then the road curved, to follow the line of the valley, and he could see open country ahead again, with one last glimpse of the child in his rear-view mirror as she broke cover to watch him go, and then took refuge inside the telephone box.

Beyond the ford the road meandered along the slope of the ridge, undulating with its gentle curves. Large single trees, which looked as though they had been planted for effect, rather than groves and plantations, obscured his view of the wider landscape. He became aware that he was in a different sort of countryside before he understood why it was different. Then he saw that there were no dummy1

hedges, only a low iron railing on each side of the narrow road: it was as though he was passing through a private parkland—

Chase—of course, that was what all this land was: Duntisbury Chase—which he had looked up in Mother’s massive double-volumed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ever to be relied on, and not least to be trusted as a sure reminder of their first and best owner, who had passed them on to him so long ago.

Chase—

3. A tract of unenclosed land reserved for breeding and hunting wild animals ME. . . ‘ME’ meaning ‘Middle English’, of the medieval variety, when, presumably, those Germanic tribes who had spoken ‘Old English’—‘OE’—had settled their conquests well enough to start breeding and hunting for enjoyment—

4. That which is hunted ME . . .

And 5. Those who hunt (1811) . . .

That certainly covered everything he needed now (the Shorter could always be relied on): here he was, Benedikt Schneider, alias Thomas Wiesehöfer, in the chase, after the chase, and one of the chase, 3., 4., and 5., with all options catered for between the iron railings this fine English summer’s midday—

But ... no further along the chase at the moment, for the road was blocked ahead, with a tractor trying to manoeuvre a trailer loaded with hay bales almost broadside across it.

As Benedikt halted the car a heavily-built farm labourer appeared from behind the trailer, eyed the gap between the side of the vehicle and the gatepost critically, and shook his head in despair.

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The tractor juddered forward slowly.

“Whoa!” roared the labourer to the youth at the wheel of the tractor. “You’ll ‘ave the bloody post an’ all! You just back up an‘

straighten ’er now, an‘ come out proper, like I told you.”

The youth looked from side to side uneasily—as well he might, thought Benedikt sympathetically, for both the road and the entrance to the field were narrow.

“Just take ‘er easy now—like I told you,” shouted the labourer.

Then he seemed to see Benedikt for the first time. “Right ’and down—that’s it!” He climbed the iron fence clumsily and came towards the car. “Sorry, mister. Won’t be long, though.”

“Please—it is no matter.” Benedikt peered at him, conscious again of his thick spectacles, and smiled as he adjusted his voice to the noise of the tractor’s engine. “I am in no hurry.”

“Ah . . .” The labourer nodded, studying the trailer’s painful progress. “Get on with it then, Bobby! We ain’t got all day.”

Benedikt wasn’t so sure that at the youth’s present rate of manoeuvre all day might not be what they would need. But there was nothing he could do about it now, for there was already a muddy farm Land Rover and a couple of boys on bicycles stacked up behind him—he could see them in his rear-view mirror—and peasants were the same the whole world over; whatever they said they liked nothing better than not to give way for men in suits driving gleaming cars.

Resigning himself to delay he started to settle back more comfortably into his seat, looking round casually into the field dummy1

beside him—

It took every bit of his accumulated experience not to jerk upright again, but instead rather to hold the casual glance just long enough for ordinary unconcern, and then to continue slumping down as he would have done if he had never before seen the man striding across the field towards him.

There was no mistake—

He returned his gaze to the youth on the tractor for a moment, and then tipped back his head against the head-rest to study the roof of the car, as though surrendering to boredom.

In fact, he never had seen the man before, not in the flesh. But there was no mistake from the photographs, close-up front full-faced, side and quarter-face, and long-shots snapped craftily to set him in the context of ordinary men—no mistake, even though he was here before he had been anticipated, dressed like any labourer too . . . creased open-necked shirt, stained khaki trousers stuffed into rubber boots—English ‘Wellingtons’, although the great aristocratic Iron Duke with whom mad old Blücher had kept faith at Waterloo had surely never worn anything so bucolic—

No mistake—the face and the size of the man, even the solid, inexorable stride of the man across the rough pasture of the field—

like a tank, thought Benedikt subjectively, out of the printed record

— tank-commander, Normandy 1944 . . . and that had been before he had ever been born, before Mother had met Papa even . . . even

—unthinkably—when Mother and Father had been enemies, before they had been victor and vanquished—

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He felt something touch the car, and twisted sideways towards the sound.

“Sorry, Mister—” one of the boy-cyclists, a snub-nosed, cheeky-faced fourteen-year-old, alongside him now while squeezing past, addressed him briefly “—I ain’t scratched it—got rubber grips, see

—?” He indicated the handle-bars of his cycle with one momentarily-free hand before pushing down on the pedals to accelerate away.

“You get on out of ‘ere, Benje, an’ get off the bloody road!”

shouted the farm labourer. “An‘ you, Darren—your mum’s been lookin’ for you—”

The second cyclist whipped past Benedikt, in desperate pursuit of the departing Benje, who had swerved skilfully past the front wheels of the tractor.

“Little buggers!” The farm labourer shook his fist at them as Darren made a rude two-fingered signal backwards at him before swerving in Benje’s wake.

“Problems, Cecil?” David Audley rested for a moment, grasping the top railing at the labourer’s side, and then leaned on it, observing the road up and down.

“No problems, Doctor Audley.”

Cecil? Benedikt’s concentration was side-tracked against his will away from David Audley by the incongruous name. Benje and Darren were bad enough—they were both English Christian names he didn’t know . . . But Cecil. . . that was an exclusively aristocratic English name—wasn’t there a renowned English lord, dummy1

whom Mother had mentioned, who had lectured to her at Oxford—

Lord David Cecil—

“Bobby’s never going to get that trailer out,” said Audley. “Not if you want to keep those gate-posts, anyway.” He looked straight at Benedikt, before turning back to Cecil. “I bet you a pint of best bitter.”

“Ahh . . . That’s where you’re wrong, Doctor.” Cecil didn’t turn round. “Right ‘and down, lad— a bit more— steady! STEADY!” He drew a deep breath. “Bobby’s goin’ to learn—make it a pint of that Low-en-brow, right?”

“You’re on. Low-en-brow it is.” Audley came back to Benedikt. “I trust your business is not urgent, sir?”

Benedikt blinked at him through the thick lenses, playing for time.

“Please?”

Audley considered him for a moment. “You . . . you-are-going-to-Duntisbury-Royal?” He spoke with exaggerated clarity, paused for an instant, then smiled helpfully. “That’s-all-there-is-down-this-road—” he pointed “—Duntisbury Royal?”

Benedikt nodded like a half-wit. “Duntisbury Royal . . . yes.” He let his attention stray away from Audley, back to Cecil, who was shouting and gesticulating at the unfortunate youth on the tractor.

“Left ‘and down—not too much— STEADY—”

The tractor roared and jerked.

“STOP!”

“Duntisbury Royal?” repeated Audley, catching a pause in the youth’s agony.

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Benedikt came back to him. “So!” The man was some years younger than Papa, but the years had also been kinder to him, increasing the gap: he was not so much beginning to run to fat as to bulk, which his height and build minimised. When young, with those prize-fighter’s features . . . features contradicted by the fierce hawkish eyes ... he would have been a nasty customer to meet on a dark night lurking in a side-street, with that brawn moderated by the brains behind those eyes.

“So!” He nodded again, and tried to hide his thoughts behind the thick lenses. “There is—” he gestured uncertainly, as though searching for words “—there is at Duntisbury Royal an hotel ... a public house?” He blinked. “With rooms?”

“With—” Audley’s mouth opened, but the renewed roar of the tractor’s engine cut him off.

“STEADY! AHH—!” Cecil’s voice graduated from warning, through anger to despair, summoning both of them.

Benedikt watched, fascinated, as the tractor twisted the trailer out of the field. It was strange how the tractor was all noise and speed, its huge rear-wheels spinning madly, while the trailer appeared to follow more slowly in what seemed like its own silence, to catch the gate-post with the last metre of its frame. The post shuddered, then bent forwards and sideways, distorting and buckling the rails which met it, as the trailer scraped its way to freedom.

“Jeesus-kee-rist-God-damn-and-blast-it-to-hell—” Cecil snatched the cloth-cap from his head and slapped it against his leg in rage.

For a moment Benedikt thought he was going to dash the cap to the dummy1

ground and stamp on it.

“I think I’ve just won a pint,” murmured Audley. Then, without taking his eyes off Cecil, he bent down to Benedikt’s level. “Your best bet is the Eight Bells, just beyond the church on the left when you get to the village. They don’t really have rooms, but if you tell the landlord I sent you they might put you up—” He straightened as Cecil turned towards them, and spread his hands eloquently.

Cecil stared at them darkly for a second or two, then jammed the cap back on his head and set off after the trailer, which was already hull-down in the next undulation of the road in the distance.

Benedikt watched him for another second or two, and then found to his surprise that Audley was no longer beside the car, but was back inside the field again, Striking across it with long strides, as though he had urgent business elsewhere.

He stuck his head out of the window hastily. “Sir—if you please, sir

—!”

Almost without checking, Audley half-twisted in mid-stride. “The-Eight-Bells . . . just-past-the-church—” he waved cheerily “—you-can’t-miss-it.”

After Audley had disappeared into the dead ground of the same slope which had swallowed up the trailer and tractor, Cecil stamping behind, Benedikt sat unmoving for a while. He had encountered David Audley, the legendary David Audley, unexpectedly. But he could not have avoided the encounter— and Audley, on the other hand, could have avoided it, very easily.

Therefore . . . although Audley, equally, could not have expected dummy1

him, but was expecting someone . . . ?

No. Alternatively, he was not expecting anyone, but he wanted to take a good, close-up look at anyone—any unaccountable stranger

—who did appear in Duntisbury Chase . . . ?

Or ... had it been pure accident? And how, indeed, could it be anything else, to combine Audley, appearing from nowhere in the thirty square miles of the Chase, which contained nowhere of importance—nowhere of human importance, anyway—except Duntisbury Royal itself, and its few isolated farmsteads ... to combine Audley with Cecil and the youth on the tractor, to detain Thomas Wiesehöfer at this precise point in nowhere?

It could hardly be anything else but pure accident, however curious and inconvenient. Yet all the same, logic notwithstanding, such a pure, curious and inconvenient accident disturbed him when he set Audley’s vast experience and known eccentricity against his own much shorter service. It was not simply that the man was a foreigner—the British, and especially the English, were not all that different, and the differences had been studied and codified—but rather that the man was in some sense a foreigner among his own people, a wild card in his own pack. So, knowing that, he must take nothing for granted.

So ... taking nothing for granted as he shifted the gear change into drive ... he took one keen look round in the rural emptiness of Duntisbury Chase.

There was nothing on the high naked ridge to his right, with its grass as close-cropped asan American pilot’s head; while on his left the undulations he had already noted were broken only by dummy1

those carefully placed individual trees, some tall and well-spread with age, some matire but still youthful, with here and there newly-planted saplinjs, until the ridge fell away finally into the bed of the stream itself.

Across the stream the pattern repeated itself. And what it was, what it all added up to, partly by its own topography, partly by what man had made of it, and finally by the descriptive noun attached to it, was marvellous hunting country: a chase not for pursuing gane on foot, in the more popular European manner, but in the glorious English style, in the red coats which they so oddly (and typically) characterised as ‘pink’—he could almost hear the hounds baying, and the sound of the horn, and the huntsman’s view-halloo as the quarry broke cover—

A loud horn-sound, unmelodious and angry, startled him half out of his seat, hitting him from behind, reminding him even before he could look in his mirror of the farm Land Rover at his back, which he had quite forgotten.

His foot automatically depressed the accelerator, and the big car surged away, leaving the sound echoing behind him. Down and up, down and up—the trees and the empty pastures and the ridge flashed past on each side—down and up, and down and up.

There was a horseman on his left, galloping parallel to the road at full speed, ducking down under the branches of a tree and then emerging, with the clods flying from the horse’s hooves. For a moment the horseman was ahead—not a man, but a boy ... or a man, but jockey-size—then horse and rider vanished behind another tree, and the superior horse-power of the Mercedes left dummy1

both behind effortlessly, and he was alone again.

The trees thickened suddenly on each side of the road, closing in on him, but he caught a glimpse of a squat church tower, grey-green with age, in a gap up in front, on his left.

And now there was a straggle of houses—little dwellings in weathered brick, hidden behind thick hedges under the trees—

But there was no road-sign ... he frowned and peered into the overgrown verges, and saw no indication that this was Duntisbury Royal at last. And yet it must be Duntisbury Royal, because it could be nothing else—there was nothing else for it to be.

The church came into view, back from the road in its churchyard full of gravestones, some of them upright and some canted over; and further on, separated from the churchyard wall by a square of gravel, a low building with roof coming down to the ground floor, little bigger than an ordinary house but with a hanging sign on one gable-end which bore a representation of bells—eight bells, Benedikt guessed.

He pulled into the empty square of gravel, alongside a tall stone cross, which had a sword in high relief superimposed on it, on a plinth beside the churchyard entrance.

Benedikt stepped out of the car. There were words engraved on the plinth, cut deep, as the English always did cut their inscriptions, but he didn’t need to read them, for he had read them on other similar crosses already.

Lest we forget. . . and somewhere, round the other sides, cut just as deep, would be 1914-18 and 1939-45, each with its list of names dummy1

even in this tiny place, which was so peaceful and far-removed from the quarrels of the great and powerful.

For the real Thomas Wiesehöfer it might have been a bad omen, he thought, closing the car door without locking it. But for the real Benedikt Schneider there could be no bad thoughts here: if they didn’t want to forget, there was half of Benedikt Schneider which had a right to remember with them, as Mother had once reminded him, for his dead uncles and great-uncles on her side, who would anyway and at this length of time be unlikely to hold anything against his other dead uncles and great-uncles, who had been their enemies.

And, besides, who was he here for now, if not for their Elizabeth Regina, D.G., Fid. Def.?

He chose the Saloon Bar, because that was the bar Thomas Wiesehöfer would have chosen.

It was a dark little room, all the colder for its big empty fireplace, smelling of furniture polish and slightly of damp, and quite empty.

Eventually someone came to the bar, which was partly in this room, and partly in the adjoining Public Bar, which (so far as he could see through) looked lighter and more friendly.

The someone was a tall, slightly-built young man, who brought the Public Bar’s friendly look with him.

“Please ... do you have rooms, with bed-and-breakfast?” It took an effort to emphasise each s, and to roll each r gutturally, as he would ordinarily have prided himself in not doing, so as to be able to surprise the landlord later.

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“Oh, no—I’m sorry—” the young man sounded quite genuinely sorry, too “—we don’t have guests ... we don’t really have room—

I’m sorry.”

“Ach—so!” Benedikt pretended disappointment. It ought to have been real disappointment, but suddenly he was glad that he wasn’t going to be trapped in Duntisbury Royal, or Duntisbury Chase, tonight. And although his orders prompted him to mention now that a large ugly man who had omitted to give his name had sent him to the Eight Bells, those orders were not absolutely precise and instinct had just cancelled them.

“The nearest place, if you’re looking for a bed, is the Golden Cross at Fyfield St John, on the main road . . .” The landlord’s face indicated some doubts about the Golden Cross’s beds. “Or, you could go back to Salisbury—if you’ve come from Salisbury, that is ... there are lots of hotels there. It’s not far, really.”

Benedikt nodded. The landlord was assuming from his speech, and perhaps from the big car outside, that he was a foreigner who had strayed off the beaten track. But, although there was no room at the inn, that was something which needed contradicting.

“Thank you.” He nodded again. “But this is ... Duntisbury Royal—

yes?”

“Yes—” The landlord began to polish an already well-polished glass “—that’s right.”

“And . . . there is here a Rrroman villa? The Duntisbury Rrroman villa?”

“Yes.” The landlord stopped polishing the glass. “It’s just behind dummy1

the church, down towards the stream.” He blinked at Benedikt suddenly. “But. . . it’s on private land ... I mean . . . they’re not excavating it at the moment—they were in the middle of excavating it, but they’ve stopped for the time being.”

Benedikt nodded. “The Wessex Archaeological Society—yes, I know. But I may look at it from the churchyard, perhaps?”

“Yes . . .” Mention of the Wessex Archaeological Society threw the landlord for a moment, and they both knew that churchyards were public land, in practice if not in law.

“So!” Benedikt nodded again. Nodding was standard practice for foreigners. Then, as though he had just remembered, he felt in his breast-pocket and produced his bit of paper. He adjusted his spectacles, which made the words difficult to read. “Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith—” he looked up at the landlord “—it is Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, of the Duntisbury Manor, Duntisbury Royal, to whom I am addressed. Could you direct me to her, please?”

If he had asked to be directed to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, D.

G., Fid. Def., at Buckingham Palace, he could hardly have disconcerted the young landlord more. Or ... perhaps if he had asked for David Audley—?

“Yes.” Now the landlord was nodding. “Miss Becky . . . but she may not be in. I could phone her from here, if you like?”

“That would be most kind.” If he nodded again, his head would fall off. But he must remember where he was. “I may have a drink, meanwhile?” He looked over the range of bottles behind the bar, dummy1

and then at the beer pump-handles. “Lowenbrau—a halfpint, please.”

As he watched the landlord draw the beer he realised suddenly what it was that Audley had won from Cecil. “You will join me, please?” He put a £5 note on the bar.

“Thank you, but no.” The landlord set the glass down. “It’s only just gone twelve—too early for me. I’ll go and phone for you, though.”

Benedikt drank some of the beer. He realised that Audley had been right—this was Low-en-brow, not Lowenbrau.

A very pretty girl appeared from a door behind the bar, and smiled at him. “Are you being served?” she inquired.

Benedikt lifted his Low-en-brow. “Thank you, yes. Do you serve lunch, please?”

“Bar snacks—what would you like?” She handed him a menu.

The bar snacks were very reasonably priced. And the Low-en-brow wasn’t at all bad, really. And the girl was pretty, and the landlord was being helpful—come to that, even Dr David Audley had been helpful in his equivocal way, just as Cecil had been polite after his fashion. And here he was, an innocent German scholar, abroad on a summer’s day in a tranquil English valley of the sort that few mere tourists ever discovered, since there wasn’t a single sign-post to direct them to it.

“Thank you, but no.” He looked at his watch. “It is only ten minutes after twelve—that is too early for me.”

The pretty girl gave him another sunny smile, and turned away to dummy1

start re-arranging the glasses behind the bar.

It was only instinct, of course . . . that prickling at the nape of the neck which came even against reason from some undiscovered part of the brain, although it always seemed to travel up the spine from the small of his back . . . or, if not instinct, then more simply his subjective reaction to the oil-and-water mixture of so much innocence here with what he knew about Audley and what lay somewhere in that quiet, tree-shaded churchyard.

Then the landlord came back, and as Benedikt rose from the bench on which he had seated himself he thought the man exchanged a glance with the girl. But he also thought he might have imagined what he thought, for she was the sort of girl with whom glances must often be exchanged.

“I’m sorry, but Miss Becky isn’t at home.” The landlord shook his head apologetically. “But I could phone again—they say she could be back any time . . . if you like to wait . . .” He shrugged. “Or . . .

I’m sure it would be all right for you to look at the Roman villa—I can’t imagine Miss Becky minding . . . It’s just that we’re not very used to strangers.” He smiled again, and pointed to a pile of coins and notes on the bar. “And I see that you’re not very used to the price of beer in England, sir.”

“Thank you.” Benedikt was pleased to have established his foreignness. “But you will take for the telephone calls, please ... So I will go to the villa, and then return—yes?”

Outside, he first felt so absurdly and irrationally glad to be in the fresh air again, away from the claustrophobic little barroom, that he concluded he was being frightened by shadows of his dummy1

imagination. In the sunlight, with the green leaves everywhere, and the birds singing and fluttering in the trees, there was nothing to fear.

Not the small boy sitting on the churchyard wall, anyway: it was the same snub-nosed Benje who had pushed past the car, with his racing-cycle now propped up beside him.

He gave the boy a nod of recognition as he pushed open the wicket-gate into the churchyard.

It was an English churchyard like any other, with its scatter of newer gravestones among older ones on which the inscriptions ranged from the barely decipherable to mere litchen-covered indentation which only God could read. There was a neat little gravel path meandering between the stones and the occasional yew-tree, to divide just short of the porch, one branch leading directly to the door, the other curving round the building.

Under other circumstances Benedikt would have entered the church, as he had always been taught to do, to say a prayer. But the sun was warm on his face, and in these circumstances, in this place at this time, he judged that Mother would forgive him for breaking her rule, and would allow him to say the words of her old Englishman under the sky, as they had originally been prayed—

Lord, Thou knowest that I must be very busy this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.

Instead, he followed the curving path along the side of the church, to the newest grave of all, which had instantly caught his eye.

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HERBERT GEORGE MAXWELL

CBE, DSO, MC, RA

1912-1982

The inscription was cut deep into the new headstone: it would take centuries of wind and weather to erase it.

Under the date, but less deeply incised because of its complexity, was a military badge consisting of an antique cannon surmounted by a crown, standing upon the single Latin word ‘Ubique’.

Below the stone, on the freshly-turned chalky soil, there was a plastic wreath of red poppies and laurel leaves, with a ribbon identifying ‘The Royal British Legion’ across it, and an unmarked posy of fresh flowers and greenery.

Benedikt marked the difference between the two tributes: on closer scrutiny, the soil was no longer quite freshly turned, for there were already tiny green things sprouting from it—the delicate spears of young grass and the minute broad-leaved weeds which would eventually reduce General Herbert George Maxwell’s last resting place to uniformity with all his neighbours in Duntisbury Royal churchyard and all his old comrades in dozens of far-flung military cemeteries (that was what ‘Ubique’ meant, after all, wasn’t it?).

But, where the Royal British Legion wreath dated from the original burial judging by the rain-spotted dust which covered it, the posy had been cut and carefully put together only a few hours before.

So there was somebody in Duntisbury Royal who still loved dummy1

General Herbert George Maxwell, CBE, DSO, MC, RA, aged 70 ...

CBE was some great honour, and DSO and MC were gallantry medals, and that crowned cannon could only mean Royal Artillery, not Royal Academician!

So here was the fuse . . . buried two metres deep, and impervious to any mischance now, but still as live and dangerous as any of the thousands of shells he had once fired, so it seemed.

But what shell, of all those thousands, had he fired which had killed him all those years after, so explosively?

They didn’t know, they said.

And who had killed him, anyway?

They said they didn’t know that, either.

Half-blurred, on the edge of his vision through the spectacles, he noticed another stone, but with the same name.

He turned his head towards it: Edith Mary Maxwell, 1890-1960 ...

he peered further to the left, and then to the right . . . they were all Maxwells here— Victoria Mary Maxwell—all Maxwell women, anyway—

And there was something else—someone else—on that blurred no-man’s-land—

Benje, the snub-nosed cyclist, was almost at his back, complete with his racing-bike.

“That’s the Old General, the Squire,” said the boy, nodding at the new grave. “We had a big funeral for him, with soldiers— gunners, they were.”

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Benedikt nodded gravely.

“The IRA killed him,” said the boy. “Blew him up, they did. Dad says they’re a lot of bastards.”

“Yes?” said Benedikt.

But that was one thing they did not say: the IRA had not blown up General Herbert George Maxwell. If they were agreed on nothing else, British Intelligence and the IRA were both agreed on that.

II

It might be useful, thought Benedikt. And even if it was not useful, it would be instructive.

But most of all it might be useful.

“You knew the old general?”

The boy Benje started to nod, and then a sound behind him diverted his attention.

The other—the boy who had given Mr Cecil the rude signal—shot out from behind a nearby yew tree on his bicycle, and came to a racing halt beside Benje in a spray of gravel.

Benedikt studied them both. They were two very different types, the boy Benje extrovert and cheekily-aggressive, and the other boy . . . What was his name? He had heard it, but it had escaped him . . . the other boy was black-haired and fine-boned, and altogether more withdrawn. The only thing they had in common dummy1

was their transport: the low-handlebarred, multi-geared racing cycles were identical.

And he had a better introduction to them both there. “Those look good bikes—BSA, are they?” He eased his accent, the better to communicate with them. “You are brothers?”

“Me and him?” Benje threw the question back contemptuously.

“You must be joking!”

“You do not look like brothers—no.” He searched for an opening.

“But you bought the same machines.”

Benje shook his head. “We didn’t buy ‘em.”

“Of course! You were given them.” He knew that wasn’t what the boy had meant.

“No. We won them.” Benje couldn’t let the mistake pass uncorrected.

“In a competition?”

Benje looked at him. “Sort of.” He paused for an instant, then nodded at the tombstone. “We got them from him.”

“From the General? He gave them to you?”

“No— not gave.” Benje frowned, suddenly tongue-tied.

“We both won places at King Edward’s School.” The other boy filled the silence coolly. “Everyone who wins a place at King Edward’s—everyone from here—gets a bicycle from the Old General.” He put a capital letter on the title.

“Ah!” And with Duntisbury Royal’s inaccessibility to public transport, that was an act of practical generosity, thought Benedikt.

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“So you are able to cycle to school!”

“No.” Benje shook his head again. “There’s a taxi comes for us—

collects us in the morning, an‘ brings us back after first prep.”

The other boy nodded. “And the Old General pays for that as well.”

It was strange how they both held him in the living present, here of all places. But presumably the benefaction was endowed to outlast the benefactor.

“ ‘Sright,” agreed Benje. “An’ it’s Blackie Nabb’s old taxi, too—

my dad reckons it’s worth a fortune to him, picking us up. Says he wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for us, and Sandra Brown and Mary Hobbs—they go to the High.” He cocked his head at Benedikt. “They got bikes, too.”

So the Old General was both directly and indirectly the village’s benefactor—but not ‘was’, rather ‘had been’ ... he was falling into their confusion of tenses.

He looked at them sadly. “But now he is dead, the Old General . . .”

“Miss Becky is paying now,” said the other, boy, mistaking his sadness with the cold logic of youth.

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she! Becky’s all right—she used to go to the High in Blackie’s old rattle-trap too, didn’t she!” Benje’s view of the Old General’s successor was less deferential than his friend’s, and so was the face he now presented to Benedikt, even though he could not yet quite nerve himself to ask the questions his curiosity had printed clearly on it.

“Miss Becky is the Old General’s grand-daughter?” He prodded Benje towards those questions without scruple. It would not do to dummy1

underestimate either of these children—it never did to underestimate any children, but these two particularly. For a start, they were perhaps older than he had at first thought, and in spite of their peasant accents they were scholarship boys as well, so it seemed. Exactly what that meant, he wasn’t sure, in the present confused state of English education, which the English themselves had not standardised and didn’t seem to understand, let alone agree on. But it was still probably true that when English education was good it was very good, and these were fledgling products of it.

“Yes.” Suspicion, rather than curiosity, was dominant in the other boy.

Darren, he remembered suddenly. The outlandish name.

“You’re not English.” The first of Benje’s questions came in the guise of a statement.

“No, I am not.” It nettled him slightly that the boy’s first thrust had penetrated his almost faultless accent. “So what am I, then?”

“German,” said Benje unhesitatingly.

“Or Swedish,” said Darren. “Remember those two who came through last year, who stayed at the Eight Bells? The chap who played rugger—”

“German,” repeated Benje. “Betcha lop.”

So the Eight Bells did have rooms. “What makes you so sure, Benje?” It was time to counter-attack just a little, to assert equality rather than any adult superiority.

“How d’you know my name?”

Benedikt smiled. “Benje and Darren.”

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“On the road below Caesar’s Camp,” Darren jogged his friend’s memory. “When Old Cecil balled us out—remember?”

“Huh!” Benje didn’t like being jogged, especially in front of the stranger whose car he had touched, and most especially when that stranger was a foreigner too, that sound suggested.

“But you are quite right.” Benedikt invested the admission with a touch of admiration: more than equality, he wanted their friendship, because with these two little mobile spies on his side he could have a mine of information open to him about Duntisbury Royal, past and present. Precious little that happened in the Chase would escape them, and David Audley was a stranger there also.

Benje thawed slightly.

“You are quite right,” he repeated himself, grinning now.

“Wiesehöfer—Thomas Wiesehöfer, from West Germany.” And since he judged it time to be honestly foreign he extended his hand to each of them in turn.

For a moment the handshaking unsettled them. But they accepted the alien custom manfully, like the well-brought-up lads he had also judged them to be under their brashness, and his heart twisted between approval of them and disapproval for his own disingenuousness.

Benje rallied first, predictably on his mettle after the debacle of the names. “You’ve come to see . . . Miss Becky, have you?”

“Miss Becky?” That was a disconcertingly sharp little assumption, but having admitted it in the Eight Bells pubjic house ten minutes ago he could not deny it now. “Miss . . . Rebecca Maxwell-Smith dummy1

is that?”

“ ‘Sright.” The boy folded his arms and appraised him with a customs officer’s eye, as though waiting to hear what he had to declare.

“Yes.” He would dearly have liked to ask how Benje had reached that conclusion. But he had to bind them to him with trust before he started asking questions, so that the settlement of their curiosity took priority over his own. “That is to say . . .1 had thought to speak with General Maxwell—with the Old General. But it is with Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith that I must speak now, it seems.”

“Why d’you want to see her?” Darren continued the interrogation with all the delicacy of a GDR border guard.

“It is not her I wish to see, not really.” He nodded at them, as though revealing a confidence. “It is the Roman villa—the Duntisbury Roman villa ... it is on her land, yes?”

“The Roman villa?” Darren frowned at him.

“It is on her land, I believe—yes?”

“Yes.” Benje nodded at him. “All the land round here’s hers—it was the Old General’s, but it’s hers now—from Caesar’s Camp to Woodbury Rings on the top, and along the stream down here, both sides—she owns the lot.” He paused. “Why d’you want to see the Roman villa? There isn’t much to see, you know.” He shook his head. “Until they started digging it up there wasn’t anything to see.

It was just a field, that was all it was.”

“My Gran knew there was something there long before they dug anything up.” Darren wasn’t going to let Benje do all the talking.

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“She says, when she was a girl there were lots of rabbits down there, an‘ there was always lots of stuff—bits of brick an’ such like

—where they dug their holes—” He stopped suddenly. “Why d’you want to see the old Roman villa?”

Benedikt was ready for that one. “Because I am a student of such things.”

Benje stared at him in disbelief. “A student?”

Darren gave his friend a sidelong glance. “Schoolmaster,” he murmured.

“No.” That would never do! “I am not a schoolmaster. Looking at Roman things is my interest—my hobby—like stamp-collecting.”

He grinned at them. “We had Romans in Germany too—did you know that?”

“Huh!” Benje scowled.

Benedikt looked at him questioningly. “Did you not know that?”

Darren’s face split into a wicked grin. “Oh, he knows it! Germani multum, Benje—eh?”

“Germani multum—huh!” Benje’s freckled features twisted.

“Germani flipping multum . . . ab hac consuetudine differunt; nam neque druides habent, qui rebus divinispraesint, neque flipping sacrificiis student.”

The contrast of the impeccable Latin—or it sounded impeccable, anyway—with the boy’s accented English took Benedikt aback almost as much as the words themselves. He struggled for a moment with their meaning, rusty memories grating on each other

— it was something about the Germans being different . . . not dummy1

having Druids or making sacrifices — and then cut his losses.

“You are a Latin scholar — ” He cut off the statement as it doubled Darren up with laughter.

“Ha-ha-very-funny,” said Benje to his friend. Then he sniffed and turned to Benedikt. “He thinks it’s a joke that I had to learn a whole flipping page of Caesar — King Edward’s is a very old-fashioned school — everyone says so.” He blinked suddenly. “If you want to see the villa I can show you the way. It’s just the other side of the church.”

“Thank you.” Benedikt leaned forward slightly towards the boy. “I went to an old-fashioned school too — I had the same trouble.”

“With Latin?” Benje pointed the way.

“With English, actually,” Benedikt lied.

“You speak it jolly well now.”

Benedikt shrugged. “So . . . one day you will speak Latin very well.”

“ ‘Cept there’s no one to speak it to —

Latin is a language

As dead as dead can be.

It killed the Ancient Romans —

And now it’s killing me!“

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They rounded the end of the church.

“But it will help you speak your own language.” Benedikt summoned up Mother’s view on the subject. “To learn a foreign language, you have to learn your own.”

“That’s what David says. Actually, I don’t mind Latin. But I’d rather learn French — or German, of course.” Benje amended his opinion hastily, out of consideration for his new companion, Benedikt suspected.

“German is a not-so-difficult language, I think.” Benedikt nodded, man-to-man. “But David is right—he is your schoolmaster?”

“No. David Aud—” Benje caught himself. “He’s just someone I know, that’s all.”

“Well, I agree with him.” That was interesting: David Audley was here, in the midst of them in the little village, and known to them—

known to Mr Cecil, and known to Benje, and certainly known to Miss Becky . . . But someone had told Benje not to broadcast the fact of his being there.

They were approaching a stile set in the churchyard wall.

“We go over here . . .What’s your job then—what do you do, if you’re not a schoolmaster.” Benje gestured towards the stile.

“Were you ever in the army?”

“No.” He set his hand on the wall. It was odd how much the lie cost him—how much he would have liked to have won Benje’s good regard, as he surely could have done with the truth, boys being what they were the world over, whatever they might think later in their student days. “My eye-sight is not good, dummy1

unfortunately. And I have flat feet.” He swung himself up, over the stile. “They would not have me.”

“Hard luck.” Benje commiserated with him. “We’ve got a boy like that in our form—he can’t play cricket.” He looked over his shoulder. “But Darren can’t play cricket either— he can see perfectly well, but he can’t hit a ball to save his life.”

“Cricket’s a boring game,” said Darren dismissively from behind them. “You were lucky—I don’t expect they tried to make you play it, Mr—Mr . . .”

“Thomas,” said Benedikt. If they called David Audley ‘David’, they must learn to call him ‘Thomas’. He was more than half-way to getting through to them now, and if he could get on Christian name terms he would be all the way.

“There’s the villa,” said Benje, pointing.

The field sloped gently away from them, down to a belt of trees which must mark the course of the stream which ran the length of the valley between the ridges on each side.

It was a typical Roman site—that was what had been said of it—

sheltered and watered, just the sort of place the Romanised Britons, if not the Romans themselves, would have been encouraged to choose in all the confidence of Roman peace, with no thought for defence behind the shield of the legions.

He looked round, to try and get his bearings. Somewhere on his left, up the valley, ran the line of the Roman road from the coast, and ‘Caesar’s Camp’ might well be its marker, if the name meant anything more than peasant legend.

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He came back to the excavation itself, on the furthest side of the field away from him, almost under the trees. Clearly, it was not far beyond the exploratory phase of the trial trenches to establish its general shape—even the two temporary huts, erected presumably to house finds and equipment respectively, had a brand-new, unweathered look; nor was much work in progress, with only a man and a youth in sight, squatting beside a grid cut in the turf which was partially covered by a great sheet of yellow plastic.

“Come on,” said Benje. “They won’t mind as long as you’re with us.”

They were half-way across the field before the man stood up, and became instantly recognisable.

“Who is that?” asked Benedikt innocently. “One of the archaeologists, is he?”

“Mmm . . .” Benje nodded.

“Yes,” said Darren, coming up on his other side. “But you didn’t tell us what you do. You’re not a schoolmaster—?”

“I am a civil servant.” The youth was standing up now. “I work for the government.”

“Are you on holiday?” Darren was really becoming rather tiresomely inquisitive.

“Yes.” But it was the youth who was coming to meet him, not David Audley. “I am with the embassy in London—or, I will be from next Monday. I am just starting a tour of duty in England, you see—”

It was not a youth—it was a girl—a young woman—

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Miss Becky.

A heavy thumping sound diverted his attention momentarily, coming from the margin of the trees beside the huts, just to his right: the front half of a horse appeared through the foliage—it tossed its head at him, and then swung round on its tether, stamping the ground with its hind legs and flicking its tail at him.

“Can I help you?”

Cool, educated voice, too full of confidence and self-assurance to allow any other emotion room in it: Miss Becky for sure—Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, only twenty years old, but already very much the Lady of the Manor on her own land, the undisputed mistress of Duntisbury Chase.

“His name’s Thomas—Thomas Wise— Vise— Veese— Veese-hoff

—” Benje gave up the attempt in despair.

“Wiesehöfer.” Benedikt met her gaze directly, and the sympathetic half-smile he had conjured up on Benje’s behalf almost died on his lips, because the look in those pale blue-grey eyes—more grey than blue—transfixed him: where that voice was neutral upper-class English, those eyes had the duellist’s look in them, of pistols-at-twelve-paces and then the churchyard behind him. “Thomas Wiesehöfer.”

“He’s German,” said Darren.

“He’s come to see the villa,” said Benje.

“He’s a civil servant,” said Darren. “He’s on holiday.”

“He’s an expert on Roman villas,” said Benje. “They’re his hobby

—like stamp-collecting, Becky.”

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Her eyes left Benedikt, softening suddenly into more-blue-than-grey as they switched to each of his defenders in turn. “Oh, yes?”

She smiled. “And he drives a Mercedes with CD plates?”

Benedikt glanced sideways, at Benje, and made an oddly moving discovery: just as there was an emotion described as hero-worship, which he had seen on very rare occasions in the faces of men and boys for other men and other boys, so there was also one of heroine-worship, quite devoid of any sexual undertones, which a boy at least (if not a man) could have for someone of the other sex ... Or which—he glanced quickly at Darren, and found no such look there—or which, anyway, this boy Benje had for this young woman, Miss Becky.

“You know about him?” Benje didn’t sound put out by his heroine’s omniscience, it merely confirmed what he already believed, Benedikt guessed.

“I am not. . . most regrettably, I must admit that I am not an expert on Roman villas.” He would have to beware of Benje’s loyalty—it might be safer to cultivate Darren; but meanwhile he must head off that misapprehension. “Roman roads are more my ... my speciality.” He smiled shyly at Miss Becky, and was relieved to find the remains of her softened expression still visible. “Miss Maxwell-Smith?”

“Yes.” Without that coldness behind the eyes, and even with her hair severely pulled back into a pony-tail, she was quite a pretty girl, though she fell well short of beauty—it was a face with character bred into it, but at first sight he could not decide whether dummy1

the jaw-line betrayed self-will and obstinacy, or determination and constancy.

“I am passing by ... on holiday, as my friends here have said, before I take up my post in our embassy in London.” He paused, and blinked at her as though taking time to sort out his English. “I am going to Maiden Castle, near Dorchester . . . and to see the country of Thomas Hardy.” Another pause. “But in London I was told of your villa, Miss Maxwell-Smith, by ... by Professor Handforth-Jones, of the Society for the Advancement of Romano-British Studies.”

He had not intended producing Professor Handforth-Jones, like a rabbit out of the magician’s hat, so early in his introduction. But Audley had come up behind her as he spoke.

“Tony Handforth-Jones?” Audley rose to the name.

Rebecca Maxwell-Smith half-turned, half looked up to the big man. “You’ve heard of him?”

“I know him. He’s a good friend of mine—and a damn good archaeologist too. But he’s more into military sites in Scotland at the moment—Agricola’s line-of-march, and the location of Mons Graupius, and that sort of thing.” He nodded at her. “But he’ll have heard of your Fighting Man, for sure.” He gave Benedikt a nod.

“Hullo again.”

Rebecca Maxwell-Smith looked from one to the other of them.

“You’ve already met?”

“We’ve met.” Another nod. “But we haven’t actually been introduced. The Mercedes with the CD plates—I told you.”

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“Oh!” She caught her mistake skilfully. “How silly of me! Yes . . .

well. . . Mr Wiesehöfer—this is Dr David Audley, who is helping us with our excavations.”

“ ‘Helping’ is hardly the word.” Audley shook his head. “I’m no archaeologist—and Roman Britain isn’t my field. . . . The truth is, I’m a wheelbarrow-wheeler, and a cook-and-bottle washer, and a hewer-of-wood and drawer-of-water, is what I am, Mr Wiesehöfer.

Not a professional.”

He had the build for manual work, thought Benedikt, smiling back at the disclaimer. But he was also a professional in another field, who wasn’t prepared to compromise his cover by lying about his qualifications for being here in Duntisbury Chase, even for the benefit of an innocent foreigner.

“Dr Audley.” He nodded again. It would be interesting to probe that cover further, to find out how Audley accounted for his presence. But it wasn’t in Thomas Wiesehöfer’s own cover to show such curiosity yet.

“If you want to see the villa—here it is,” Rebecca Maxwell-Smith gestured around her. “We haven’t got very far with it, but of course you’re welcome to see what there is of it.”

“This is the end of the preliminary reconnaissance operations,”

explained Audley. “The big effort starts next spring.”

“Ah, yes.” What Audley had not added was that the reconnaissance had ended prematurely, somewhat to the archaeologists’ irritation.

At first, after the General’s death, they had been allowed to carry on, with only the loss of a single day for the funeral. But then Miss dummy1

Rebecca Maxwell-Smith had very recently indicated her wish that operations should cease for the time being, with the promise of generous financial aid the following year when she had full control of her inheritance. And with the estate trustees already obedient to her strong will, there was nothing the archaeologists had been able to do about it except to register their disappointment publicly—and their mystification at her change of heart privately. But Thomas Wiesehöfer ought not to know any of that.

He looked around. “But you have made discoveries, so I have been told.”

“Oh yes.” The girl nodded. “They have a fair idea of the extent of the buildings, as far as the trees.”

“They’ve uncovered the edge of a pavement over there—” Audley pointed “—and it just may be an Orpheus one, too.” He watched Benedikt covertly as he spoke.

“An Orpheus pavement?” Benedikt obliged him quickly. “I have seen fragments of such a pavement not far from my home, near Münster-Sarmsheim, also discovered recently—not as large as your great pavement at Woodchester, of course . . .But there are many villas in the territories of the Treveri, so there is always hope.” He smiled at Audley. “I may see this find, perhaps?”

“I’m sorry—it’s been covered up again,” the girl apologised. “To protect it from the frost during the winter.”

“Ah yes!” He transferred the smile to her. “And I’m afraid our Fighting Man isn’t on view, either.” She shook her head sadly.

“They’ve taken him away for detailed study—they didn’t want to dummy1

risk leaving him, once they’d found him. Did your friend in London tell you about him?”

“Professor Handforth-Jones? Yes . . . that is, he spoke of a warrior.

I did not quite understand . . . but a warrior, yes.”

“We call him our Fighting Man.” She pointed to a larger area of excavation. “He was found there, in what may have been a barn.

They think he was a Saxon, judging by his equipment.”

“A burial?” He nodded. “It was the custom sometimes, was it not. . . of the Saxon invaders ... to bury dead persons in such ruins?” That was what Handforth-Jones had said, anyway.

“No.” She frowned for an instant. “I mean, it may have been their custom—I’m not a historian. But, what I mean is, they don’t think he was buried—deliberately buried.”

“It was pure luck, really,” said Audley. “They were digging one of their trial trenches, and they hit the remains of this chap straight away, under the fallen debris of the roof—and just the way he’d fallen, too—sword in hand— literally sword in hand.” He paused for a moment, staring not at Benedikt, but across the field towards the area of excavation which the girl had indicated. “Or . . . what remained of the sword and the hand, anyway . . . and everything else he died with, so they think— helmet of some sort, and a belt with a dagger, and maybe some sort of crude cuirass even . . .

Right, Becky?”

The girl nodded. “They’re not sure about that. They said it was much too early to be certain. But they did get very excited about him, and they were tremendously careful about lifting him out—in dummy1

the end they undercut him, and raised him in one piece . . . What they think—well, they don’t go as far as saying that they think it, but it’s one theory—is that the barn caught fire, and fell on him . . .

when the villa was sacked. Because they found evidence of fire, both there and in another trench, over on the other side.” She pointed. “And the way they thought it might have happened is that he was killed in the barn here, but in all the confusion no one saw that—or no one lived to tell the tale, anyway . . . And the barn caught fire, and fell down, but maybe it was empty, so no one picked over the ruins, like they would have done with the main buildings—or, it could have been at night that the villa was sacked . . . But they didn’t see what happened to him, one way or another, anyway. He just disappeared.”

“ ‘Missing, presumed killed in action’,” murmured Audley. “Or maybe even ‘AWOL’, as we used to record more uncharitably in some cases.”

“It’s how he was when they found him, you see,” explained the girl. “He had his arms flung out wide, with all his equipment and his sword still in his hand, like David says. And what Dr Johns says is that if his own side had buried him they might have left his weapons with him, but they’d have laid him out properly at the very least. But if his side had lost, then the other side would have stripped him—they wouldn’t have let perfectly good weapons go to waste.”

Benedikt looked around him. The gently sloping meadow betrayed no tell-tale signs of what lay beneath it, except where the trial excavations had been dug. It wasjust a field, with trees on three dummy1

sides of it, the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping through them on one side, bounded on the fourth by the churchyard wall and the tree-shaded church itself. And it looked as though it had been just a field since the beginning of time.

You must rebuild inyour imagination, was what Papa always said about sites such as this. But it required an immense effort of will to raise up a great mansion in this grassy emptiness—a house with colonnades, and many rooms, and gracious pavements on which Orpheus had tamed his wild beasts in the lamplight, where generations of people had lived.

And then one day . . . one night . . . this dream of a great house had turned into a nightmare, with the red flower of the raiders’ fires bursting out of the thatch of the out-buildings as the house died, signalling the end of civilisation—

But it probably hadn’t been anything like that, he disciplined himself: the end would more likely have come much more slowly and ignominiously, with the original owners of the Orpheus pavement long gone, and their uncouth inheritors squabbling in the decayed ruins with invaders who were almost indistinguishable from them, but more virile.

The bleakness of that conclusion roused him. Whatever way the Duntisbury Roman villa had gone down into the dark, it was of no importance to him.

He blinked at Audley through the thick lenses of the spectacles.

“That is a most interesting theory, Dr—Dr Audley.”

Audley smiled. “Not mine, Mr Wiesehöfer. And not the most dummy1

interesting thing about the Fighting Man either, to my way of thinking.”

Benedikt looked at him questioningly.

“He was killed close to the door—almost in the doorway. They know that because of the position of the post-holes left by the door-posts.”

“So?” He thought there was something curiously mischievous in Audley’s smile.

“So . . . how was he killed? And who killed him?” Audley paused.

“Supposing the barn didn’t fall on him and kill him . . . and if it was just about to collapse he would hardly have gone into it ... did some poor frightened little Briton stab him from behind as he went in—someone lurking just inside the door, say? Or did some hulking great German—I beg your pardon!— some hulking great Saxon or Jutish warrior spear him from the front, while he was defending the doorway like Horatius on the bridge?”

Benedikt frowned. “But did you not say—or was it not Miss Maxwell-Smith who said . . . that he was a Saxon warrior?”

The smile was almost evil now. “That’s what the experts think, yes. But apparently there were people called ‘ foederati’ in those days, Mr Wiesehöfer.”

“Foedus” piped up Benje suddenly. “Foedus— foederis ... ‘a league between states or an agreement or covenant between individuals’—that’s the noun . . . But there’s an adjective foedus which means ‘foul, filthy and horrible’—L ike foedi oculi means

‘bloodshot eyes’, like Blackie Nabb’s got on Sunday mornings—”

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“Benje!” snapped Miss Maxwell-Smith, suddenly much older than her years. “You mustn’t say that about Blackie.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Benje was not overawed by his heroine.

“Dad says if it wasn’t for the Old General, Blackie ‘ud ’ave been disqualified from driving years ago—” he caught himself too late as he realised he had mentioned someone the memory of whom would pain her. “Sorry, Becky!”

“My fault—” interposed Audley quickly “—I told young Benjamin about foedus and the foederati.... We were having a discussion about the Latin language, and we decided the Roman-Britons must have made a joke of it—how their new Foreign Legion of great hairy beer-swilling Ger— Saxon— mercenary bodyguards were a filthy lot, with bloodshot eyes, like—”

“David!” Miss Maxwell-Smith treated Dr Audley with the same disapproval as Benje.

“Sorry, Becky.” Audley accepted the rebuke meekly, as though accepting also that Mr Blackie Nabb’s drinking habits were now under Miss Maxwell-Smith’s special protection. “The point is, Mr Wiesehöfer, that there were these Saxon foederati who were hired, and eventually given land to settle on, in return for protecting the Britons against their own Saxon folk who came raiding.” He stared at Benedikt for a moment. “So . . . was our Fighting Man one of the foederati being true to his salt, to the death, like a good mercenary?

Or was he a raider who came up the valley from the east, or over the hill from the south, to get his comeuppance and his just deserts, eh? Only time will tell!”

So that was it, thought Benedikt: Audley could hardly have made it dummy1

plainer if he had inscribed it in deeply-chiselled stone for his benefit.

“So! Yes . . .” He met the big man’s stare with obstinate innocence, refusing to be overborne by it. “That is something which only your experts will be able to tell—and perhaps not even they will be able to provide an answer to satisfy you.”

“Were there foederati in Germany?” Benje’s eyes were bright with intelligence. “The Romans had German provinces, didn’t, they?

They must have had German soldiers—they had British soldiers in their army, you know.”

It was impossible not to meet a boy like Benje.more than half-way.

“There have been German soldiers in the British Army, young man. Our Hanoverian Corps in my grandfather’s time carried the name ‘Gibraltar’ among the battle honours on the flags of its regiments—‘ Mit Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg’ was written on their standards: ‘ With Eliot to Glory and Victory’—we helped to defend your rock once upon a time, under a General Eliot . . . And we fought in Spain, for your Duke of Wellington—”

“Garcia Hernandez,” said Audley suddenly. “The King’s German Legion broke a French square there—the 1st and 2nd Dragoons, under Major-General von Bock . . . He’d already been wounded—

it was after the battle of Salamanca—and he was extremely short-sighted, like you, Mr Wiesehöfer .... But he was a splendid chap, and those KGL regiments were by far the best cavalry Wellington had—the best ones on either side, in fact . . . the British were the best horsemen, but as soldiers they were undisciplined rubbish, most of them—Garcia Hernandez was the finest cavalry action of dummy1

the whole campaign. Rommel would have been proud of them.”

Benedikt looked at Audley in total suprise. The man had been in a British armoured regiment in 1944, of course, so he was a cavalry man of sorts—the dossier said as much. But it had also stated quite clearly that he was a medievalist when not an eccentric ornament of British Intelligence.

Audley registered his surprise. “I had an ancestor there—at Salamanca ... an idiot officer in our dragoons. He was killed earlier the same day, when they smashed the French in Le Marchant’s charge,” he explained almost shyly. “Family history, you might say . . . my mother’s family, Mr Wiesehöfer.” Then he nodded.

“But you’re quite right about the Germans in the British service—

Hessians in America, but most of all Hanoverians against Napoleon, whom they didn’t like at all. . . . They used to slip across the Channel and enlist in a depot not far from here, at Weymouth—the 1st and 2nd eventually became the Kaiser’s 13th and 14th Uhlans . . . ‘ Tapfer und Tret? was the 1st’s motto at Salamanca and Garcia Hernandez—” he looked down at Benje “—

Fortis et Fidelis to you, young Benjamin. Not a bad motto for anyone, foederati or native.”

“Brave and faithful,” translated Benedikt.

“So what was our Fighting Man?” Audley considered him, unsmiling this time. “We may never know—you may be right. All we do know for sure is that he came into Duntisbury Chase alive, and he stayed for fifteen hundred years—dead.”

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III

“A fascinating old mechanism.” The priest nodded towards the contraption of cog-wheels and weights and ropes which Benedikt had been dutifully studying for the last five minutes. “They say that it is the oldest clock in England still in working order. But that is not strictly true, of course, for it was silent for many years, and it has been extensively restored.”

As though it had been listening for its cue, the mechanism jerked suddenly, and the ropes on the wall quivered, and somewhere far away and high up a bell rang in answer to the movement, joining the other bells which had been calling the faithful to prayer. In God’s world it must be time for evensong, to give thanks for the day’s blessings and to pray for safety during the hours of darkness to come.

The priest plucked nervously at the folds of his long black cassock.

“Mr Wiesehöfer?” He smiled tentatively at Benedikt.

A priest? But a priest, of course! Who better, in a cathedral, than a priest?

Benedikt nodded. “Good evening, Father. I am Thomas Wiesehöfer, yes.”

“Mr Wiesehöfer.” The priest looked half relieved, half fearful.

Perhaps he really was a priest. “If you would follow me, please.”

Benedikt crossed the nave silently in the wake of the black cassock, pausing only to pay his duty in the central aisle in dummy1

conformity with his guide. There was a small gathering of evening worshippers far down the rows of chairs towards the high altar, he observed. It would have been pleasant to have been able to join them—it would have been something to tell Mother in his next letter, the reading of which would have pleased her. But he had other gods to worship now, the unforgiving old earth-bound gods of man’s world.

The priest waited for him by a doorway, flanked by an elderly black-gowned verger who regarded him with a mixture of disapproval and slight suspicion as he squeezed through the half-closed door into the gloom beyond.

It was a cloister. He turned, expecting the priest to follow him, but the man remained in the gap, unmoving.

“Down to your right, Mr Wiesehöfer—you will see a light.”

Benedikt looked to his right. On one side the cloister was open, but the evening had come prematurely for the time of year under a canopy of low clouds and the passage ahead of him was full of shadows. Far down it he could see a faint yellow light diffusing out of a gap in the wall.

He turned back to the priest. “Thank you, Father.”

To his surprise, he saw the priest’s hand, pale against the cassock, sign the cross for him. “God bless you, and keep you always in His mercy, Mr Wiesehöfer.”

Then the door closed with a thud which echoed down the cloisters ahead, towards where the light waited.

Amen to that—his own thought mingled with the blessing.

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But why all the precautions? The blessing was fair enough, and better than fair, and any man far from home might feel the better for it. And it had been a good contact. But this was their territory, where their writ ran on their terms. So ... why all the precautions?

The wall on his left was rich with memorial tablets, all probably dedicated to the departed faithful of the diocese but which he could not read in the half-light. Then, of course, the English loved their memorials: they had a Roman weakness for cutting words into stone, as he had observed in the body of the cathedral, not merely to recall its past servants, but also the servants of the state who had died in their imperial wars and lay in faraway graves. Their

‘Fighting Men’, indeed!

The opening out of which the pale yellow light came was a doorway: a tiny arched doorway, so low that he had to duck his head to pass beneath it.

“Mind the step, Captain Schneider,” said a voice which he had never heard before—which was certainly not the voice of the Special Branch man Herzner had introduced to him.

Outside, the light had been pale, but inside it was bright enough to make him blink at the single unshaded bulb which hung low in the little room, surrounded by the smell of old stone and damp, slightly flavoured with furniture polish.

Polish—polished shoes— highly polished shoes, glistening ox-blood red-brown . . . then trousers with old-fashioned turn-ups in them, immaculately creased in expensive British tweed, lifting his eye up, past the matching jacket, and the Old School or regimental striped tie.

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“Captain Schneider—” Above the tie, the face was fierce, almost brick-red, to match the receding pepper-and-salt hair, and unmistakable from its photographs “—I’m Colonel Butler... and Chief Inspector Andrew you already know.”

Benedikt snapped into top gear. Chief Inspector Andrew, slender and sharp-faced, and sharp-witted, he did already know, and had expected; but Colonel Butler he also knew, but had never met, and had certainly not expected to meet here— now. And Colonel Butler changed all his points of reference.

He straightened up. “Sir . . . Chief Inspector . . .”

The thing to remember—Herzner on the Chief Inspector, and the Kommissar print-out from Wiesbaden on Colonel Butler—was that neither of them was a quite typical specimen of the breed he represented: the system had worked on them both, moulding them to its traditions, but they were also both meritocrats who had risen from the ranks, each therefore with his own element of unpredictability. And that wasn’t an altogether comforting thing to have to remember.

“Captain.” The Chief Inspector acknowledged him with a nod of recognition. “You found Duntisbury Chase, then?”

“Yes.” Benedikt had expected the Colonel to conduct the meeting, but the Colonel studied him in silence. “I have been there—I have looked around it, as you asked me to do, Chief Inspector.”

“Interesting place, is it?”

“Most interesting.” If the Chief Inspector was going to ask the questions, then he would ignore the Colonel until the Colonel dummy1

chose not to be ignored. “Duntisbury Royal is the name of the village. I arrived there just before midday. I went to the public house, which is named the Eight Bells. I drank a glass of Lowenbrau there, but I was unsuccessful in booking a room for the night. The landlord directed me to the Roman villa which is being excavated nearby. On the site I met Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, who is the owner of most of the land around the village. She introduced me to Dr David Audley, who is presently staying at Duntisbury Manor, where she lives. I returned to the public house, where I had lunch. After lunch I walked round the village, and then on up to Duntisbury Rings, which is an Iron Age earthwork on the ridge to the south. From there I walked along the ridge, westwards, until I reached another earthwork, which is known as Caesar’s Camp, but which is certainly not a Roman construction—it is more likely a tribal fort, like the other earthwork, only much later in date. I then spent the rest of the afternoon ostensibly searching for the line of the Roman road which crosses the valley from south-west to north-east. I left the Chase at 1730 hours, and came directly here, as arranged with you yesterday.”

Chief Inspector Andrew nodded. About half-way through the recital he had flicked one quick look at Colonel Butler, after the mention of Audley. “What did Audley say to you?”

“We discussed the antiquities of Duntisbury Royal . . . briefly.”

“Oh aye? You know something about antiquities, do you? Iron Age earthworks and Roman villas?”

“I know little about earthworks. I know a Roman fort when I see one. But more about Roman roads, as it happens.” Benedikt dummy1

understood that, while he was replying to the Special Branch man’s questions, he was actually speaking to the Colonel, and being assessed on his answers. “You warned me that Dr Audley was in Duntisbury Chase, Chief Inspector. You did not tell me why I might be there, however . . . and it is not a place to which strangers are likely to come by accident—or perhaps it is only by accident that they may come there, when they wish to be somewhere else, so that they would not wish to remain there, as I had to do. So I needed a reason.”

They waited for him to continue.

“The Press Attaché obtained for me photo-copies of newspaper cuttings in which Duntisbury Chase—or Duntisbury Royal—was mentioned.” He shrugged. “Mostly they concerned the death of General Herbert Maxwell ... or, so far as Duntisbury Royal was concerned, his funeral . . . But I could not think of any sufncient reason for Thomas Wiesehöfer to be interested in a victim of terrorism—nor did I judge it prudent to display such an interest, even if I had thought of a reason .... However, there was a report of an archaeological discovery there, and of excavations in progress . . . And, you see, Chief Inspector, my father was for many years a professor of Roman Archaeology in Germany. As a boy I used to accompany him on his journeys, during the holidays . . . Later on, when I was at university, I used to drive him

—he lost an arm during the war, in Africa. Tracing Roman roads was one of his hobbies, so I am not unacquainted with the terms used—with the metalling and the alignments, and so on .... Even, Chief Inspector, I believe I may have identified a terraced agger dummy1

this afternoon, on the slopes of the ridge near Caesar’s Camp, though on chalk downland it may be difficult to prove, since such terraces were often unmetalled, and it may be only a pre-Roman tribal trackway, you see—eh?”

The Special Branch man gave him a thin smile. “You mean . . .

you think you can bullshit David Audley, eh?”

“He’s not an archaeologist,” said Benedikt mildly. “I believe he is a medievalist. . . among other things. Is that not so?”

The smile compressed into an unsmiling line. “What you want to ask yourself, Captain—or, let’s say, what’s more important—is . . .

whatever he is ... did you bullshit him?”

Benedikt shook his head. “That is impossible to say, Chief Inspector. I am not aware of having made any mistakes . . . But . . .

it is true that he warned me off—”

“Warned you off?” That made the Special Branch man frown.

“How?”

Benedikt smiled. “He told me what happened—or what might have happened—to another German who strayed into Duntisbury Chase.”

“What German?” Chief Inspector Andrew obviously didn’t know about the Fighting Man. “What happened to him?”

“He died there.” Benedikt raised his hand. “It was a very long time ago, Chief Inspector—in the last days of the Romans.” He didn’t want to antagonise the man. “They dug up the bones of an Anglo-Saxon warrior—a Germanic soldier. . . . He told me about it in some detail. But it was gently done; for me, if it concerned me, in dummy1

whichever way it concerned something of interest to an archaeologist, but a warning to someone who wasn’t.”

Colonel Butler stirred. “Aye—that would be Audley!” He spoke with feeling. “That would be Audley to the life!”

Benedikt turned to him. “But he could hardly have known what I was doing there.” The curiosity which had been consuming him drove him on now. “Or, if he did, he knows more than I know, anyway.”

“Aye.” The candid expression on Colonel Butler’s face suggested depressingly that such might well be the case. “Happen he does, Captain . . . happen he does.”

The English construction ‘happen’ threw Benedikt for a moment, until he concluded it must be a dialect word, meaning ‘perhaps’.

“But not from me, sir.”

“No.” Butler’s harsh features softened. “You’ve done very well, Captain Schneider. I’m grateful to you.”

Now was the time, when the Colonel had spoken to him, but evidently thought that his brief and unimaginative report, plus the Fighting Man episode, was all that he had to tell: now the Colonel was ready for him.

“I don’t mean just from me—from what I said.” The final lesson of the seminar on de-briefing surfaced in his memory: and this, a de-briefing by a foreigner unwilling to press him too hard, was an exemplar of that lesson, that the correct delivery of information could be almost as important as the information itself, if it was to convince the listener!

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“Go on, Captain.” Colonel Butler knew there was more.

“Yes, sir.” He could feel the Colonel’s attention concentrate on him. “The brief which was given to me, with Major Herzner’s agreement, was that I should go down to Duntisbury Chase and have a look round it, to see what was there—to see who was there ... to see if there was anything to be seen—if there was anything out of place. A reconnaissance, in fact.”

“A reconnaissance—aye, Captain.”

“Yes. I was told only that Dr David Audley was there, which might otherwise have surprised me—taken me by surprise, I mean.”

Colonel Butler said nothing to that.

“From that I chose to assume that. . . first. . . you were using me on unofficial attachment because—”

“Official attachment, Captain Schneider,” snapped Butler. “Your transfer to London is to liaise with the appropriate British intelligence agencies.”

“Yes, sir. But not for another ten days—and because I’m not known over here—because I have no experience of British operations and I’m not known over here ... no more than Dr Wiesehöfer is known, as it happens—”

“All right, Captain. So you’re not known.” Butler lifted his chin belligerently. “Or ... let us say . . . what you did in Sonnenstrand, and what you’ve been doing in Yugoslavia since then, isn’t known

—to those who don’t need to know it—right?”

Benedikt swallowed. It was as Herzner had said: Don’t be deceived into thinking that his bite won’t be as bad as his bark just because dummy1

he looks like one of their sergeant-majors. . .

But he had to go on now, even though he didn’t fancy moving from first to second. “Yes, sir. So . . .”

“So I didn’t have anyone else to use at short notice, who wouldn’t be known to David Audley?” Butler brushed his hesitation aside.

“Very well—you can assume that, too—just so long as you also assume . . . no, not assume—so long as you also rely on the certainty that Dr Audley is a senior officer of unimpeachable reliability, on whose loyalty I would bet my life as well as yours—

that will save us all time . . . and it may even save you from a certain amount of worry and embarrassment, according to how accurate the print-out from your Wiesbaden computer has been.

Right, Captain?”

Right, Captain? Audley was a specialist—and very nearly an exclusive specialist, too—on Soviet intentions. And that had been worrying—no question about that! But ... so where had the Kommissar got it wrong? That was worrying, too.

But he still had to go on, jumping some of his clever assumptions which had maybe not been so clever.

“A reconnaissance, Captain.” Butler exercised the senior officer’s prerogative of mercy. “We’ll come back to Audley later ... A reconnaissance, you were saying?”

The correct response to mercy, when there was no other alternative, was confession.

“You are quite right. There is something wrong with Duntisbury Chase.” The pressure on him suddenly crystallised all Benedikt’s dummy1

impressions. “I’ve never been in a place like it—not even on the other side.” The crystallisation left him with an extraordinary and frightening near-certainty which up until this moment had been a subjective theory he would only have dared to advance tentatively.

Even . . . even though he believed it himself, now, as all the pieces of it slotted into the places which had been made to fit them, it seemed quite outrageous for a stretch of peaceful English countryside.

“Trust Audley.” Chief Inspector Andrew nodded at Colonel Butler.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Ssh!” Colonel Butler raised his hand and nodded encouragingly at Benedikt. “Tell us, Captain. And don’t be put off just because of anything I’ve said.”

That was the final incentive Benedikt needed.

“If you wanted me to look at them, I thought they might want to look at me, Colonel. So I prepared my belongings for them.”

“Fair enough.”

“They opened the car—and they opened all my baggage. They went through everything.”

Andrew frowned. “But you came straight here—?”

“I’m in a multi-storey car-park. And it only took a minute to check, Chief Inspector. Because I set it up to be checked—and it had been searched—”

Butler gestured to stop him. “Professionally?”

This time Benedikt frowned. “They did not leave obvious traces—

there were no marks on the locks, or anything crude . . . But they dummy1

had plenty of time, while I was going round the Chase—”

“Not Audley.” Colonel Butler nodded to Andrew, then came back to Benedikt. “Opening things up delicately is not one of his skills—

it’s a skill he has always been at pains not to acquire. So he had someone else with him who could do it, that’s all.”

Benedikt stared at him. If it had not been Audley ... it had never occurred to him that it had not been Audley. But . . . Rebecca Maxwell-Smith would not possess that sort of expertise, and neither Old Cecil nor young Bobby fitted the tfill, any better than did the friendly landlord of the Eight Bells, or his nubile assistant—

“What else?” The Colonel prodded him.

What else, indeed!

Yet it still required an effort. “There are no signs to Duntisbury Royal, Colonel. Would you believe that?”

“Signs?”

“Signposts. . . . On the main road there are many little side-roads, all with signs naming villages—even naming farms. But there is no sign ‘Duntisbury Royal’ on the signpost on the main road.”

“So how did you get there?”

“I asked the way. There is a petrol-station near the turning— it is the only such place for several miles, and therefore the obvious place at which to inquire.” Benedikt paused. “But later on, when I returned, I examined the signpost. There was an arm on the post, but it has been cut off with a wood-saw.”

Butler nodded slowly. “So you asked the way.”

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“So I asked the way. So I was expected.”

“Expected?”

“Along the way, perhaps ten minutes, I was delayed by a farm tractor, manoeuvring on to the road a trailer. And behind me there came a Land Rover, boxing me in.” He paused again.

“You mean, the petrol-station attendant warned them that you were coming?” Butler cocked his head. “Why should he do that?”

“So that I could be examined . . . scrutinised.”

“By whom?”

“There were two men in the Land Rover. Their windscreen was so dirty I could not make them out, but they could have studied me easily enough. But also by David Audley, certainly.”

“Audley was there?”

“He arrived there. And he came up to the car to look at me closely

—to hear me speak, perhaps.”

Chief Inspector Andrew shook his head. “But you said you met him ... at the Roman place?”

“I was introduced to him there. I was directed to him there, the second time. But the first time ... we were not introduced.”

“So he wanted to know more about you?”

“By then he knew more about me, I think. At the public house I explained why I had come to Duntisbury Royal. But he wanted to know more than that—yes.”

Colonel Butler rubbed his chin, and in the silence of the little stone cell Benedikt could hear the slight rasping sound of the blunt dummy1

fingers on the invisible stubble.

“And what did he make of you, Captain Schneider? You said you made no mistakes?”

“I do not believe I did. Also, at least he would not have taken me for a soldier, Colonel. And if he telephones the embassy they will tell him about Dr Wiesehöfer—they will confirm what I told him.

Major Herzner will have seen to that.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“He has phoned the embassy?” Benedikt looked from one to the other, and the Colonel nodded to the Special Branch man.

“Somebody phoned the embassy.” Andrew nodded. “Not from there—we’re monitoring all the calls from Duntisbury Royal. And not Audley either.” He studied Benedikt for a moment. “What did you say Herr—Dr—Wiesehöfer did for a living?”

“I said he was a civil servant, Chief Inspector.”

“And what does he do?”

“He is a civil servant.” They would know, of course. “He is a procurement advisor on the NATO standardisation committee.”

Andrew half-smiled. “Yes . . . well, it was from the export director of Anglo-American Electronics, the call was. They specialise in micro-systems for missiles for NATO.”

But why the half-smile? “So it was a genuine call?”

Chief Inspector Andrew shrugged. “Could be.”

“The trouble with David Audley ... is that he knows a lot of people, Captain,” said Butler.

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“Like the managing director of AAE, for one,” said Andrew. “So, if he was going to check up on you, this is exactly the way he might do it—on the old boy network. But there’s no way we can check up on that without spooking him, because the MD there owes him a big favour, and we can’t rely on patriotism being thicker than gratitude in his case, because he’s an American.”

The contradictions of the situation were beginning to confuse Benedikt. In Germany the managing director of a company specialising in NATO missile-systems would be no problem, he would know where his duty lay, and his best interests too. But then in Germany, when Colonel Butler’s opposite number trusted a senior officer to the extent that Colonel Butler trusted Dr David Audley, there would have been no problem to resolve in the first place. It was all very confusing.

Butler had stopped stroking his chin. “Why would he not take you for a soldier?”

That, at least, was easy. He extracted the spectacle-case from his pocket, and the spectacles from the case.

“Soldiers are not half-blind.” He perched the appalling things on his nose. His eyes hurt and the faces of the two men swam in an opaque sea, and he took the spectacles off quickly. “I use them with contact lenses—I became used to them several years ago—”

He smiled at Colonel Butler, remembering Sonnenstrand “—in Bulgaria. With contact lenses, it is a matter of growing accustomed to them. Then the glasses by themselves are no problem. Also, with contact lenses and the necessary preparations which go with them, no one questions that I should have all that in my baggage too dummy1

—they cannot know that the lenses correct the glasses, not the eye-sight, you see.”

“Huh!” Colonel Butler sniffed. “A gimmick.”

“But a convincing one, sir. And not inappropriate for a student of Roman roads.”

Butler remained unconvinced. “But Audley’s no fool. And I didn’t expect him to surface so quickly. I was expecting him to keep in the background.” He shook his head. “So I wouldn’t bet on it—and that gives us less time, I’m afraid . . . Always supposing that we have any time.”

“The Roman roads weren’t bad, sir,” demurred the Chief Inspector.

“He can hardly have been expecting that, for God’s sake! Not in the time we had—”

“Huh!” This time it was more like a growl. “He once passed me off as an expert on Roman fortification—or on Byzantine fortification, anyway, which is a damn sight more obscure than Roman roads—

and in a damn sight less time, too!” He grimaced reminiscently.

“But you couldn’t know that—I doubt whether even Captain Schneider’s computer in Wiesbaden knows it!”

The Colonel was plainly worried about his unimpeachably reliable subordinate, notwithstanding that loyalty-to-the-death. And although that added to Benedikt’s confusion, so far as that was possible, it also fed his instinctive liking for the man: Colonel Butler was a leader out of the same mould as Papa’s idols.

“I don’t know what he made of me, sir.” He came back to the original question. “But I was not the man he was waiting for—that dummy1

I know.”

“The man?” Colonel Butler forgot his worries. “The man?”

“It could not have been a woman. He would not have come to look at me if I had been the wrong sex.” He stretched what he believed to its limits. “At the worst ... he was not sure of me—that I was not doing what I was actually doing . . . Looking over the place, that is.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I was never alone, sir. From the moment I entered the Chase, there was always someone, I think, who was watching me.” He struggled with the concept. “At the road-block . . . and in the public house . . . But there was a man on the hillside—on the ridge—

before that. . . And in the village, when I walked round it, there was this woman on a bicycle who seemed to follow us—”

“Us?”

Benedikt smiled. “There were these two little boys I met, on their racing bicycles—they showed me round . . . Before lunch they took me to the Roman villa, and afterwards they led me through the village, to the footpath which leads to the Duntisbury Rings—”

Benje had been dismissive: “She’s just an old nosey-parker— you don’t want to take any notice of her.”

She had been tall and thin, riding a tall and thin bicycle unbalanced by an immense wicker basket resting on her front mudguard. But she had been there behind them, off and on, until the second man had appeared.

“—and after her there was another man—”

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The man with the gun couched under his arm, on the skyline.

“That’s Old Levi— from the Almshouses. He lives on boiled sausages, Mum says— and boiled rabbits, when he can bag one,

‘cause there’re not many of them around . . . An’ he sleeps in his gumboots, Mum says . . . Because when they took him into the cottage hospital, when he had ‘flu, they had to cut them off his feet, to get him into bed—yrrrch!”

But Old Levi—(who didn’t look particularly old, from the way he kept up with them; but everyone who wasn’t obviously young was old to Benje and Darren) but Old Levi had paced them, on the skyline and off it, all the way from Duntisbury Rings to Caesar’s Camp, and then down along the possible terrace of the Roman agger into the valley, to the sun-dappled pools where the stream idled between the trees—

Another thought struck him, which dove-tailed beautifully with everything else he had said, like the good work of a master carpenter slotting together, yet much more frightening, and much more humiliatingly—

“What’s the matter?” It was the Chief Inspector who had read his face more quickly.

The little boys! thought Benedikt. The little clever boys, with their clever and insistent questions—?

But he had clued himself to the answer, with his own remembrance of that village near Leipzig two years ago, when because of his stupidity the Russians and the East Germans had both been close behind him—inescapably close—with the women carrying their dummy1

sheets off the line, down by another stream, and the children coming back from school, staring at him with huge eyes until the women had sent them about their business as he had slipped away into the trees—

All he had to do was to reverse the situation—he had said as much himself: I’ve never been in a place like it, not even on the other side

— to become an enemy, not a friend!

But here in England—?

Here in England, too! Yes!

He looked at Chief Inspector Andrew, then at Colonel Butler. “I think I have been stupid, you know.”

They both waited for the end-product of that conclusion.

“It is not that I have given anything away. Perhaps quite the contrary . . . But I have nevertheless been stupid.”

Suddenly he saw the little girl beside the water-splash, sitting on the footbridge in her grubby dress, and then ducking behind the phone-box. And then into it—

“Yes . . . these two small boys, who accompanied me . . . not so little, but not big boys . . .”

“Little boys?” Butler regarded him incredulously.

“They attached themselves to me.” There had been no escape from them then, and there was no escape from them now. “I...I have experience with boys. I have nephews . . . and I help to run a youth club for the church, in the place where I live, when I am there.”

The need for honesty outweighed the burden of his humiliation: in a de-briefing honesty was essential, anything less than the truth dummy1

mediated against security. “I thought to use them—to ask questions which I could not so easily ask their elders.”

“Yes?” The Special Branch man was there.

“I thought I was cultivating them. But now I’m not sure that it wasn’t the other way round—that they were questioning me . . .

And that they were watching me more closely than their elders could have done—that the woman, and the second man . . . they were the back-up, watching over the boys, rather than watching me.”

“Yeah—y eah!!” Chief Inspector Andrew at least didn’t find it outrageous. “I’ve seen little kids look out for their elder brothers, on a job . . . Nothing like this, of course. But if you’ve got a bright kid . . .” He nodded at Butler.

“God bless my soul!” The Colonel took a moment to adjust to the idea. “Children?”

“These were clever children, sir.” Benedikt himself still couldn’t quite accept the little girl at the water-splash. “They were at... is it

‘secondary school’, you call it?”

“Comprehensive? Grammar?” hazarded Andrew. “Public?”

“It was named after a king of England. And they both learnt Latin.”

“They still learn Latin at comprehensive schools, or some of them do,” said Andrew. “Thank God!”

“They had scholarships—”

“Never mind!” snapped Butler. “What you’re saying . . . what you are saying is ... the whole village?” The adjustment still taxed him, dummy1

too. “The children . . . the tractor driver—and the Land Rover driver . . . the woman on the bicycle, and the man with the shot-gun . . . ?”

“The petrol-station attendant at the garage,” supplemented Andrew. “Him too. And the publican.”

“And Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith.” The Colonel added to the roll-call. “And Audley.”

Benedikt began to feel foolish. Behind the Iron Curtain was one thing, from the Elbe to the Vistula and along the Danube . . . But not in England, surely! Or ... if in Toxteth and Brixton, maybe . . .

not in Duntisbury Royal, anyway—

Yet Colonel Butler was nodding at his Chief Inspector. “That could be it. Remember how she said ‘we’?‘ We really have a chance’?”

Benedikt stopped feeling foolish. “A chance of what, sir?”

Butler came back to him. “Let us get this absolutely straight, Captain. You believe, having been to Duntisbury Royal, that they are waiting for a man to arrive there?”

“A man—or men, perhaps.” Benedikt nodded. “Or someone.”

“With hostile intent?”

He could only shrug. “I cannot tell that. But they had no flags out—

no garlands of welcome. They wished to be warned of the approach of strangers, and they were concerned to identify such strangers.” In the end he had to commit himself. “What I am saying is ... subjective, of course. Since you asked me to look there, I went there looking for something. And there was Audley . . .”

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“And there was Audley.” A corner of the Colonel’s mouth twitched. “And you would know that where Audley goes there is trouble—that would be on your computer.”

“Yes.” No point in denying that, even though Audley had not operated in Germany for many years. He stared at the Colonel.

“Hostile intent. . . yes. Or the intent may be with the stranger. So perhaps defensive intent, sir.”

“And the whole village is involved in this . . . defensive intent?”

That was still the sticking point. “I did not meet the whole village.

It seems . . . unlikely.”

“Unlikely?”

“In England unlikely. There are places where it would not be unlikely—places where the government of the country is hated, and where strangers are feared and distrusted—where the laws are unjust and oppressive . . . And also in peasant communities, where there is still traditional leadership and strong feelings of local solidarity. In such places it is the objective of the regime to cut off such leadership and undermine such feelings, but sometimes such efforts have the opposite effect. But. . . .”

“But?”

“But I do not think I am describing England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Colonel. That is the difficulty.”

Colonel Butler nodded. “Yes. So it is possible that you have imagined all this?” He smiled suddenly. “Not altogether unreasonably ... on the basis of your instructions, and the presence of David Audley . . . and also perhaps because of your own dummy1

experiences elsewhere, eh?”

“I did not imagine the searching of my baggage.”

“No. But that could have been an ordinary thief—ordinary, but skilful—on the look-out for money and a good German camera.

There’s a lot of that about in England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, I’m afraid, Captain.”

Well: there was the challenge. And all the rest of what they had said could have been merely leading him on.

“My car was parked very publicly, outside the public house, beside what passes for the main street in Duntisbury Royal. It would have had to have been a very skilful thief.” Benedikt played for time.

“Oh, we’ve got a few of them.” Chief Inspector Andrew cocked his head ruefully. “They just don’t go around in cloth caps and striped jerseys any more, carrying bags labelled ‘Swag’.”

No more time.

He looked the Colonel in the eye. “No. Duntisbury Royal is different. There is something very wrong there. I cannot prove it, but I feel it.” His confidence strengthened as he spoke. “It is . . .

what I feel is ... it is a most beautiful and peaceful valley, where the people are kind and helpful— and I was glad to get out of it in one piece, Colonel.”

They stared at each other for one more moment, then the Colonel turned to his colleague. “Aye . . . Well, show him the papers, Andrew. Sheet by sheet, if you please. He’s ready for them now.”

The Special Branch man half-turned, to pick up a grey folder which had been hidden behind him within the jumble of stacked dummy1

ecclesiastical furniture half-filling the cell. From the folder he passed a single sheet of closely-typed paper to Benedikt.

Herbert George Maxwell was born in 1912, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Julian Robert Maxwell MC, Grenadier Guards, who was killed in action in 1917 shortly after succeeding to command the 2nd/21st West Yorks at Ypres, and who as ‘Robert Julian’ was widely recognised as one of the most lyrical of the war poets while his military identity remained a close secret shared only with a few close friends.

The Maxwell family has lived at Duntisbury Manor, in Duntisbury Chase, Dorset, since the Reformation. From the time of Marlborough the first-born son of the house without exception has served the sovereign as a soldier, invariably rising to command a distinguished regiment of cavalry or battalion of infantry, and often retiring from a higher command still.

‘Robert Julian’s’ poems were nothing exceptional in the Maxwells; most of the soldiers among them were considered by their colleagues to be ’brainy‘, and army gossip and gaps in their recorded service indicate a remarkable range of interests, from the collection of antiquities in Italy and Greece to friendship with Darwin and Huxley. At the same time, the Maxwells traditionally devoted much of their lives to the service of the family estate, of which the Manor was the centre and the surrounding farms of Duntisbury Chase the greater part, which pursuit was not in those days incompatible with a military career.

Herbert Maxwell differed from his ancestors only in joining the dummy1

Royal Artillery. After his father’s death he was brought up by his mother, but with help from her brother, Major William James Lonsdale, who had lost an arm commanding a troop of field-guns at Mons in 1914, and who looked after the estate at his brother-in-law’s request until 1917 and thereafter until his nephew’s majority, retiring to Bournemouth then, where he died in 1934.

Herbert was educated, as his father had been, at Wellington, and, as his uncle had been, at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

He was commissioned in 1932, serving subsequently with pack-guns on the North-West Frontier and later with the Home Forces, latterly as an instructor in Gunnery at the School of Artillery, Larkhill, not far from his beloved Duntisbury Chase. He was a devoted—

The sheet ended there, and Benedikt looked up, to receive the next one.

Husband? There had been no mention of wife and children yet—

— student of symphonic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and officers who served with him remember his books on musicology, his portable radiogramophone apparatus dismantled for carrying in steel cartridge-boxes, and his box of gramophone records.

On the outbreak of war in 1939 Maxwell left the School of Artillery

— the Commandant later remarked that he all but cut his way out of Larkhill— and returned to take command of a troop in his old dummy1

regiment, which was one of the first artillery formations to go to France in that autumn, and one of the last to leave, via Dunkirk in June 1940. Awarded the Military Cross for gallant and above all effective conduct as one of his regiment’s Observation Post officers in actions from near Brussels all the way back to Ypres and then to Nieuport, he remarked of this period long afterwards that if there were a military manoeuvre more difficult to do well than a fighting retreat, he had yet to see it; and that while it was not a test he would choose, nothing revealed the quality of units and formations more clearly than did a lost battle— not even the debilitating stalemate they had endured between September and May.

Soon after returning to England with the remnants of his troop, Maxwell was appointed General Staff Officer Grade III Liaison at Divisional Headquarters. He said of this period afterwards that it was his most entertaining and unrewarding military job: all he had to do was stand about pretending that he knew what was going on, until called upon to dash off on a powerful motor-cycle to talk to some senior officer who knew even less than he did.

By the end of 1940 the division of which Maxwell’s regiment formed a part was back to full strength. But for many months the war was conducted without the help of what its officers and men considered to be the best regiment in the best division in the British Army. Early in 1943 the command of Maxwell’s troop fell vacant and he returned to it, however— which was correctly recognised by members of the regiment as a sure sign that their long wait would soon be over.

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The second sheet ended on that note of high expectation, but Benedikt was beginning to become confused again. This was all very interesting, the ancient history of the Maxwells—or, at least, it would have been very interesting to Papa, whose guns had been the best ones in his beloved Division Afrika zur besondern Verfügung—the immortal goth Light—and who, come to that, knew exactly how Major William James Lonsdale had felt at Mons, and afterwards. But where did it all fit into the modern history of Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Duntisbury Chase?

In March the division sailed to Algeria, to join the First Army in its assault on Tunisia. Herbert Maxwell promptly fell ill with a bad case of dysentery, and so missed the spoiling attack by the Germans across the Goubellat Plain south-west of Tunis. The attack was launched with their customary élan and professionalism in an area where the British forces were not well deployed for defence. However, when the German armour made contact south of Medjez-el-Bab it had the misfortune not only of encountering two of the most capable of the British divisions (one arriving and the other about to depart), in a sector where a single brigade might have been expected, and there were not only more British regular officers per square mile than anywhere else in North Africa, but also the new British 17-pdr anti-tank guns which matched the fearsome and much admired German 88s—

Papa would like this—to be characterised as ‘fearsome and much-dummy1

admired’ would make his day—his month—his year—

— fearsome and much admired 88s. Even so, the Germans inflicted casualties, and when the uproar died down there were promotions.

Herbert Maxwell thus returned afterwards to the command of a battery in another regiment.

After the inevitable end in North Africa, where the struggle had become unequal, there was another distressing period of inaction for Major Maxwell, during which the division was called on to reinforce other formations, and when trained and experienced units seemed on the verge of disintegration. Maxwell nevertheless held his battery together, and was rewarded by transfer, sailing to Italy in February 1944 as Second-in-Command of his original regiment.

The Italian front was static for a while, and the guns were in the comparatively quiet Garigliano sector. But in May the regiment formed part of the great concentration of artillery supporting the Eighth Army’s third and final attack across the Rapido, past the dominating height of the Montecassino Abbey. The crossing was difficult and casualties heavy among all ranks, but particularly among officers. More than one Commanding Officer of an artillery regiment was disabled by nebelwerfer fire on brigade headquarters

—

There had been a slow change in the narrative, Benedikt noted, as he reached for the next sheet. It had moved gradually from the dummy1

generalised second-hand, with memories recalled ‘long afterwards’, to exact recollection which could only come from first-hand experience: the narrator had not been in Larkhill or Dunkirk, but he had crossed the Rapido under that nebelwerfer barrage—

— at this time. Maxwell was promoted and transferred again, this time taking command of a regiment.

The family record was unblemished, though with guns this time, rather than horsemen or sweating infantrymen. But what command was there for little fierce Becky, in her turn?

This was when I knew him—

The confirmation of his guess so quickly warmed Benedikt, rousing his confidence and his interest—

This was when I knew him, as far as a subaltern officer in action on his gun-position ever gets to know his Commanding Officer, whose place is either at Regimental Headquarters or with the infantry most of the time; we never had a regimental officers’ mess within range of the enemy; and as far as a temporary officer in a regular regiment of artillery dared to know his superiors—

This hadn’t been written, either: it had been taped or taken down in dummy1

shorthand from someone long afterwards . . . someone highly literate and discerning, with a trained mind and memory, recollecting not only his memories of long ago, but also the facts and impressions which a young and inquiring mind had soaked up in combat, to fit him for his ‘temporary’ career.

Papa had been just like that.

He looked up at Colonel Butler. “Who wrote this, Colonel? Or can’t you tell me?”

Butler gazed at him with a hint of approval, as though he understood what lay behind the question. “I don’t suppose it matters if you know, Captain. At least . . . let’s say it’s one of our most distinguished and enlightened High Court judges. Somebody I’d like to come up before if I was innocent—and not if I was guilty. Okay?”

He was a fine-looking man, and dressed well in a horsey sort of way. In wet weather in action he wore breeches and riding-boots with his battledress blouse. His nickname . . . though not to anybody as junior as I . . .was ‘Squire’— he had served once, some time, with the son of one of his tenants, who called him that instead of ‘sir’, and the name stayed with him. In fact, they said that between Dunkirk and the Tunisian campaign he spent every leave down on his estate in Duntisbury Chase, so it wasn’t inappropriate. . . . But I know that all the regular officers, who in our regiment occupied all the captaincies and above at the beginning of the Italian campaign . . . they all thought very well of him, as a horseman and a gentleman, as well as professionally—

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the old-fashioned order, if you like— and the other ranks worshipped him. As for the subalterns . . . and by now they were entirely temporary officers . . . they trusted his calm competence, and responded to him as ... as an elder brother, perhaps— quite terrifyingly exacting in the line but always friendly.. .. It isn’t true to say that we would have died for him, because you don’t think of it like that— you may have to die, it’s always a possibility, because that’s the nature of war, but no one wants to. But he was the closest one I came to who might have made me think like that, if the choice had been put to me. Which it wasn’t, thank God! Where was I, though? It’s the facts you want— Montecassino, yes . . .

Well, the regiment performed quite adequately there, and when they gave him his DSO we were all well-pleased for him, even though some of us had been a bit miffed in the past because all the gongs went to the regulars, by custom, because they needed them professionally, and we were going back to civilian life afterwards, and wouldn’t need such things. . . . But when he got it we were perfectly content— and he made it plain, of course, that he regarded it as a form of congratulations to the regiment for doing its job properly.

The last sheet came to him.

But he didn’t get any more promotion during the war, as I recall—

because he was already quite young for his rank, the way the army conducts its arcane affairs . . .But there were the divisional dummy1

reunions, and I used to see him there, off and on, and from below the salt we all watched his progress, the way one does . . . I think he was a brigade major in one of the few undisbanded divisions in

‘46, and then he was a half-colonel again, as GSO I in the British Army of the Rhine— we cracked a bottle of champagne over that, I do remember . . . In fact, that’s when we realised where he’d been at one stage, between campaigns— on one of the short war-time courses at the Staff College . . . Which shows that they’d got some sense— and that legged him up to Brigadier General Staff eventually, and finally Major-General as Second-in-Command, BAOR— missiles, and things, which he was quite bright enough to handle . . . But that would have been when Duntisbury Chase was pulling him away, with his retirement coming up— CBE, naturally . . . though we would have voted for a K— a knighthood . . . But then that never was Maxwell style: do your duty and keep a gentlemanly profile—’ fear God and honour the King‘— and make sure everyone below you is all right, that was his style . . . Also there was some family trouble— daughter and son-in-law killed in a smash somewhere. . . never met his wife, bit of an invalid— blissfully happy marriage though, they say . . . But there was this little granddaughter they were bringing up— something like that, anyway. . . . That’s all— I’m not going to pronounce on the manner of his passing, because that may conceivably become my business one day, and I shall reserve my views on that until then, just in case.

He handed back the full collection to the Special Branch man—or, dummy1

as he noticed when the man replaced them in the folder, perhaps not the full collection.

“Yes, there is more.” Colonel Butler had observed his glance at the folder. “There is the recollection from an aged general, whose GSO III he was, and a letter from a headmaster, on whose board of governors he served, who knew him well more recently, and a conversation in the Eight Bells which was taped ten days ago surreptitiously by a plain-clothes detective, not long after his death

—the local taxi-man talking to the local ne’er-do-well, with occasional mumblings from his retired groom, who could think back as far as his father and his uncle. But they all simply confirm what the judge said in their own different ways.”

Behedikt nodded. “He was a well-respected man.”

“More than that. Perhaps a glance at the first page of what the Vicar said at the funeral might help you. Andrew?” The Colonel paused. “Did you meet the Vicar on your tour, Captain?”

“No sir.”

“Aye . . . well, it’s too small to maintain a clergyman of its own now, the village. But it’s a Maxwell living, and the old General paid out of his own pocket for a retired priest to look after the parish.”

Most of you, who today fill this little church which he loved, in this place which he loved and shared with us, will have known our dear Squire too well for any words of mine to be necessary. Some of you grew up with him, and knew him as a boy and a young man; some dummy1

of you served with him in the war, and afterwards; some of you, the younger members of this congregation, were privileged to be his friends in his later years.

There are, however, a few who are here today in our midst in their official capacities, discharging their duties, to whom our Squire can only be a name, albeit an honoured one. It is to them that I say . . . that we who knew him are not here to mourn, but to give thanks for his life, which enriched ours, and to pray not only for him, but also— as he would have wished—for God’s mercy andforgiveness on those who must one day stand before the Judgement Seat to account for their actions—

“You don’t need any more. Except to know that he went on for another page about the perfection of God’s justice, and the imperfection of man’s, and the uselessness of bitterness and anger.

He’s a sharp old bird, is the Vicar, I rather suspect.”

Benedikt looked at him questioningly.

“He’s not in on it, but he might have sniffed trouble, is my guess,”

said Colonel Butler simply. “Because what they plan to do is to get the man who put the bomb in the old General’s car to Duntisbury Chase, and then deliver him to that Judgement Seat themselves.”

“You know this?” Benedikt felt a small twinge of anger. “You have known this all along—since the beginning?”

“I first heard about some of it a very short time ago. I learnt a bit more about it yesterday. Enough to go to your Major Herzner, who owes me a favour.” If the Colonel had noticed his anger, it didn’t dummy1

bother him. “But I haven’t been rock-hard certain until this evening, if that’s what you want to know, Captain.”

Suddenly there was no room for anger, there were too many questions in his head for that.

“Aye—” The Colonel forestalled him “—and now you’ll be asking why I didn’t go straight down to Duntisbury and ask Dr David Audley what the hell he’s playing at, eh?”

That—among other things—

“Instead of which I let you take your chance?” Butler shook his head. “I tell you one thing, Captain Schneider—whatever David Audley’s playing at, it won’t be murder. And it certainly won’t be acting as an accessory to a teenage slip of a girl and a bunch of farm labourers—least of all when he’s given someone his private promise that he’ll look after her. He’s a tricky blighter, if there ever was one, but that isn’t his style.” The grizzled head shook again. “You weren’t in any danger.”

Benedikt recalled the Wiesbaden Kommissar’s print-out on Audley: whatever his failings the man had an intuition for mischief like a bomb-sniffing dog for explosives.

“But someone is in danger, Colonel.” Obviously the Colonel trusted the man up to a point, but only up to a point. “Who was it who set the bomb under General Maxwell’s car?”

For a moment the Colonel looked at him in silence. “They haven’t the slightest idea. They don’t know who—and they don’t know why.”

“They?”

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“The Anti-Terrorist Squad,” said Andrew. “Their inquiries are proceeding—officially. But the truth is, they’re at a dead standstill.”

“And your inquiries?”

Andrew looked at the Colonel, and not too happily, Benedikt thought.

“Do not exist—for anyone else’s consumption. Not yet.” The Colonel’s features hardened. “And we know no more than they do.

As yet.”

It was easy to see why the Chief Inspector wasn’t altogether happy.

“Except that Dr Audley is in Duntisbury Chase?”

“Dr Audley is on leave, Captain.”

“Writing another book,” murmured Andrew. “He writes books.”

On feudalism, remembered Benedikt. And perhaps Duntisbury Chase was at present not such an inappropriate place for him to be, in which to study a text-book example of its survival in the 19805.

But that was not why he was there.

He had come to the real question at last. “But in Duntisbury Chase they know—they know who and why. That must be so, Colonel.”

“Happen they do. Or someone in there does—aye.”

But perhaps . . . but happen . . . that was really not so surprising, thought Benedikt. Peasants the world over kept their own counsel, close-mouthed, rejecting outside interference in their affairs; and if there was a secret in the Chase, the people of the Chase would be more likely to know it than any outsiders, even outsiders with all the resources of the British intelligence and police agencies.

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It was not what they knew, but what they proposed to do about it, and what that signified, which was so startling.

“And . . . whoever it was . . . they know he’s coming to them—”

“Right!” Colonel Butler pounced on him before he could finish.

“They know he’s coming to them! And the Vicar preached to deaf ears: it’s good, old-fashioned Old Testament vengeance for them, and no messing around. But that won’t do for David Audley, Captain—do you see?”

Knowing the man was everything—in this case, reflected Benedikt. Colonel Butler was known to be a stickler for the book, army-trained, which was the antithesis of everything that was known about Dr David Audley. But each was an intelligent and successful officer, and if the Colonel was now consciously and deliberately breaking every rule in his own book there had to be an over-riding reason for it.

“Looking after the girl—that’s what he promised to do, so that’ll be what he’ll be doing. But there’s got to be more to it than that.”

Not knowing the man was the problem. Benedikt ran the film of his memory, marrying it to the print-out: Audley striding away across the field, super-confident—over-confident?—in his old clothes . . . the scholar built like a boxer: in good shape, but physically past his prime—too old for the ring, too old for field-work . . . for guarding a girl—or a secret—from a professional, with a village of unprofessional peasants at his back?

Then he knew what was coming.

“I don’t want to spoil whatever he’s doing. Because it’s my guess dummy1

that he’s seen something that they haven’t seen—it depends how far he is into their confidence, but acting as a bodyguard doesn’t suit him any better than acting as an accessory to murder. I don’t want to spoil it—but I don’t want to leave it to chance, Captain. I need to know what’s really happening in there.”

He knew exactly what was coming. And it would be better to meet it as a volunteer than to wait for the order which would be couched as a request, from one ally to another.

He shrugged. “Major Herzner has lent me to you for a week, Colonel. I could go back . . . But if Dr Audley has contacts of his own ... I do not resemble Dr Wiesehöfer very closely. So I do not think my cover will last so long—always supposing that it has survived this afternoon.”

“Forty-eight hours, at most—if you go back,” said Chief Inspector Andrew. “He’ll have to get back to Germany. Herzner’s got it buttoned up here.”

“No.” Butler shook his head. “Forty-eight hours is too much—it’s making pictures we’d like to see. And with Audley you don’t make pictures. We’ll go for another cover.”

“Another cover?” Benedikt couldn’t conceal his disappointment. It wasn’t that Colonel Butler’s lack of confidence in his Roman roads disappointed him—it was good that the Colonel preferred to plan for the worst, rather than the best. But anything which reminded him of Papa had its own special virtue, and the gentle study of small irregularities in the ground for signs of the passing of mighty Caesar’s legions had recalled happy memories of the old man’s boyish enthusiasm, and his own happiest days.

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“Don’t worry, Captain! I have a cover much closer to your real skin in mind.” The Colonel misread his face. “But I won’t send you naked back into Duntisbury Chase. And I won’t forget what you are doing for Her Majesty’s peace, either.”

It was an old-fashioned way of expressing gratitude, thought Benedikt—it was like granting him a Mil Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg battle-honour of his own. Indeed, it was almost embarrassing . . .

except that it gave him an insight into Colonel Butler which the Kommissar had not printed out.

“And I’ll give you something better than that.” The Colonel became matter-of-fact again. “I’ll tell you what I particularly want to know which shouldn’t be too difficult to find out.”

He was almost diverted from his concentration on what Butler was saying by the change in Chief Inspector Andrew’s expression, which graduated in that instant from proper subordinate interest to equal concentration.

“Yes, sir?” What the Colonel was giving him now was something new to the Chief Inspector also.

“I told you no lie when I said that we don’t know much more than what the Anti-Terrorist Squad knows—other than what we know about Audley being there, of course.” The Colonel bridged the huge gap effortlessly. “But what you’ve told me— the fact that you confirm what we’ve suspected . . . that helps me to see it through Audley’s eyes. And because of that I can see a lot more than I saw before.”

The Chief Inspector’s face confirmed his impression: he was in on dummy1

a new picture of what was happening in Duntisbury Chase.

“Unfinished business. That’s the only thing which could bring back the bomber to Duntisbury. So the bomb didn’t do the job . . .

and he’s dealt with bombers before—and bombs— Audley has. I should have thought of that before, too!” Butler castigated himself for his error.

Bombs—

Benedikt had dealt with bombs, too: bombs were the dirtiest killing method, because no matter what the bombers said—and even when they said it honestly in their hearts—bombs were in the end indiscriminate, counting the risk to the innocent passerby as incidental to hitting the target; and while that might have to be a harsh necessity in war, in peace—in Her Majesty’s peace—

“Unfinished business,” repeated Colonel Butler.

In peace, bombers were the dirtiest killers, never taking the face-to-face risks—killing the bomb-disposal men when they failed to hit their targets—

The chasm opened up at Benedikt’s feet, which he was trained to avoid: Why shouldn’t the bastards be killed like mad dogs? What was so wrong with what the ‘slip of a girl’ and the peasants of Duntisbury Chase planned to do?

“What unfinished business?” Andrew addressed his superior more sharply than he had done before.

“Kelly, of course. Gunner Kelly, man!” Butler snapped back at him.

“Kelly—?”

“He should have gone up with the car—with the General.” Butler dummy1

reacted to the snap harshly. “You’ve been telling me that from the start, damn it! Loyal Gunner Kelly—wasn’t he distraught when they tried to talk to him? Wasn’t he so sick that he couldn’t even go to the funeral? Maybe he thought someone was going to take another shot at him! Or maybe he was busy doing something else, perhaps.”

“But—”

“But he was with the General in the war? And he’s been back with him for the last four years?” Butler stabbed a finger at Andrew.

“But where was he in between? And what’s more to the point. . .

where is he now?”

The Chief Inspector said nothing, and the Colonel encompassed them both. “If you think about what we know, that the Squad doesn’t know—Audley maybe knows ... is that it isn’t finished, what happened in Bournemouth—and Gunner Kelly should have been finished there, with the General.”

Pause.

“So what I want to know—from you, Andrew—is the life-story of Gunner Kelly, from Connemara or wherever, until the day he didn’t drive the General’s car a fortnight ago.”

Pause.

“And what I want to know from you, Captain Schneider, is whether Gunner Kelly is in Duntisbury Chase now—because he’s supposed to have gone away for a holiday somewhere, but I think he is there . . . And if he is there, I want to know what he’s doing there.”

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IV

The burniture removal van lurched abruptly left and then right in quick succession, following the driver’s scripted indecision, and then suddenly juddered to a stop.

Benedikt stood up in the darkness and applied his eye to the narrow opening which had been left for him in the little sliding hatch in the partition which separated the cargo space from the driver’s cab. The headlights blazed ahead undipped, out across the darkly rippling water of the ford, illuminating the road ahead, and the telephone box, and the overhanging trees.

“You there?” The driver didn’t turn round.

“Yes.” He divided the gap between eye and ear.

“We’re at the water’s edge. I’m going to switch on the cab light so I can look at the map. Then I’ll get the torch, and get out and look for a signpost. Okay?”

“Yes.” The repetition of orders was unnecessary, but it was reassuringly exact. It wasn’t Checkpoint Charlie they were going through, but there was still no room for error.

He ducked down into his own darkness again, and looked at his watch. It was 2242 exactly—three minutes to the police car.

The engine noise ceased suddenly, and a thin bar of yellow light filled the gap. For a few moments the map rustled on the other side of the partition, and then the light went out.

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“There’s someone out there—” The driver hissed the words “—I can see a torch . . . I’m getting out.”

The cabin-door clicked, and there was a scrape of boots on metal as the driver swung himself out. The van shuddered slightly.

“Aw— fuck!” exclaimed the driver angrily.

Benedikt raised his ear to the edge of the gap, and was rewarded with the sound of a splash. The driver swore again. Cautiously Benedikt turned his head, just in time to catch the lancing beam of a torch directed from the other side of the water towards the side of the van.

“Are you arl-roight there?” The question came across the water from the source of the torch-beam, in a rich peasant accent.

“No, I’m fucking not, mate!” The driver answered irritably, in his own townsman’s accent. “I’m up to my fucking knees in fucking water—that’s what I am!”

“Arrr . . . You didn’t ought to ‘ave stopped there.” The voice was unsympathetic. “You want to get out of there—you’re in the water there, you are.”

The driver didn’t swear in answer to that, but emitted a throaty sound of exasperation. There came another splashing sound, and then a stamping of boots on tarmac.

“Where you goin‘, then?” the voice challenged.

The stamping stopped. “Where the fuck am I, mate?”

“Where d’you want to be?”

The driver swore. “Not bloody ‘ere, I don’t think. ’Old on mo‘, an’

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I’ll tell yer . . . Norton somethin‘ . . . ’old on ... Norton Down—

The Old Vicarage, Norton Down—name of Winterbotham . . .

Major E. H. Winterbotham, The Old Vicarage, Norton Down.”

“Norton Down?” The voice echoed the name incredulously.

“Yeah. Major Winterbotham—you know ‘im?”

“This aren’t the way to Norton Down.” Scorn had replaced incredulity.

Benedikt looked at his watch again. The police were due any second.

“Fourth turning, they told me. Down the hill till the road forks, an‘

it’s signposted there, to the right.” There was a pause. “Left goes to Cucklesford St Mary an’ right to Norton Down— bloody stupid names!” Another pause. “But I can’t see any bloody sign!”

“Arr . . . nor you can! Because there ain’t none.” The peasant belittled the townsman. “You took the wrong road— that’s what you don. Cucklesford St Mary an‘ Norton Down’s on t’other side.”

The driver grunted helplessly. “Can I get through from ‘ere?

Where am I?”

“Na ... If I was goin‘ to Norton Down from wherever you come from I wouldn’t start from ’ere. What you want t’do is to turn round an‘ go back where you come from . . . an’ then—”

The fierce headlights of the police car and the sound of its engine arrived almost simultaneously, to cut off these extraordinary directions in mid-flow. They must have coasted down the ridge from the main road to arrive so silently, with the kink in the final approach, and the trees themselves, cutting off the warning of their dummy1

arrival until the final bend.

But now the speaker on the other side of the water, who had been hidden behind his own torch-beam outside the van’s headlights, was suddenly caught in the glare as the police car pulled alongside the van, outside Benedikt’s vision.

He heard a car door slam.

“What’s this, then?” It was strange how the official voice was the same the world over—confidently suspicious and suspiciously confident. “Is that you over there, Blackie Nabb? What are you doing here?”

“Arr . . . Mr Russell?” The voice parried the question. “Is that Mr Russell?”

“You know me, Blackie. Why aren’t you in the Eight Bells?”

“The Eight Bells?”

Now, there was a difference, from the world over, thought Benedikt: there might be suspicion both ways here, between Mr Russell and the man over the water . . . but there was no fear in either of them—and—what was a greater difference—there was no hatred either!

“The Eight Bells, Mr Russell?” False incomprehension filled the question. “But it’s gone closing time—an‘ I’ve been over to my sister’s, at Cassell’s, anyway... So what would I be doin’ at the Bells, then?”

The other police-car door slammed.

“What’s this, Russell?” A senior-officer voice, not so much confident as super-confident, and alien for that reason, cut in.

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“Who is this?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Mr Russell answered his officer evenly, also without fear. “But that’s Mr Nabb over there, who runs the taxi-service in the village.”

“Oh, yes?” The senior officer sounded as though he had heard of

‘Mr Nabb’. “And where’s his taxi?”

No answer came from over the water, and Benedikt began at last to understand the dimensions of the drama to which he was a witness, which Chief Inspector Andrew had enlisted to serve Colonel Butler’s purpose.

“I don’t think he’s on duty tonight, sir. It looks like he’s visiting his sister, Mrs Tanner. . . She’s married to Mr Tanner, who’s manager at Cassell’s Farm, sir.”

“Oh, yes?”

Benedikt’s dislike of the officer voice—the inspector voice—

blossomed with his understanding: it had suited Colonel Butler’s plan that the local police were busy in this part of Dorset, leaning on after-hours drinking in public houses, which was in contravention of Britain’s archaic licensing laws—it had suited him that the Eight Bells in Duntisbury Royal, although not a primary target, had been one of the subsidiary targets to which Chief Inspector Andrew with his special contacts could divert one particular attack at short notice.

What he had not understood until now was that, while the inspector wanted to catch the Eight Bells regulars drinking happily after hours, the local constable— Mr Russell—had no such ambition . . .

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Because Mr Russell, at the very first opportunity, had warned Mr Nabb what he was about, and close to a convenient phone-box.

“Oh, yes?” The Inspector had made some of those same connections, if not all of them, by the sound of his voice. “And who are you, then?”

He had come back to the van-driver, realised Benedikt.

“Eh?” The van-driver sounded not one bit abashed by the question.

“What the fuck is that meant to mean—who am I?”

He had to adjust, thought Benedikt: the Inspector must know what he was doing, and this was all for Mr Nabb’s benefit—‘Blackie’

Nabb’s benefit—if he was on duty at the ford, as they had expected someone to be on duty here, as the first trip-wire in Duntisbury Chase’s defence system.

But the corollary of that was that the Inspector must behave as he would have behaved in real life—so that ‘Blackie’ Nabb should react in the same way, to warn the Chase of the arrival of the police within that same defence system.

But ... in the meantime . . . the van-driver had to react also—and this was England—rural England in the 1980s—and that in itself was educational.

“What are you doing here?”

“Doing?” The van-driver echoed the verb insolently. “I wish to fuck I knew, mate!”

“There’s no need to use that sort of language with me—not if you want to stay out of a cell tonight.” The Inspector remained coolly unmoved by the insolence, he merely pitched his voice so that it dummy1

could be heard on the other side of the water. “I’ve got a warrant-card in my pocket. . . and we’ve had enough burglaries round here for me to inquire what you’re doing in these parts at this hour of the night. So you can argue the toss with me, and I can put the constable here behind the wheel of your vehicle and take you back to the nearest police station—if you like . . . And we can sort you out there.” Pause. “Or you can answer the question. Take your pick.”

Two seconds—five seconds—

“Well?”

One second—

“All right, guv‘!”

“Well?” The repetition was lazy with dominance.

“Worsdale, guv—Jack Worsdale . . . Easy Removals—you can ring my gaffer, Mr Page, if you don’t believe me—straight up!”

This pause, thought Benedikt, covered a pointing finger at the phone-box, to support the surrender. “Takin‘ an upright grand—a grand pianer—to Major Sidebotham— Winterbotham ... at Norton

—Norton Down—The Old Vicarage, Norton Down.”

“At this hour of night?”

“There was an ‘old-up on the M3—on the Alton junction— wiv’ a tail-back . . .”

Pause.

“There was a crash on the M3, sir. Junction 5,” said Constable Russell, almost apologetically. “Early this evening. The road was blocked for nearly two hours.”

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“An‘ I ’ad a blow-out near Stockbridge.” The van-driver achieved a genuine whine. “Took me another hour— and they gave me the wrong direction then—”

“All right!” The Inspector cut short the explanation. “Is the back locked?”

“Locked, guv‘? Naow. There’s only the pianer in there—”

“Russell. Go round the back and have a look inside . . . You stay here, where I can see you . . . and you over there—Mr Nabb, is it?

— you stay where I can see you, too! I have business in Duntisbury Royal when I’ve dealt with this man and his vehicle.”

Benedikt started to move.

“What are you doing?” shouted the Inspector.

Benedikt continued to move, past the blanket-covered, lashed-down object in the centre of the cargo-space.

“Keep yer ‘air on—I ain’t goin’ anywhere. I’m jest goin‘ to phone the missus to tell ’er I’ll be late ‘ome.”

Benedikt smiled to himself in the darkness. Whether he was on guard duty or not, Blackie Nabb had put two and two together satisfactorily, and was about to warn the Eight Bells of the impending after-hours raid.

But meanwhile, the business of the night was beginning at last, because from outside, at the back of the van, there came the sound of the scrape and clunk of the locking-bar which secured the doors.

He sank on to one knee beside the piano—it probably was a piano, and maybe Jack Worsdale was a van-driver, and the police really dummy1

had intended to raid Duntisbury Royal to catch after-hours drinkers.

His finger touched and ran along the rough bark—it felt like genuine tree-bark—which covered the Special Air Service’s cylinder, past the false branches—genuine plastic—until they felt the cord at the end, with its wrist-loop.

One of the doors banged open and a bright torch-beam transfixed him.

“Nothing in here, sir,” called the policeman. “Just the piano, it looks like—like he said. It’s all clear.”

The policeman moved away, leaving the door open, sweeping the bushes with his torch.

Now it had to be done quickly. It was all clear, and the policeman would have scouted round with his torch to make sure of that, in so far as it was possible. And Blackie Nabb was in the phone-box, and it was unlikely that they’d have more than one guard this far from the village.

The cylinder was unnaturally heavy—heavy not because of its contents, but because it had to float correctly and unobtrusively, like a water-logged tree-trunk. But he was ready for its weight, and the van’s position—front wheels already in the water, within a metre of the footbridge alongside it—cut the distance he had to move to a minimum. Half a dozen noiseless steps took him into the water, and if he made any splash it was covered by the extra banging the policeman made as he closed up the van. Even before that had finished he had ducked down under the footbridge into the darkness and deeper water downstream, cradling the cylinder in his dummy1

arms.

The immediate need was to put distance between himself and the vicinity of the ford, in case Mr Nabb strayed round to the footbridge, for the reflected light from the headlights of the furniture van illuminated the pool that was scoured below the bridge by the flow from off the hard surface of the ford. But the action wasn’t as easy as the thought, for though the water took the weight of the cylinder from him, the thick mud of the river-bed sucked down his feet, holding him back.

River— R. Addle— River Addle—the map had called the blue line which straggled along the margin of Duntisbury Chase. But a river it was not; perhaps in mid-winter, or when the spring floods rose, it might aspire to that description; but here, even in this deeper pool in the middle of a damp English summer, its mud and water between them could only submerge him to chest-height.

His feet came free at last, and he was able to push forward, half-swimming, half-walking, in the wake of the cylinder, which had already begun to drift away on the sluggish current.

At least the distances were miniature, though: a dozen noiseless strokes and trailing branches brushed his head as he reached the exit from the pool; and then, as utter darkness closed around him, he could already see a paler area ahead of him, like the night outside a tunnel, which marked the end of the woods surrounding the ford, and the beginning of the open fields through which the River Addle flowed, with only occasional willow-trees on its banks, until it reached the trees of the Roman villa site on the edge of the village.

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River, indeed! thought Benedikt contemptuously, as his feet sank into another shallow part of the bed of the ‘river’, and one of his hands touched the SAS cylinder, which had snagged on a tree-root

—

What am I doing here, encased in a wet-suit, crawling up a muddy English ditch like this towards an English village, for all the world as though I’m penetrating a high-risk Comecon installation, somewhere east of the line? It’s ridiculous!

He pushed the cylinder aside and waded out into the open, beyond the last straggle of undergrowth. An image of the air photograph Colonel Butler had shown him reproduced itself in his brain: from this point he had perhaps a mile of river to negotiate, little more, along the valley bottom, although the road he had travelled a few hours before—the rolling English drunkard’s road—had meandered for twice that distance.

What am I doing here?

Herzner’s voice answered him: Whatever it is he wants you to do, within reason— do it. This has the smell of one of their domestic scandals, so it may be tricky . . . But Colonel Butler is a man of honour, as well as influence in high places. If we assist him he will not forget it . . .And Audley . . . Audley will either go to the very top or into the outer darkness— perhaps Audley and Butler together . . . one more Intelligence failure over here, and they are well-placed to pick up the pieces and take over. So you are in the nature of an investment, Schneider— a professional and political investment—

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Benedikt did not much like being an investment, the more so if there were politics involved, and most of all when someone as equivocal as Dr David Audley was involved in them. It would be better—or, at least, it would be simpler—to see himself as a loyal ally of an ancient comrade-in-arms ... in the mud of the Addle stream now, but once in the mud of the Lasne, where the road to the field of Waterloo crossed it, straining to get von Billow’s guns across to save Wellington’s army, with old Blücher’s challenge in his ears: Come on, lads! Would you have me break my word!

Treading mud, he could see just above the banks of the Addle, across the fields on each side.

Well, at least there was one thing he could do, which had nothing to do with being a loyal ally, even: he could see— literally see—

how good the British image intensifiers were, courtesy of the SAS, as supplied to the Falklands reconnaissance groups!

Well . . . they were good—they were really quite good, and almost as good as those on which he had trained—