Soldier No More

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SOLDIER NO

MORE

ANTHONY PRICE

PROLOGUE

Pyrexia of Unknown Origin

STARING AT THE blank ceiling above him, Roche knew exactly how poor bloody Adam had felt in the garden, stark naked and scared out of his wits.

But finally God cleared his throat to indicate that he had reached a decision.

"All right, you can put on your clothes, Captain Roche. And don't look so worried. There's absolutely nothing to be alarmed about—I'm not going to invalide you out, or anything drastic like that, if that's what you've been afraid of."

Despair filled Roche. Ever since they'd decided to refer him to God he'd been buoyed up by the hope that there might be dummy5

something rather seriously wrong with him, at least sufficiently for them to throw him out on the grounds of ill-health. To that end he had most scrupulously avoided taking the medication his French doctor had prescribed, and had done everything he had been told not to do. But he never did have any luck.

"Then what's wrong with me?" he said plaintively. "There is something wrong, damn it!"

"Oh yes . . . you've had a fever, but you're getting over that now, even if somewhat slowly .... What I meant is that there's nothing organically amiss. You're basically healthy." God reacted to his doubts by increasing his own air of reassurance. "You've had . . . and to some extent you still have . . . what my late distinguished predecessor in this job always diagnosed as 'a touch of the old PUO'."

"PUO?" Roche's spirits fell even lower. PUO sounded rather common, and not at all serious.

" 'Pyrexia of Unknown Origin'. But then he learnt most of his medicine in the Ypres salient in 1917 ... whereas I learnt most of mine with the Americans in Italy in '44. And they called it variously 'battle fatigue' or 'combat fatigue' when it came to causes, as opposed to symptoms." The reassurance became even blander. "I've seen much worse than you, Captain—

you've still got a lot of mileage in you, don't worry."

About a quarter of a mile, to the café-bar on the corner of the boulevard to be exact, thought Roche.

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God smiled at him. "Are you due for any leave?"

"Not until October."

"We'll change that." God took a piece of paper and uncapped his fountain pen. "What precisely is it that you do?"

Roche frowned. "I'm afraid I can't tell you that."

God continued to smile at him, while reaching down into a drawer in his desk. "My dear Captain Roche . . . you wouldn't have been referred to me if I hadn't been cleared to ask that question. I look over all you fellows from SHAPE and NATO, and the Embassy ... But to set your mind at rest—" he pushed what he'd taken from the drawer across the desk towards Roche "—will that suffice?"

Roche recognised the letter-head, and the rank on the identification folder positively overawed him. "Yes, sir."

"Not 'sir'. I left the red tabs behind in Italy." God replaced the authorisation and identity card in his desk. "The only difference in our relationship from the purely civilian is that I'm obliged to report on your state of health to London. But, as I say, you don't need to worry. Your case is by no means unique in these dark days. In fact, the first thing you've got to do is to stop worrying, Captain."

Worrying was what Roche was doing, and the ex-Brigadier had already exacerbated his worries by moving towards the causes of his patient's PUO.

"Yes, sir." There was only one thing for it: he had to confirm God's initial snap-diagnosis for the origin of his anxiety, even dummy5

if it was the reverse of the truth. "You're really not going to kick me out?"

"Perish the thought!" God regarded him benignly, then glanced down at the open folder at his elbow. "Sandhurst?"

"No, sir. National Service—regular commission after Korea."

“University?"

"Before National Service, sir."

"Just so . . ." The nod seemed to confirm the greater likelihood of PUO among graduates who had remained with the Colours than among Sandhurst career officers. "And now Military Intelligence here in Paris?"

“Yes, sir."

God looked up. "In the field?"

This was what Roche had feared, for it was easily checkable if it wasn't down there in front of him already. But fear had given him time to prepare for it.

"Not really, sir. Pretty damn desk-bound at the moment, actually. I'm a communications officer, mostly economic traffic related to military capabilities—that sort of stuff." He shrugged modestly. "There are specific additional assignments from time to time, naturally . . ." He left the implication of secret heroism unspoken between them.

"Such as?"

Roche thought of his latest report, on French perceptions of the extent of direct Soviet involvement in the supply of arms dummy5

to the FLN. But the answer to that, as supplied by Jean-Paul and cleared by the Russian military attaché as being suitable for transmission to the British, was that French intelligence correctly perceived direct Soviet involvement as negligible.

But that wouldn't quite do. "I'm currently working on sources of arms for the Algerian rebels, sir."

God nodded. "An assignment not without risk, that would be?"

Another modest shrug would do there. If he'd been set to look into the private arms sources, which was worth doing, it might well have been dangerous. But with Jean-Paul and the attaché to help him, the Soviet inquiry had been less hazardous than crossing the road.

"And they're working you hard, of course?"

Roche's two highly efficient squadron sergeant-majors handled nine-tenths of the communications work, and the only difficulty in the French Perceptions report had been in finding respectable sources to account for what Jean-Paul and Ivanov had told him, with his former French contacts mostly hostile to him since Suez.

"The French are a bit awkward these days, sir." He advanced the only truth he could think of with proper diffidence.

"Very true." God smiled understandingly. "And that's half the trouble with you people just at the moment. It's a matter of stress, and it happens to all of you .... You have to understand that you're only ordinary men, but you have to do dummy5

extraordinary things from time to time . . . and that exacts a correspondingly extraordinary price. That's what battle fatigue was: the overdrawing on men's emotional current accounts. You, Captain Roche . . . you are probably well-adjusted for normal withdrawals, but not for the contempt in which your French colleagues now hold the British, since the Suez business. In some people it manifests itself as boils—

one of the embassy secretaries has a splendid one on his bottom at this very moment. The poor fellow can hardly sit down to eat his dinner—"

The only Frenchman who frightened Roche was Jean-Paul, and he wasn't at all sure that Jean-Paul was actually French; and he still got most of what he needed from dear old Philippe Roux, anyway. It was the Comrades who sickened him.

"—but with you it's PUO, Captain. But I'm not going to pack you back to England, that would only scar you permanently.

If you run away now, you'll run away again." God picked up his fountain pen and wrote on his piece of paper. "Now. . .

I'm going to give you a month's leave—go and find the sun in the south somewhere, and laze in it—" he looked up again quickly "—I see you're not married . . .but have you got a girl-friend? If so, take her. . . if not—get one. Right?"

Roche was speechless.

"I'll give you a tonic—and take that too. But go easy on the alcohol—I want you mended, not drugged. Do you understand?"

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"Yes, sir." Roche needed a drink badly now.

"But stay in France. Your French is fluent, I take it?"

"Yes, sir." His fluent French, thought Roche, was probably why he was still here. "Why France?"

"Because most of your problem is here, and you've got to come to terms with it. Take the girl-friend—take the tonic . . .

and take a month." God passed a month across the desk to him. "And come back and see me in five weeks—"

Five minutes later Roche had the shakes again, right on the street outside God's house and worse than before. And five minutes after that he was fortifying himself in the café-bar at the corner, in preparation before phoning in to Major Ballance. He stared into the drink, trying not to drink it because he already needed another one.

A genuine illness, if not an actual disease, might have been enough to put Jean-Paul off. But what he'd got was the shakes, and a month to get rid of them, which was worse, because in a month they'd be worse too. And then, or very soon, Jean-Paul would see them; and then it wouldn't be a tonic and a month's leave, because it would be a matter of Jean-Paul's preservation.

He had drunk the drink, and the waiter, who knew his man, filled his glass without being asked.

God had been right about one thing: it was a sort of disease, even if it wasn't some bloody pyrexia of unknown origin—it dummy5

was a pyrexia of known origin . . . pyrexia, whatever it was, sounded like the sort of disease a careless young soldier might have picked up out east, and that was really what it had been, he saw now. A disease.

He had caught it on a beach in Japan, and it had been feeding on him for six years without his knowing about it, and then without his understanding the symptoms he had experienced—not until the first authentic reports had come out of Hungary had he begun to add the facts to those symptoms. Or was that really it?

But causes hardly mattered now. All that mattered now was the progression of the shakes from his hands to his face, because when that happened Jean-Paul was bound to recognise the tell-tale signs, which he must be trained to spot.

With an effort, he left his second drink half-finished and found the phone. "Roche here—Bill?"

"How are you, young David? What did the quack say?"

“He's given me a tonic, Bill."

Major Ballance started to laugh, but the laugh turned into a paroxysm of coughing before Roche could add his month's leave to the tonic. Roche waited for the noise to subside.

"Bill?"

"A tonic?" Major Ballance managed at last, still wheezing.

"Then you will allow me to add a little gin to it—export gin."

What?"

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" 'Most Urgent from London for Captain Roche'—you've got a signal all of your very own, dear boy! Somebody up there loves you after all."

It was too early for Bill to start drinking. "What d'you mean, Bill?"

"I mean . . . you've got a posting—and a very good one too. It couldn't have happened to a nicer chap."

Roche leaned against the wall. "A posting?"

"That's what it amounts to. They want to see you there tomorrow morning at 1100 hours—a nice civilised time—

FSMO 1100 hours, best bib and tucker."

Roche's hand started to shake again. "What's so good about that, Bill? Maybe they're going to bowler-hat me." That would be the day! But something worse was far more likely.

"Not what but who, David. And where ... Sir Eustace Avery in Room 821, Eighth Floor, Abernathy House—that's the rest of it. So I'm booking you an afternoon flight to give you time to take a leisurely breakfast tomorrow. Congratulations."

"Sir Eustace Avery?" Roche dredged his memory. "Isn't he the one you said was a stuffed shirt?"

"Ah-ha! Stuffed shirt he may be. But he was plain Mr Avery then, on the RIP sub-committee last year—now he's been birthday-honoured into Sir Eustace, as a reward for his great and good services in the late catastrophe . . . So if he wants you, young David, you'll be hitching your waggon to a star, not vegetating in our communications room here .... The dummy5

Eighth Floor of the Abernathy overlooks the river, too—on the Embankment, just past Cleopatra's Needle. Very 'igh class property for very 'igh class operations."

"What operations, Bill?"

"The new group, dear boy—don't you ever listen to the in-house gossip?"

Bill always knew everything. "What new group?"

"Ah . . . well, it is a bit secret, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn't gab about it on an open line." Major Ballance brightened.

"But then the Frogs aren't really into wire-tapping, and everyone except you this side of the Kremlin already knows about it. So I don't suppose it matters much. . . Sir Eustace's new group—'Research and Development' is the euphemism in current use . . . He's been recruiting for the last month—

everyone hand-picked, true-blue and never been a card-carrying CP member, even as a child . . . and with automatic promotion, so rumour has it. Big time stuff, in fact.... so congratulations, Major Roche."

Roche was horrified. This was worse than God's solution to his problems—far worse.

"But Bill . . . I've got a chit for a month's leave in my pocket—

sick leave."

"Then tear it up. This is your great opportunity—you miss this one, and you'll be sucking on the hind tit for the rest of your life with the awkward squad, like me. Besides which, it's an order, so you don't have any choice." Bill's voice dummy5

hardened, then softened again. "And it's what you really need for what ails you, young David. A cure is much better than a tonic for a sick man—"

He had to phone Jean-Paul next, but he needed the rest of his drink more than ever.

Room 821 sounded more like a kill than a cure for his sickness. In fact, the only person who'd be really pleased was Jean-Paul himself, who was always reproaching him with the slowness of his professional advancement and the low grade of his material.

He stared into the colourless liquid. There was no escaping from the truth that he'd always been a great disappointment to the Comrades, as well as to himself. If Bill was right—and Bill was usually right—it was the cruellest of ironies that he was now about to go up at last when he was at last resolved to get out at the first safe opportunity.

But they'd got him now, both of them: if he fluffed the interview, he'd be on borrowed time with Jean-Paul; but if he didn't fluff it he'd be exactly where the Comrades had always wanted him to be, and then they'd never let go.

There was only one option left, but it terrified him utterly.

He'd already thought about it, he'd even had nightmares about it, waking and sleeping.

PUO was a laugh: he hadn't got PUO and there was no cure for what he'd got.

The only treatment for gangrene was amputation.

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Reconnaissance:

Young Master David

I

"MR Cox?" inquired a voice, disembodied and slightly metallic, but also recognizably female.

Roche looked round the lift for some evidence of a microphone, and found nothing. There weren't even any controls: Cox had simply ushered him into the blank box, and the doors had closed behind them, and the lift had shuddered and moved upwards. Or downwards, as the case might be, for all the directional feeling he had experienced—

downwards would have been more appropriate. Not down to a particular floor, but down to a level, and some level in the Ninth Circle of Nether Hell, which Dante had reserved for the traitors.

"And Captain Roche," replied Cox, to no one in particular, unperturbed by the absence of anything into which the reply could be addressed. "Captain Roche's appointment is timed for eleven-hundred hours, madam."

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The Ninth Circle was reserved respectively for traitors to their lords, their guests, their country and their kindred, but Roche couldn't remember in which order the levels were disposed, down to the great bottomless frozen lake far beneath the fires of Hell. But it did occur to him that—strictly speaking—he was now for the first time in a sort of limbo between all the circles and levels, since he was at last absolutely open-minded on the subject of betrayal: he was prepared to betray either side, as the occasion and the advantage offered.

The lift shuddered again, and the doors slid open abruptly.

Roche was confronted by a sharp-faced woman of indeterminate age in prison-grey and pearls, against a backdrop of London roofscape.

"Captain Roche—I-am-so-sorry-you've-been-delayed-like-this," the woman greeted him insincerely. "Have you the documentation, Mr Cox?"

Cox, apparently struck dumb with awe at this apparition, offered her the blue card with Roche's photograph on it which he had collected, with Roche, from the porter in the entrance kiosk.

The woman compared Roche with his photograph, and clearly found the comparison unsatisfactory.

"This is supposed to be you, is it?" she admonished Roche, as though it was his fault that the photographer had failed.

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Roche was at a loss to think of any other way that he could prove he was himself when she abruptly reversed the card for him to see. It certainly didn't look like him, this fresh-faced subaltern—not like the wary (if not shifty) Roche who faced him in the shaving-mirror each morning.

He took another look at the picture. This was undoubtedly the Tokyo picture of 2/Lt (T/Capt) Roche. And, true enough, this Roche had been just twenty-one years of age, while looking all of eighteen, and the shaving-mirror Roche of this morning, six years of treason on, didn't look a day under forty.

He grinned at her uncertainly. "I was a lot younger then—

Korean War, and all that... 'A Roche by any other face', you might say, Miss—Mrs—?" He floundered deliberately, trying to take the war into her territory.

"Mrs Harlin, Captain Roche." She expelled the invader with a frown. "A Roche by any other face?"

He struggled to keep the grin in its trenches. "A joke, Mrs . . .

Harlin. Romeo and Juliet."

Macbeth would have been more appropriate, with false face must hide what the false heart doth know. But false face wasn't doing very well at the moment.

"Indeed?" Mrs Harlin had met jokers before, and their bones were whitening on the wire of her forward defences. "This photograph needs updating, Captain Roche."

Cox, shamed at last by the massacre of the innocent, coughed dummy5

politely by way of a diversion. "Do you wish me to remain, madam? Or will you ring for me?" he asked her humbly, without looking at Roche.

"Just do what the book says, Mr Cox."

"Thank you, madam," said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.

"Captain Roche, Sir Eustace," said Mrs Harlin.

Sir Eustace—Mr Avery that was, of the RIP sub-committee—

Sir Eustace was standing behind a huge desk, half-framed by the great gilded frame of the portrait-of-a-naval-officer behind him.

Roche thought: That must be the Sargent picture of 'Blinker'

Hall and if Avery's got that picture for his room then Bill Ballance and Jean-Paul are both right about the new group.

"David—"

Roche tore himself away from Admiral Hall's basilisk eye. It was Thain, the only man in Personnel Recruitment who had thought well of him after he'd fluffed half the tests in training.

"David—let me introduce you—Sir Eustace, this is David Roche, about whom you've been hearing so much these last few days."

Christ! Thain had come up in the world since PRT days, to be in this company, overlooked by Admiral Hall himself. But dummy5

that at least accounted for his own presence, even if 'hearing so much' could hardly ring true. Since his PRT debacle he'd been little more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in spite of Thain's approval. So there really wasn't so much to hear about.

"Sir Eustace," he mumbled. But he had to do better than that

—here— now—by God! He had to shine—

"Colonel Clinton, David—"

Clinton was another new face, but the name rang faint warning bells: one glance at Colonel Clinton was two glances too many—the thought of Colonel Clinton hearing so much these last few days was blood-curdling.

Clinton smiled a terrible non-smile, far worse than Jean-Paul's bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck grin. "Roche."

"Sir!" Roche did his best to make the word stand to attention for him.

"And St. John Latimer, of course," concluded Thain.

St. John— Sin-jun—Latimer was very young, and podgy with it; and languid, like an Oxford undergraduate who had strayed into the wrong party but was too idle to do anything about it.

"Latimer," said Roche.

"St.John Latimer," corrected St.John Latimer, swaying at Roche's faux pas.

Latimer—plain Latimer, damn it—was standing to the right dummy5

and slightly behind Colonel Clinton, in the creature-to-the-Duke position, so that was what he might very well be since he was too young to be here by right of experience and seniority. But he might also be some sort of catalyst, introduced to sting a reaction from the provincial and dull Captain Roche.

"Is that so?" Well, if they wanted a reaction, at least let it be a controlled one. "Jolly good!"

Like all good catalysts, Latimer showed no sign of change at this controlled Roche-reaction, he didn't seem even to have heard it.

"Yes . . ." It was Thain who produced the reaction, and it was a decidedly uneasy one. "Yes—well, I must be off now—" he gave Roche a glance which was more charged with doubt than encouragement, like a gladiatorial trainer delivering a novice into the arena "—subject to confirmation and—ah—

mutual agreement, David, you will be transferred from the Paris station to Sir Eustace's care ... on a temporary basis, of course—"

Sale or return—as the liquor store off-licence would have put it. Or suck-it-and-see, as Roche's old squadron sergeant-major more accurately would have pronounced.

"—Colonel Clinton will fill you in on the details."

The figure of speech was unfortunate after the memory of SSM Lark had been conjured up in Roche's memory: to be filled in at Shaiba Barracks involved the scattering of blood dummy5

and teeth in all directions.

"Sir Eustace—Colonel—" Thain looked at Latimer, who was examining the pattern on the carpet, and decided against including him in the general farewell. Perhaps he hadn't come up in the world, or not as far as the present company and venue had suggested; perhaps he had only been present to complete the formality of pushing the doomed Roche out on to the arena's sunlit ellipse of sand for the killing.

"Thank you, Malcolm. You've been a great help," said Sir Eustace with the easy insincerity of long experience. "I'm sorry you have to go . . ."

He wasn't sorry. And, what was worse, Thain wasn't sorry either.

"David—nice to see you again," Thain nodded.

He wasn't sorry because he expected Roche to fluff it again.

And maybe that had also been what Jean-Paul expected, except the possible benefit of his not fluffing it outweighed the attendant risk. What was more, his— Roche's—very presence here, win or lose, increased his value as a bargaining counter on the board. After this, for Jean-Paul, he would be worth trading in for some other advantage as he had never been before. He was on the way to becoming a blue chip.

And that made his own betrayal of Jean-Paul even better sense, as a pre-emptive strike, to mix the very latest Israeli jargon with that of the Stock Exchange. More than ever, he dummy5

had to do well now simply to keep ahead of them—both of them—until he could bargain on his own account.

The door closed behind Thain.

"Now then, David—sit down—" Sir Eustace indicated the central chair in front of his enormous desk.

Roche sat down.

There was a file on Sir Eustace's blotter, which he pushed forward into the sphere of influence within Roche's reach.

Roche made no attempt to pick up the file, let alone touch it, never mind open it. Instinct was in charge now, preventing him from breaking the taboos.

"We've got another David for you, in there," said Sir Eustace.

"Audley," said Colonel Clinton. "David Audley."

"David Longsdon Audley," said St.John Latimer.

"We want him," said Clinton.

Roche stared at him. "He's one of theirs?"

"He's one of nobody's," said Clinton. "But we want him to work for us. And you are going to get him for us, Roche."

II

"IT'LL TAKE ABOUT an hour, maybe," said the mechanic.

Roche frowned. "An hour?"

"I'm on the pumps as well, see . . ." The mechanic sized him up. "And then I got to find the right parts."

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"What parts?" Roche hadn't intended to argue the toss, but with what he'd most carefully done to the engine not an hour before, half an hour's work was a generous estimate, and no replacements were necessary. "What parts?"

"Ah . . . well ..." The mechanic blinked uneasily. "There's this bracket, for a start—" he reached into the engine and wrenched fiercely at something out of sight "—you didn't ought to go round with it like that, it'll let you down when you're miles from anywhere." He shook his head. "An' it's a fiddling old job, too . . . maybe three-quarters of an hour, say?"

Roche realised that he had miscalculated. He had concentrated on the necessary time element, but had not allowed for time being someone else's profit.

"You've got the parts?" he capitulated.

"Oh yes, sir." The mechanic relaxed. "It's only I dunno where to put my hand on 'em right off. But I've got 'em, don't you worry."

"Hmm ..." Roche looked at his watch. "It's simply that I've this important business engagement and I don't want to be too late. So if you can hurry it up as best you can . . ." He left the possibility of extra reward implicit in the plea.

"Half-hour, sir," said the mechanic cheerfully, recognising a sucker. "There ain't much traffic today, so it should be quiet on the pumps, with a bit of luck."

"Can I use your phone?"

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" 'Elp yourself, sir. In the office—"

Roche dialled the number he'd been given, and a woman answered.

"Roche for Major Stocker ..." Stocker was new to him too.

They were all new to him, apart from Thain, who was unlikely to appear again. It was like making a fresh start, in a new job, as a new person . . . with a new personality which he could adjust according to need as he went along.

"Roche here, sir. The car they gave me has broken down—I'm phoning from a garage just outside Leatherhead—yes, sir, Leatherhead—" he didn't say which side, but even if the Major offered to come and collect him the distance was nicely calculated.

The Major didn't offer.

"The man says three-quarters of an hour, but I don't think it'll be as much, sir ... Yes, sir, I'll ginger him up—I'll be with you as soon as I can, sir."

He didn't like the sound of the Major. But then he had never liked the sound of majors, who always seemed to exist in a limbo, either embittered with the failure of their hopes or hungry for the promotion almost within their grasp.

Still, that was a good job well done: he had his half-hour now, and a generous half-hour too, all correct and accounted for and accountable, and above all innocent. The rest depended on others, and on their correct observance of the routine.

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He sauntered across the forecourt towards the workshop feeling reassured, if not happy. It might all be routine, and the Comrades were always sticklers for routine. Yet the effort involved even in this routine, and the precautions they had taken in communicating with him, made him feel important, and more important than he had felt for years. And if the feeling was a secret one, like the rich man's pleasure in stolen masterpieces in his hidden gallery, then that was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of it.

The mechanic withdrew his head from the raised bonnet and bobbed encouragingly at him.

"Found the right bracket, sir—just the job!" He plunged his head back quickly, before Roche could question him or God could strike him down for bearing false witness against the British Motor Corporation.

Roche nodded uselessly at his back, and continued his aimless saunter, back on to the forecourt, slowly past the pumps, to the very edge of the highway.

He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn't given up smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn't like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was always cautioning him to give up drinking, or almost, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-dummy5

Paul, only to himself; and although the new Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance . . . and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he had in mind for himself.

Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a Daily Sketch in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.

Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view—maybe art imitating reality imitating art. And it was time to find out.

He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.

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Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.

Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.

If he was wrong about the man, it didn't matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn't worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche's naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

Nothing to fear. He had told them where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that lunportant to them—or even if it wasn't—they could be relied on to oversee their security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to soldier on until they were ready to try again.

He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they dummy5

didn't make contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about Audley, David Longsdon, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—

merely annoying. So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at churches was one of his hobbies.

Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.

The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.

If they were here, then still nothing to fear. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was "This is your big chance, David"—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else. And so it was, by God!

"Mr Roche."

At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the dummy5

Daily Sketch reader outside.

"I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me 'Johnnie', Mr Roche—and I shall call you David."

The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked 'Johnnie' into 'Ivan'; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol horseman riding through the man's ancestry at about the same time as this church had been built.

"Johnnie," Roche acknowledged the identification.

"How long do we have?" The voice didn't fit the face, it was too accent-less, any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who wouldn't have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.

"About half an hour."

"Where are you going?"

"To Guildford. I'm due to meet a man named Stocker."

"Major Stocker?"

"That's right. You know him?"

"Why?" Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn't think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.

"He's going to brief me on this man Audley."

"He's your controller—Stocker?"

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"No—I don't know . . . I'm to report back to Colonel Clinton when—"

"Clinton?" The eyes and the face remained expressionless, but the voice moved. "Frederick Clinton?"

"Yes—?"

"He was there? At your meeting—on the Eighth Floor?"

"Yes. But—"

"And you are to report back to him—not Avery? Or Latimer?"

Genghis Khan pressed the question at him like a spear.

"Clinton?"

"Yes." It was disturbing to see his own fears reflected in Genghis Khan's evident concern. "Is that bad?"

"You. . . are to report back to. . .Clinton. . . about this man Audley?"

Audley, David Longsdon. Born, St. Elizabeth's Nursing Home, Guildford, 10.2.25. Only son of Major Nigel Alexander George Audley (deceased), and Kathleen Ann, nee Longsdon (deceased), of The Old House, Steeple Horley, Sussex . . .

He didn't even bloody well seem interested in Audley, David Longsdon, damn it!

"Yes. What about Clinton?"

"This man Audley, then—" Genghis Khan ignored the question again, as though it hadn't been asked. But it was no good thinking of him as Genghis Khan, and letting him ride dummy5

all over David Roche as though over a helpless Muscovite peasant: he had to be Johnnie, and he had to be resisted.

"What about Clinton?"

The pebble-eyes bored into him. "He frightened you, did he?"

"If he did?"

"He should. He's good, is Clinton."

"He frightens you, does he?"

"No. But he does interest me." The Slav features failed to register the insult. "He is an interesting man, I think."

"He interests me even more. Because I have to report back to him, and you don't."

Genghis Khan, refusing to be Johnnie, inclined his head fractionally to accept the truth of that. "Maybe later. But not yet—not now. You tell me about Audley now, David."

That was probably as much as he could expect to get about Clinton, decided Roche, since Clinton was evidently a wild card in the pack. But Audley was another matter.

"I thought you would be able to tell me about him."

Genghis Khan almost looked disappointed, as near as he was able to indicate any emotion.

"I gave you his name," said Roche.

"So you did. But what do you expect us to do—to go asking questions?" The head moved again, this time interrogatively.

"And we ask the wrong question in the right place—or the right question in the wrong place, which is no better—and dummy5

then what? Someone asks questions about us—and then someone asks questions about you, maybe? And is that what you want, eh?"

"I didn't mean that. I mean . . . you must have something on him, damn it!"

"On Audley? But why should we have anything on Audley?"

Roche frowned. "But Sir Eustace said—"

Sir Eustace said—

"How long have you been in Paris then, David?" Sir Eustace Avery asked.

"Nearly three years, Sir Eustace. Two years and ten months, to be exact."

"To be exact? You sound as though you've been marking the calendar." Sir Eustace sat back, raising a cathedral spire with his fingers. "Don't you like it there?"

"It's ... a lovely city." Roche decided to push his luck. "And the food's good."

Sir Eustace regarded him narrowly. "But the work's dull—is that it?"

Chin up, Roche. "Mine certainly is." Dull, dull, dull!

“Even though liaison is an integral part of intelligence work?"

The finger-tips at the point of the spire arched against each other. "And you're in charge of communications too—" Sir dummy5

Eustace looked down at the open file in front of him "—and communications are your special skill, aren't they?"

My file, thought Roche despondently: aptitudes, test marks, assessments, with more bloody betas and gammas than alphas.

But that wasn't the point. The point was that the Eighth Floor didn't muck around with communications—or with communications experts.

"I mean, we got you from the Royal Signals, didn't we?" Sir Eustace continued, looking up at him again. "In Tokyo, wasn't it? During the Korean business?"

Since it was all down there in front of him, in black and white, the questions were superfluous to the point of being both irritating and patronising.

"I put down for the Education Corps, sir," said Roche. "I was posted to the Signals."

"Indeed?" Sir Eustace raised an eyebrow over the file. "Let's see ... you'd already been to university . . . Manchester?" He made it sound like Fort Zinderneuf. "Where you read History

—that was before you were called up for your National Service?"

“French history mostly, actually."

“French history?"

"It's a well-established qualification to the Royal Corps of Signals," said Roche, straight-faced.

"It is?" Sir Eustace gave him an old-fashioned look. "But you dummy5

volunteered for the RAEC nevertheless—did you want to be a schoolmaster, then?"

"No, Sir Eustace." Roche cast around for a respectable reason for joining the RAEC while not intending to go into teaching after demobilisation. He certainly hadn't wanted to be a teacher then—that had been Julie's idea later. Then ... he hadn't particularly wanted to be anything; and a degree in History, and more particularly a knowledge of French history, had equipped him with no useful qualification except for transmitting that otherwise useless interest to the next generation. And so on ad infinitum, from generation to generation—that bleak conclusion, as much as anything else, had turned him against teaching. The conviction that the later French kings had been not so much effete as unfortunate had somehow not seemed to him of great importance in the creation of a more egalitarian Britain, not to mention a better world.

"Why, then?" persisted Sir Eustace.

He met Sir Eustace's gaze and, to his surprise, truth beckoned him once more. And not just truth, but also a sudden deeper instinct: these were the top brass, not the middlemen he was accustomed to report to—their rank and demeanour said as much, Thain's obsequious departure said as much, and Admiral Hall's portrait confirmed the message.

They hadn't summoned him here simply to give him his orders, they had other people to do that. He was here because they wanted to look at him for themselves, to see the dummy5

whites of his eyes and—more likely—the yellow of his soul.

It was his chance, and he had to take it. And he wouldn't get it by answering 'Yes, Sir Eustace' and 'No, Sir Eustace' like the scared, timeserving nonentity he was.

"I thought, if I fluffed the selection board, or I didn't stay the course as an officer-cadet at Eaton Hall, then at least I'd end up as an Education Corps sergeant in a cushy billet somewhere," he said coolly.

"You like cushy billets?" Sir Eustace pounced on the admission. "Isn't Paris a cushy billet?"

"Yes, it is—"

"I don't know a cushier billet than Paris!" Sir Eustace looked around him for agreement.

"Or a duller one, either," snapped Roche, seizing his opportunity before anyone could answer. "And I'm not a poor bloody National Serviceman any more either—and that's also the difference. And I wasn't conscripted from the Signals to Intelligence—I volunteered."

Sir Eustace met his gaze steadily for a moment, and then nodded slowly, not smiling, but at least acknowledging the point.

"Yes . . . ." To Roche's disappointment it was Clinton who spoke now. "And just why, in your considered opinion, is Paris so dull these days?"

Roche transferred his attention to Clinton, and wished he knew something—anything—about the man beyond what the dummy5

faint warning bells had whispered to him.

He licked his lips and decided to play for time. "I handle the liaison traffic," he began cautiously.

"I know that," said Clinton.

Roche's courage sank. Sir Eustace had digested the assessments in the file, yet was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Colonel Clinton had reached a different and hostile conclusion, and there wasn't any time to play for.

"They don't love us, the French," He had to find something to give Clinton, something which might impress him.

"Go on."

"They don't even like us. . . . Last year, for maybe six months

—from the time Nasser seized the canal through to the landings—they tried to like us, but even then it was a bloody effort. But they tried." He paused.

"Go on."

"Now they don't even try." When he thought about it, the one thing he did know about Clinton was that he didn't know anything about him. Which meant that he hadn't been active in the Paris station. "They used to say that the Entente Cordiale was buried somewhere between Dunkirk and Mers-el-Kebir." The words were Bill Ballance's.

"Where?" St. John Latimer cupped his ear.

"Where we blew half their fleet out of the water in 1940, Oliver," said Sir Eustace.

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"Oh— there . . ." St.John Latimer looked down his nose at Roche. "Oran, you mean."

Roche concentrated on Clinton. "Now they say the corpse has been re-interred beside the Suez Canal, somewhere between Port Said and Ismailia. And their next entente will be with the Germans, who are likely to be more reliable."

"So?" Clinton again packed tell me something I don't know into the question.

"So they don't give us anything. Or practically nothing—in effect, nothing. . .But that's fair enough really, because we give them the same in return—nothing, as near as damn it."

Clinton favoured him with a tiny nod. "So you've got nothing to trade—is that it?"

Nothing to trade in more ways than one, thought Roche bitterly. Nothing to give dear old Anglophile Philippe Roux, who made up for his embarrassment with marvellous lunches, and nothing to give—or very little to give— to Jean-Paul either.

"Is that it?" repeated Clinton. "Is that all?"

The difference between Philippe and Jean-Paul was that Jean-Paul didn't seem to mind. Indeed, not only was he neither disappointed nor worried by the lack of information, but he was rarely even much interested in what there was. It was as though he knew it all already.

And then suddenly, as he was about to admit that it was all—

and enough to account for the dullness of Paris, if not to dummy5

satisfy Colonel Clinton that Captain Roche was God's gift to Intelligence—more of Bill Ballance's ideas sprang into Roche's mind. "No, sir."

Roche inspected the ideas first from the front and then from the back. They were fully armed and equipped, and their boots and buttons were shining.

Clinton was waiting.

"You asked me for my opinion, sir." Roche used the extra seconds to re-inspect the ideas. It didn't matter whether they were false or not—in fact, he himself was living proof that they weren't false, really. But now that he was no longer on Jean-Paul's side that didn't matter. "And this is only my opinion, sir—I'm not in a position to substantiate it." He allowed himself to glance uneasily at Sir Eustace for support.

"Go on, David," Sir Eustace encouraged him.

"Well, sir . . ." He came back to Clinton. "I think we're well-advised to restrict the traffic. Because I strongly suspect the Russians have got the French Special Services buttoned up from top to bottom. I think they already know what the French are giving us, for what it's worth—which isn't much.

And I think most of what we give them goes straight back to Moscow—" he let himself break off, as though afraid he had gone too far.

"Yes?" Sir Eustace leaned forward.

Roche shrugged. "Well. . . there's a lot of talk about their reorganising at the moment. But that isn't because they dummy5

believe they've been penetrated, it's because the present set-up can't handle the Algerian war, and holding on to Algeria is their Number One priority at the moment. In fact, if anything, they think they're secure at the moment—"

This time the break was genuine, as it occurred to Roche that the next thing Sir Eustace—or more likely Clinton—would ask him was for the source of his suspicions, unsubstantiated or not, and since he could hardly admit he was parrotting Bill Ballance, that put poor old Philippe in the cart, than whom no one was more truly red-white-and-blue and the soul of honour.

"I rather think there's someone high up who's sold that as the official line, and they're sticking to it, anyway," he added belatedly.

"Where did you get this?" asked Clinton.

"It's pretty much rumour, sir." Roche felt himself slipping.

"But you believe it?" Sir Eustace prodded him. "Obviously—

you do, eh?"

Obviously—he had to. "Yes, sir. I think they're blown."

"Have you talked about it with your contact?"

There was no escape. He had to have a source, and the source had to be Philippe. And, no matter with what regret, the choice between the careers of Commandant Roux and Captain Roche was no choice at all.

"In—in a roundabout sort of way, Sir Eustace." In a very roundabout way, actually. Because it had been British dummy5

security, not French, that they had been talking roundabout, in effect.

"And what did he say?"

Au revoir, Philippe. "He said ... he said that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Or words to that effect."

"What words?"

Roche rocked on his chair. "He asked me if we knew yet who'd tipped off Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, among other things." There was no denying Philippe had said that, even if the context had been subtly different.

"Who is your contact? Is he reliable?" Sir Eustace frowned down at the file, and finding nothing there, frowned up.

"I've no reason to think not." But he had to go, nevertheless.

Because now that the possibility of a leak had been aired, then the possible unreliability of Philippe Roux not only demonstrated his own shrewdness but also accounted for any small leakages which might otherwise now be traceable back to David Roche. So—adieu, Philippe. "But..."

"Yes?"

"I don't know. I've just got a bad feeling about him. Nothing I could put my finger on—just a feeling." The feeling was guilt, but in his present scale of priorities Roche thought he could handle it.

"Who—" Sir Eustace broke off as he caught the expression on Colonel Clinton's face. "Yes, Fred? You think David has made his point?"

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The corner of Colonel Clinton's mouth had twitched, but not with anything approaching amusement judging by the expression on the rest of his face.

"He's made his point right enough." Clinton nodded. "But I was thinking of Roux, as a matter of fact."

"Roux?"

"His contact—their liaison man. Philippe Roux."

"You know him?"

"Not personally. But he was in Berlin about three years back, before my time. And he was on Gehlen's Red List then as a probable KGB contact."

"That is good," said Genghis Khan. "He gave you Roux—and he gave you Gehlen."

"Damn it—I gave him Roux!" The thought of Philippe Roux being no better than David Roche—and not only no better, but also not so good professionally speaking, if the West Germans had penetrated his cover— had been somehow shocking as well as disturbing. He had had Philippe down as true blue.

"So you gave him only what he already knew, and in all innocence. And now you have told me, and I know—and that is good too," Genghis Khan nodded approvingly. "And, what is more, I will do nothing about it, I assure you. Roux must take his chances—you are more important than Roux, David."

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That was highly reassuring, but he couldn't help looking at Genghis Khan interrogatively nevertheless.

"Clinton trusts you. He gave you Gehlen—and he has been with the Gehlen Organisation for the last two years, liaising with them." Genghis Khan nodded again. "So he gave you Roux, and he didn't need to—and that is even more pleasing."

Roche wished that Genghis Khan could show his pleasure more obviously, but the face was still as expressionless as a waxwork.

"I rather got the impression he didn't like me much."

"Liking is not necessary. In any case, it is not you he dislikes, it is Sir Eustace Avery—and the man Latimer, he will be disliked too. I would guess that you are their choice, and they are thrusting you on Clinton. But at least he is disposed to make the best of you."

The way Genghis Khan was talking, estimating the likes and dislikes of the British top brass, suggested that he himself was above half-way up the ladder. And it also suggested that Genghis Khan had decided to emulate Colonel Clinton in trusting the eminently trustworthy David Roche with his confidences. And that happy state of affairs had to be capitalised on while it lasted, to help him play both sides against the middle as required. "I think you'd better explain that—'thrusting me on Clinton'." On second hearing it didn't sound so flattering, either. "Why do they dislike each other?

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Just what is happening?"

The pebble-eyes bored into him. "What is happening. . . what is happening is that they are each survivors of the great disaster which has befallen your service in recent years. Do you understand?"

"No. Not really. Tell me."

Genghis Khan looked at his watch. "There is not time, not now. It is enough that they are two of the survivors—Clinton has survived because he was absent at the right time, so he was lucky. . . or perhaps he was prudent, perhaps it would be safer to assume that—and Avery has survived because he was also lucky, but in a different way . . . and because he has the right connections—because he is a political animal and not a pure professional like Clinton—indeed, he is a great survivor . . . And that is also why they dislike each other."

It was going above Roche's head, but Genghis Khan was right: they were running hard on time.

"So now they must build again, with what they have—"

Genghis Khan looked hard at him "—and what they can get."

And what they have is me, thought Roche, and that's one measure of the disaster, by God!

"You obviously have some special qualifications they need, I am thinking," said Genghis Khan speculatively, "to get them what they want."

What they want.

"So now I think you'd better tell me about this man Audley,"

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said Genghis Khan.

III

"No, ROCHE, I cannot tell you anything about this fellow Audley that isn't in the file," said Major Stocker brusquely.

"What I know is in the file."

Major Stocker wore a Royal Artillery tie beneath a face which was weathered like a block of Blenheim stone cruelly exposed to the elements over several centuries.

"What I know is in the file," repeated Major Stocker, as though to pre-empt any feeble Roche-protest, "because I compiled the file."

And Major Stocker also frightened Roche in the same way as Colonel Clinton had done; perhaps not quite so much, allowing for rank, but almost as much because—according to Genghis Khan's informed guess—he was Clinton's creature, and had therefore been quarried from the same hard strata.

Yet, nevertheless, he didn't frighten Roche quite as much as Genghis Khan had done, and that made all the difference.

"But there must be something—"

"Of course there's something, man!" They had had two minutes together, but already Stocker had no time for Roche, that was plain: Captain Roche in Major Stocker's battery would have led a dog's life. "That's why you're here, damn it!"

"I mean, something you know that isn't in the file—about dummy5

what sort of man he is—damn it!" Fear hardened Roche into resistance.

What sort of man he is: David Longsdon Audley—

Oliver St.John Latimer didn't like David Longsdon Audley—

had never met him, had never sat the same exams, had never packed down in the same scrum (the idea of Oliver St.John Latimer stripe-jerseyed for a game of rugger was beyond imagination), never eaten in the same mess (the idea of Oliver St.John Latimer crammed into the same tank was equally beyond imagination)—but Oliver St.John Latimer didn't like David Longsdon Audley, and that was a fact if not a fact in the file. Because he'd said so. "He's a tricky blighter, if you ask me," said Oliver St.John Latimer, eyeing Sir Eustace Avery coolly, equal to equal, and then David Roche pityingly, superior to inferior.

"Latimer is one of the new recruits," said Genghis Khan.

"Eton, then Merton College and All Souls at Oxford—a very gifted young man—we would like to know very much how they recruited him . . . perhaps also a very nasty young man . . .")

"A tricky blighter, then," said Latimer. "Arrogant, selfish, indisciplined, bloody-minded, ruthless, cunning—take your pick." He stared into space as he listed David Longsdon dummy5

Audley's virtues, at a point above Roche's head.

"Brilliant," supplemented Sir Eustace. "Brave."

Roche achieved a surreptitious sidelong look at Colonel Clinton, and was rewarded with a fleeting vision of Clinton observing Oliver St.John Latimer in an unguarded moment.

"Clever—I'll grant you clever," begrudged Latimer.

"A First at Cambridge," murmured Sir Eustace. "An Open Scholarship when he was seventeen—the Hebden Prize—and a First after the war."

"Anyone can get a First at Cambridge," said Latimer disparagingly. "It isn't difficult."

"And a doctorate," said Sir Eustace.

Latimer sniffed. "On a singularly obscure aspect of Byzantine religious history. Which I also strongly suspect he cribbed from an even more obscure untranslated Arabic thesis on the subject ... I know of a chap who did exactly the same with a Ph.D on Richard Hooker— all out of an untranslated German book . . .But — clever, I'll grant you, yes!"

David Longsdon Audley . . .

Educated: Miss Anthea Grant's Kindergarten, 1930-33; St.

George's Preparatory School for Boys, Buckland, 1933-38; St. Martin's School, Immingham, Hampshire, 1938-42; War Service (see below); Rylands College, Cambridge, 1946-49

(Open Scholarship in History, 1942; Hebden Prizewinner, 1948; 1st Class Honours, 1949; Ph.D., 1953).

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"And brave." Sir Eustace allowed the hint of a sharper edge into his voice, almost as though he was deliberately taking a cut at Latimer.

"Ah . . . well, I wouldn't like to set myself up as an authority there, Eustace," said Latimer off-handedly, as impervious to the cut as a rhinoceros to the brush of a thornbush. "They didn't give him any pretty ribbons, but that doesn't prove anything, I suppose — medals being no more than a lottery.

But no doubt a gallant officer."

War Service (Immingham School OTC, 1938-42) Army, 1942-46 (conscripted); OCTU, Mons Barracks, Aldershot, 1943; 21 Lt, Royal West Sussex Dragoons, 1943; 15th Armoured Division, 2nd Army, Normandy, July-August 1944; Lt. September 1944, attached Intelligence Corps; T/

Capt., February 1945; demobilised, Oct 1946.

"Wasn't it the Duke of Wellington who asked to be preserved from 'gallant officers'?" Latimer cast a lazy glance in Colonel Clinton's direction. "I suppose military bravery is in the nature of a communal activity — the urge to conform multiplied by the bloodlust of the hunting-field, would you say, Fred?"

Clinton shrugged. "I'm not an authority on it either, Latimer.

I can't say I've ever thought about it."

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"But he was a cavalryman of some sort, wasn't he?"

"He served in an armoured regiment, if that's what you mean," said Clinton evenly.

"The Royal . . . something Dragoons . . .?"

"West Sussex. He was with them in Normandy."

"But not for long, if I remember correctly?"

Was this being staged for his benefit, Roche wondered — or did they always spar like this?

"They didn't last long. They were practically wiped out in the bocage country, south of Caumont." Clinton paused. "If I remember correctly."

"In the best British cavalry tradition," agreed Latimer. "It was a smart regiment, I take it?"

"It was a good yeomanry regiment," said Clinton icily.

"That's what I mean—sons of the local squires in pretty uniforms—gold braid and magenta-coloured breeches, and all that."

Magenta was their colour, yes."

"How ghastly! Doesn't go with anything, magenta—I should know, because it's my old college colour too," murmured Latimer. "And it was after that debacle you met him first, wasn't it, Fred?"

Suddenly Roche began to watch them both much more carefully.

"Briefly," said Clinton, equally briefly.

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"Yes. And that's where the book of words starts to become rather sketchy," nodded Latimer.

So it wasn't for his benefit—they were fencing with unbuttoned foils, decided Roche.

Latimer had done his homework on Audley, no matter what he pretended—even down to knowing that the regimental colour of the Royal West Sussex Dragoons was magenta, which was a dead giveaway to the depth of his research. But, nevertheless, there was still a lot that he didn't know about Audley—and therefore a lot that wasn't in the file—for which, even for any unconsidered titbit an irritated Colonel Clinton might let slip, Latimer was now unashamedly fishing.

But, much more to the point, 2/Lt Audley had met Clinton in 1944, and although obviously still very young had been involved in intelligence work thereafter.

So ... they didn't just want Audley as a recruit—they wanted him back.

"So then he went to work for you," confirmed Latimer obligingly.

"Not for me," Clinton shook his head.

"For us, then." Latimer waited for a moment or two. Then, when it became clear that Clinton wasn't going to elaborate on that piece of negative intelligence, he turned to Sir Eustace. "What exactly did he do? Beyond causing a lot of trouble to a lot of people, if I read between the lines correctly?"

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Sir Eustace smiled almost genially, as though he didn't want to offend Latimer. "It isn't really grist to our mill any more, Oliver. It's all water under the bridge—'in another country, and besides the wench is dead', and all that."

"You mean—still classified?" Smiles didn't fool Latimer.

"If you like. But also unimportant now. You've seen his fitness reports."

"Unfitness reports, more like," amended Latimer. "Oh yes, I've seen them. And I've talked to Archie Forbes at Cambridge too, and he pretty much confirmed them.

Arrogant, selfish, indisciplined, bloody-minded, ruthless and cunning."

"He's matured since then, Oliver."

"Or hardened."

"So much the better." Sir Eustace's voice roughened. "At all events, Oliver—and David—I want him. And I want him quickly."

Latimer gave Roche a quizzical look, almost as though he was seeing him for the first time. "Well, you're welcome to him.

But I say he's a tricky blighter—"

"So he worked for them." Genghis Khan did not appear either particularly surprised by the news, or embarrassed by the fact that it was news. "And then left them."

"And you've got no record of him?" Roche made no effort to dummy5

conceal his disappointment.

"Nothing?"

"The inquiry into our records is in progress. But now I will inquire more urgently, since we know there is something to look for. Do not despair."

"I'm not despairing. I just expected more help, that's all—if it's so important."

"It is important." Genghis Khan's fractional nod was, by the standard of his immobility, a wild gesture of agreement on that, Roche supposed. "It is so important that it is all the more important for us not to rush in to help you, I think. We must help you with caution, is better."

That sounded very much like all aid short of actual help, thought Roche bleakly. Between Sir Eustace's I want him quickly and Genghis Khan's we must help you with caution and St. John Latimer's he's a tricky blighter, not to mention his private plans, he was already in over his head, and he hadn't even started.

"And above all you must be cautious," Genghis Khan compounded the situation. "At least until we know what they want, there must be no risk taken, no slightest risk."

"They want Audley, damn it—we know what they want,"

snapped Roche.

"Sir Eustace Avery wants Audley." Genghis Khan stared at him un-blinkingly. "But Oliver Saint-John Latimer does not want Audley—"

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" Sinjun. It's pronounced Sinjun, not 'Saint-John'," said Roche. " Sinjun Latimer."

Genghis Khan blinked just once, like a lizard. "He sees Audley as a rival. And it is also perhaps that Avery intends him to be a rival. . . But that is not enough, there must be more . . . And there is Clinton. There is always Clinton—he must be considered."

More?"

Genghis Khan ignored him. "To go to such trouble for one man. There must be more—there will be more."

He was having difficulty adjusting his thought-processes to the limitations of a decadent fascist-capitalist society, that was it. Recalling Audley's Russian equivalent to the colours would not have presented such problems. "I don't see why."

Arguing back was risky, but if there was something else behind the man's certainty he needed to know it. "They think he'll maybe play hard to get, that's all. He worked for them during the war, and they approached him again a few years ago, but he turned them down flat. They think I can do better."

The lizard-blink was repeated. "Why you?"

Roche decided not to be insulted. "I have what they call 'a sympathetic profile' apparently. It seems we both read history at university." He could see that sympathetic profiles and history both left Genghis Khan unmoved. "And I have a high security clearance."

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That did the trick: Genghis Khan smiled, or almost smiled, and Roche wished he hadn't. It was more like the corpse-grin out of an Asiatic burial mound in which the khan presided over his circle of slaughtered slaves and horses.

But mercifully it lasted only for a moment. "So you have been cleared to approach this man Audley . . . But that changes nothing. What matters is why they need him so urgently—

that is what we want to know."

"It may be what you want to know. But if I don't find out a lot more about Audley than there is in the bloody file we'll never get that far," said Roche bitterly. "So I hope to God Major Stocker knows what he's about better than you do! Because if I fail—"

"If you fail?" Genghis Khan shook his head slowly at Roche.

"If you fail Sir Eustace Avery will not retain your services?"

Roche's guts knotted. "It's possible."

"Then I think you would be well-advised not to fail, David Roche," said Genghis Khan.

"I mean, what sort of man he is—what makes him tick?" he pressed Major Stocker. "You must have some ideas about him, more than what's in the file?"

Major Stocker pursed his lips. "Not really, no—I haven't actually met him, you know. I've just assembled the facts."

Stocker was Clinton's man, so it seemed, and there was nothing very unnatural about that. In peacetime, you made dummy5

the best with what you could get, and what soldiers could get usually consisted of other soldiers. He himself, although he was hardly a reassuring example of the process, was another instance of it, out of the additional factor of conscription and the accident of the Korean War. But he could have wished for the Audley file to have been assembled by someone more like Latimer.

"Seems a pretty ordinary enough chap on the face of it,"

Major Stocker struggled with his inclination to stay inside the safe defences of the facts in spite of Roche's appeal to him to crawl out into the no-man's-land of opinion.

"On the face of it?"

"Yes . . . That's to say, prep school, public school, then in the war— decent regiment until they pulled him out of the line—"

Stocker made Audley's attachment to Intelligence sound like victimisation, with Audley more sinned against than sinning

"—doesn't look as though he fitted in awfully well there, but he did his time."

No remission for good behaviour?"

"What?"

"They kept him on right to the end—October '46. And the university term starts in October. I seem to recall chaps getting special release in my day," said Roche politely, to make up for his lapse into facetiousness.

"Nothing unusual about that, if he was on a job. His fitness assessments were pretty damning, certainly—looks like dummy5

maybe someone had it in for him for something he'd done."

"You don't know what he'd done—what he'd been doing?"

"Yes . . . that is, no." Stocker shook his head. "I put in a request on a 'Need to Know' basis, but it was denied. I was told that it wasn't relevant."

"Is that unusual, in your experience?"

"Oh yes—quite usual. They hold on to that sort of thing as long as they can, as a matter of course. But in this case Colonel Clinton also turned down my request. He said there was no need for me to know."

"You went to Clinton after your request had been denied?"

"Naturally." Stocker regarded him candidly. "I never take the first no as the final answer .... But, at any rate, Audley made up for all that at university—he's bright, no doubt about that.

Not popular, but very bright. Good at games . . . rugger mostly, almost first-class at that, but not quite. Club level—

helped to found a local club on his home territory—funny name—"

"The Visigoths."

"That's right—it's in the file ... they won the Wessex League in '54 ... and the usual squash and fives, at college level, nothing special."

"Clubbable, in fact?" Audley did seem a depressingly normal public school product—school, regiment, university, work-and-games, mens sana in corpore sano. Apart, that was, from St. John Latimer's assessment.

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Stocker was looking at him, and Stocker hadn't answered.

Perhaps he hadn't heard?

"Clubbable?" Perhaps Stocker was unacquainted with the word.

"Joins in, plays the game, and all that?"

"Yes." Stocker continued to look at him. "Yes and no."

"What d'you mean—'yes and no'?"

Stocker considered his contradictory answer. "I rather think I mean 'no', actually."

Roche waited for the Major to elaborate the contradiction.

"You know ... we don't know where his money comes from?"

Stocker went off at a surprising tangent.

"The file said 'private means'," said Roche, deciding not to press the Major on that 'yes-and-no-meaning-no' on the assumption that he would come back to it in his own good time.

"Yes—that's what they are— private." Stocker nodded.

"They're so damn private we don't know what they are, or where they are, or where they come from."

Audley was living in France at the moment, in the south near Cahors. But before that he had been on the move constantly, through Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and even in the Middle East, only returning to England at carefully spaced tax-evasive intervals. And while it wasn't the sort of life-style that necessarily needed vast resources, its funding could be dummy5

made very difficult to check, and with only a little ingenuity too.

"He's officially domiciled in Switzerland," continued Stocker.

"But I've half an idea the money is in Lebanon. The difficulty is that Colonel Clinton doesn't want him alerted that anyone is sniffing around, so we're having to move very slowly. So slowly as to be practically stationary."

Roche frowned. "But I thought his money was inherited?

Wasn't his father well off?"

Stocker shook his head. "Just a façade. Or ... there must have been money there at some time, but by the time the father was killed early in the war it had nearly all gone. The flat in London went in '39, and most of the land had already been sold by then. There was the house ... it isn't so big actually, but it's very old and it is rather nice . . . but even that was in a very poor state of repair, and the father was dickering to sell that too. He was posted to France just as he was about to sign on the dotted line."

That was in 1940?"

"That's right. He was killed just before Dunkirk."

And the mother died before that."

"Yes. She died when Audley was very small. But fortunately for him she'd taken out an education insurance policy for him, otherwise the house would have had to go. It was that tight." Stocker paused. "But since then he's had the house repaired, and he's even bought back some of the land. So he's dummy5

picked up quite a lot of hard cash from somewhere, that's for sure."

"He writes books though, doesn't he? And articles for magazines?"

History books—and learned magazines." Stocker wrinkled up his nose at culture. "And I doubt there's much profit in the early Middle Ages. You've seen the list of his works?"

Roche nodded. "Hardly best-sellers, I agree."

"Best-sellers? You couldn't rent a council allotment with The Influence of Islamic Doctrines on Iconoclasm in 8th Century Byzantium. He bought two hundred acres of Sussex farmland last year."

"So he makes his money some other way." The more Roche thought about Audley's finances, the less he liked leaving such loose ends untied behind him. Stocker's facts had merely whetted his appetite for opinions the Major seemed incapable of giving. "There are still ways of making quick money if you're clever. And he's clever."

"Meaning dishonest?"

Stocker regarded him dispassionately. "Very well, I'll go on digging. But I can't promise quick results there."

Roche sighed. "So what are you promising me ... sir?"

Stocker nodded out of the bar towards the dining room.

"Lunch first."

And then?"

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"Half-an-hour's drive. We should reach Immingham just after the pub closes."

"Immingham?"

St. Martin's School, Immingham, 1938-42 . . . '

"That's right. You want to know what sort of man Audley is.

Wasn't it Wordsworth who said 'the child is father of the man', eh?" Stocker looked at his watch. "If that's true, then I think there's someone at Immingham who may be able to help you, Captain Roche."

IV

THE RUGGER POSTS of the St. Martin's School, Immingham, 1st XV pitch stood tall and very white against their backcloth of Sussex landscape, on a vivid green field of late summer grass, dwarfing the two figures beside them.

Roche rounded the corner of the pitch and turned towards them at last, along the goal-line. But although he knew that they had seen him the moment he had appeared from behind the pavilion, they still took not the least bit of notice of him.

". . . ah, well you may have it your way, Major Willis, sir—"

God! Another major!

"—but I say it's in good heart, and if we leave it alone it'll be right enough with no more fussing, if we get a drop of rain."

"But will we get that, Mr Badger? You want to put your trust in God, and I say that God helps those who help themselves."

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Major Willis bent down and examined the grass at his feet. "I don't know ... I don't think it's as vigorous as it ought to be for the time of year—" he straightened up abruptly "—so let's have a third opinion, eh?"

"Eh?" The groundsman frowned at him, and then at Roche, since there was no other possible opinion in sight.

The schoolmaster also turned towards Roche. He was a slightly-built man, with a ferrety look which reminded Roche of Field Marshal Montgomery.

"Captain Roche, is it?" he inquired peremptorily.

"Major . . . Willis?" And also the Field Marshal's rather nasal voice. But not, judging by the smell of Scotch whisky, the Field Marshal's celebrated abstinence, thereby confirming Stocker's intelligence work. "My—ah—my colleague, Major Stocker, phoned you, I believe, sir."

"So he did—jolly good! Now then—" Willis gestured to the great open expanse of playing field "—are you a sportsman?

Of course you are, I don't need to ask, do I!"

Roche felt that he had been warned, yet insufficiently forewarned nevertheless.

"So what d'you think of it, then? Am I right—or is Badger here right?"

It was all just grass to Roche, and rather lush, if anything.

"My game was hockey, actually." It might be a risk, admitting that, but it was less risky than remaining on the subject of grass.

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"Hockey?" Willis frowned at him. "What club d'you play for?"

None, at the moment. I haven't played for some years—the last time I played was in Malaya, actually."

Willis nodded. "For the Army?"

"Yes." That was stretching the truth, but if sporting prowess was the way to Major Willis's heart then so be it.

Willis nodded again. "They're rather good, aren't they—the Malays?"

Damn good," said Roche heartily. "But it was a scratch game

—we were on the way to Korea at the time. That was the main fixture just then."

Willis stared at him for a second. "Ah . . . yes, I see what you mean—the main fixture, what!" He nodded once more, and then turned to the groundsman. "Well, Mr Badger, we'll let it wait until the weekend—right?"

"If you say so, Major Willis, sir," the groundsman nodded lugubriously, and stumped away down the goal line.

"He knows he's in the wrong—and he just doesn't want to do the work—he knows damn well that I know it, too!" Willis shook his head at Mr Badger's departing figure. "The trouble is, it's no good knowing better than other people these days—

I've been suffering from that all my life, and I ought to be used to it by now, I suppose . . ." He swung back to Roche in another of his abrupt Montgomeryesque movements. "Now then, Captain—what's this 'matter of national interest' with which it is alleged I can help you, eh? Let's have it straight, dummy5

with no frills—identity card first— right?"

Roche watched him scrutinise the identity card.

"Seems okay. 'David Roche'? Can I call you David?"

"Yes, Major—"

"And we'll put a stop to that, for a start. Badger calls me

'Major' because he served in the same battalion with me for most of the war, and he knows it annoys me. He was an idle sergeant and I was an unpopular major, so we made a good pair, both civilians at heart. . . But you don't have to 'major'

me. The boys call me 'Wimpy' now, so you can do the same—

right?"

Right. . ." Or it would be right if he could get a word in edgeways. "Right, then! Suppose you tell me about this national interest of yours? But I should warn you—you'll have to make a damn good case if you want me to help you.

I'm not in a giving frame of mind these days, you know."

Roche looked at him questioningly. "I beg your pardon?"

And so you should. Since Suez, my lad—when I was of a mind to go to the Canadian Embassy, or whatever they call it, and ask them if I could emigrate, except they would probably have told me they didn't want old buffers like me. . .And then we came a cropper— et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos, as Virgil put it. So where was 'the national interest' when we invaded Egypt, then—eh?"

"I didn't have anything to do with Suez—"

"Naturally. Like when Field Marshal Haig said to the poor dummy5

squaddie 'Where did you start the war, my man?' and the poor fellow replied 'Christ, sir—I didn't start it!' But is that a sufficient answer, I ask you? So where is the national interest now, Captain Roche?"

The plain white envelope in Roche's breast-pocket began to make its weight felt.

" Only in the last resort," Stocker had advised him. " Use it if he positively won't talk. Fred Clinton doesn't want it used, but you'll have to exercise your best judgement there."

"Well—spit it out, man! Don't just stand there," Willis exhorted him.

"Yes, sir—" Roche floundered.

" 'Wimpy'. You call a man 'sir'—or 'Major Willis', for that matter—and you're halfway to making an issue of it. But if you call him 'Jack', or 'Harry', or 'Wimpy', then you can get away with insulting him to his face," said Willis, of a sudden half-conciliatory, almost friendly. "Don't be put off by my bark—it's only a concealment for a total lack of bite, dear boy. I talk too much, that's my trouble. It's part natural—the way I'm put together—and part guilt-complex that there are still young fellows like you, having to look to the 'national interest' a dozen years after we won the war, which we'd never have had to fight in the first place if we'd stood up for what was right and in the national interest— audiet pugnas vitio parentum, rara iuventus . . . but I don't suppose you've had time to study the Classics—'how they fought shall be passed on to a younger generation smaller because of their dummy5

parents' crimes'—the context was different, but the sense is there, I'm sorry to have to admit..."

Stocker had described him as being 'mildly eccentric', especially on the subjects of sport and the classics, and therefore unpredictable; but reputedly benevolent after his lunch time sessions—out of term, naturally—with his cronies in the local pub; and a formidably good teacher, and a ladies'

man, but a bachelor—and, for God's sake, what did all that add up to?

"Well, David?" said Willis. "The national interest, then?"

It added up at the moment to the reduction of David Roche almost to a tongue-tied Sixth Former with doubtful prospects in Higher Cert.

"Yes . . . Well, I'm told you were one of the executors of the will of Major Nigel Alexander George Audley, Mr Willis—"

Note i. Father, ed. Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; major, Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers (T.A.), killed in action, France, May 1940.

"—and Legal Guardian of David Longsdon Audley—"

Audley, David Longsdon—

Willis looked at him blankly for a moment. "What?"

"You're David Audley's legal guardian?" repeated Roche.

"I was, yes." The schoolmaster emphasised the past tense.

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"You were a friend of his father's?"

Willis nodded. "Yes."

"And you taught the son—at his prep school?"

Another nod. "Yes."

"And here at Immingham?"

"Yes."

Roche waited in vain for something more than that third successive 'yes', until it became obvious that in spite of being self-confessedly talkative Willis was now determined to be monosyllabic.

"So you knew him quite well?"

Willis bent down to examine the grass, probing it with his fingers as though he was looking for something. And so he was, of course, thought Roche. But it wasn't in the grass.

"Who?" Willis didn't look up, though.

"The son."

Willis straightened up slowly. "Why do you want to know?"

"The national interest, Major."

Willis faced him. "I told you, I don't like being called 'Major'—

and particularly at this precise moment, I think."

"Why not—at this precise moment particularly?"

"Because I suspect it's to remind me that I once held the King's Commission—'Right trusty and well-beloved', and all the rest, Captain."

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The envelope would be required. Stocker had known that all along.

"Don't think that I've forgotten that allegiance," said Willis.

"It's simply that there are other allegiances—like that of a legal guardian, for example. And a teacher's too ... 'in loco parentis' covers both—'in the place of a parent', if you have no Latin, Captain." Willis paused. "How would you say 'in the national interest' relates to 'in loco parentis', morally speaking?"

Roche waited. The briefly monosyllabic Willis had been a little unnerving, but now that the man had started to talk again he could afford to wait. "I concede the classical precedents. It would have presented no problem to a Roman father, and certainly not to a Spartan one . . . But nowadays they encourage children to inform on their parents behind the Iron Curtain, and we regard that as an attribute of barbarism. And I don't see why the boot shouldn't be on the other foot as well, in all honesty."

The whole drift of Willis's soliloquy was fascinating, in that he'd taken it for granted Audley was the subject of a security investigation of some kind. But what was surprising was that Willis himself didn't seem in the least surprised.

"What makes you think I want you to 'inform' on him, as you put it?" he inquired innocently.

Now Willis did seem a touch surprised. "My dear fellow, I can't imagine you want me to 'inform' on his father! Apart from the fact that Nigel's been dead these sixteen—seventeen dummy5

—years, I hardly think his ... gentlemanly activities, such as they were—his gathering of rosebuds—were ever likely to be of the slightest national interest, or of any other sort of interest, except perhaps sociological, as a footnote to the 1930s. So that only leaves young David, and you clearly wish me to 'inform' on him—even so unworldly a person as myself can see that!"

But—"

Willis raised a hand. "And I must tell you that on mature consideration I don't think I will, and for two reasons . . . Of which the first is that I doubt that I have anything of the slightest importance to impart, since I haven't clapped eyes on him for several years, and we correspond but rarely with each other . . . And the second, and to my mind much stronger reason, is that... as his former guardian and teacher, not to mention the friend and brother-officer of his father . . .

I'm not prepared to sneak on him— certainly not without a very much better reason than anything so vague as 'the national interest'. Indeed—whose 'national interest'? Not that of those who conceived the Suez landings of last year as also being 'in the national interest', I can tell you!"

Roche nodded deprecatingly. "I do take your point, sir—" he could no more bring himself to call the man 'Wimpy' than he could have called the terrifying Johnnie 'Genghis Khan' to his face "—but I don't think you quite understand why I'm here . . . why we need your help, that is . . ."

"Indeed?" Willis regarded him with an expression of polite dummy5

but absolute Misbelief.

"We want David Audley to help us," said Roche.

" 'With your inquiries'?" murmured Willis. "Isn't that the phrase: 'A man is helping the police with their inquiries'? But I do understand that, my dear fellow. I understand it perfectly. And nothing you say is going to stop me understanding it."

Roche took the envelope out of his inside breast-pocket and handed it to Willis.

"What's this, then?" Willis looked at the blank envelope suspiciously.

"It's for you, sir."

"It's not addressed to me. It's not addressed to anyone!"

"It's for you, sir, nevertheless," insisted Roche, aware that he was quite as curious about the contents as Willis must be.

He watched the schoolmaster take a spectacle-case from his pocket and perch a pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses on his nose, and then make a nervous hash of splitting the stiff white paper, which was definitely not Government-issue.

The single sheet of paper inside matched the thickness of the envelope: it was slightly curved from its carriage inside Roche's breast-pocket, but not crumpled, and it gave a dry parchment-like crackle as Willis opened it.

Handwriting, that was all Roche could make out.

"Good God!" exclaimed Willis. "Good God!"

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It was going to work, whatever it was, thought Roche.

Everyone had a key to them somewhere, and Clinton had obtained Willis's somehow.

"Well I never!" murmured Willis. "Good God!"

It was a pity that Audley's key wasn't so readily available.

But, for a guess, Audley didn't have a simple key, but more likely a combination of numbers; and one or more of those numbers was apparently locked up in Willis's head—and some more numbers might be locked up in some numbered account in Zurich or Beirut as well. But this was a start, and he ought to be grateful for that. Because only in opening up Audley could he gain access to sufficient funds with which to bargain for his own freedom, and be shot of the lot of them.

But Willis had read his letter, and was now looking at him with a new expression in his eyes. "You work for him—that foxy beggar?"

Clinton's features broke through the mists in Roche's mind—

the high colour, which had nothing to do with blood pressure but only with blood, and the sharp features, sharper even than Willis's ferrety-Montgomery look— foxy would do very well for them, even though the hairline had receded back and down to reveal the freckled skin stretched tight over the skull, leaving only a tide-mark of that once-red hair above the ears. No beauty now, Clinton . . . and the foxy look was inside now, radiated rather than apparent.

But Clinton, for sure—

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"I'm very much inclined to agree with you, Oliver. Audley is a tricky blighter. And, what is more germane to our present problem, there was an attempt made to recruit him again shortly after he came down from Cambridge. And it failed abysmally—it was bungled, wouldn't you say, Fred?"

"It was none of my doing." Clinton pointed his muzzle at Roche. "This time we must know what we are about, Roche

—"

"The hair's all gone now," said Roche carefully.

"It has?" Willis flicked a glance at him, and then returned to the far distance. "That'll be the effect of the sweat, I shouldn't wonder . . . I've seen the same thing with some of our old boys, coming back for Reunion Night—crowning glories smooth as billiard balls—yes! And what is he now—a full general? He was just Major Clinton then—'Freddie' to his betters ... or his elders, anyway, if not his betters ..."

Another major. The whole world was full of majors today: majors gone up, like Clinton; majors in the balance, like Stocker; majors long dead, like Nigel Audley, cheated of his destiny; and majors ossified in wartime memories, like this little schoolmaster before him. And even one other potential major too!

And yet . . . once upon a time this garrulous schoolmaster had crossed Clinton's path, which neither he nor Clinton had dummy5

forgotten; though there was nothing remarkable in that, any of it, for Clinton must have made a lot of men sweat over the years, and he hadn't finished yet.

"He's not a general. . ."He left the end of the statement open, as though there was more to come.

"Doesn't matter. I'll bet he tells the generals what to do! He wasn't above telling 'em a thing or two when—" Willis stopped suddenly, cocking his head knowingly at Roche "—

but that's another story . . . It's a small world, though—a small world ... All those years ago, and now this— out of the blue—a damn small world!"

He lifted the paper, but didn't offer it to Roche. Instead he fumbled in his pocket, producing first a pipe, which he stuck between his teeth, and then a gunmetal lighter.

"And he's still foxy, too," he muttered, snapping the lighter and applying the flame to the edge of the letter. When it was well alight he looked up at Roche, the twist of a smile lifting the opposite corner of his mouth to that which held the pipe.

"Instructions!"

Roche watched the flames consume the paper right down to the last finger-hold, which the schoolmaster abandoned just in time. The charred remains floated to the ground, where they lay for a moment still in two complete and almost recognisable pieces; then the breeze shivered them, and lifted them, and finally broke them up, drifting them away across the field.

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Willis put his pipe back in his pocket. "Maybe I should be a little bit frightened, instead of merely obedient—and very grateful he didn't order me to chew it up and swallow it instead. It would have been most uncommonly indigestible."

Whatever there had been between them, it was wind-blown ashes now, and all that could be recovered from it was whether or not it had served its purpose, decided Roche philosophically. It would have been nice to know more, but it didn't really matter apart from that.

Willis looked at him again. "Very well, then—I think your last meaningful question was 'Did I know David Audley quite well?' And the answer to that is 'Yes, as well as anyone did, and probably better than most'—and certainly a lot better than Nigel Audley ever did, although that's not saying much, in all conscience—so, yes is the answer to that one, David Roche."

So the paper had been the right key, and doubly the right key, if they were right about Audley—

"This time we must know what we are about, Roche," said Clinton. "Because some fool, whoever it was, went at it bald-headed last time, in '49—you're right. . ." He nodded at Sir Eustace.

"Yes ..." Sir Eustace accepted the nod and passed it on to Roche. "Bad psychology . . . and probably bad timing too—

too soon after the war. Too many scars not properly healed, dummy5

most likely."

"I don't know about that," St. John Latimer demurred. "He didn't have a bad war."

Clinton looked at Latimer without speaking, and for a moment his eloquent silence monopolised the debate.

"What I mean is, by the time he got into it, we were winning

—" Latimer plunged forward again "—and in any case that's not quite the received wisdom, according to Forbes at Cambridge—the war-weary hero explanation. What Archie Forbes seems to think is that he had other fish to fry at the time, that's all."

"His academic work, of course," agreed Sir Eustace, whose attitude towards the Clinton-Latimer cold war appeared to be one of indifference, if not ignorance. "He had a research fellowship of some sort, didn't he?"

"He did, yes—a minor one." Latimer sniffed.

"And that was the fish, Oliver, was it?"

Latimer scowled. "Forbes wasn't too sure about that. The truth is, so far as I can make out, they regarded Audley himself as a bit of a queer fish."

"Queer?" Sir Eustace raised an eyebrow.

"I don't mean queer—" Latimer waved a pudgy hand irritably

"—the one thing you can't accuse the fellow of is being queer.

I mean odd—"

"Eccentric?"

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"Not that either. . ." Latimer's scowl deepened as he searched in vain for the word he wanted.

Sir Eustace examined the file in front of him. "Well, there's nothing out of the ordinary here . . . certainly not down to

'49 ... nothing at all."

Latimer nodded. "That's right. There's nothing strange at all.

And maybe that's what's so strange, I don't know . . . But they didn't like him, anyway. Or they didn't trust him, might be more accurate. And no one seems to know why, not even Archie Forbes, who was his tutor and supervisor."

"And our talent scout," murmured Sir Eustace. "Which is why they didn't elect him to a fellowship after the research grant ran out, I take it, Oliver?"

"That's the way it seems to have been." Latimer's face wrinkled with distaste. "But the precise reason why . . .

eludes me still, I'm afraid."

Evidently, the fact that Audley was arrogant, selfish, indisciplined, bloody-minded, ruthless and cunning—not to mention generally tricky, in summation—did not count in St.

John Latimer's estimation of the reckoning of any collection of Cambridge dons, as debarring Audley from election to a college fellowship. There was some other bar, but he did not know what it was.

"You don't happen to have a nice fellowship in your gift by any chance, Eustace?" The distaste was still etched into Latimer's face, if anything even deeper.

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"For Audley?"

"Uh-huh." And that of course was the reason for the Latimer expression—soliciting a plum for a man he detested. Or maybe envied would be more accurate? "I suppose Oxford would do as well. He'd probably turn his nose up at a redbrick place." Latimer flicked a glance at Roche.

"You think that might interest him?"

Latimer scratched his head. "It might. But after having been turned down once ... I don't know, I just don't know . . . but with this fellow I can't believe it'll be as easy as that." He looked directly at Roche. "And I wish I knew why."

Colonel Clinton grunted. "Which is why— this time—we must know exactly what we are about, Roche—"

"—so, yes, I knew him, David Roche," said Willis, nodding at Roche, but then looking away from him towards the distant rugger posts at the far end of the pitch. "And yet, the answer could just as well be no for all the good it'll do you."

Yes— and no—had said Major Stocker.

Roche looked up at the rugger posts towering above him, and began to suspect even more strongly from his own inadequate knowledge of the game that Willis was kicking for touch, not so much to gain ground as to win time in which to let the defenders get in position.

"David Audley was in the war, wasn't he?" As of now, if the dialogue was going to go off at a tangent, it would be David dummy5

Roche's tangent.

"The last half, yes," agreed Willis coolly, taking the change in his stride, his defenders ready. "He was in Normandy about the same time as I was, actually."

"In an armoured regiment?"

"Yes. Yeomanry lot, dashing about the place in Cromwells, to the west of us—we were poor bloody infantry."

"He did quite well, I gather?"

"He didn't let the side down, no," agreed Willis. "And they did have a pretty rugged time in that neck of the woods, the tank chaps—bad country for them, that bocage. Good anti-tank country—we'd have loved it. Badger had a bloody field day in it, with his PIAT! But of course they were on the receiving end, trying to push south, past Caumont towards Flers and Conde, to take the heat off the Yanks at the time of the break-out." He smiled at Roche. "Lovely place for a holiday—marvellous food—but a rotten place from which to winkle hard-bitten Jerries with the Fuehrer's stand-fast order in their pockets." He paused, and nodded to emphasise his military judgement. "He did all right, did young David, even if he was a bit over-sized for his tank—he performed satisfactorily, anyway . . . And, more to the point, he survived, which in itself indicates a certain skill. Mere longevity is a considerable virtue, in peace as well as war, don't you think?"

Stripped of all its verbiage, and allowing for the fact that the dummy5

schoolmaster had a tongue like a cow-bell, there was more there than old soldierly memories. Willis had known exactly where his ward had gone into battle, and the long odds against his survival unscathed; and if it was all a gentle joke now, casually thrown off, it wouldn't have been a joke then—

no joke at all.

"There's a lot to say for surviving, I agree." He returned Willis's smile. "But his father didn't do so well there, did he!"

"Ah ..." For one fraction of a second the change in direction caught Willis unprepared. "Yes . . . that is to say, no—he didn't—" The eyes clouded as the defences were adjusted "—

though, again, perhaps it wasn't altogether ill-timed, in so far as being killed can ever be considered well-timed—but Tacitus did say it of Agricola, after all— felix opportunitate mortis, and all that, eh?"

"What?" exclaimed Roche, totally outflanked.

"A charming fellow, Nigel Audley—quite delightful . . .

manners, breeding, grace—and guts . . . everyone liked him, everyone admired him. Good-looking, and clever with it— the expectancy and rose of the fair state—he had that rare quality of perfection which prevented lesser mortals envying him his silver spoon, he was too far above the rest of us for that, we were simply grateful for knowing him—that's the simple fact of it, David Roche."

Roche was struck speechless by this panegyric: David Audley's father was too impossibly good to be true.

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Willis regarded him tolerantly. "Ah—I know what you're thinking: de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. But it's not true, you can ask anyone who knew him, and every man-jack of them—and every woman too—will bear me out."

Roche waited for him to continue, but he seemed to have run out of steam with surprising suddenness.

"He was killed in 1940, wasn't he?"

"What?" Willis turned towards him, frowning. "Why do you persist in asking me questions to which you already know the answers?" he asked sharply.

And that was uncharacteristic too, thought Roche, taken aback by the sharpness. If the defences around David Audley were well-sited, those protecting his father were in even greater depth, and suspiciously so for such a paragon.

"Do you always ask your pupils questions they're not sure of—

or do you lead them from what they know to the more difficult ones?" he countered as gently as he could.

Willis stared at him, at first vaguely then focussing exactly.

"T ouche . . ." he nodded, accepting the rebuke. "You made me remember things I'd forgotten—I'm sorry—you're quite right, and you have your job to do ... Yes, in 1940, when the skies were falling in on us—in 1940, in France."

And he hadn't told everything, either: because in one particular respect, and the most important one, he had already indicated that the paragon wasn't a paragon.

But that could wait for the right moment.

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"How did you come to meet him in the first place?"

Willis looked at him questioningly. "I taught him—when he was at St. George's, Buckland—but you know that—"

"I meant the father." Was that a simple misunderstanding, or was it deliberate?

"Oh, I'm sorry—I thought we were back with David ... I knew the family. And I got to know Nigel pretty well at Oxford, of course. I was at Univ—University College—he was at Balliol—

Eton and Balliol, like his father—" Willis caught himself "—

but you hardly want to know about that."

"I think I want everything you can tell me."

Willis shrugged. "Oh ... he was killed in '17, on the Scarpe, commanding our old territorial battalion—the Prince Regent's Own. And Nigel was killed in '40, in the same battalion, not far away. . . that's all—history more or less repeating itself, don't you know."

So David Audley must have felt a bit queasy, landing in Normandy in '44; or certainly after the break-out had commenced, which might have taken him back over the same ill-omened ground. With such a family tradition survival did indeed have great virtue.

"Why didn't David join his father's unit?" The question was hardly important, but there was something niggling in the back of Roche's mind.

"He couldn't have, even if he'd wanted to—it didn't exist any more. After it was massacred in '40 it was never dummy5

reconstituted. The nearest equivalent was the West Sussexes

—that's where they put me afterwards . . . But I suppose the armoured corps was more fashionable than the poor bloody infantry—blitzkrieg and Rommel and all that—more likely to take a young man's fancy." Another shrug. "I don't know—

what made you join whatever you joined, David?"

That was no joke—or no joke meriting the truth, anyway. "I was too young to know any better."

Willis nodded understandingly. "Well, there's your answer.

And just as well, too, because war's a young man's sport, and it relies on a high degree of stupidity—like volunteering for air crew. He was prime cannon-fodder, young David—he didn't know any better . . . Whereas Nigel and I—we were almost too old, we were a different sort of fool altogether: a

'no fool like an old fool' variety, trapped by foolish patriotism in the 1930s." The corner of Willis's lip drooped. "But there we were in '39 and '40—in the front line, and far too old to be there. And after that, the ones who survived—like me—we were the veterans, we were." He grinned at Roche.

"I even commanded a battalion for one brief, utterly unmemorable spell in '45—not for long, because they're not that stupid, the brass-hats—not for long ... but I remember in

'42 and '43, some of my young fellows were quite apologetic about my being there—and even more in '44, as though I'd arrived on the battlefield by some ghastly administrative accident."

How old was he, then? With a little bouncy fellow like this—

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plenty of healthy sport divided by a substantial intake of alcohol at the local pub made it hard to judge, and the Audley file had had nothing to say on his legal guardian's curriculum vitae.

"Yes . . . but, of course, the truth was, we were too old—and Nigel was even older than I was when he copped it—far too old for playing dangerous games like that! Fair enough if you're on the jolly old touchline, urging the team on and shouting instructions—'tackle him low, you stupid boy'. But to be actually on the field, getting wet and cold and muddy—

and not only that, to have people shoot real bullets at you into the bargain—that's really monstrously unpleasant, you know."

Roche cursed his inability to stem the flow, aware at the same time that there was something the schoolmaster had said that he wanted to pull him back to—what had it been, though?

"He must have married very young—Nigel Audley?" he cut in quickly, as Willis opened his mouth to expatiate further on the horrors of war.

"Eh?" Willis stared at him vaguely for a moment, as though he found it difficult to withdraw from his memories. "Oh, I suppose so. Does it matter?"

"David Audley must have been a honeymoon baby, practically."

Must he?" The vague look was tinged with irritation. "I can't dummy5

say I've ever bothered to work it out, you know." Willis shrugged dismissively. "But I hardly see what that's got to do with you. Or me."

“What was she like? The mother?"

“She died when he was a baby."

"Yes, I know. But what was she like?" Roche didn't know why he was pressing the question, only that it was there in his mind.

"Oh ... she was . . . very young." Willis fished in his pocket again, for his pipe.

"Yes?"

Willis jammed the pipe between his teeth. "Yes what?"

What was she like?" repeated Roche obstinately.

Willis removed the pipe and commenced filling it from an ancient leather pouch. "What was she like?"

Yes," said Roche.

"What . . . was she like?" Now it was the lighter's turn. Puff.

"Didn't really know her that well." Puff, puff. The wind scattered the smoke. "Nice enough girl." Puff, puff, puff. "So I believe."

“They met at Oxford, did they?"

“Mmm—think so." Willis took the pipe from his mouth suddenly and pointed the stem at Roche. "What's all this in aid of, David Roche?"

Roche met the question innocently. "Didn't Colonel Clinton dummy5

make that clear in his letter, Major?"

"Not Major— Wimpy. You keep forgetting, don't you!" The schoolmaster's voice was mildly chiding on the surface, but Roche sensed the anger swimming beneath.

"Sorry!" he apologised quickly. This wasn't the moment to antagonise the schoolmaster—and, for a guess, that was a warning signal his pupils wouldn't have missed, too.

"All right, then ..." Willis— Wimpy—accepted the amends with a nod. "Your lord and master made it very clear, even abundantly clear, one might say, that Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, requires the services of her father's former right trusty and well-beloved lieutenant of dragoons, my erstwhile pupil . . . yes, he did make that very clear, I grant you . . . and quickly too, she wants him. And that has a familiar ring about it also, I must say—meaning that owing to the vast stupidity and incompetence of some others among her right trusty and well-beloved servants she has her royal knickers in a twist."

Well, that was one way of putting it. And it was quite characteristically Willis's—Wimpy's, damn it!—way, lacking only a Latin tag.

"But what he did not make clear—" Wimpy cocked a sudden sharp eye at Roche "—always supposing it's not mere vulgar curiosity on your part, David Roche ... is the reason for all this inquiry into my David's remote antecedents. You must have his family history to hand, with his military record—and no doubt you've got more than that ... So why the rest, eh?"

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Obviously Clinton's letter had not spelt out the past in detail, but that left Roche in a quandary as to how far he ought to go to rectify the omission.

"And please don't tell me that you're just obeying orders,"

continued Wimpy, still watching him closely. "It wasn't good enough for our late enemies in '45, so it isn't good enough for you now."

And yet in a way that was the answer, thought Roche. He was here asking these questions of this man because he had been directed to do so, not for any reason of his own.

"Come on. Or I shall begin to suspect you're busy putting lies together for me,"said Wimpy silkily. "And I might find that. . . discouraging."

There was no more time. "It isn't that. I'm not sure how far I can trust you, that's all." Damn it! It was gone now.

Wimpy smiled again, a winner's smile. "I don't think you've a lot of choice—do you? As the Good Book says, you just have to cast your bread on the waters."

"All right." It was time to cut his losses. "You could say 'the child is father of the man', for a start."

" You could say it." Wimpy's face closed up. " I would say ...

that a child has many fathers." He paused for a moment, then gestured towards the rugger pitch. "There's one father, if you like. Certainly one of David Audley's fathers, I'd say."

Roche looked at him questioningly.

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"Yes ..." Wimpy nodded. " 'Audley spent a cold and quiet afternoon at full-back'—I believe that was his first appearance in print at his prep school, in the school mag at St. George's, the first time he played for the school, in the under-twelves."

"And you taught him rugger there?"

"I had a hand in his education. But at St. George's the essence was not so much the games master as the headmaster, to whom certain forms of play in rugby football were a form of Christianity, or otherwise ethical behaviour—

it was unchristian to tackle high . . . not because it was dangerous, but because it was ineffective . . . running straight was the same—you were in trouble with the Head if you didn't tackle low, or run straight, or fall on the ball when the other forwards were advancing, or do these various things, because that was the moral, decent, ethical thing to do."

"You taught David Audley at St. George's and here at Immingham?"

Roche rallied.

"So I did. David Audley came up from his prep school with a scholarship ... in the same year, the same term. We were new boys together, yes." He grinned at Roche, as though the memory had mellowed him.

"Okay, then." Roche grinned back. "But what I'm going to tell you is classified. I wouldn't want my boss to hear about it."

Wimpy acknowledged the confidence with a single nod.

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"Understood. And I wouldn't want you to think that anything I may say to you as a result is because Fred Clinton has twisted my arm—far from it! Whatever I tell you now is for my young David's sake. Because it's time he did a proper job of work—time he matched his racket to balls worthy of him . . . time he did something difficult, instead of wasting himself on mere scholarship—which is for him quite ridiculous . . . And all of which, of course, the egregious Clinton is relying on—with me as well as David. And that's the whole difference between us, between the goats and the poor bloody sheep: we both know how people tick, but he knows how to make them jump as well. So ... what is this that's so frightfully classified, then?"

The man was no fool. Through all the verbiage and side-tracking he held to his primary objectives, one after another.

Roche watched him narrowly. "You know David Audley worked for intelligence at the end of the war?"

"For Clinton?"

"Or someone like him—yes."

Wimpy nodded. "I didn't know. But it doesn't surprise me one bit. Not one bit."

No fool, and perhaps more than that, thought Roche, observing the little schoolmaster's deadpan reaction. Viewed from the spectators' stand, the connection between Clinton and the once-upon-a-time Major Willis had seemed a remarkable slice of luck in the process of gathering dummy5

information about David Audley. But from the players' point of view such happy coincidences could never be accepted on their face value until every suspicious element of cause-and-effect had been eliminated.

"Yes?" inquired Wimpy innocently.

Too innocently. Because all a player had to do to eliminate this coincidence was to rearrange the facts to make better sense of them.

"He mustered out when he went up to Cambridge in '46, I take it?" urged Wimpy, offering his intelligent guess as any innocent seeker-after-knowledge might have done.

Much too innocent. Because, in spite of his repeated allusions to the purely regimental nature of his military service as a 'poor bloody infantryman' , Wimpy had known Clinton well long before David Audley had put on his dragoon's uniform; and Clinton had never been a 'poor bloody infantryman' in his life—he had been Genghis Khan's

'professional from way back', a career intelligence officer.

"That's right—"

Yes, and doubly right: if this little schoolmaster hadn't been a full-time intelligence player, he had done his time on the substitutes' bench, in Clinton's team. And that answered that nagging little question, hitherto unanswered: how did a callow dragoon subaltern, however bright, get pulled out of the battle into intelligence work at the age of nineteen or twenty?

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"—it seems he caused a certain amount of... hassle in the work he was doing, as a matter of fact, actually . . ." Roche trailed off deliberately, passing the ball back to Wimpy.

The schoolmaster smiled. "He made waves? Yes . . . that doesn't surprise me either. When he was young he was ... he appeared to be, I should say . . . malleable—biddable, you might say. But there was always a well-concealed streak of obstinacy in him—it was as though he seemed to be doing what you wanted, but in the end it turned out to be what he wanted, don't you know!" He shook his head, still smiling.

"When he grew up, as he got older, the streak became more obvious. But back in '44 he was worth saving, and he still is, by God!"

The last piece of the Clinton-Willis connection slotted into place with jig-saw accuracy. That smile was made of more than pride in a bright pupil and affection for a dead brother-officer's only son: for a guess it had been Wimpy himself who had recommended Audley to Clinton back in 1944, to get him out of the front line.

"Bloody awkward, is the way I've heard it." He smiled back at Wimpy.

Wimpy managed to adjust his smile at last to something more properly neutral. "But they like him now, enough to want him back, nevertheless?"

"I don't think they ever stopped liking him, actually." A little soft soap wouldn't go amiss, especially when there had to be an element of truth in it, whatever Latimer might maintain.

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"They . . . meaning you?" inquired Wimpy politely.

Roche shook his head. "They meaning they." It would do no harm to differentiate the decent Roche, just doing his duty, from the foxy Clinton. And there was a bit of truth in that too, anyway. "They parted when he went up to Cambridge in

'46, when he was demobbed. But they tried to re-enlist him again after he graduated, you see—before my time—"

"Ah!" Wimpy raised his hand. " Now I see what you've been driving at—why you're here, asking all these damnfool questions! Why didn't you tell me straight off?"

Roche stared at him questioningly. "I beg your pardon?"

"My dear man—Glendowerin Henry IV—' I c an call spirits from the vasty deep'—I sent David tickets to see that at Stratford in '52, and bloody marvellous it was too! He'd understand—and Hotspur replies: ' Why, so can I, or so can any man— but will they come when you do call on them?'—

that's the question!" Wimpy beamed at him. "Not under military discipline any more, like in '44—so when they called on him he wouldn't come, naturally . . . once bitten, twice shy!" And then suddenly the smile vanished, as though it had been switched off from within. "But now it's different, isn't it!"

The switch to seriousness was somewhat disconcerting.

"How d'you mean different?" said Roche cautiously.

"Because they wanted him in '49, or whenever it was, after Cambridge. But now they need him, that's the real dummy5

difference." Wimpy nodded again. "Because something's happened, and they've damn well got to have him, one way or another—isn't that the strength of it?"

And that was even more disconcerting: by whatever reasoning, the little schoolmaster had reached the same conclusion as Genghis Khan, that Audley's recruitment was not an end in itself, but a means to some other end.

"You could be right," Roche admitted.

"I usually am, though it's never done me much good." The smile came back as suddenly as it had disappeared. "But don't worry! On this occasion it's at least to your advantage.

It's high time my David was gainfully employed, as I've already said." Wimpy gestured down the goal line. "So come on, then . . . and 'you shall come and go and look and know where I shall show'. Though I can't guarantee that you shall know neither doubt nor fear in the end, as Puck promised."

“Puck?"

"Kipling— Puck of Pook's Hill." Wimpy began to move down the line. " Puck and Stalky & Co are your two set books for this examination, my dear fellow. My young David was brought up on those two books, when the world was also young . . . Kipling and the rugger field . . . and then the battlefield—so which was illusion and which was reality, eh?

And then the cold war after the hot war to add disillusion, maybe?"

I'm not sure I understand you," said Roche.

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"I'm not sure I understand myself. But he's there somewhere, in the middle of it. And if you want to understand him you've got to go there yourself first, I think."

"Where?"

"Where indeed!" Wimpy thought for a moment. "A place first, yes. And a person too, I think—yes!"

"Where?" Roche abandoned the idea of why. "And who?"

"Someone who makes the best fruit cakes in Sussex," said Wimpy.

V

"WILL YOU HAVE another piece, sir?"

Roche studied the last third of the fruit cake, rearguards of guilt offering token resistance against greed. It was the best fruit cake in Sussex, beyond doubt; and very probably the best fruit cake in England, and consequently the best one in the whole world, almost certainly . . . and was would be the operative word for it if she carved them two more of her gargantuan slices, like those they had already consumed. But the opportunity was far too good to be missed.

He looked up from the fruit cake to meet Ada Clarke's gaze, trying to feign a moment's indecision for conscience's sake.

"But. . . what about your husband's tea, Mrs Clarke?"

Wimpy emitted a short, unsympathetic chuckle. "To hell with Charlie! Speaking for myself, Clarkie—"

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"And you always do, sir, Mr William—" she cut back at him, quick as a flash, but smiling "—if I may make so bold as to say, sir—"

"You may, Clarkie—you may! And I always do—I admit it, I admit it frankly and unashamedly . . . for if I do not speak for myself, then who will speak for me?" Wimpy accepted the state of affectionate war between them with evident delight.

"Not you, Clarkie, not you. . .therefore. . .speaking for myself, I will quote first that fine old French saying—which covers any claim Charlie may or may not have on that cake—'he who is absent is always in the wrong', Clarkie. In which case—"

"But I wasn't offering it to you, sir. I was offering it to—to—"

Mrs Clarke blinked at Roche uncertainly: she had forgotten his name.

"To Captain Roche—of course! Who guards us ceaselessly, so that we may sleep safely in our beds—a thoroughly deserving case, Clarkie. Hardly less deserving than myself, a poor bachelor schoolmaster .... Cut the cake, Clarkie—bisect it into equal portions, and stop arguing!"

Mrs Clarke shook her head at him in despair, and turned back to Roche.

"You mustn't mind him, sir, Captain Roche—you must take no notice of him. Now..."

But she was already dividing the cake. She had known from the start that he would succumb to temptation, that her cake would reduce them both to greedy schoolboys.

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"And don't worry about Charlie, sir. I always make two cakes at a time . . . it's habit, really: one for Charlie and one for Mr David, like in the old days. Only now Charlie eats both of them, that's all."

"Well . . . thank you, Mrs Clarke." Roche accepted his half-of-one-third. Poor old absent Charlie—half-witted, shell-shocked Charlie—was on to a damn good thing, whatever his handicaps.

A damn good thing: the little cottage smelt bewitchingly of cake and cooking and cleanliness, scrubbed and polished and apple-pie-ordered. The black kitchen range, out of which the paradisal cake had come, glistened with use and elbow grease; above it, on the mantelpiece, a line of cheap commemorative mugs caught his eye—the Queen's Coronation cup from five years back, then King George VI's, and Edward VIII's premature celebration, and so on through other coronations and jubilees to Queen Victoria herself.

"Interesting, aren't they?" murmured Wimpy. "You had the end ones from your mother, didn't you, Clarkie?"

"That's right, sir. Mine begin with the coronation of King George that was King Edward's brother—King Edward that married that American lady, or the Prince of Wales as he'll always be to me. He was a lovely boy, the Prince. I saw him once, at the races, when Charlie and me went to attend to a party the Master, Mr Nigel, was putting on—he gave me a lovely smile, like he knew me, as I took round the tray with the champagne on it, the Prince did . . . 'Course, I was dummy5

younger then, only a slip of a girl." She nodded knowingly at Roche. "And he had an eye for the girls, he did, did the Prince of Wales."

Roche glanced covertly at her. She was little and dumpy, with cheeks reddened by all weathers and the heat of that black kitchen range. But those tight pepper-and-salt curls had once been blonde, and the sparkle in the blue eyes was still bright.

"So he did," agreed Wimpy. "And that, you might say, was his undoing in the end, eh?"

"And that Prince Philip—he's a lad!" Mrs Clarke warmed to what was clearly one of her favourite subjects. "Of course, he gets that from having been a sailor, like his Uncle, that was Lord Louis when I was a girl—I met him too. And Lady Louis

—" she nodded proudly at Roche "—Edwina Ashley, she was, and beautiful like in those magazines, you should have seen her!"

Wimpy caught Roche's eye for a fraction of a second. "But that mug from the Silver Jubilee in 1935 ought to be yours too, Clarkie, surely? You were in service then?"

"So I was, sir. But so was Mother—and I broke mine, so that's hers, that one." She grinned at Roche. "To tell the truth, sir, Captain Roche, I got tiddly that night—all because of the Master, Mr Nigel, and his champagne ..."

"A tradition of the house," agreed Wimpy, shifting his attention from Mrs Clarke to Roche as he spoke. "On great occasions the wine flows in the Old House—in the dummy5

appropriate receptacle, naturally." He nodded at the line of mugs on the mantelpiece.

"That's right, sir," said Mrs Clarke, nodding at Wimpy and Roche as she spoke. "Filled to the brim with champagne, that was the rule. No wonder we all got tiddly!"

Roche reached up towards the nearest mug, fascinated.

"You look at it, sir," Ada Clarke encouraged him, "and see for yourself how much it takes. That was Master David's favourite, that one, he liked it because of all the writing on it."

Wimpy gave a derisive snort. "Absolute rubbish, Clarkie! He liked it because it was bigger than the others—it held more champagne, that's why. And he was drunk as a lord on both occasions as a result."

"He was sick both times, more like," conceded Mrs Clarke defensively. "But it could have been what he ate just as easily."

"He was beastly drunk—"

They were oblivious of him, duelling with twenty-year memories.

"It was too much rich food. All that smoked salmon, sir—and the caviare from Fortnum and Mason's . . . and I made him that Black Forest cherry cake specially—"

"Full of kirsch—precisely! He was tight as a tick, Clarkie dear.

Kirsch plus champagne—no wonder!"

Or maybe Wimpy was very far from forgetting him—maybe dummy5

quite the opposite . . . maybe this, very deliberately, was the beginning of Wimpy's special tuition on David Audley.

Mrs Clarke drew a deep breath. "Well. . . if he was . . . a bit tiddly—"

"Aha!" Wimpy seized her admission instantly. In any argument with Wimpy the loser would never be allowed to retreat in good order, pursuit would always be close and merciless. Indeed, he was already turning triumphantly to Roche. "Now the truth comes out, old boy!"

"Huh!" exclaimed Ada Clarke, also turning towards Roche.

"And if he was, then who was to blame, I ask you!" She nodded significantly at Wimpy. "You don't need far to look, sir, Captain Roche—indeed you don't."

Wimpy spread his hands. "I'm not denying anything, Clarkie dear."

"Nor can you—I should think not!" She gave him a mock-disapproving sniff. “No, sir—" she caught Roche with his mouth full of cake "—you should have seen what he brought down here, for Mr David—I saw him slip out of the House with the tray ... I was waiting on the guests of course-piled high with everything, like he was feeding a regiment. . . and a whole bottle of champagne, and Master David hardly ten years old . . . and the Master sees him too, what's more—"

"I never knew that, Clarkie!" Wimpy leant forward. "You never told me that before."

"You never asked me. But I saw—and he sees you—" back to dummy5

Roche again "—the Master, Mr Nigel, that is ... And he says to me 'Aye-aye! Now where's he off to then, Mrs Clarke, eh?'

with that look in his eye, like he half knew already—like he always did when it was you and Mr David up to your tricks, goin' up to London, and that—"

"Good God!" whispered Wimpy, a muscle twitching in his cheek. "He knew about—London?"

"When you took Master David to see the illuminations, for the jubilee— and the coronation?" She shook the grey-blonde curls with a quick, almost convulsive movement. "He didn't know—but he knew all the same—like, he couldn't know, because he wasn't here those nights, when you went off, but he knew somehow, I don't know how . . . You know Mr Nigel, sir—he always knew everything somehow—"

Except which horse was going to win—"

"I mean about people, sir, Mr William, not horses." She stared at Wimpy in silence for a moment.

Wimpy nodded into the silence. Now, this time, and for the first time, they were both oblivious of him, thought Roche: now they were both wrapped and enveloped in a secret play in which they had acted independently, here in this sweet-smelling room and also up the drive, in the house which he hadn't yet seen, where the Master, Mr Nigel, had lavished entertainment on his smart friends—

"So . . . what on earth did you do, Clarkie?" Wimpy watched her intently.

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"I told a lie, sir—a black lie." She half-smiled, the recollection of the black lie warming her memory. "You remember that Mrs Templeton, that went off in the end with Captain Wallace-White, and there was all that scandal?"

Wimpy's eyes widened. "Phew! Do I not! Lottie Templeton—

phew! She was there—I remember that too, by golly!"

"That's right. And she fancied you, what's more, sir."

"Lottie Templeton? She never did, Clarkie!"

"No, sir. She fancied you."

"I fancied her. She just talked to me, that's all."

"You made her laugh. And she said you were clever, I heard her say so. She fancied you, and that's a fact."

Wimpy shook his head. "Oh . . . come on, Clarkie! Mere schoolmasters weren't Lottie's style."

"Begging your pardon, sir, anything in trousers was Mrs Templeton's style."

The servants knew, thought Roche. The servants always knew. And, judging by Wimpy's failure to reply this time, the same thing was occurring to him.

Ada Clarke nodded. "Yes, sir ... So it came to me, right on the spur of the moment, and I says to him—or I whispers to him, more like—'I think Mr William is looking after Mrs Templeton in the summerhouse, sir'." She paused. "And she was in the summerhouse too."

"But not with me—" Wimpy blinked at her.

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"No, sir. You weren't quick enough off the mark! But he didn't know that—or ... he couldn't be sure, not without going after you, which he couldn't do, and wouldn't do—"

"You're wrong, Clarkie." He shook his head again. "He'd know better than that, whatever you say."

He always knew everything about people. . .

She looked at him silently for a second or two, curiously without any expression on her face. "Maybe he did, sir. But you know what he was like, about Master David—like he didn't want to know if he could help it? He was the same with those times the two of you went off—knowing, and not knowing at the same time . . . All he wanted was an excuse not to know, and that's what I gave him—an excuse. Because he said, 'Oh well, then that's all right then', and went off back to the party, to—" she caught Roche's eye "—back to the party he went, sir, Captain Roche . . . But it was him that gave Master David all that to drink, anyway, is what I'm saying."

She nodded accusingly at Wimpy.

The schoolmaster sat back as though released from a spell. "I don't think poor Captain Roche understands a word we're saying, Clarkie. He can hardly be expected to fathom our ancient and exceedingly byzantine history."

There was an irony in that, though whether it was accidental or deliberate it was hard to estimate, thought Roche: it had been out of that byzantine family history and into genuine Byzantine history that 'Master' David had eventually plunged himself, as to the manner born.

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But meanwhile his role was to draw Ada Clarke out in whatever direction Wimpy indicated.

He looked at her expectantly, as one desiring enlightenment.

"Mr— Major Willis . . . brought the champagne down here . . . ?"

Mrs Clarke sighed. "The Master was always very strict with Master David when there was a party up at the house, you see, sir—"

"Strict?" Wimpy cut in. "He banished the boy at the drop of a hat, more like."

"No, sir. That's not quite fair. Some of those parties, they were . . ." Mrs Clarke searched for a word descriptive of Major Nigel Audley's entertainments, ". . . not suitable."

" 'Adults only'," supplied Wimpy. "There is an element of truth in what Clarkie says—or doesn't say . . . This was the thirties, you have to remember, dear boy—gangsters in America, and Herr Hitler's little experiment in Germany, and Uncle Joe in Russia, killing off everyone in sight. . . and Mussolini in Italy, and Kim Philby reporting the war in Spain for The Times—and for Uncle Joe, of course ..."

And unemployment in England," said Roche.

"And unemployment—for the unemployed," agreed Wimpy.

"And for Nigel Audley and William Willis MA there was

'gather ye rosebuds while ye may'—and for dear Lottie Templeton too, for that matter... no one could say her nymphomaniacal instincts weren't well-advised in the dummy5

circumstances—the jolly old winged chariot collected her in the Blitz in 1940, didn't it, Clarkie? I rather lost touch with her after Jack Wallace-White succumbed to her charms . . .?"

"No, sir. It was a V-l in 1944," said Mrs Clarke. "She was driving a mobile canteen for the Church of Scotland, down in Camberwell it was."

For the Church of Scotland?" Wimpy echoed her incredulously.

"That's what Colonel Deacon told me, sir. He said it was on account of her husband—him that was killed in the desert, I think ... or was it that one, or the other one?"

Wimpy nodded. "Jack was certainly killed in the desert—Sidi Rezegh in '41. But the Church of Scotland . . . well, I suppose that was because all Jack's money was tied up in whisky distilling . . . and if Laurie Deacon said so, then it's not to be contested." He grinned at Roche. "That's Mr Laurie Deacon MP, QC et cetera now—he was one of the gang then, a smart young barrister who'd just taken silk ... in fact, it was probably him in that summer house with Lottie, the blighter

—Clarkie?"

Ada Clarke pursed her lips. "That's not for me to say, sir, Mr William."

“Or was it Georgie MacGibbon? He was killed at Kohima, Clarkie, so he won't mind if you tell me!"

Ada Clarke shook her head. "All I'll say, sir, is ... it wasn't you."

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Wimpy stared at her, and then nodded again, slowly. "Fair enough . . . 'It is knightly to keep faith—even after a thousand years'." His eyes came back to Roche. " Puck of Pook's Hill—

Kipling's your set author for this exam, old boy, and don't ever forget it. We all knew it backwards—I read it to young David in this very room, by God! And the last party we ever had—do you remember that, Clarkie?—September the second, 1939—do you remember that—?"

"It was a Saturday, sir. I remember that because my Charlie was in uniform, and you brought him along with you—you and the Master, Mr Nigel, you were all in uniform—and I pressed three uniforms that night. . . those blooming battle-dresses with the pleats down the back—I had to put soap along the inside of them, to set the creases right—like knife-edges, they were, when I'd finished with them. . . and you all got horrid drunk that night—and my Charlie too, with you, what never got drunk normally— I remember!"

Wimpy's eyes glittered. "That's right.And young David was banished— as usual—and I came down here ... I came down here while I could still walk, that is ... and I found him sitting in front of the window, and he was reading Puck—the chapter where the Saxon chieftains come to the young Roman officers under flag of truce and invite them to plunder Britain together instead of fighting each other on the Great Wall—I remember too!" The eyes came back to Roche, but this time they no longer saw him. "And I went back to the house full of whisky and Kipling—they turned the Saxons dummy5

down, of course, the young Romans did . . . 'The Wall must be won at a price'. . . and I looked at Nigel and Georgie and the rest of them, and I said, like the Saxon said, 'We be a goodly company; I wonder what the ravens and the dogfish will make of us before the snow melts'. I remember."

The little room was silent for a moment, full of memories in which Roche had no part to play, except as an archaeologist.

Then the schoolmaster blinked and focussed on him again.

"Pure melodrama, old boy! Because when the snows melted we were all still there, large as life and useless as a box of lead soldiers. The war didn't start off at all the way we expected—we'd readied ourselves up for battle and sudden death, and all we did was parade-ground drill and route marches for nine months." He grinned. "My first war wounds were two dislocated thumbs falling off a motor-bike and a broken collar-bone playing rugger!"

“Ah—but it made up for lost time after that, the war did,"

said Mrs Clarke grimly.

"Very true, Clarkie," Wimpy nodded, no longer grinning.

"And the ravens and dogfish did get most of us in that party by '45, sure enough—only Laurie Deacon and I came back, in fact . . . and Laurie hardly counts, because he went straight into Intelligence—or straight in via the Judge Advocate's Department, anyway, and after that he knew too much to be allowed to risk his skin." He paused. "And Charlie, of course."

Ada Clarke sighed. "Only half of my Charlie came back, sir.

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He left half of hisself back in Dunkirk . . . and I sometimes think it was the half I knew best—" she caught herself quickly, with a half-glance at Roche, the stranger "—but you're right, sir—you and Mr Deacon and Charlie . . . and Master David, of course—we mustn't forget him!"

"We certainly mustn't," agreed Wimpy, not looking at Roche.

"I never thought to see him go, that the war would go on so long, to take him as well as Mr Nigel—and I was sure that he was going to get killed too, he was that keen and pleased to go, being just a boy and not knowing any better . . . You know

—" she embraced them both with a proud look "—I pressed his battle-dress just the same as I did for you, sir ... and Mr Nigel . . . except Master David had a better one, what he'd got from a Canadian friend of his, he said . . . that last leave he had, before the old Wesdragons went off to France—" she nodded at Roche to emphasise the occasion "—that was just right after the Normandy landings they went—he was in the tanks, Master David was."

"The 'Wesdragons' being the West Sussex Dragoons,"

explained Wimpy, almost as proprietorial as Mrs Clarke.

"That's right, sir. It's the cap badge, you see—Master David explained it to me. It's supposed to be a horse, because they used to be on horses in the old days, but it doesn't look like no sort of horse that ever lived, it's that badly done. So they reckon it's part horse and part dragon—the dragon being the proper badge of Wessex. It's all part of tradition, and tradition's very important, to my way of thinking—like doing dummy5

a thing the old way, like it's always been done, which is the way it ought to be done—the proper way . . . And, of course, he said, a dragon's just right for them in their tanks, because it's all covered with scales—like in the window in the church, of St. George and the dragon—and they'd got all these iron plates to keep the bullets and suchlike out, you see."

"Huh!" murmured Wimpy. "All except 88-millimetres, and the odd Panzerfaust, anyway . . . and suchlike."

She frowned to him. "What's that, sir?"

Nothing, Clarkie, nothing—just a thought, that's all." Not so much a thought as a memory: they were practically wiped out in the bocage, south of Caumont....

Roche observed the two very different faces, the sharp ferrety features of the schoolmaster and the red-cheeked middle-aged countrywoman, as they watched each other, sharing overlapping recollections of past fears—fears they had shared for very different reasons, the one because he knew the perils lying in wait for young tank commanders, the other because she had seen so many of them march away, never to return.

And there was a third face, the one in the file, to be superimposed on those unrealised fears, hard and young and arrogant, quite unlike either of these—quite unlike the young

'Master David' he might otherwise have imagined from their evident affection, and yet the face which united them nevertheless: a broken-nosed, rugger-playing face.

"Ah. . . well, he did come back, sir, Mr William."Ada Clarke dummy5

might not know a Panzerfaust from a hole in the road, but she had understood Wimpy's meaning in the end.

"He was invulnerable, certainly." The schoolmaster's agreement was strangely grudging. "But it was also a post-war version of him, Clarkie."

"Well, you wouldn't expect him to be the same, would you, sir?" Ada Clarke chided him sympathetically. "Growing up in the war. . .just waiting to take part—watching the other boys go before him, like young Mr Selwyn in the RAF, that was killed . . . and then seeing all those terrible things in those camps, that they showed on the films on VE-Day—" she turned to Roche suddenly "—I remember going to the Odeon Cinema in town that day, with Jim's wife Mavis, my sister-in-law ... my Charlie didn't want to go, 'cause that was after he'd been invalided out, and he never wanted to see war films after that, only films with Betty Grable, and it was a war film that was on that day—I can't remember what it was—it was an American one, though . . . but I went with Mavis, anyway."

She nodded at Roche, as though it was necessary to quote Mavis as corroborative evidence. "And in the interval the lights went up, and the manager—the cinema manager—

comes on the stage and says 'Will all mothers with young children under the age of fourteen take their children outside

—and all children, and anyone of a nervous disposition please go outside with them—because we're going to show these newsreel films that it's better they shouldn't see. And then they can come back afterwards when it's over.' And so dummy5

Mavis had to go out of course, because she had young Jimmie with her—"

"Young Jimmie who's in the army now, is that?" inquired Wimpy politely, with only the merest hint of irony.

"Not in the army sir—a Royal Marine Commando, he is."

"That's right—of course! He was the one who went in at Suez last year?"

"Port Said, sir. And that mad he was when he came back—

wouldn't stop talking about it, even though my Charlie didn't like it, and went off and wouldn't listen! But he says to me, young Jimmie does, 'We were winning, Auntie—going through them like a dose of salts—and they wouldn't let us go on!'—that mad he was! You should have heard him, sir!"

Wimpy nodded. "Yes. Perhaps I should have."

"Doing very well, he is. A sergeant now, and he's thinking of putting in for a commission and making a career of it."

"In spite of Suez?" Wimpy caught himself. "Sorry, Clarkie—

you were in the cinema on VE-Day—?"

"Yes, sir ... Well, of course, young Jimmie was only a nipper then—he was eleven years old, or thereabouts, must have been—so Mavis has to take him out. And she wasn't very pleased, either! 'You tell me what happens, Ada', she says . . .

And . . . then they showed these films of the camps, where all the people were dead, poor souls—with arms and legs like matchsticks, and the bones showing through . . . just skin and bone, they were—I never saw anything like it in my life.

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Great piles of them, with the legs and arms hanging out—you couldn't hardly credit it, not unless you'd seen it—like scarecrows, poor souls." Ada Clarke shook her head, still only half-believing the evidence of her own eyes after a dozen years.

"Yes, Clarkie?" Wimpy jogged her gently.

"Yes, sir. Well... I thought—I can still remember what I thought, like it was yesterday—" she looked at Roche. "I thought 'he hadn't any right to do that, did Hitler'. I mean . . .

killing people, that's bad enough, when they haven't done you any harm—but doing that to them . . . that's not right."

Roche waited.

"And then I thought—it's funny, but we had this German couple to stay at the house, friends of the Master, Mr Nigel—

before the war. . .and they couldn't have been nicer . . . and I thought, they couldn't have known about this, not Herr Manfred and Frau Clara—they wouldn't have stood for it—

they would have put a stop to that if they'd known about it, they would."

Out of nowhere, unsought and unbidden, the memory of the report on the Siberian camps and the recent Hungarian deportations came to Roche. It wasn't true to say that he hadn't believed the report; rather, he had accepted it on a level which had somehow rendered belief irrelevant to his own personal existence, his own reality.

But he had stood for it. Or ... he had not stood against it: he dummy5

had felt as anonymous, as removed from cause and effect, as guiltless as a bomb-aimer far above a darkened city, Hamburg or Dresden or Coventry or Moscow, just doing the duty which had fallen to him—which had to be done by someone—and armoured by the belief that the end must sanctify such means.

Yet now . . . even now he didn't know how he had argued himself into that original dishonesty, except that it had somehow been inextricably mixed up with Julie, and that her doubts had become his certainties . . . even, he didn't know how those certainties had become doubts again; or even if they were doubts—or that it was simply the accumulation of his own fears which was finally shooting him down, forcing him to descend into the fires of his own making.

"And then I thought—I can still remember thinking it, seeing our boys there in the film, in that awful place, with all the dead people—I thought 'Lord, I hope Master David isn't there, seeing such things right there in front of him . . .' " Mrs Clarke trailed off, blinking at Roche for a moment, then taking hold of herself. "It'd be enough to turn anyone's mind, that."

So that was the other fear Ada Clarke had slept with, night after night, while her adored Master David had galloped off to the war—and a fear she'd literally slept with, in the person of her Charlie, who had taken his wounds in the mind, on the Dunkirk beaches—that her Master David would also come back unrecognisable, handicapped in the same way.

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He smiled at Mrs Clarke. "But he did come back all right?" he encouraged her. One thing at least: the excavation of Master David now seemed the most natural thing in the world.

"Oh yes, sir—"

“But different," cut in Wimpy.

"Not much different, sir. The big difference was before that—

after the Master was killed, and right through until he went off to the war, he was difficult then. But that's not to be wondered at... And he was never an easy boy—"

"Which is not to be wondered at, either," said Wimpy drily.

"He was too much on his own, that's what. A boy ought to have friends. And being away at school so much—and even during the holidays too sometimes, when the Master was away, when he stayed on at school—he didn't have any friends, not of his own age." Mrs Clarke sniffed. "And that Mrs Templeton—"

Wimpy sat up. "Oh—come on, Clarkie!"

Mrs Clarke shook her head. "No, sir! I could tell a tale there—

if I chose to . . . which I don't. . . But I could." Her lips thinned to a hard-compressed line. "She was a man-eater, she was."

“But not a boy-eater, Clarkie."

"Hmmm!" Her jaw hardened. "More like what they put in the local paper, sir: 'Pedigree bitch—house-trained, eats anything, very fond of children'."

"Clarkie!" Wimpy sounded genuinely shocked.

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"I didn't say it, sir. It was Mr Deacon that said it—and it was Mr Deacon that put a stop to it too, in the end. You ask him if you think I tell a lie, sir, Mr William."

"Well. . ." As near as he had ever come to being at a loss, Wimpy was so. "Well, he never told me, Clarkie."

"Mr Deacon, sir?"

"David, I mean."

She shook her head. "Well, he wouldn't, sir, now would he?

What Master David wants to forget, he forgets, and it's like it never happened to him. But what he wants to remember, he never forgets."

If Audley had that peculiar ability, it was a blessed gift, thought Roche. But, nevertheless, the boy and the man must still be the sum of this strangely twisted past in which so many influences had combined to tarnish the silver spoon he'd been born with.

"Hah—hmm ..." Wimpy eyed Roche uneasily, as though the dialogue had outrun his intention. "And how's the house getting on, then, Clarkie?"

"Ah—" she shook herself out of the past gratefully "—that's getting on a treat, sir. They've finished the main roof, with all the timbers replaced that had the death-watch beetle. And they've done temporary repairs on the barn—only temporary, because Master David's coming home in the autumn to have a look at it himself before they do the job properly. . . But they've bought the tiles for that, from an old place up dummy5

Guildford way that's falling down—he won't have anything new, won't Master David, it's got to be just right, no matter what the cost. . . thousands, he's spent on it, my Charlie reckons . . . Old Billy and Cecil have been on it three years nearly now, and not done a day's work anywhere else since they started—they're away today with the lorry, getting the oak beams for the barn that Master David ordered in the spring when he was here last."

"He was here in the spring, was he?"

"Two weeks, sir. And three games of rugger, that's what he did. And all the bills paid—and wages for me and Charlie, and Old Billy and Cecil, in advance right until the end of October, cash money—" she shook her head disbelievingly "—

not like with Mr Nigel, nothing on tick, all cash money . . .

It's got so if they want credit, Old Billy says, he could get anything he wants, the builders' merchants are so pleased to see him now— not like Mr Nigel. . . Except Mr Nigel never spent anything on the house, if he could help it, even with the rain coming in through the end gable so I had to put the old tin bath to catch it, to stop it coming through into the dining room! But not a drop comes in now, with the roof done good as new—"

Stocker's reservations on Audley's finances echoed inside Roche's head. There had been some money, and then there had been very little of it. But here was Audley satisfied with nothing but the best, even down to restorations in original materials plundered from old houses by his own private staff dummy5

of restorers!

"And the bathrooms are done, like with things you never saw before— except Charlie remembers them, that he's seen in France when he was there—"

"Bidets, you mean, Clarkie?"

"If you say so, sir." Mrs Clarke sniffed her disapproval of all things French. "The plumbing's all done, anyway. And the electric wiring, that the insurance man wanted."

"And central heating?"

"No, sir—he won't have that done."

Wimpy nodded at Roche. "The lingering legacy of a public school education."

"But he doesn't come home much in the winter," said Mrs Clarke loyally. "He's like Mr Nigel there ... So Charlie lights all the fires twice a week to keep the old place aired . . . and that roof's made a heap of difference, I can tell you." She nodded. "You wouldn't hardly recognise it."

Wimpy smiled. "I should like to see it... remembering the discomforts of the past." He flicked a glance at Roche.

"Would you like to have a look, David? Would that be okay, Clarkie?"

"Of course, sir." She turned to Roche. "It's a beautiful old place, sir—it was a crime to let it go to wrack and ruin. But Master David's put that right." She gave Wimpy a sly look.

"All it needs now is a woman's touch, to my way of thinking, sir, Mr William."

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Wimpy shook his head. "No sign of that on the horizon, I'm afraid, Clarkie. And it'd need an exceptionally resilient young woman to handle our David—let alone capture him."

"Hmm ..." Ada Clarke pursed her lips, but didn't deny the assessment. "A mistress it needs, I still say."

"It's had one or two of those, by golly!" Wimpy chuckled.

"I didn't mean that, sir—and well you know it! There were too many of them up to the war . . . But there's never been a real lady since—since—" she broke off suddenly, staring at Wimpy blankly for an instant, then seeming to notice Roche again as a stranger just in time. "There now! You want to go up to the house, and I've got my Charlie's tea to think about—

if you should see him you tell him to come on back now, he's up there somewhere—" she rose from her chair and began fussing over the plates and teacups "—and there's some parcels for Master David you can take up for me while you're about it, and save me the bother—"

VI

THEY MADE THEIR way up the long, curving gravel drive between great banks of hawthorn and briar and elder interlaced with blackberry branches.

"Going to be a good year for blackberries." Wimpy nodded at the cascades of unripe greeny-red fruit. "Charlie never cuts the hedges back until after the jam-making and bottling—

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always wonderful picking along here."

Roche balanced the parcels with which he was loaded, and attempted to sort out his thoughts. He was aware that he had been fed with a great deal of information about David Audley, which might be priceless because it was of a kind that money and conventional interrogations would never have bought, except that he still didn't know why it should be so valuable.

"I used to pick them along here with Charlie when we were both boys," continued Wimpy. " 'Pick one—eat one' was our motto, as I recall."

Wimpy, as well as Ada Clarke and Charlie, was an old retainer of the Audley family, Roche decided. But there must be a class difference in the relationship which he hadn't yet worked out.

"You knew him—Nigel Audley—before Oxford?"

"Oh yes. My father was up there with his father—the one that was killed in 1917. . . They were both at Balliol at the same time. Only Dad was clever and poor and Audley grand-père was clever and rich . . . But they rowed in the same eight, and they became friends. And they stayed friends even after Dad metamorphosed into a poor schoolmaster, like me after him—

it's in the blood, I'm sorry to say, dear boy!" He bobbed his head at Roche. "Only I didn't really get to know Nigel until Oxford—I knew Charlie better until then, as a matter of fact.

Poor old Charlie!"

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Poor old Charlie . . . . This had been—and still was—a strange intertwining of people and families, across the boundaries of class and money, here and in Oxford, and through two world wars, which had turned the schoolmaster into Audley's guardian and the housemaid into something more than his nurse.

"She brought him up, in effect—Mrs Clarke?" The question followed the thought.

"David?" Wimpy nodded. "In effect—I suppose she did. In association with St. George's and Immingham and Rudyard Kipling, you might say— they brought him up too, just as much, no matter how much he resisted them."

"He . . . resisted them?"

Wimpy twisted a smile at him. "Not on the surface. One thing a boarding-school teaches you . . . is to conform or go under.

And yet the saving grace of the British system is that it always manages to throw up a percentage of eccentrics and rebels nevertheless, to leaven the lump. So they have the great potential for good or evil..."

Bloody-minded, remembered Roche. That had been Latimer's assessment, and since Latimer was a product of the same system he should know a fellow spirit.

"I'm not sure that David has decided which horse to back,"

continued Wimpy. "Perhaps you'll be the catalyst—you're the man he could be waiting for. Freddie Clinton could be right."

Roche frowned. "What d'you mean? Right about what?"

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Wimpy walked in silence for a time. "What do I mean? I think I mean. . . if you could recruit David—if he came to you of his own free will this time, not as a conscript, like in the war—"

"They don't conscript people into Intelligence."

"Wrong word? It was Intelligence or back to regimental duty, but after what he'd seen in Normandy that wasn't a choice . . . No, what I mean is, if you can'get him to give you his loyalty freely just once, then that'll be it. 'Whether she be good or bad, one gives one's best once, to one only. That given, there remains no second worth giving or taking'—

Pertinax in Puck, once again. I don't think he's given his best yet, to anyone or anything. That's all."

It was more than enough to Roche: it was dust and ashes bitter in his mouth. No one was a greater authority on the second best than he: he had spent years giving it, ever since Julie. Whoever Pertinax was, he was right.

"We're getting close to the house. It's just round the curve ahead, through the trees," said Wimpy. "It really is a fascinating old place—"

"What was wrong between Audley and his father?" asked Roche.

"Nigel?" Wimpy half-stumbled, tipping the topmost of his share of the parcels into the trackway ahead of him. "Damn!

Mustn't damage the merchandise. Can you rescue that book for me, old boy? You're not so heavily laden as I am."

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The division of the parcels had appeared equal to Roche, but it seemed churlish to refuse the request. He set down his own burden—of books also; all the parcels contained books by the shape and feel of them—and set about recovering the fallen volume, which had half emerged from its torn wrapping.

He couldn't resist the temptation to examine it—it would be a history book, something to do with Visigoths or Islamic doctrines, for a bet—

But it wasn't. Or rather, it wasn't quite: the garish dustcover illustrated the head of a warrior as though picked out in stained-glass, one-eyed and bearded and helmeted— The Twelve Pictures, by Edith Simon. Letting the remnants of the wrapping drop, he opened the book.

' The Twelve Pictures' is a novel as rich and wonderful as a medieval tapestry— a tapestry of beauty and terror. . .

"Interesting?" inquired Wimpy politely.

Roche looked up at him. "It's an historical novel—about Attila and the Huns." He couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice.

"Is it, indeed?" Wimpy reflected the surprise back at him. "I wouldn't have thought that would be quite his style of light reading—not these days ..."

That was it exactly. Oxford and Cambridge were notoriously addicted to whodunits and mysteries—they were even given to writing the things. But historians (and although Audley wasn't an academic he was certainly an historian) were dummy5

surely the last people to indulge in third-class relaxation in their own chosen subject.

"Let's have a look at the others," exclaimed Wimpy, his eyes alight with mischief and curiosity. "We shouldn't. . . but I can never resist temptation, old boy!"

It was hardly the place to start tearing open parcels, in the middle of a leafy lane, but the little schoolmaster had set down his parcels and was ripping at them before Roche could suggest as much.

"Here's another one— The Restless Flame, by Louis de Wohl. . . about St. Augustine of Hippo. And it's second-hand, so he must have ordered it—yes, it's from old Evan White in Guildford, of course! A damn good bookseller—he doesn't overcharge for the Loebs I've been extracting from him . . .

And here's another one—Jack Lindsay's The Barriers Are Down . . . let's see . . . 'Gaul during the break-up of the Roman Empire'. And a new Penguin—Graves' Count Belisarius. I read that in hardcover before the war, I bought it for the school library in fact—"

They were all historical novels, new and second-hand; there wasn't a serious history book among them.

"Alfred Duggan— Winter Quarters," concluded Wimpy. "I must get that for the school library, I didn't know he'd got a new one out—a damn fine writer. I was arguing with Steve Bates, our sixth form History man, just not long ago that his hopefuls could learn more about the First Crusade from Duggan's Knight with Armour— aye, and more about the 5th dummy5

century from Palfrey's Princess in the Sunset— than from anything he could offer them." He gave Roche a knowing leer. "He conceded Duggan, but Palfrey's purple passages about delicate over-bred Roman maidens having to submit to the sweaty embraces of hairy Goths were a bit too much for him." He sighed. "But we can't squat here all day, maundering over David's extraordinary taste in literature—

and it is very odd, I grant you ..." Wimpy gazed at the book in his hand.

Odd, certainly; though perhaps not altogether extraordinary if Audley had been raised on a diet of Kipling; and maybe not extraordinary at all on second thoughts, if the eccentric Wimpy's hand had been in that raising. And yet the little schoolmaster himself had magnified his own surprise, thought Roche: he had wondered at these books, even though they were undoubtedly Audley's books—apart from the carefully-typed addresses . . . Dr D. L. Audley (to await arrival), c/o Mrs C. Clarke, The Lodge, Steeple Horley, Sussex.

"Come on, then." Wimpy straightened up, balancing his armful of historical fiction but leaving their wrappers at his feet. "I'll ask Charlie to clear up this mess on his way home.

The house is just ahead, round those trees—"

At first glimpse, through a scatter of silver birches, The Old House was disappointing—almost another Audley contradiction.

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After Major Stocker's casual description—'not so big, but very old and rather nice'—Roche hadn't expected a minor stately home. But from the way Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken, almost reverently, of the care lavished on the restoration and of the high days and nights of Nigel Audley's smart parties in the thirties, he had mentally prepared himself for a substantial manor, of the sort with which so many English villages were still blessed and which complemented the glorious little parish churches, his own special interest—medieval church, Stuart or Georgian manor, and Victorian school, plus ghastly twentieth-century village hall, that was the progression he had most often observed.

But The Old House was something different: a mixture of stone and weathered brick and half-timber, with windows and gables of different sizes apparently inserted at random—

long and low . . . lower, indeed, than the windowless, ivy-covered barn beside it—the ivy at odds with a wisteria on the house—which had been tacked on to it at right angles, to form an L-shaped courtyard.

"Magic, isn't it!" murmured Wimpy, at his shoulder. "It always takes my breath away—I envy you the first sight of it, old boy. 'Earth has not anything to show more fair', and stout Cortez and Chapman's 'Homer', and all that, eh?"

The scales fell from Roche's eyes.

"Or 'Merlin's Isle of Gramarye', even," continued Wimpy softly, almost to himself. "The kitchen garden's full of bits of dummy5

Roman tile, and we found coloured tesserae from a pavement when they dug the drain at the corner—I swear there's a villa underneath it somewhere . . . 'Merlin's Isle', that's what we used to say, David and I—there's a track that runs behind the house, just below the rise of the downland up above— O that was where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip's fleet! "—remember Puck's song? Or maybe you don't. . ."

Roche's mouth was dry. "It's . . . " he swallowed awkwardly

". . .it must be very old," he said.

"Older than old. God knows how old!" Wimpy paused. "It's the servants' quarters, actually—the kitchen wing of the original house, the 15th century house that was burnt down in 1603—the very day Queen Elizabeth died, the records say.

But there was a fortified manor here before that house, and a Saxon hall before that. . . and, for my money, a Roman villa before that. And God only knows what before that, as I say. . .

But the barn was built in the 1570s—the family was Catholic then, and there's a local legend that there's a 'Priest's hole' in the house somewhere, but no one's ever found it . . . It's certainly a fact that Elizabeth's officers raided the house regularly. But they never caught anyone, so it's either just a legend, or the hiding-place is too damned well hidden. You pays your money and you takes your choice . . . But David and I have spent hours tapping and poking and prying, when Nigel was away, and we haven't found anything yet. . . But we live in hopes, because—if you ask me—because it'll be a dummy5

useful thing to have, a secret hiding place in one's house, in this country one day."

Roche looked at Wimpy questioningly. "What?"

"Oh, it'll be all right under Hugh Gaitskell—he may be a damned intellectual, but he's in the Attlee-Bevin tradition, the old Labour Party I voted for in '45. It'll be okay when he gets in after Macmillan—which he will next time . . .But there are some damned dodgy bastards in the wings after that, if you ask me—chaps who've never either done an honest day's work or smelt gunpowder properly. . . the way Ernie Bevin and Clem Attlee did, old boy ... I tell you, we're in for a bad fifty years now—a bad twenty-five years, anyway, even if the bloody Russians don't shit on us from a great height! So a prudent Englishman would do well to have a numbered account in Switzerland—always supposing it was legal!—and a secret hiding place in his house—" he pointed at The Old House "—if only he can damn well find it!"

Roche blinked at him, and then stared at the house to hide his confusion. If David Audley didn't yet have the hiding place, it did look as though he had acquired the numbered account; and if this was what his legal guardian had taught him that was not to be wondered at, either. And just at this precise moment, he—David Roche, as ever was—wished that he had the same, only more so, and with better and more urgent reason.

"Hah—sorry!" Wimpy coughed apologetically. "Got on my jolly old soap-box in a moment of weakness—bad form—and dummy5

particularly bad form with you, eh, old boy? And that isn't the object of this exercise anyway." He nodded towards the house. " That is the object which I wanted you to study, David Roche."

Roche studied The Old House obediently, though the act of obedience required no effort: he couldn't keep his eyes off it—

off its detail, of which nothing appeared to have been planned and everything was irregular; and yet the whole, the sum of the detail, fitted together like a perfect jigsaw in its frame of trees, with the soaring curve of the downland behind it. The mystery of his first disappointment niggled him; had it been that he simply wanted something about Audley to be simple and predictable and ordinary?

"I'll say one thing for Cecil and Old Billy," murmured Wimpy.

"They're damned cantankerous pair of old rogues, but they've done a bloody marvellous job on that roof. If they can do as well with the barn, they may get into heaven yet. . ."

Roche shifted his gaze unwillingly from the ancient mulberry tree at the corner of the house, its sagging branches crutched with rusty iron supports as befitted the oldest living inhabitant of the picture, to the dilapidated roof of the barn, with its chaos of moss-covered tiles. In one place the ridge was sagging like the mulberry's branches.

"Well?" inquired Wimpy. "What d'you think of it?"

Roche estimated the artfully restored roof of the house against that of the barn. It would cost a pretty penny—that roof would have to be stripped, and the rotten timbers dummy5

replaced . . . but Wimpy had said they'd found the oak for that

—

"It's got you, hasn't it?" said Wimpy. "Good!"

Roche turned towards him, and found that he was smiling.

"What d'you mean—it's got me?" He frowned. "Good?"

"It's in your face. It doesn't take everyone that way. But you're one of the lucky ones—or unlucky, maybe." Wimpy's own face was animated by mischief, almost malice. "I was hoping you would be, because it could help you."

It could help you?

"Let's say . . . you need to see this place, I think, if you're to have a chance of understanding my David—which frankly I don't any more, to be honest—" Wimpy seemed to have overheard that last unspoken question "—because this is David's obsession, so far as I can make out. And I don't wonder, even if he is hardly ever here—I don't wonder—"

Roche didn't wonder either.

"Yes . . . a bit of the old Matthew, chapter four, verse nine, eh?" said Wimpy softly. " 'All these things will I give thee, if only thou wilt fall down and worship me'—if I whispered that in your ear, supposing I had horns and a forked tail and oakum in my boots, how would you reply, young Roche?"

Had that been what the schoolmaster had seen in his face, thought Roche: had the envy been so naked?

He stared all the harder at the house to hide his annoyance with himself. To possess such a place—to hold such a piece of dummy5

Old England—any sensible man would lie and cheat and steal, and do any dishonourable thing, certainly. And fight, of course, as no doubt those old Romans and Saxons and Normans had done—and scheme too, as no doubt those Elizabethan Catholics had done, with the Virgin Queen's Gestapo breathing down their necks—

He found a false smile to give Wimpy. "I don't think I could afford to run it on my pay, not even with the expenses thrown in, let alone employ Cecil and Old Billy, and Mr and Mrs Clarke."

Wimpy nodded. "Good point. I'd have to throw in gold as well, of course. But the Devil always does that, doesn't he!"

And yet there was a mystery here, to add to all the others, now that he'd seen the house: if this was David Audley's obsession, the restoration of the family home to its past glory, his father's intention seemed to have been the exact opposite—to use it, and mortgage it to finance its use, and to let it decay all the while. . . and even at the last to try to sell it over his son's head, which only a German bullet in 1940 had prevented?

"You think we might get at him—at David Audley—through the house, somehow?" Roche faced the little man squarely, frowning sincerity at him. After all, the virtue of this diversion was that if it paid off it would cease to be a diversion. Not Mr Nigel, but Master David, was the objective.

"Hmmm . . . not if 'get at' means 'threaten', certainly."

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Wimpy shook his head slowly. "Threatening my David could be ... unproductive, let's say. It isn't something I'd undertake lightly—he has a streak of obstinacy a mile wide."

At least Wimpy and Oliver St.John Latimer agreed on something, then!

Roche nodded at the house. "Where does the money come from?" It was rather a straight question, but it followed naturally.

"Blessed if I know!" Wimpy's shoulders lifted. "I suppose you could look into that—he could be up to some fiddle, I shouldn't wonder . . . the way we're taxed these days, it can hardly be honest money, and that's a fact!" He turned his gaze to Roche, still with the ghost of the smile on his face.

Then the eyelids shuttered like a camera, and the next expression on the reel was cool and calculating. "But I'd do that carefully if I were you, if it's a volunteer you're after ... I think ... if it's a fiddle it'll be fool-proof— income-tax-inspector-proof, rather."

Roche felt his own eye drawn again towards the house. He had never owned anything like it—he had never even imagined owning anything like it. All that he possessed could be packed into a tin trunk and two large suitcases, plus a couple of tea-chests for his books. Up until recently his heaviest piece of baggage had been an idea, an article of faith which he had pretended to himself was an unshakeable political conviction, which Julie had bequeathed to him as the sole beneficiary of her will. But he hadn't really owned dummy5

the idea for a long time now, and perhaps it had never really been his.

"You take my point? I rather think you do, eh?" Wimpy was observing him narrowly, but was evidently misinterpreting his face this time.

Roche felt his back muscles shiver. How could the man have come so close, after having been so wide of the mark? "But his father didn't take the point, did he!"

"His father? Whose father?" Wimpy frowned.

"Audley's—David Audley's. 'Mr Nigel'— the expectancy and rose of the fair state," quoted Roche brutally. "Wasn't 'Mr Nigel' about to sell the house?" He threw the truth down like a gauntlet between them, challenging Wimpy to choose where his loyalty lay, with the father, his old comrade-in-arms, or with The Old House and his David.

The schoolmaster's face clouded. "Ah . . . well . . . Nigel . . .

was Nigel." He looked up and around nervously, as though he'd only just realised where he was, and Nigel—was —Nigel might be eavesdropping on them. "Clarkie said we ought to look out for her Charlie, because it's time for his tea—half of which we've already eaten . . . And she also said, sotto voce, as we were leaving—as I was leaving—that old Charlie's having one of his turns ... in his downhill phase, as the headshrinkers say . . . which means, the sooner he's back home, the better. You just wait here, old boy, and I'll go look for him—he's in the garden somewhere." Wimpy started to turn away before Roche could open his mouth to protest.

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"Talk about Nigel later, maybe." The turn went through a full circle so that Wimpy was facing him again while retreating backwards towards the wrought-iron gate into the walled garden. "Just look after the books till I get back." Wimpy pointed to the pile of historical novels he had deposited on the gravel. "Or, better still, take 'em into the house and stack

'em on the table by the door, and then have a scout round for yourself—right?"

Roche shut his mouth. If Wimpy was transparently set on ducking the question, solving his loyalty-dilemma simply by quitting the field, at least he was offering something attractive in exchange: to enter The Old House without a running commentary was a chance not to be missed.

"Right." Wimpy waved vaguely, half at Roche, half at the house, and swivelled back towards the gate.

Roche watched him disappear through the trailing cascade of magenta-flowered clematis which covered the stone archway above the gate. Then he dumped his own armful of books alongside Wimpy's and stamped across the gravel forecourt to the porch.

As the door swung open a burst of sunlight edged with rainbow colours caught him full in the face.

He shifted his head, shielding his eyes from the light with his hand, and stared up the beam of light through an arch full of dancing dust-motes into a stained-glass window—a high window blazoned with a rich coat-of-arms, yellow and red dummy5

and blue, set at the top of a carved oak staircase—beyond which the afternoon sun blazed.

Directly ahead of him was an immense refectory table, dark with age like the panelling all around it, with a great bowl of roses on it. Some of the roses had shed their petals in different-coloured piles around the bowl, on a fine coating of dust which the sunlight betrayed. He sniffed, and the scent of the roses, mixed with a damp cellar-smell from somewhere under his feet, combined with the stained-glass to carry him back to this morning's church and Genghis Khan. He wrinkled his nose, uncertain whether it was the cloying rose-scent-plus-church-smell which made him think of funerals, or the memory of Genghis Khan which also made him think of death, that disturbed him more.

His eyes were becoming accustomed to the strange mixture of brightness from the searchlight-beam of the sun and shadow accentuated by the dark panelling, with its ghost-marks of pictures which had once hung on the walls.

Family portraits, maybe? And no prizes for guessing what had happened to them, one by one, as Mr Nigel's horses let him down in the last furlong before the winning post, also one by one; the pictures were always the first thing to go, the easiest things to pack off to Sotheby's and Christie's. All that was left on the walls was a line of old photographs up the staircase, school and college groups of cricketers and oarsmen sun-bleached to pale sepia-brown; and the refectory table, which was too big to sell, and the grandfather clock in dummy5

the furthest corner, silent at ten minutes to noon or midnight

—had that also been too big, or not worth the trouble of selling? Or had Adolf Hitler saved the last furniture with the house by his own pre-emptive bid for Europe and all its contents in 1939?

In spite of the sunlight, the house was cool, almost chilly, he could feel its cold breath against his cheeks. It wouldn't do to let his imagination stray too far here: reason advised him that thick walls and stone-flagged floors could hold winter all the year round when the owner was mostly absent, and fires were only lit occasionally, and that this house had been trapped in the vicious circle of such absences for a generation, so it was no wonder that its atmosphere was unwelcoming; but beneath reason he could sense an older instinct of unreason, which whispered very different rumours inside his head, of the enmity of old things to the flesh and blood of intruders like himself, and to would-be destroyers, like Mr Nigel, who had not lived to come safe home to the house he had neglected.

Of course, it was foolish to let such thoughts unnerve him; and they were only the combined product of his own disturbed emotions, and his own fascination with old buildings, and maybe too much of Ada Clarke's rich fruit cake unsettling his digestion.

It was only an old empty house, and the afternoon sun was shining outside, and Wimpy wasn't far away—Genghis Khan was far away, and Audley was even further, and Mr Nigel was dummy5

bones in a war grave long-forgotten, and none of them could touch him at this moment, any more than the house itself could reach out at him.

There were doors, panelled in the panelling, ahead of him—

to the right, and to the left, under the staircase—that door would lead to the cellars . . . to the wine-cellar, at a guess; which would be full of racks emptied, but not renewed, by Mr Nigel, for another guess . . . cellars full of cobwebs and the damp smell which was in his nostrils, and he certainly wasn't about to scout around in them unless Wimpy was cheerfully leading the way, by God!

The door on the right didn't look much more inviting, but there were those arched passages on each side of him which he'd half-glimpsed in the first moment after he'd ducked the sunlight, before his whole attention had been drawn up to the stained-glass coat-of-arms . . . one way would lead to the day rooms, most likely—the sitting room, and the library, and maybe a study; the other way to a dining room, and a breakfast room, and then the kitchen and the pantries, and the servants' quarters; though with an old hodge-podged place like this, which already seemed vastly bigger inside than it had from the outside, full of unsuspected space, such regularity might well be a bad guess. He could only tell by looking for himself.

Left or right? Roche peered down the left-hand passage, undecided, his eye lifting to the flaking white-washed vaulting above the panelling. For sure this part of the house, dummy5

which had survived the great fire on the day of Elizabeth Tudor's death, had in any case been the older wing. Wimpy had said—

The recollection of what Wimpy had said died unthought as he turned towards the right-hand passage, which was identical with the left-hand one, except that the door at the end of it was open, and that there was someone standing in it staring at him.

Christ! He hadn't heard that door open—there hadn't been a sound after his own footfalls on the flagstones which had carried him through the porch and the archway of the original door into the hallway—

Christ! He hadn't heard that door open because it hadn't opened: the man had been standing there, staring at him, ever since he had entered the house, watching him silently, as soundless as the house itself!

An insect crawled back up Roche's spine as he returned the stare. This right-hand passage wasn't exactly identical ... or ...

or it was, but the wisteria overhung the low window recessed into the thickness of the wall on this side, deepening the shadow with a green cast.

It had to be Ada Clarke's Charlie—it was either Ada Clarke's Charlie or it would vanish in the instant he addressed it—

"Hullo there?" Somewhere between the intention and the final articulation the words lost their planned heartiness, and echoed hollowly down the passage instead. "Good afternoon dummy5

—Mr Clarke, is it?"

That was better. The figure moved, shifting its feet so that the sound of hobnails scraping on stone released Roche from fear. Ghosts didn't wear hobnailed boots; or, if they did, the phantom hobnails wouldn't scrape like that; and ghosts weren't so substantial, and Charlie Clarke was nothing if not substantial: he filled the doorway, all of six-foot-three, with long arms and huge hands in proportion.

Also, the collarless striped shirt, the Fair Isle knitted pullover and the shapeless corduroy trousers was no uniform for any self-respecting spectre in this setting. Doublet-and-hose, or satin breeches, or even Mr Nigel's well-pressed battle-dress—any of those might not be out of place in The Old House, but not a Fair Isle pullover. Not even the faintly green-tinged light which filtered into the passage through a window half-obscured by wisteria could make a convincing ghost of Charlie Clarke on second glance.

But if second glance stripped the supernatural from Charlie it did nothing to lessen the hostile vibrations which eddied round Roche as they stared at each other—the same sensation his sixth sense had picked up moments before, but had ascribed to the house itself. And there was something no less creepy about the sensation now that its source had become tangible: the way both Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken of Charlie, the man was at best a simpleton, but at worst— in his downhill phase—perhaps something more dangerous. And the confirmation of that lay not only in the dummy5

gorilla-length arms and meat-plate hands, but also in the way those addled brains had been able to transmit a signal before Roche had set eyes on the signaller. Which, by any standards, was strong magic to beware of, not to ignore.

"It's 'Charlie', isn't it?" said Roche tentatively. "Charlie, my name's Roche—David Roche." The giving of names freely was an old ritual of peaceful intentions.

The words unlocked Charlie's legs, but not his tongue. He took two slow steps out of the doorway, and then stopped.

But that short advance carried his face out of deep shadow into enough light for Roche to make out the little pig-eyes and heavy chin separated by a button nose and tiny mouth in a brick-red expanse of face. The sum total was so close to being classically oafish, if not actually brutish, with no spark of anything in the eyes, that the contrast between Charlie and his wife was not so much surprising as painful.

Roche licked his lips. "I was. . . I was hoping to meet Mr. . .

Master. . . David—your Master David, Charlie," he lied nervously. "Is he home?"

The mention of Audley appeared to take Charlie by surprise, his eyes almost disappearing into the frown which descended on them.

Charlie took a deep breath. "Not 'ere—" the words came from deep down, through layers of gravel "—what are you doin'

'ere?"

It was a good question, but altogether unanswerable. More dummy5

than ever, Roche wished that Wimpy was at his side.

"I came here with Mr Willis, Charlie." However dim and downhill Charlie might be, he couldn't forget Wimpy. No one could forget Wimpy, he was supremely memorable.

"You know Mr Willis, Charlie." Whatever the Germans had done to Charlie at Dunkirk seventeen years before, they had done thoroughly. " Major Willis—Master David's guardian."

Charlie's baffled expression cleared magically. " Captain Willis, you mean," he growled.

"Captain Willis," he agreed hastily. Captain Willis?

"Arrragh!" The gravel rattled in Charlie's throat. "Captain Willis is 'D' Company, an' Mr Nigel, that's Major Audley—

he's 'B' Company. An' Captain Johnson, that was Mr Johnson until just recently—'e's 'A' Company now, of course . . ."he nodded slowly at Roche". . . an' 'C' Company is. . .is. . ." the nod faded away as Charlie cast around in the lost property room of his memory, and failed to find the name of 'C'

Company's commanding officer, who had let him down by being unmemorable after seventeen years. " 'C' Company is. . ." he rocked slowly from side to side "—'A' Company is Captain Johnson, that was Mr Johnson as was . . ."

Roche watched the Caliban-face twitch with the effort of putting the names of men who had most of them been dead and buried for years to formations which had long been disbanded. Someone—some irate sergeant-major or despairing corporal—had once hammered those names into dummy5

Charlie's memory so firmly that they were still there in the present tense.

"Captain Willis is out in the garden," he nodded at Charlie.

" 'D' Company—I just told you," said Charlie irritably. Then his incongruous little mouth twisted into some sort of grin.

"Get hisself killed on that motor-bike of his one of these days,

'e will—Captain Willis, that was schoolmastering before the war broke out." He nodded back in Roche's direction. "That's

'im what learns young Master David his letters, an' thinks the world of 'im, like my Ada does—'D' Company, 'e is." He focussed on Roche, and frowned as though he was seeing him for the first time, but could supply no 1940 name for what he saw. "Who are you, then?"

"I'm—" Roche stopped abruptly as the macabre reality of Charlie's 'downhill phase' registered fully with him. The man was in his own private time-warp, so it seemed from all those present tenses and 'Captain' Willis and 'young' Master David.

"I'm Captain Roche, Royal Signals," he snapped. Whatever it might mean, there was one sure way of finding out, albeit a cruel and risky one.

"Is Master David not home, Clarke?" he snapped in Captain Roche's military voice, long disused.

Charlie's features twitched with the effort of thinking.

"Well, Clarke?" Roche jogged him mercilessly. "Speak up!"

Charlie stiffened out of his stoop. "No, sir."

Roche braced himself. "Is Major Audley home, then?" This dummy5

time he hardly dared to watch Charlie's face, the thoughts behind it were unguessable and didn't bear thinking about.

"No, sir," said Charlie. "Haven't seen him today, sir." God, it was true! One end of this interrogation stood in 1957, but the other was trapped in 1940, with no years in-between! And, what was worse—Roche's flesh crawled at the possibility—

was Haven't seen him today, sir.... How many times did Charlie catch sight of his Mr Nigel, and the other ghosts of Mr Nigel's time, drifting round The Old House? But he had work to do now, in 1957.

"Hmmmm ..." Captain Roche's simulated annoyance almost choked him. "I was hoping to catch one of them, damn it!"

He frowned at Charlie, whose face had settled into blank immobility. What business Captain Roche had with Mr Nigel and Master David was none of Fusilier Clarke's business.

And yet it was in that private area that the work had to be done. " Hmmm . . . Seems to me, Clarke, that the Major doesn't hit it off very well with his son—am I right?" he said briskly.

Charlie started twitching again. "Sir?" The gravel reduced the word to a croak.

"Mr Nigel and Master David—why don't they get on? Speak up, man! Don't pretend you don't know!"

Charlie's mouth opened and shut, and his head jerked from side to side, and his eyes rolled and ended up staring past Roche, over Roche's shoulder to the line of ancestral dummy5

photographs running up the staircase as though he was pleading with them to come to his assistance.

"Come on, Clarke—you can tell me. I'm a friend of the family, you know."

" And so you are!" The voice came from the doorway on Roche's right, just out of his vision, and it was Wimpy's.

"So you are, my dear fellow—a good friend of the family!"

said Wimpy genially. "Afternoon, Fusilier Clarke." The geniality remained, but there was iron beneath the velvet.

"You cut along back to your billet now and have your tea, and I'll talk to you later—right? Oh . . . and there's a bit of a mess on the road, you'd better clear that up smartly or sar-major will see it, and then there'll be hell to pay, I shouldn't wonder. Right?"

"Sir!" Charlie's hobnails cracked to attention on the flagstones. "Sir!"

Wimpy nodded. "Off you go then, Clarke."

Only after Charlie had departed did Wimpy move again, and then he circled Roche, ignoring him and breathing in The Old House's damp smell half-critically and half as though it was doing him a power of good.

"Well, old boy ..." Wimpy didn't look at him ". . . you took a bit of a risk there, didn't you!"

"I did?" Ignorance was never an excuse, but it was all he had to offer.

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Wimpy nodded at the line of photographs. "Big chap, Charlie Clarke. . . Seen him lift a five-hundredweight truck to save his mates popping the jack under the rear wheel, to change it

—Charlie's only party trick, you might say . . . We had two like him in the battalion, with too few brains and too much brawn—never should have been recruited, except maybe into the Pioneers ... I had one of them in my company, 'Batty' they called him, because of the way he'd run amok. But he was killed in France in '40."

Roche watched Wimpy sigh, and was grateful for the past tense: at least both of them were together in 1957 now, however uncomfortable the next few minutes might be!

"The other one was Charlie, in Jerry Johnson's company—

General Sir Gerald Johnson as he is now—and Fusilier Charlie Clarke as he is still. . . they were both lucky, after a fashion, anyway." He looked at Roche at last, but bleakly.

"They both survived, that is—Jerry to prosper in his chosen profession, and Charlie . . . after Dunkirk ... to be Charlie, only less so at intervals—to be Charlie in 1940, before Dunkirk, as you have discovered, Captain Roche, eh?"

Oddly enough he didn't seem angry now. He seemed almost relieved by Captain Roche's abortive discovery.

"And you have been lucky too, I suppose one might say, Captain Roche," said Wimpy.

Ignorance and silence were still safest, especially when the latter might purge the former.

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"Charlie was the gentle one, you see." Wimpy nodded. "Batty actually liked killing things—rabbits, Germans . . .

fortunately he never had a proper chance with regimental policemen, but it was all the same to him. Charlie was different, he was always gentle ... or almost always gentle—he meant to be as gentle as he could be, if people let him alone.

That was all they had to do—just let him alone." He gazed at Roche almost sorrowfully. "But you didn't let him alone . . .

and in this house too—he's very protective about this house.

God help the burglar he ever catches here!"

Roche felt the air cold against his cheeks: he could testify to the truth of that, the memory of Charlie's protectiveness was in that air still.

"But you were lucky, as I say. I turned up just in time, before he took you apart," said Wimpy simply. "Very lucky for all concerned . . . Though, of course, I blame myself too, old boy."

There, at last, was the opening he had been waiting for, thought Roche, hot inside against the cold on his face from the memory of Charlie.

"So you damn well should!" he exclaimed. "You wouldn't answer the question. Every time I asked it, damn it!"

Wimpy shook his head. "Not 'wouldn't', old boy. I promised, but there's a time and place for the right answer, that's all."

He pointed towards the staircase. "David put them up himself, but. . . typical David, putting them up ... he did it when he came back from Normandy, the first time, on the dummy5

last day of his leave . . . but Charlie carried the hammer and the nails . . . typical David—" he shook his head at Roche, as blank-faced as Charlie had been "—took them all out of the study, plus the extra one Nigel had buried in his bottom drawer . . . and that was typical Nigel too—putting it away, when he could have torn it up, and burnt it, and it would have been dead and buried . . . But no—he just put it in the bottom drawer for David to find; and he knew David would find it, because David finds everything sooner or later—just put it in the bottom drawer for David to find, and David found it of course.... So out they all come from the study, plus the extra one—with never a word to Clarkie and me—and Charlie holds the nails—and bang, bang, bang, there they are in public, for everyone to see on the stairs—the one place everyone has to see, with never a word to me, not ever . . .

not even now—not now, not ever . . ."

Roche looked at the photographic gallery on the stairway, and then at Wimpy, and then at the gallery again. There were more bloody pictures there than was comfortable, if there was one extra picture which he was expected to home in on at first glance, to tell him what he ought to know.