Soldier No More

"Go and see for yourself, my dear man— don't let me stand in your way, just go and see for yourself, eh?"

Roche went quickly, before the schoolmaster could confuse him further, either deliberately or accidentally.

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The line was not so much a line, as a double zig-zag over half a century— more than half a century—of the history of Oxford-and-Cambridge and photography both.

Indeed ... it went back to Great-Grandfather Audley, looking faintly like Prince Albert, in the smartly-cut but unpressed suiting of the time, blotched and faded by age, at the bottom of the staircase, gracing the Hoplites Society of Balliol College, to David Audley himself, vintage 1949, scowling from his college rugger XV, which had been added at the very top as a Cambridge afterthought—almost an act of defiance amongst a collection of otherwise exclusively Balliol College, Oxford: pictures of Father Nigel, Grandfather and Great-Grandfather, who had all been oarsmen in their college VIIIs, or ornaments of that same Hoplites Society . . . which, at a guess, from its name, and the stylish fashion of their evening dress, and the nonchalant don't-give-a-damn slightly drunken expressions they affected, must be an exclusive club for the young Classical gentlemen of their time.

God! What would Genghis Khan make of this collection?

Here, to the life, were the young bloods of the Tsar's Imperial Guard, lazing it at ease among the empty Champagne bottles through the 1905 revolt, past the 1914 armageddon to the 1917 reckoning!

Roche concentrated his wits and his memory. Wimpy had said (or was it Sir Eustace, or Colonel Clinton, or Stocker? Or had it been in the records, merely?) that Mr Nigel's father had been killed in 1917—

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It had been Wimpy: My father was at Oxford with his father

— the one that was killed in 1917—take away the right number of years and that was where to look—was it?

But why should that be worth looking at?

All the same, he looked—frowned, rather—at the Hoplites of the generation before Passchendaele: a double row of languid young men, none of whom could have imagined himself as a rotting corpse in thick mud, and none of whom he recognised . . . although the list of names underneath indicated that there was a D. N. D. Audley (hon. secretary) in it somewhere, next to The Hon. W. de V. Pownell-Lloyd (president) . . .

Wimpy's own father ought to be here somewhere, though hardly among the rich young Hoplites, because he had been clever but poor, and that ruled him out of their company.

Maybe he would be among the oarsmen in the next picture—

a crew comic not only for their close-fitting but elongated rowing uniforms, but also for their deadly-serious expressions, as though it had been the battle of Salamis in which they'd distinguished themselves, not Oxford in eighteen-ninety-something. But at least he could instantly identify the Audley in this crew—the familiar face stared at him out of the photograph—the Audley face, minus the broken nose, plus the rowing cap and the frail undergraduate moustache!

And there was a Willis in this crew, too—another plain plebeian W. Willis (another Wimpy?), but Captain of Boats dummy5

no less, and in a victorious Eights Week, judging by the list of defeated colleges beneath the names of the oarsmen. So both families had something to be proud of in this particular photograph, clearly—

He studied the picture for a moment, and then shifted to the Hoplites Society group just below it, and then returned to the oarsmen. They bore the same date, and the same photographer's name, but the oarsmen were clearer—much clearer, much less faded—

Buried in the bottom drawer!

It was here, in this picture, on the wall for everyone to see—it was here, somewhere among J. R. Selwyn (No.4) and D. N. L.

Audley (stroke) and N. B-R. Poole (cox) . . . and W. Willis (bow, Captain of Boats), but he couldn't see it.

He looked at Wimpy again, and knew for certain that it was there in front of him—it was in Wimpy's face, by God!

He stared at the oarsmen again, and then at the Hoplites, and then at the oarsmen.

And saw at last, what had been there all the time—what had been there half the afternoon, but not in Wimpy's face.

Literally, not in Wimpy's face.

He checked the names underneath to make doubly sure.

The chickens had come home to roost, and W. Willis (bow, Captain of Boats) had rowed them all the way from the eighteen-nineties: he was the spit-and-image twin, minus the broken nose, of David Audley.

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ADVANCE TO CONTACT:

Madame Peyrony's young ladies

VII

THE FRENCHMAN HAD been swimming strongly in the river current in the same place for all of ten minutes.

Molières, Beaumont, Roquépine, Monpazier. . . they had all belonged to the English . . .

The sight of the man battling to no purpose, together with the hot sun not long past its zenith and the warm stones under the rug, and the truffle omelette and the trout, all conspired to undermine Roche's concentration.

Villeréal, Montflanquin, Villeneuve, Neuville, Villefranche-du-Périgord . . . they were the French ones . . . but there were other Villeneuves and Neuvilles and Villefranches to be distinguished from them, which had been just as new and free, but also English, on this embattled frontier seven hundred years ago.

And Domme—French—high and golden above the river, which had betrayed him into over-eating when he needed a clear head—

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Maybe that was how it had happened— God! How I love this fat, fertile, self-indulgent country, so ripe for plundering but also so cruel and dangerous and ready to betray its enemies

—had that been the last Anglo-Saxon insight, the last clear English thought old John Talbot had had as the French cannon opened up on his archers at Castillon down the river five hundred years before—that it had always been too good to be true, the English Empire in France, from Bordeaux to Calais—too rich and too tempting and too strong for cold-blooded islanders?

He mustn't go to sleep! He wasn't even tired, he had slept five dreamless hours in the couchette from Paris-Austerlitz, lulled by the train sounds even through dawn halts at Limoges and Perigueux to be woken gently by the well-tipped attendant in time for Les Eyzies (expense no object—that was heady and frightening at the same time, and it had already been his undoing in the restaurant at Domme), and with Raymond Galles meeting him at the station in his own battered old Volkswagen, which had been driven down from Paris yesterday by some poor nameless bastard.

God! He mustn't go to sleep: he must think of his bastides, Beaumont and Monpazir, Villereal and sun-baked Domme, and the rest of them on the list—all that Anglo-French history he had sweated and frozen over during his Manchester days, in those ghastly wind-swept, bomb-swept open spaces around the University and the History Faculty, which were dismal even when it was dry, like a piece of East dummy5

Berlin authentically reproduced in England, no expense spared—

Roche shivered at the memory, coldly wakened by it, and twisted sideways on to one elbow, blinking against the glare, the better to observe the lunatic swimming Frenchman.

He was still there, breasting the current in the same yard of river, hauling himself forward and instantly being carried back by the force of the water, and then hauling himself forward again, only to be carried back again in a perfect display of useless determination.

All that history . . .

The afternoon sun rippled on the broken water rushing by the swimmer. Perhaps it wasn't a useless exercise: maybe the man was stretching his sinews in preparation for some Marathon swim, across the Channel or the Hellespont, where tides and currents were hostile; and this way he could take his punishment at full stretch without ever losing sight of his little pile of clothes and belongings on the stony strand ten yards from him?

All that history had seemed just as useless, just as much mental energy equally pointlessly expended on the past when it was the present which had lain waiting in ambush for him in Korea and Japan, and if he'd understood more about that then perhaps he wouldn't be lying here now, not knowing any more whose side he was on.

And yet now all that history had become a qualification for dummy5

something at last, at least in part, though in a way neither he nor his teachers had ever envisaged—

"That's everything then, I think—," said Clinton, pushing the buff-coloured envelope across the table. "Ticket to Paris, a little spending money . . . Raymond Galles will have more for you when he meets you at Les Eyzies on Thursday morning.

And Galles will have fixed your transport too—he's a good man, a born and bred Périgourdin, knows the country, knows the people. Been on our books since '41—would have been since '40, only it took him eight months to extricate himself from a PoW camp . . . Not used him much since '44, but you can trust him right down the line. A good man, he'll look after you . . . Thompson'll meet you in Paris, of course, with the cover material all written up—most of it you'll know, some of it you must re-write in your own fist, to make it look authentic, just in case anyone gets nosey—and your train ticket. Gare Austerlitz, 2150, all the way, arrive just before breakfast—time to refresh your memory and get some kip.

Very convenient. Any last questions?"

"What historical material, sir?" He hadn't expected to be finally briefed by Clinton himself.

Shrug. "I honestly don't know, Roche. Thompson's choosing something appropriate to the area, naturally—something worth being there for. But he won't give you any of Audley's specialities, they're too damn esoteric, so I gather." Smile.

"According to Master Oliver St.John Larimer, anyway."

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A singularly obscure aspect of Byzantine religious history certainly rated as esoteric, thought Roche uneasily.

"Don't worry, man!" Clinton picked up the unease. "You'll be able to hold your own."

"I didn't get a First at Cambridge."

"Balls to Cambridge—and to Oxford." Clinton's jaw tightened. "There's too much Oxbridge in the service. That's one of its troubles."

So much for Oliver St. John Latimer— and Sir Eustace Avery!

"But you want me to recruit Audley nevertheless, and he's Cambridge sir."

"Audley's a maverick." Clinton shrugged off the inconsistency. "And there's nothing wrong with the Manchester School of History."

"In which I got a shaky Second."

"Which should have been a First, according to your professor." Clinton leaned forward, frowning. "And your flat in Paris is full of books—"

"Yes, but—"

" We chose you for this, Roche," Clinton overbore him. "I told you before—we chose you very carefully—we chose you particularly—get that into your head, and don't ever forget it. You, and no one else, Roche."

Roche opened his mouth, and then closed it quickly. After The Old House and its secret he was consumed with curiosity dummy5

about Audley, so that he almost wanted the assignment for its own sake.

"Because you can do the job, that's why." Clinton sat back.

"When you learn more about David Audley—you may understand . . . but you ought to know one thing already, from what you heard in the Admiral's Room—"

Sir Eustace's room, under the Sargent portrait, where the Admiral's eyes had screwed into his soul, seeking out its innermost treachery: how could Clinton miss what the long-dead Admiral saw so clearly?

"—if we sent Master Latimer, with his Oxford First in P.P.E.—

whatever that is—do you think Audley would change his mind for him! Not in a hundred years! Or Malcolm Thain—

not in a thousand years! That man couldn't recruit a drunkard for a piss-up in a brewery, I don't think—not if we really needed him." Clinton wrinkled his nose in contempt.

"But you, Roche. . . you just might manage it."

The train was in the station, but it was still moving, and it still might not stop.

"You're a bit of a dreamer, Roche. But you're also a soldier, and that's important, if you have to deal with David Audley, because whatever he may say about his military service—

however he may denigrate it, he's proud of it."

Clinton was a strange man, thought Roche warily: not Oxbridge, even contemptuous of Oxbridge. But not unintellectual.

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"And you're a scholar too—and that's also important for Audley. He values scholarship."

"Hardly a scholar, Colonel." The devil was still talking. "Not since Manchester. And not even then, not really."

"But still close enough. And you left to become a soldier."

Clinton smiled evilly. "It should have happened to him—and you'll see that he knows how it happened."

"How it happened? I was called up, that's how it happened!"

"I mean, how you got into Intelligence—a volunteer, not a pressed man."

God! If they knew the truth about that!

"A scholar—but not Oxbridge . . . and he has his reasons for not loving Oxbridge . . . and a soldier," continued Clinton smoothly. "So you have the right profile of the pen and the sword . . . And you have one final attribute which neither Master Oliver nor Master Malcolm possess, more's the pity, I'm sorry to have to admit. Can you think what it is?"

The recollection of how he had really come to volunteer for that transfer from Signals to Intelligence was still unbalancing Roche: what the hell did he have that Latimer and Thain didn't, except that guilty secret?

"You'll send me back to Paris if I fail?" Clinton and Genghis Khan were brothers under the skin.

"Not to Paris. An ambitious young man can still be unhappy in comfort there. If you fail with Audley we'll bury you somewhere uncomfortable, Roche."

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If he failed with Audley, and was relegated to counting paperclips in some backwater, then he'd never get away from either of them—until the Comrades decided to trade him for some minor advantage.

"But I don't think you'll fail. I think you can do the job," said Clinton, almost amiably. "And then you'll be Major Roche in London, I shouldn't wonder. 'And there is in London all that life can afford', as Dr Johnson said." He nodded at Roche.

"So the incentive is a two-way one—"

Molières, Beaumont, Roquépine, Monpazier, Lalinde—

All the same, that clever-stupid bastard Thompson had still got it wrong, thought Roche morosely. The study of the medieval bastides of Aquitaine might be outside Audley's special historical period, and even a perfectly reasonable subject for a student of French history to study in this particular area of all others, the more so as it was also an uncommonly congenial region as yet unspoiled by le tourisme.

Nevertheless, if bloody Thompson had only taken the trouble to ask, instead of using his initiative, he would have learnt that student-Captain Roche, the soi-disant soldier-scholar, was far better informed on the 16th and 17th centuries than the 13th and 14th, and on the French Wars of Religion than on their endless dynastic blood-lettings with the English in the Middle Ages.

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Roche rolled on his back and day-dreamed of the good old 16th century, when a chap could happily betray one side to the other, and change sides two or three times as commonsense dictated, and still be reckoned a man of honour if he timed his actions prudently.

That was his century, which he had studied most and enjoyed most; when there were two rival faiths, just like now, but with just enough elbow-room for the same man to make honest mistakes and learn from them without being damned, unlike now . . .

And his favourite century would have done well enough here, which had been debatable territory for the Catholics and Protestants just as it had been for the French and English in medieval days . . . well enough, or even better, remembering the Domme bastide where he'd lunched well, but not too wisely, only a few hours ago, which had been ingeniously seized from the Catholics by a famous Protestant commander who had then promptly changed sides and sold it back to its proper owners at a handsome profit to himself.

Those were the days! He could have prospered then, in those days. He could have served his own interest, and saved his own skin, and kept his self-respect as well. Whereas now . . .

Whereas now he was suspended between Clinton and Genghis Khan, and tied more tightly to each of them so that he could no longer even be sure where his best interest lay—

or even where his best chance of survival might be.

But he didn't want to think about them, because more dummy5

immediately there was Audley—

Only, before Audley, thanks to bloody Thompson, there was Villeréal and Castillones and Montflanquin and Villefranche-du-Périgord and Domme and Beaumont and Monpazir and . . .

"Good heavens! Isn't it David Roche?"

The sun switched on and off and on, in blinding flashes between red-black, and his tongue was half as big again as it ought to be, and tasted of armpits.

"It is David! I thought I recognised the car back there—the Volkswagen—your posszonwagen! Wake up, David!"

A shadow blotted out the sun above him as he fumbled for his dark glasses, which had slipped off his nose somehow while he had been dozing.

"David who-did-you-say?" Another shadow took the place of the first one, a bigger shadow with a fluffy aureole of hair.

"Do I know him?"

"How on earth do I know? But I shouldn't think so—David's an army-type, commuting between the OEECD and NATO, doing frightfully important things . . . I met him at Fontainebleau—wake up, David!"

Roche managed to get his sunglasses back in position at last, to filter out the glare.

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"What are you doing here, David?"

One thing was for sure—or two things, counting the fact that he had never done anything important between the OEECD

and NATO as the first one of them: he had never seen this girl before in his life.

He blinked at her, the glasses sliding on the sweat which had accumulated on his nose. "Gillian Baker—Jilly!"

There was another girl coming into view, alongside the big one with the fluffy golden hair, a small, dark-haired one; three of them . . . but the one who was due to recognise him was doing the talking, and she had to be Gillian Baker—

Thompson on Gillian Baker: Foreign Office assistant principal, Cheltenham Ladies' College and Oxford— plain as a pikestaff but super-bright— she'll get you on to the inside . . . not one of ours, but they're doing us a favour for once— someone high up must have twisted their arm, they've never done as much for us before . . . but they've got her in, and she'll get you in— you met her at a NATO

reception and took her out to dinner afterwards . . . 'Jilly', you call her, and take it from there—

"I adore soldiers!" exclaimed the big girl. "And isn't he gorgeous—what a tan!"

Roche didn't feel gorgeous as he staggered to his feet. "And tall, too!" The big girl seemed set on demoralising him.

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"What are you doing here, David? Are you on leave?" Jilly persisted. "Take no notice of my predatory friend."

"I was trying to sleep." It was hard to take no notice of the big girl: Jilly wasn't really as plain as a pikestaff, she had a beautiful slender body, just sufficiently rounded, to go with her snub nose and freckles; but the big girl would have stopped any merely casual conversation, not only with her splendid proportions but also with her slightly glazed expression, which contrived to be eager at the same time.

"We were just going for a swim," said the big girl encouragingly. "We always swim here—isn't that lucky!"

Roche couldn't help smiling at her, even though whatever it had been, this encounter hadn't been a matter of luck.

"Come on, Jilly—introduce us!" said the big girl. "Don't be mean."

"Do shut up, Lexy," said the dark-haired girl. "How can anyone introduce anyone when you're burbling all the time?"

"Oh—sorry! Sorry everyone—" The glazed-eager look embraced them all, settling finally on Roche "—I mean, if he's yours, Jilly darling, I mean double-plus sorry—"

"Oh God!" murmured the dark girl.

"He's not mine, Lexy," said Jilly. "He's not anyone's."

Lexy's mouth—a big generous mouth, revealing very white teeth with gaps in the centre—opened wide.

"Don't say anything, Lexy," said Jilly. "David—Lady Alexandra Perowne—David Roche—Meriel Stephanides—

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David Roche. End of introduction."

"Lexy for short. Pleestameecha, David." Lady Alexandra Perowne began to unbutton her dress.

"Hello, David," said Meriel Stephanides, offering a cool, long-fingered hand to Roche. The dark hair and the pale olive skin were as Mediterranean as the surname, but the voice was English home counties, refined in some exclusive boarding school. Also, now that he looked at her properly, he realised that she was the most arrestingly beautiful of all, so much so that he wanted to go on staring at her with pure platonic admiration, even while trying to take in Lady Alexandra's unbuttoning with entirely different thoughts in mind. For if Lady Alexandra was a splendid English rose in full bloom—or maybe more like a great big prize chrysanthemum—Miss Stephanides was some rarer and more exotic flower, delicate and subtly perfumed.

"Do you hunt?" Lady Alexandra's fingers stopped midway down.

Roche swallowed. "I beg your pardon, Lady Alexandra?"

"Are you cavalry? And 'Lexy', not 'Lady'. Are you cavalry?

You look like a hussar. I met an absolutely smashing one at Christmas, at our hunt ball—Jerry Somebody-or-Other. He wore these marvellous tight trousers which looked like they'd been painted on him—Jerry Somebody—" she waved a rather grubby hand vaguely "—if you're a hussar then you'll know him. He has this birthmark ..."

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Roche tried desperately to concentrate on what she was saying, rather than what she was showing: there was already a generous portion of Lady Alexandra on view, but there was a lot more where that came from—and it was coming, what was more.

"No, I—I'm afraid I'm not a hussar," he said quickly, before she could render Jerry Somebody's identification easier by locating the birthmark for him.

"What a shame!" The grubby paw toyed with the next button.

"But you don't look like a guardsman—"

He had to put a stop to this somehow: that button was going to give way any second now, and then even his sunglasses would be no protection.

"—you look too intelligent for a guardee—almost haggard, like Daddy's accountant—"

"Lexy—" interposed Jilly.

"No! Don't interrupt me when I've almost got it." The paw waved Jilly off, but then came back to the button, tugging at it distractedly. " 'Doing frightfully important things', Jilly said

—something fearfully hush-hush, I'll bet—"

"Lexy!"

"I've got it!" The button gave way. " You're in the Secret Service!"

The moment of truth elongated as she pointed at him in triumph and the dress gaped open.

"You're bursting out all over, Lexy," said Jilly sharply.

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"So what? We came here to bathe, didn't we?" Lexy paused.

"I'm wearing my—" she looked down suddenly "—oh! I'm not, am I!"

"No, you're not, Lexy dear," said Meriel Stephanides. "You're definitely not in the Secret Service, like David."

"Oh— damn!!" exclaimed Lexy, snatching clumsily at the edges of the dress. "You made me come away so quickly—

you're always rushing me, both of you!" As she captured the dress the towel under her arm escaped, liberating two scraps of bright scarlet material at Roche's feet. He bent to retrieve them, half instinctively and half to give himself something to do other than goggling helplessly at a situation which had passed beyond his control.

Lexy's reflexes were one disastrous second slower than his: as he started to straighten up, she bent over him, and his head collided with soft breasts which momentarily enveloped him with expensive perfume, perspiration and embarrassment.

"Oh—fff fff— sorry!" She looked into his eyes at close quarters, but he was too overwhelmed to register her expression. "Thanks—" Pause—"— oh bugger!"

Roche croaked incoherently. What made things worse was that Jilly and Meriel Stephanides, the brains and the beauty of this incongruous trio, were laughing at him.

"Not at all like Tiffany Case," said Meriel.

"Or Vesper—or Gala Brand," said Jilly.

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"Or James Bond, come to that," said Meriel.

"Who?" said Lexy, frowning at them.

"We told you—we gave you From Russia With Love to read, Lexy dear," said Meriel sweetly.

"But she doesn't read thrillers—remember?" said Jilly to her confederate. "She only reads historical novels—she's too busy swotting up on Galla Placidia, to keep up with David Audley tonight—remember?"

Meriel nodded. "Of course! To keep up with David! Sweet chance she's got—of keeping up with David!"

"Always supposing that she still wants to keep up with that David . . ." Jilly nodded meaningfully at Meriel.

"With that David?"

"With that David?" Meriel glanced at Roche calculatingly. "Of course— with that David!"

"Tactics," said Jilly.

"Tactics!" agreed Meriel. "Conjure up the green-eyed monster as an ally: pit David of the Secret Service against David the Dragoon!"

"Of course! That's why she wanted to know whether he'd been a hussar!" Jilly bobbed agreement in turn. "Horse to horse—sword to sword! Or should it be 'sabre'?"

"We'll have to ask him." Meriel continued to consider Roche appraisingly. "But d'you think it'd be a fair match?"

Jilly eyed Roche like a horse-dealer at an auction. "Don't see dummy5

why not. He's a damn sight better-looking, haggard or not.

And he's younger."

"Always back a good young 'un against a good old 'un? But he's not much younger. And maybe he won't bite?"

Jilly looked at Meriel, and shrugged. "We can only try."

“Well then—you try. You know him, after all, Jilly."

"But it was your idea, Steffy."

"No, it wasn't—it was yours!"

Looking from one to the other, Roche decided that it was time the horse had its say in the auction.

"Could someone please tell me what's going on?" He tried not to sound plaintive.

For a moment none of the three girls spoke. Then Lady Alexandra rallied, drawing her dress together as much as its inadequacy allowed.

"Yes. As my Mum always says, 'bitches are women, and vice-versa'. And these two particularly, David," she said icily.

"Whatever they say, you say 'no' to them."

"Nonsense!" snapped Jilly. "And it's your interests we're thinking of. Are you on leave, David? Or are you just passing through?"

Jilly was running the show. Whatever the 'idea' was, it hadn't been Steffy's—it was Jilly who was making the running—

Getting him in!

"I'm on leave. I've three weeks due to me." He smiled dummy5

innocently, playing back to her. "As a matter of fact, I'm gathering material for my somewhat delayed doctorate."

"Doctor—what?" Lexy shook her blonde head at him.

"Doctorate. Not the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lexy dear—

Ph.D—D.Phil, that sort of thing," said Jilly dismissively.

"What's your thesis on, David?"

"The development of the bastides in the 12th and 13th centuries." It sounded as stupid as it really was when he said it out loud. Damn Thompson!

Lexy's mouth contracted involuntarily, the generous lips puckering into an interrogative b for bastides—

Suddenly, Roche had her pinned down in his memory, from yesterday in the plane and from last night in the train, before sleep had claimed him— from Kipling's Stalky, which Wimpy had given him in that farewell parcel beside the Lodge at Immingham: not an overblown English rose, and not a prize chrysanthemum either, but Mary Yeo, the tall daughter of Devon, the county of easy kisses, fair haired, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked, with a bowl of cream in her hands—

Pretty lips— sweeter than— cherry or plum, Seem to say— Come away, Kissy!— come, come!

"No, Lexy." Jilly shook her page-boy curls wearily. "Not dummy5

'bastards'— ' bastides' . Remember when Mike and David took us to that place at Monpazier, under the arcades? That was a bastide—the whole village."

Roche's heart went out to the big girl, so confident and aristocratic—Do you hunt? Are you a hussar?—and yet so vulnerable and amiable and utterly inoffensive at the same time. He wanted to get her down on her back and make love to her, but failing that just to cuddle her protectively and not take advantage of her.

"They're the fortified towns—or mostly villages now—built round here by the English and the French in the old days, Lady Alexandra," he hastened to explain before Jilly could put her down again. "Sort of custom-built places to mark the frontier, where the inhabitants could trade and farm by day, and sleep safely at night behind their walls, do you see?"

"She knows," said Jilly. "She's been told all about it by David Audley— she knows . . . She's not stupid, she only pretends to be, to get the edge on the rest of us. Don't be deceived by her

—she knows perfectly well. And her old Mum was talking about her, what's more—not us, David. You'd better remember that from now on." She put out her tongue at Lady Alexandra. "So just you watch it, Lexy—if you want us to help you."

Lady Alexandra answered with an even longer tongue. "And the same to you, Miss Clever-Baker—"

"Ladies! Ladies!" Meriel Stephanides interposed pacifically.

"David— where are you staying tonight? And afterwards?"

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Duty recalled Roche to the colours. "Well. . . not anywhere exactly, at the moment. I've got a tent in the car, with my things—I was going to look around, sort of. . ."

Lexy perked up. "Well—you can pitch your tent in our garden

—"

No he can't!" snapped Jilly. "Don't be an idiot, Lexy—

Madame would kill us if she discovered another man walking around the premises at dawn, and well you know it—you of all people." She turned back to Roche apologetically. "Sorry, David, but much as we'd like you to ... there's this Madame Peyrony who rents us this cottage, and she lives right next door."

“And she conceives it her duty to keep her eye on her jeunes demoiselles anglaises—Jilly's quite right. She's a bit of a dragon, is Madame Peyrony," agreed Meriel.

"She's an old bag!" growled Lexy.

"Old bag she may be. Nevertheless, she's got my boss's address—he's the only one who got us the place, David,"

explained Jilly. "And he believes that emancipation has already gone too far ... and she's already threatened to write to him, after having chanced upon Lexy's inamorato— one of the many—swanning around in his underpants—"

That's a slander!" said Lexy.

"Sue me any time you like, Lexy dear."

It wasn't fair, anyway."

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"It certainly wasn't fair! He was one of yours—and it's my address she's got! So I had to beg for mercy."

"I gave her Father's address too, darn it!"

" 'House of Lords, Palace of Westminster, London Wl',"

murmured Meriel. "And he'd probably be overjoyed to hear that you were courting a fate worse than death, getting yourself into trouble, with those little sisters of yours still on his hands."

"I haven't got myself into trouble!" protested Lexy.

"No—only Jilly, very nearly," said Meriel.

"Mind you ..." began Jilly thoughtfully, her eye flicking for a fraction of a second at Roche before settling on Lexy again

". . . mind you—you could do a lot worse than get yourself into trouble with David Audley, you know."

"I wouldn't have David if he was the last man on earth!"

exclaimed Lexy hotly. "And he wouldn't have me, either."

"Oh, he'd do the decent thing if he had to. And you shouldn't judge him by the bachelor squalor he lives in with those friends of his, Lexy dear. There's no shortage of the ready there—he could certainly support you at the standard of living God and your father have accustomed you," Jilly nodded wisely.

" That's it!" burst out Meriel. "Why didn't we think of it before?"

"Think of what, Steffy?" inquired Jilly.

"The Tower—David Audley!" Meriel pointed at Roche. "If dummy5

Lexy asks him nicely, he'll put up this David for as long as he likes. There's room in the Tower, because they don't sleep there—they sleep in the cottage alongside, and only use that for their orgies."

"Good thinking, Steffy!" Jilly beamed at her friend.

"Of course I'll ask him," said Lexy. "He's bound to say yes, David." She grinned at Roche. "David is, I mean—the other David."

"Of course he's bound to," said Meriel. "It's one historian doing a good turn for another."

Roche decided that it was again time for him to show some interest in his fate. "David who?"

"David Audley. He lives just up the road from us," said Jilly.

"He's a historian, like you. Only he's more or less a full-time one, sort of. He's got money, we think."

So did other people. Roche wondered how Major Stocker was progressing on the track of it.

"He's also Lexy's boyfriend—"

"—sort of, also," cut in Meriel-Steffy. "David the Dragoon—

ex-dragoon, actually. He was in the tanks during the war, with Lexy's father. That's how we got to know him—it wasn't a casual pick-up."

"He wasn't actually with Daddy. I mean . . . he's not old," said Lexy loyally. "But he was sort of with Daddy, just after D-Day, you know ..." she trailed off vaguely again.

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"What she means, David, is that her daddy was a sort-of general in command of a brigade or something, and David Audley was a sort-of second lieutenant inside a tank," said Steffy. "But he was in her daddy's old regiment, so he counts as family."

"Anyway, he's frightfully nice, and you'll like him," said Lexy defiantly.

" 'Nice' is absolutely the last word that would come into my mind to describe David Audley," said Steffy. "'Frightfully'

might be applicable— like 'frightfully clever', or even

'frightfully drunk' on occasion."

"He was frightfully brave, Daddy said," Lexy regarded Steffy with disapproval. "They could never get him to shut the lid of his tank, he was always poking his head out of it, Daddy said."

" 'Frightfully inquisitive', that sounds like," said Steffy.

It sounded more like frightfully stupid, thought Roche. But in the meantime, Steffy either didn't approve of Audley—or envied Lexy's inamorata role?

"Anyway—we were thinking of introducing you to him before

—it was your idea, Steffy," said Jilly. "Remember?"

Steffy frowned. "I thought it was yours?"

"No—yours. But now we've got a proper reason . . . And we're already invited up to the Tower for an orgy tonight, so we can combine business and pleasure."

"And it's David's turn to buy the drinks and hold the floor, dummy5

too," said Steffy. "That'll put him in a good mood for a start."

Roche looked from one to the other, and to Lexy, trying not to goggle at them. In spite of the tough talk, they were still only three grown-up English schoolgirls; indeed, because of the tough talk, which was at least partially designed to impress him that they were women of the world, they couldn't really mean orgy when they said it. So he was a bystander to some sort of in-joke of theirs.

"Well, as long as I don't have to hold the floor," said Lexy fretfully. "I don't mind buying the booze, but I draw the line at having to spout."

"Your turn will come, Lexy. You're bound to draw the short straw sooner or later," said Steffy.

"It's all right for you—and Jilly. You're both too bloody clever for words, with your scholarships and your degrees. But all I've got is five School Cert passes and a bit of shorthand-and-typing—I'm no blue-stocking!" Lexy protested. "What am I going to talk about, for God's sake?"

The dress had begun to gape again: Lexy was certainly no blue-stocking. Steffy spread her hands. "Sex, darling—what else?"

Lexy opened her mouth, searching for words but not finding any. So this was the moment, thought Roche, when David of the Secret Service must sing for his orgy, if not his supper.

"If you draw the short straw, Lady Alexandra, then I'll take it," he said gallantly. "It's the least I can do, whatever it is, in dummy5

return for your speaking up for me, to find me a place to lay my head."

They all looked at him in silence for a moment. Then, before he could think of retreating, Lady Alexandra threw her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek.

"Put the man down, Lexy!" said Jilly. "At once!"

Mmm . . ." Steffy pursed her lips. "I don't whether that's permissible under the rules."

"What rules?" said Lexy. "There aren't any rules! Let's go to the Tower at once and find a bed for this super chap, Jilly!"

"No!" said Jilly, in command as always. "David's not there yet. He's in Cahors, talking with his French rugger boozers—

you don't play rugger, by any chance, do you, David?"

It was like not being a hussar. "No, I'm afraid not. Hockey is my game."

"Thank God! Don't be sorry—I couldn't bear to go through the Lions' match against the Springboks at Ellis Park again, blow by blow! And we've been through it twice in French too . . . Anyway, he won't be back until nightfall—always supposing he doesn't drive into a ditch somewhere on the way back, that is." She gave Roche a grin, wrinkling her snub-nose. "Besides which, we came here to bathe, and I need cooling down."

Cooling down had its attractions, not least after that collision with Lady Alexandra's unrestrained curves.

"Me too!" He grinned back at her. It wasn't really a snub-dummy5

nose, it was delightfully retroussé, and the grin beneath it was infectious.

"I shouldn't wonder, with what you've just been through!"

And there was no maliciousness in that knowing look, either.

In the catalogue of their very different virtues, Jilly Baker's might strike a higher total than either Lady Alexandra's and Meriel-Steffy's, when they were all added up.

"Right then!" Jilly's command never slipped for a moment.

"David and I will bathe forthwith. Steffy will hold up a towel so that Lexy can attire herself in those inadequate red bandages of hers without causing offence to the local voyeurs, and then both join us in the Dordogne."

They didn't seem to mind being pushed around as peremptorily as Lexy's sort-of general father had once pushed his Audley subalterns to their deaths, they seemed happily accustomed to it.

Roche, less accustomed, found himself looking to the river to see if the Marathon-swimming, long distance-no distance Frenchman was still breasting the current—if this was their accustomed swimming place, to which Raymond Galles had so accurately directed him, was he one of the local voyeurs?

Was all that effort in aid of them?

But there was no one there, the river was empty now. Had the sight of Lady Alexandra's charms, briefly glimpsed, been too much for him, spoiling his concentration for one fatal moment, so that the river had swept him away?

dummy5

At any rate, he wasn't there, and they were alone.

" Right!" Jilly's voice turned him back towards her just in time to see her strip off her dress over her head with one continuous serpentine movement, to reveal a slender body in a white bathing dress.

He kicked off his sandals at the water's edge, and then the discomfort of the slippery stones under his feet brought him down to earth painfully.

"Come on—you have to do this bit as quickly as you can!"

Jilly Baker took his hand, pulling him forward. "Once the current starts to lift you off your feet it's not so bad—"

The water swirled about his knees, and then frothed about his thighs, surprising him with its solid force even though he had watched the Frenchman battle against it. He had never stepped into a river like this, which dragged at him as though it was alive.

"There's a flat piece there—see?" Jilly pulled at him, pointing to a rippling white shape beneath the surface just ahead of them. "There now! That's right—just hold me—make them jealous!"

Roche anchored his feet, one on bearable gravel, one on the smoothness of bed-rock stone which had been sandpapered by ten thousand years of shifting pebbles.

He looked back at the charade on the dry strand from which they had come. The rush of the river was loud all around dummy5

him.

"Don't worry! They can't hear us. And Lexy'll take hours stuffing herself into her bikini," Jilly said conversationally, her cheek against his shoulder. She was wet and slippery as an eel, and he didn't know quite where to put his hands, although he knew where he wanted to put them.

"I'm sorry about that, Captain Roche—David—can I call you

'David'? I shall have to, anyway—so . . . David?"

Jilly." Her waist was the only safe place.

"I don't know what you're doing. . . and I don't think I want to know. . . But they said it had to be natural, after I picked you up, so it had to be Steffy who thought of it, if not Lexy—

inviting you to Audley's. . . Only she was so slow to catch on."

"I thought you did it beautifully." He couldn't help kneading her stomach under water. "What's this chap Audley like?"

"He's okay—big, tough man . . . likes his own way too much for my taste. But he also likes it if you stand up to him. And he doesn't suffer fools gladly ... So don't let him push you around just for good manners' sake ... In fact, the best thing you can do is make a straight play for Lexy—it shouldn't be too difficult now."

"Not for you? I'd prefer that, if there's a choice."

She moved against him. "Thanks for the compliment."

“It wasn't a compliment, Jilly."

"Well. . . thanks for the insult. But, the way it was put to me, there isn't any choice. Play for Lexy, and put the rest down to dummy5

might-have-been, David."

All the world was might-have-been. Julie was might-have-been. "Won't Audley take exception to that?"

"Audley doesn't give a damn for anything, least of all competition. I think he really fancies Steffy more than anyone, only he's afraid she's up to something . . . Lexy isn't up to anything—but she's not nearly as stupid as she pretends, she just doesn't want a tough guy like Audley for a husband. She wants someone she can mother. Audley's just for kicks—and vice-versa . . . The point is, Steffy also fancies Audley. So you go for Lexy, and Steffy'll be on your side, and so will Audley."

Roche glanced quickly towards the riverbank, and had to tear his eyes away from Lexy, magnificently bikinied. Steffy was still undressing.

"Audley has two friends staying with him?" That was what Raymond Galles had said, he remembered belatedly.

"Yes, two of them. David Stein's ex-Cambridge—ex-RAF too.

Photographic reconnaissance . . . I'm not sure whether he's an archaeologist, or an art historian—he's here for the cave paintings, the prehistoric stuff, anyway. But he's an Israeli now—"

"An Israeli?"

"Dyed-in-the-wool. Got three wars under his belt now—one world war and two Arab-Israeli wars. He was back flying with them last year, at Suez, though he won't talk about it. A bit dummy5

hush-hush, as Lexy would put it."

"And the second one?"

"American. Mike Bradford. Also ex-Cambridge—no, Oxford—

Rhodes Scholar ... I don't know where Audley picked him up, or he picked Audley up, as the case may be—"

"They're coming, Jilly. Rhodes Scholar?"

"I think. Now he writes novels. Got a modest hit in the States last year—war novel. Another very bright fellow—like Davey Stein ... In fact, they're all bloody clever, as Lexy would say—

she's nice, is Lexy. The man who gets Lexy won't have time to live to regret it." She twisted to smile up at him. "He'll be too busy supporting a litter of huge, voracious children."

Roche watched Lady Alexandra and Meriel Stephanides pick their way across the stones of the dry margin of the river bed to the water's edge just upstream of them. Alongside the Anglo-Greek girl, and inadequately covered by what looked like two medium-sized scarlet pocket handkerchiefs, Lexy looked even bigger and pinker and blonder than before.

"She's got three brothers as well as three sisters," murmured Jilly. "And positively hordes of cousins. The Perownes come up like mushrooms, it's quite hard to keep track of them all.

We've got one of them with us in Fontainebleau—one of the cousins. And I think it was through a cousin of some sort that David Audley got to know the family actually, rather than the General. . . Dragoons and Cambridge, and all that. . ."

That figured better than Lexy's account, thought Roche: dummy5

second-lieutenants didn't usually strike up battlefield social acquaintances with generals. And, come to that, maybe the Fontainebleau cousin had been used to link up Jilly with Lexy.

"She's all yours now, anyway," said Jilly.

Go where glory waits, Roche, as Kipling would say, recalled Roche from his recent reading.

Well—a little cover was better than none at all... in this job anyway, if not in the case of Lady Alexandra's bikini: with Lexy introducing him to Audley, apparently at Steffy's suggestion, his own Jilly-link might pass as a mere accident, at least for the time being.

Having waded gingerly into the water until it reached to the lower handkerchief, Lexy hurled herself into the current with a mighty splash.

And the bonus she offered, apart from the cover she could give him, was that if he could get her to talk about Audley, who better than she to—

"Time to unhand me," whispered Jilly.

Roche started to obey, searching for another foothold beneath him, when Lexy surfaced alongside them, blowing water like a whale. The river had carried her down with astonishing speed.

"Put—" she spluttered more of the river"— ouch!— put the poor man down, Jilly— ouch! damn and blast these bloody stones! At once!” Steffy surfaced on the other side of him, dummy5

sleek as an otter. "Jilly is our dark horse." She gave Roche a shrewd look.

"Jilly is not to be trusted," echoed Lexy. "What sweet nothings has she been feeding you about us, David?"

"Or what devious plans has she been hatching?" said Steffy.

The thought came to Roche that both Clinton and Genghis Khan might have put watchers on him. For once, since leaving England, he hadn't bothered to look over his shoulder, so there could be half-a-dozen of them by now, falling over each other. He looked around, scanning the banks on each side. There was enough cover to hide two rival regiments among the trees and tall reeds. If there were, then at least neither regiment would be hostile to him—not yet—

but after this little play they'd be dipping their pens in envy for the composition of their reports.

"You're not married by any chance, are you, David?" said Steffy sweetly. "He's not married, is he, Jilly?"

"Not as far as I know," said Jilly.

"And not as far as I know, either," said Roche. "Why do you ask?"

Oh . . . just, I've seen that worried look before—the one you've been casting about." Her smile was undiluted mischief. "Just shy? Well, don't worry about the Frog with the binoculars down by the bridge—he's always there. He's got a pash on Lexy."

Roche kicked himself mentally, once for missing the observer dummy5

and again for betraying his thoughts.

"What I want to know," continued Steffy, "is what Jilly's been saying to you. She's not usually so gabby."

"How d'you know it's me he's got a pash on?" Lexy's mental reflexes appeared to be sure, but slow.

"Because he's never seen anything like you before, Lexy dear." Steffy looked at Roche. "You have to tell us, David."

"I was telling him about tonight, that's all," said Jilly.

"About the orgy? I bet he didn't believe it!"

Roche blinked unhappily. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for handling a situation like this.

"I don't wonder!" said Lexy. "I don't believe it either—and I take part in it! And if I told Daddy about it, he wouldn't believe it... but I shall never get the hang of it."

"That's because you don't prepare yourself properly. But you ought to be able to do better tonight, with a bit of last minute cramming—and your new David to cheer you on—"

"Don't bet on it. I'm just not cut out for that sort of thing, darling."

Roche felt the current drag at his knees. Even if he wasn't imagining all this, how could he possibly report the gist of it to Genghis Khan in less than an hour's time?

"Darling—it's easy!" chuckled Jilly. "You've just been reading all about Galla Placidia and her Visigoths—just lie back and imagine you're her, being possessed by a great big hairy dummy5

barbarian!"

Roche let the river take him away.

VIII

EVEN WITHOUT BENEFIT of Thompson, Roche could see at a glance that Neuville belied its name: it was a lovely little honey-coloured bastide which hadn't been a 'new town' since the 13th century judging by the look of medieval gateway and surviving walls.

But Lady Alexandra allowed him no time to admire Alphonse de Poitiers' original defences.

"Do you really do something hush-hush, David?" It was a question she'd been working up to for ten kilometres.

So he was ready for it. "Frightfully hush-hush, Lady Alexandra. And also frightfully dull." And he also had his own question waiting for this opportunity. "Do you really take part in orgies in the Tower, Lady Alexandra?" he inquired politely.

"Oh—phooey!"

"Is that yes—or no?" He manoeuvred the Volkswagen through the gateway. "Where do I go from here?"

"Straight ahead to the square. You can park there, and it's quite near La Goulard's shop."

He drove on slowly. "Was that yes ... or no?"

Lady Alexandra sniffed. "It was yes. But I bet your job isn't as dummy5

dull as our orgies."

"Sounds a funny sort of orgy."

"You can say that again! You just wait and see—park over there, under the trees." She pointed. "And now you can help me do my shopping."

The prospect of the orgy certainly didn't seem to inspire her in the way he would have expected, and from the sound of her voice the shopping wasn't very popular with her either.

He looked at his watch. "Sorry, but I've got to make a phone-call. Where's the public call-box?"

"A phone-call?"

He shrugged and smiled at her. "One of the penalties of being hush-hush, Lady Alexandra. I have to let them know where I am each night." He put his finger to his lips. "Top secret."

"Oh— you!! I suppose you're calling your girl-friend, more like!"

That had done the trick. "No. But they pass the information on to her, as a matter of courtesy."

"Okay! I asked for it!" Her vague smile returned. "The phone's somewhere down there, beyond the war memorial, by the Post Office place . . . and La Goulard's shop is back that way—come and bail me out of there when you've finished being top secret—"

Roche felt the accumulated warmth of the day rising off the dummy5

cobbles under foot as he made his way past the heroic bronze Poilu of 1914, whom some fool had placed on the spot where the revolting peasants of 1637 had been broken on the wheel, according to Thompson, and with fine disregard for the way the monument spoilt the view of the medieval arcade nearby.

If he put his foot wrong now, he would be broken on some other wheel, but less publicly.

Yet he had no choice, he had to give Genghis Khan Lady Alexandra and the Misses Baker and Stephanides, not to mention the Israeli and the American, because he needed all he could get about them, and quickly.

The Comrades were obviously the best bet for all of them; their records were better and much more extensive than anything the British were likely to have. Indeed, the very fact that the British had supplied him with so little information, which they bloody-well ought to have known in advance with Galles down here, was proof of their incompetence.

Indeed . . . maybe the Comrades already had useful messages for him, which would help him to put the right questions to the British, to make them think all the better of him, as well as helping him forward.

The thought brightened him: that, after all, was the way he had planned it all—

He didn't recognise the voice on the other end of the line, but he hadn't expected to. All he had hoped for was the correct dummy5

recognition sign and the 'clear' word to go with it, to indicate that it was safe to go ahead.

Any messages?

No, there were no messages. Had he made contact with the client yet?

Roche decided to hold that one back for the moment. Instead he inquired rather brusquely whether anyone was watching over him.

Why did he want to know that?

Because the other side was probably watching him too—he deliberately didn't elaborate on that possibility; it covered Raymond Galles if they knew about him, but if they didn't then there was no percentage in mentioning him at this stage

—and he didn't want heavy-footed Comrades falling over them, or leaving their pug-marks for all to see.

There was a pause while the voice consulted higher authority at its elbow, and then an assurance that he had nothing to worry about on that score, he was on his own until he called for back-up, or until higher authority decided he needed it.

But had he made contact yet?

No—but things were going according to plan. There was this woman—

"Baker—Gillian Baker . . . she's with the Foreign Office, a straight civil servant, just doing what she's told—"

The way he felt about Jilly, with the memory of the slender feel of her and the smell of her hair, he wasn't going to dummy5

suggest otherwise. They would check up on her anyway—they would assume she wasn't straight, and if she wasn't, and if her cover wasn't good enough, then it was hard luck on her and better that he should know about it—but that was the least and the most he could do for her in return for that memory.

And Lexy—Lady Alexandra Perowne . . . P-E-R-O-W-N-E ...

the General's daughter, and the daughter of the Regiment, Audley's old regiment, no problem there—

And Steffy—Meriel Stephanides . . . S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-D-E-S . . . they liked names because names were facts, and easy to check—Steffy, friend of Lexy, no problem there either—

"The names I want checked as quickly as possible are Stein—

S-T-E-I-N . . . David . . . and Bradford—"

He repeated what little Jilly had told him in the river, but also Genghis Khan's own words about the dangers of asking too many questions in the wrong places.

"—I don't want anyone alerted that we're interested in these people, remember. I think it's very unlikely that they're not what they seem. It's just ... if we've got anything on record about them already, I'd like to know. Then I can get the British working on them for me. Right?"

Again the voice paused for consultation, and Roche wondered idly whether it was Jean-Paul making the decisions, because he had been his controller in France, or whether Genghis Khan had taken over regardless of station dummy5

boundaries. On balance he decided that it would be Genghis Khan, because the penetration of Sir Eustace Avery's new group was his baby, and also because this was an important operation and he was the senior of the two, at a guess.

Then the voice came back, deferring to him as before. They would check at their end, here in France, and that would be only a matter of minutes. The checks in Tel Aviv and Washington would take longer, but if he would call back in an hour they would be able to tell him when that information should be available.

Roche felt positively euphoric, almost Napoleonic then: he had never been treated like this before, with this whole huge communications apparatus at his beck and call. It hadn't occurred to him that they would go as far as Israel and the United States at the drop of a couple of names, falling over themselves to be helpful without his asking. And that. . . that could mean only one thing—his knowledge of how slow and bureaucratic they were normally, British and Russians alike, to clear such decisions, and how grudging they were in general with communications time for such inquiries, and how much more grudging in particular with small fry like himself... all that triangulated his position exactly, beyond reasonable doubt.

Jean-Paul had told him, and Genghis Khan had told him, and he had told himself over and over again, and yet had never quite believed it in his heart-of-hearts—and Sir Eustace Avery had also told him, and so had Colonel Clinton, and he dummy5

still hadn't quite believed them, either. But here at last was the practical proof of it, demonstrated dramatically in a form he could appreciate—in man-hours of communication time at the peak period of routine transmissions when all the day's general material was scheduled, they were clearing the way for his slightest whim, unasked!

He glanced at his watch, trying to calculate how long Lexy would be. Not that it mattered, he could stall her with any cock-and-bull story and she would probably be slow anyway, and they had plenty of time, and the longer he had to pick her brains (what there were of them) the better. He could spare them an hour, no sweat—

"Not an hour, I can't hold on that long here." Roche smiled into the mouthpiece. Let the bastards sweat a bit for past slights, and more recent ones too—Jean-Paul and Genghis Khan, it didn't matter whom, in conceding the importance of this assignment they had still treated him with tjje identical thinly-veiled contempt, like aristocrats with a pools winner.

So let the bastards sweat! "Half an hour at the outside, that's all I can spare without compromising my position. So I'll call back in thirty minutes—right?"

Another pause, and this time he savoured every petty second of it, while they sweated out his ultimatum.

"Very well—half an hour." Click.

He returned to Lexy happily then, basking in his new self-dummy5

importance.

Contrary to his expectations, she had almost finished her shopping expedition. But one earful of her atrocious dog-French, which she delivered unselfconsciously to the little swarthy Frenchman who bobbed attendance on her, confirmed Roche's guess that her success was due more to French gallantry than to any proficiency she might have with the language after umpteen years of expensive private education.

"Can I be of assistance?" Roche hastened to offer his own expertise, to impress her.

"Dear David—thank you—but no, I'm doing fine. They don't understand a word I say, but they're so sweet and helpful ..."

Lexy flashed a dazzling smile at the little Frenchman, who glowed appreciation back up at her from shoulder level, oblivious of the sour expression on the face of Madame, his wife, in the background.

"I've just got to buy the wine—" Lexy transferred a piece of the smile to Roche, exerting the same sexual force in his direction unconsciously "—you can advise me there. It's all just red or white, sweet or dry, to me. Father's tried to teach me what's what, but ever since I opened a bottle of his Chateau Something-Somewhere for an old boyfriend of Mother's when we were having bangers-and-mash he gets all tight-lipped and upstream and troutish when we talk about wine. All I've managed to grasp is the shape of the bottles—

like that's claret, and the tall brown ones are hock and the dummy5

green ones are Moselle—or the other way round, maybe—and I can tell a shampers bottle of course . . . we've had a bottle of that before, and I quite liked it—" she pointed at the most expensive champagne on the shelf "—and this dear little man recommended it, too."

Roche shot a quick jaundiced glance at the dear little man, whose gallantry was evidently firmly based in avarice, and the dear little man managed an infinitesimal man-to-man shrug, not without difficulty, but also with a nuance of frank man-to-man envy, transmitting the encoded message if all this gorgeous jeune milady anglaise is yours, m'sieur, and I have a living to make and a cold, hard bed in which to sleep, is there not room to make a small sacrifice to your good fortune, eh?

"What are we eating tonight?" he compromised.

"Darling—it's my turn to cook ... so we're having bacon and eggs and mushrooms and bags of pommes frites, and bread and oodles of butter—the famous 'Lexy Special', though it isn't really a Lexy Special without sausages, but I can't get proper sausages here, not English sausages—so what ought we to drink with that, David?"

The question threw Roche utterly. The Lexy Special sounded more like a cross between breakfast and high tea, in the life-style of the lower middle-Class Mr and Mrs Douglas Roche, deceased, than that of Lady Alexandra Perowne, daughter of

—if she was a 'Lady' it had to be the Earl of Somewhere, at the least; and the proper beverage at those Roche meals was dummy5

tea, as supplied by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, not vintage Moët et Chandon.

"Father always says you can drink shampers with anything,"

said Lexy helpfully, pointing to the champagne again, "even with breakfast."

Well, that was close to the mark in this case, thought Roche.

And who was he to go against the advice of the Earl of Somewhere? And especially when Her Majesty was going to pay?

"Let's have that, then," he nodded quickly at her. "But only if you let me buy it for you."

"No, David!" She waved negatively at him. "Besides, I've got to stock up for several days, and—" her eyes left him momentarily, returning with a different expression in them

"— oh golly!"

"Bonjour, m'sieur-dame?"

From the way the dear little man quailed and strove to de-materialise himself, Roche knew who was speaking before he turned towards the speaker.

"Qu'est-ce que vous désirez?" Madame embraced them both with her disapproval, even while directing her question like a spear-thrust at Lexy.

"Madame . . ." Lexy didn't quail, but she did swallow nervously. "Yes . . . well now . . ."

Roche saw instinctively where both honour and duty lay, and self-interest too. Up to now he had hardly distinguished dummy5

himself, but here was a chance of demonstrating a bit of the old cavalry é lan which Lexy apparently admired so much.

"Bonjour, madame," he said, drawing her attention deliberately. For a moment, as she appraised him frankly, he felt more like an infantryman who had unwisely left the safety of his trench than a dashing cavalryman answering the trumpet-call to glory. But the euphoria of his victory over the Voice on the Telephone encouraged him to single combat.

She was all of six inches taller than her husband, almost to his own eye-level, and once upon a time she'd been a beauty, with Meriel Stephanides' colouring in Lexy's measurements.

Imagining away the lines and the wrinkles, and the sag of sallow skin which had once been firm and creamy, Roche wondered what had yoked her to the dried-up shrimp at his back—had it been simple peasant avarice, her beauty in exchange for his money? Or had her boy marched away to Verdun and the Chemin des Dames forty years ago, with all the other likely lads, to Mort Homme and Fort Douaumont, and when he didn't come back, it didn't matter?

Well, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she wasn't giving him her sour look now, that she was thawing under his appraisal, even that they were exchanging thoughts out of time—might-have-beens in which memory and imagination out-voted the years.

"M'sieur?" She cracked an almost-smile, showing yellow teeth, and not too many of them.

"Madame—" he plunged into his best idiomatic French, the dummy5

words coming easily, and then more easily still, to sketch what he surmised were Lexy's requirements, only omitting that it was for bacon-and-eggs that the champagne was needed.

"Ah ..." she nodded, her eyes ranging over the bottles, then coming back to him, caressing him.

The dried-up shrimp, emboldened by the change in her, made a suggestion, indicating Lexy's choice, and was instantly silenced with a frozen glance.

—That wine was not good, not of the best. That wine (at two-thirds of the price) was better . . .

Roche ordered a dozen bottles. Madame was kind to advise him— perhaps she could recommend a claret? And (a wine for Lexy—a seducer's vintage?) a white wine, even a sweet wine?

—M'sieur speaks French like a Frenchman! And, by the accent, from Paris . . . But M'sieur is an Englishman? And en vacances?

Roche warmed to his task. M'sieur was not on holiday, but on leave. M'sieur was of the British Army, with the honour of serving with the French Army—serving in Paris, Madame's ear did not deceive her—but also a student of French history, of which there was so much hereabouts, in the most beautiful region of France—

(M'sieur was also aware of Lexy, wide-eyed beside him, and that Madame was also aware of Lexy.)

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—and, as an old comrade of M'sieur Le Due, Milady Alexandra's father, as he was passing through, it had been his pleasure to call on Milady Alexandra, of course . . .

(Bandying words with a shopkeeper's wife, such words, was hardly necessary. But it was all good practice, and it was clearly impressing Milady Alexandra mightily.) (And, when Madame had digested it, and had acknowledged Milady with a little nod, it impressed Milady even more; because, if the nod was not yet quite approving, it was no longer altogether disapproving, and that was undeniably impressive.)

(It never failed, thought Roche with a mixture of cynicism and bleak self-knowledge, and satisfaction: the French were so accustomed to their contempt of the average Englishman for his halting use of their wonderful language that they were disarmed and flattered into helpfulness by any stray anglais who could distinguish a subjunctive from a hole in the road—

the women no less than the men, and perhaps even more so.)

—So! And now . . . there were clarets and Sauternes (Madame swept a glance over her wines, and dismissed them all, and came back to Roche fondly). . . but here in the south-west there were other wines of character, delicate and fine, of Bergerac and Cahors, of Rodez and Conques—pressed from the pineau grape—for M'sieur . . . and for Milady, the Monbazillac, sweet and perfumed—

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"God, David—I've never seen anything like it!" Lexy surveyed the loaded Volkswagen with disbelief after the dried-up shrimp, sweating and terrified at his wife's command, had transported the cases to the little car under the trees. "What did you say to her? What did you do to her?"

Roche shrugged modestly. "I didn't do anything. I just smiled at her."

"Smiled at her! Wait until I tell Jilly and Steffy—she positively drooled over you, darling! Do you know what you've done—do you?" Lexy brushed ineffectually at the blonde tangle which had fallen over her eyes. "That was Madame Goutard—La Goutard in person! No one's ever unfrozen her— not even David Audley, le Grand David."

"Madame Goutard?"

"La Goutard—Madame Peyrony's bosom friend. They get together three times a week at the chateau, allegedly for tea ... I think they swop spells and work out who's next for the evil eye and the ague. But you charmed her. . . I swear she even almost smiled at me! And she'll be on the phone to La Peyrony, with a bit of luck, telling her that at last we've rustled up a decent and respectable young gentleman to look after us, and that'll put us in good with La Peyrony—she thinks the sun rises and sets by what La Goutard says . . .

What did you say to her?"

Roche spread his hands. This was evidently one of those days when he could do no wrong. "I just talked to her . . ."

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"Well, you said the magic word." Lexy brushed at the tangle again, with a hand only a little less grubby for its immersion in the Dordogne river. "And like a native too—perhaps that's what did it. The Great David knows all the words, but half the time no one seems to understand what he's saying . . . and one look from La Goutard and I just dry up completely. But you were absolutely super!!" She gave Roche a huge, dazzling smile. " And you paid for everything—" She plunged the paw into her handbag, which was the size of a haversack, and rummaged among its contents until she had gathered a fistful of creased and equally dirty banknotes.

Roche shook his head. "That's my contribution to the housekeeping, Lady Alexandra. I insist."

She blinked at him. "Please don't call me Lady. My umpteenth great grandmother—great times ten, but not good

—was one of Charles II's innumerable mistresses, that's the origin of Father's title, and every time anyone calls me Lady it only reminds me that I'm a lady neither by merit nor inclination—especially as Father says I'm a throwback to the founding mistress of our line ... At least I can pay for the wine, yes?"

She was gorgeous, dirty hands and tangled hair and every other buttgn still undone, thought Roche protectively.

Cleaned up and well-dressed. . . if she was a ringer for one of the Black Boy's playmates then no wonder the King had succumbed to her ancestor. As she was, she was no less irresistible, dirt and tangle and all.

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But he had work to do. And dirtier and more tangled work too. He waved away the banknotes. "I thought I might take a few bottles to—what's his name?—David Audley and his friends, if they're giving me room to pitch my tent among them—"

"A few bottles?" Lexy laughed. "Darling, that'd be coals to Newcastle— they're permanently awash in booze at the Tower, they live in an absolute haze of alcohol and intellectual conversation. But you don't need to worry, because they can be jolly—and when I tell them about La Goutard fetching over you they'll welcome you with open arms . . . and open bottles." She grasped the door handle of the Volkswagen. "Did you make your rules-and-regulations phone call okay? Because I can't wait to tell Jilly and Steffy the great news of your conquest."

Roche looked at his watch. "Ah... I had a bit of trouble there—

the lines all engaged, or something—so if I could try again in a few minutes . . . You can show me the sights of the town in the meantime, maybe?"

Lexy shrugged. "A few minutes is about right, darling . . .

because there isn't anything worth seeing, except the church, so they say . . . but I've seen it, and it isn't worth seeing either

—it's more like a castle than a church—"

Roche kept a straight face. That, of course, was why the church of Saint-Maur was worth seeing, precisely: it was a perfect bastide church, with its four flanking towers and parapet walks, and the downward-slanted loopholes with dummy5

their stirrup-shaped bases giving the defending archers wider fields of fire—an innovation (according to the Thompson notes he had studied on the train) which a bastide-expert like Captain Roche would unerringly identify as a legacy of 12th century crusading experience.

But all that would be lost on Lexy, whose historical knowledge most likely ended in King Charles II's 17th century bed . . . and who was now reaching half-proprietorially, half-shyly, for his hand with one of those grubby paws of hers.

But at the last moment she thought better of it. Instead she raised both the paws for his inspection.

"Oh God—just look at me! Father always says that I attract grime . . . but this is thanks to David, damn him!"

Roche couldn't avoid examining the hands of Lady Alexandra Perowne, which at close quarters resembled those of a garage mechanic, black-stained and calloused, and broken-nailed.

"That's bloody David's bloody engine oil!" exclaimed Lady Alexandra hotly. "He thinks bloody cars run on petrol, faith and hope, and never a drop of oil or water, that's what he thinks! He's the cleverest man I've ever met—and he's an absolute bloody idiot with cars."

So here was another curious and unexpected insight into David Longsdon Audley, then.

In itself it was hardly important—that the man didn't have the skills one might have expected of an ex-tank commander.

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But—what was important—it warned him of how little he really knew about the man even though he knew so much that others didn't know.

He looked up for a moment, away from Lexy's oil-stained hands which the river had failed to clean, and caught a glimpse of one of Saint-Maur's towers through a gap in the roof-line. Then he forced his eyes and his mind back to the hands.

"You do his car maintenance for him?"

"Well, he can't do it. And the others won't—not even Davey Stein, who's supposed to know all about aeroplane engines. . . and Mike's even worse— he was in the engineers during the war, he's always telling us, too—but he won't even hold a bloody spanner for me. I tell you, darling—they'll have me sweeping the chimney and rodding their drains for them before they've finished . . . Not that I couldn't do both those things—the trick is to keep turning the rods clockwise." She frowned at him suddenly. "Or is it anticlockwise?"

Roche couldn't help smiling at her. The three men had quite obviously got her hog-tied into doing their dirty work, but an informed guess suggested that she had held the ropes while they tied the knots—that what Lady Alexandra needed most was to be needed in some role other than in bed; and if that involved crawling under a car, rather than into the back seat of it, then she'd require even less encouragement for the former than the latter. Protests notwithstanding, Lexy was doing what came naturally, and was happy with it.

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And David Roche still had work to do, natural or unnatural.

"Davey?"

Lexy snorted. "Yes—I can see life's going to get rather complicated, with all these different Davids . . . Davey Stein, I mean—Colonel David Stein— every time the Israelis have a war, they put him up a rank, so he'll be a general next time, David says—oops! I meant David Audley that time— sorry!"

"He's in the Israeli air force?" Roche judged that a little intelligent interpretation of Lexy's stream-of-consciousness monologues would not go amiss.

"Well—no. I mean . . . he's not a regular, like you. What David

—David Audley, darn it!—what David says is, every time Davey hears gunfire in the Middle East he just grabs the nearest plane and takes off... But he was in the RAF during the war, taking pictures—he flew Spitfires and things, you know..."

"He was in photographic reconnaissance?"

"Uh-huh, something like that. Shooting pictures, not people, is how David puts it, anyway."

What David Audley said, and how he put things, appeared to dominate Lexy's views.

"He smokes a perfectly foul pipe, but apart from that he's rather a poppet," continued Lexy. "You'll like him—he's frightfully clever, of course. But then they're all bloody clever

—Mike too, in his own quiet way. I'm the only dumb one—the mechanic—" she exhibited her hands to prove it.

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"Mike Bradford—the engineer?"

"During the war he was an engineer. With the American Army—he's an American, did I tell you?"

Roche shook his head.

"Well, he is. And he was an engineer, though I rather think he was more a blower-up of things than a builder-up, from what he says, if you know what I mean. But he's a writer now

—novels about the war with rude words in them which make a lot of money for him—the novels, I mean, not the rude words ... Or maybe it's the rude words that make the money—

David says they're authentic, anyway. Or almost authentic, because in fact it seems every other word they said in the war was a rude one, and Mike hasn't gone quite that far." She frowned at him. "Although I can't imagine Father effing and blinding all the time . . . But I suppose it was all different then . . . Anyway . . . Mike writes his books and Davey digs up old bones, and then photographs them."

Roche nodded. The logical thing was to ask her about Audley now, but a more oblique approach would be preferable there.

"I see. And they all first met during the war then, did they?"

"Did they?" She brushed at the tangle again with that characteristic gesture of hers. "I don't know . . . Were you in the war, David?"

"Do I look old enough?"

She examined him carefully. "Mmm . . . the question is, are you young-old or old-young? But probably not—not quite."

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Roche half-smiled. "Not their war. Mine was the Korean War."

"Oh ..." She sounded almost disappointed. "That was all that negotiating at Pan-mun-something, wasn't it?"

Could memories really be so short? thought Roche bitterly.

"I mean, it was a little sort of war," said Lexy.

"Not so little." The dark past rose inside Roche. "Not for all the people who died in it. It was a very big war for them."

"Oh—yes, of course!" Her face fell, and it was like the sun going behind a cloud. "I'm sorry, David—that was silly of me.

Forgive me."

With an effort, Roche pasted the half-smile back on his face.

"There's nothing to be sorry about. Compared with theirs it was a little war. And a long way away."

And besides, the wench is dead! The same words always came back to him when he was with another woman, sooner or later.

She looked at him uncertainly, still contrite.

"Mind you, it could have been a big war." He couldn't quite bring himself to change the subject, but he could drive it forward, like a barbed arrow in his flesh which could only be extracted by pushing it clear through him. "It could have been the biggest of all—if MacArthur had dropped the Bomb on the Chinese."

"The bomb?"

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"The atomic bomb. He wanted to, you know. But fortunately he got the push instead."

Lexy brightened. "Instead of dropping the Bomb, he got dropped!" she exclaimed.

The half-smile wasn't so difficult now. "Who says you're dumb? That's good."

She grinned at him ruefully. "It may be good, but it isn't me—

it's David. And the trouble is, I ought to be an authority on your Korean War. We had a whole orgy on it a few days ago—

it was Jilly's orgy, because she was mixed up in all those endless talks at Geneva or somewhere, not long after she joined the Foreign Office or whatever, and she knows all about it... Only . . . only, the minute she started talking I went straight to sleep, and I didn't wake up until the end almost, when David was on about General MacArthur getting dropped instead of the atomic bomb." She shook her blonde tangle at Roche. "You've got to face it, David—I'm hopeless, absolutely hopeless."

Roche was feeling helpless, rather than hopeless. The idea of a whole orgy on the Korean War, as observed by a very junior Foreign Office clerk just down from Oxford University, boggled his mind. Clearly, whatever activities transpired at the Orgies in the Tower, they were far removed from those of Nero and Caligula.

He looked at his watch, and discovered that he was late for his second contact.

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The second contact was a different one, and it was quite unmistakable, even allowing for the distortions of distance and technology. Accentless, passionless, almost sexless.

Genghis Khan.

"This is Johnnie—you understand?"

Absurdly, Roche smelt a faint fragrance of roses—a foully-cloying memory-smell of the spray of blooms under the lancet window of the little Sussex church, from behind which Genghis Khan had stepped. And it was the wrong church—it was too little and respectably Victorian, and altogether too far from the Genghis Khan reality: the bastide fortress-church of Saint-Maur de Neuville was Genghis Khan's church

—not where he would have worshipped, but which he would have stormed and desecrated and burnt in the midst of dead children and screaming women, better dead—

"Are you there? Do you hear me?" Still no passion, no anger, even though the questions should have contained some emotion, urgency atjhe least.

"Yes." Even with nothing to signpost it, this was a very different voice from the obsequious and deferential voice of the first contact.

"Then listen. Once only I will say. First, there is a man to beware— Raymond Galles—G-A-L-L-E-S—garage proprietor of Les Mustiques, near Les Ezyies. He was a British agent, he may still be one."

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Oh— shit!

"Yes?"

"Very well! Subject— Stein, David Aaron, reserve colonel, Heil Avir Le Israel—"

Genghis Khan wasn't wasting any time.

"—formerly flight-lieutenant, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, DFC 1944; at present Fellow of Rylands College, Cambridge, university lecturer in Paleolithic Art; nothing known—"

"Nothing known?"

"—I say once—"

"But, damn it—he was flying last year—he was with the Israelis at Suez!" protested Roche.

"And I say nothing known. Ends," snapped Genghis Khan.

" Subject, Bradford, Michael LeRoy; United States Army, 1942-46, captain 758th Combat Engineers, European theatre; visiting lecturer in English Literature and Language, Hawkins College, California; novelist; occasional script-writer, various Hollywood studios; extensive travel, Europe, Middle East, 1951 to date; known contacts CIA London, Paris, Beirut, Cairo, unconfirmed Rome, Bordeaux, Lyons.

Category 'C 1952, updated 'B' 1955. Ends."

That was better. Or not exactly better, but more predictable.

Or, not better at all, even if Category 'B' was no more than the sum of those contacts, which could well be accidental and innocent with all the CIA agents that were in the field at any dummy5

moment, which any travelled American might make through sheer chance. In short, Bradford had been observed in doubtful company four times, and maybe seven times, over five years, but had never been known actually to do anything; but the Comrades always assumed the worst until the subject proved the opposite, which was almost impossible, short of his actually offering them his services.

But that made Colonel David Aaron Stein's nothing known all the more surprising, because nothing known meant just that. As near as dammit, Colonel David Aaron Stein must be a-political, that meant; and, for an Israeli, that sounded near impossible—

" Subject, Baker, Gillian Agnes, only daughter of Archdeacon and Mrs Wilfrid Baker, Old Sarum, Wiltshire; scholar of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Assistant-Principal, Foreign Office. Ends."

Nothing known didn't apply to poor Jilly—didn't and couldn't, even though they obviously didn't know anything much about her. Because with Jilly the established Soviet diplomatic analogy already applied: if she worked for the British Foreign Office she would already be guilty as charged, even if she hadn't turned up on Audley's doorstep as ordered to help Roche establish himself. He had been foolish to think they'd accept his word for her innocence.

" Subject, Champeney-Perowne, Alexandra Mary Henrietta, eldest daughter of Denzil Arthur Fitzroy Champeney-Perowne—" Genghis Khan managed the whole mouthful of dummy5

names with his accustomed lack of passion "—Tenth Earl of Cotswold, MVO, DSO, MC, MA (Cantab.); brigadier-general, retired; colonel-in-chief, Royal South Wessex Dragoons; nothing known—"

Roche grinned into the mouthpiece. Nothing known in the case of Denzil Arthur Fitzroy et cetera meant that everything was known about him, and his father, and his father's father, all the way back to the moment when the bed-springs had creaked to receive His Gracious Majesty King Charles II alongside their resourceful Champeney-Perowne ancestress, and that it was all there to see in Debrett's and Burke's Peerage and Who's Who. And the idea of Genghis Khan quoting from those seminal works was captivating.

"—and Cornelia Ashley, nee Vanderhorn, American citizen—"

Lexy's mum was a Yankee!

"—nothing known—"

Vanderhorn sounded like dollars—oil, banking, meat packing, peanuts?—dollars in exchange for the coronet of a marchioness!

"—born New Hampshire, American citizen—"

And that applied to Lexy herself: Lexy was an American citizen, by God!

"—known contact CIA London, New York, 1956. Category 'C'

1956—"

"You're joking!" exclaimed Roche.

"What?"

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"I said 'You're joking'," said Roche.

"I am not joking," said Genghis Khan unjocularly. "Are you requesting repetition?"

"No. I'm requesting a little bloody common-sense. Are you telling me Lex—Lady Alexandra. . . is a CIA contact?"

There was a pause. "I am saying she is Category 'C' 1956."

Another pause. "What are you saying?"

Roche thought for a moment, and came to the conclusion that a doormat was what people wiped their feet on. "I'm saying . . . I'm saying that I'm just about to make myself agreeable to Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne—if possible, very agreeable . . . and I suppose I'm also saying. . .

I know the CIA are good, but surely they're not that good? So what the hell are you saying, then?"

There was another pause. Then "Wait," said Genghis Khan.

Roche waited. Category 'C' didn't mean anything, as he had already told himself. But in this instance he wanted to be sure.

The pause elongated. Obviously Genghis Khan was making further inquiries, even further afield on another phone. And the idea of Genghis Khan jumping for him fed Roche's courage and self-esteem at compound interest rates.

The phone crackled in his ear. "We are still inquiring. Are you able to wait?"

Another nought appeared on Roche's deposit of courage.

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"For a few minutes more, maybe . . . One thing, though: do you have any idea where Audley's money comes from? He seems to be 'of independent means', as they say, but his father ... his father . . . was up to his ears in debt. So he's acquired ready cash from somewhere—and quite a lot of it.

Have you anything on that?"

This time the delay was only to be expected, since this hadn't been one of the questions on the list, and sub-stations weren't geared for this type of uncleared traffic. But if Genghis Khan was as top-brass as Roche guessed he must be, then he just might bend the rules.

"We have nothing on that." He betrayed nothing in his voice, either. The bending was still in the balance. "I would prefer to talk to you face-to-face on the matter."

The idea of Genghis Khan swanning around in Raymond Galles's neck of the woods was not to Roche's taste at all.

"That might be difficult. I'm going to be pretty tied-up the next day or two. I'm not sure I can get away."

You will get away if I require you to do so."

Roche dug into his capital. "I'll get away if it's safe to do so. I don't promise anything—not if you want results."

He wished he could see Genghis Khan's face, even though there'd be no expression on it. Face-to-face was better, and in the end safer too, in spite of all the complications.

But not just now.

"Information has been received on Audley," said Genghis dummy5

Khan out of the silence, apropos of nothing. "Rather curious information. He's a strange man."

You can say that again, thought Roche. "How d'you mean?"

Sniff. And sniff, in the context of Genghis Khan, was a manifestation of extreme emotion.

"He worked for British Intelligence, from maybe 1944 to 1946. In Germany, perhaps in France, perhaps in Spain . . .

perhaps also in Greece—we are not sure. He was very young."

"And that's strange?"

"We are being circumspect, and that makes investigation difficult, and more so with the passage of time." Genghis Khan ignored the question. "He left them ... it appears that he left them in anger in '46—mutual anger. We believe that he disobeyed orders. Or possibly he misinterpreted orders—

again we are not sure. We are not sure about anything."

And they didn't like being unsure, that was for sure.

"But they surely want him back now," Roche goaded him.

"And they tried to get him back once before, too."

"That is correct. It was at Cambridge, in '49. We have that authenticated beyond doubt."

There was more to it than that—and that offered a very obvious hypothesis. "Did we approach him at Cambridge—

after he turned them down?" Roche chanced his arm. "What happened?"

Genghis Khan chewed on the questions in silence for a time.

"It was. . .a very gentle contact. Very circumspect, you dummy5

understand."

'Circumspect' was the in-word of the moment. But there was the minutest suggestion in that passionless voice that the very gentle circumspection of 1949 hadn't fooled David Longsdon Audley for one minute.

"Yes?" inquired Roche innocently.

"It was not successful."

"How not successful?"

Pause. "It was rejected."

"He went to the police, you mean? Or the Special Branch?"

Pause. "He threw our contact into the river, from a flat-bottomed boat."

The 'flat-bottomed boat' added a vivid realism to Audley's rejection of the chance to join the destined conquerors of the world. Recruitment— would-be recruitment—on a punt on the Cam was an unusually imaginative touch, nevertheless!

Roche smiled. "Well, he's a big fellow, so they say. I expect he caught our man at a disadvantage, anyway."

Sniff. "Our man was a woman."

Well! Well. . . maybe Oliver St.John Latimer did have it right, at that! And add unchivalrous and eccentric to all those other attributes into the bargain!

"I see what you mean by 'strange'," agreed Roche carefully. It was also rather strange that Genghis Khan should have told all this in such detail, unless he'd calculated that nothing but dummy5

the truth would serve to warn Roche himself of the perils that lay ahead. "I'll make a point of not going boating with him."

"When he travelled in the Middle East—he has travelled extensively in the course of ... historical research—" Genghis Khan brushed aside Roche's levity "—he made it a practice to visit the ministries of police to explain that he had served with British Intelligence during the war in Europe, but was no longer a serving officer. He did this in Egypt and Syria and Jordan and the Lebanon."

Well again! Now . . . that was what Genghis Khan had really meant by 'strange', not the Cam punting episode at all! And it was strange, by God! (It was not in the least strange that Genghis Khan knew about it: the Comrades had all those police ministries sewn up tightly, for sure, and it wouldn't have needed any circumspection to throw up that information, for even surer!)

But, of course, neither those ministries nor the Comrades would have taken such a disclaimer on its face value; rather, it would have put them on their mettle.

And yet, obviously, all consequent investigations had proved negative— obviously, not only because if it hadn't been so he wouldn't be here now, trying to recall this strange man to the colours, but also because if there had been anything to unearth, the combined efforts of half a dozen middle eastern security departments and those of the Comrades would have done it by now.

And yet it was still strange ... or, it would be still so if dummy5

everything about the man wasn't of a piece with it. In fact, with everything going against him, Audley appeared to have achieved classic nothing known status.

"So he's clean, then?"

"Until now," agreed Genghis Khan.

"Of course. As soon as I meet him he goes into Category 'A', naturally."

"I don't mean that—wait!" Genghis Khan abruptly cut off further inquiry.

Roche squinted down the sunlit street. He could see his Volkswagen, but there was still no Lady Alexandra beside it to force him to break contact before he had discovered what sort of relationship she had had with the CIA.

"Very well." The phone reclaimed him. "The woman Charnpeney-Perowne is confirmed Category 'C'. But you are right—it is a bureaucratic nonsense nevertheless."

Roche's morale went down and up in quick succession.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"She had a close contact. A known agent in their trade delegation in London, and then in New York. It is of no significance whatsoever—you can discount it."

"A close contact?"

"The contact was in bed. He has since left their service."

Genghis Khan sounded as though he would have sounded angry if he had ever allowed himself the luxury of sounding dummy5

anything recognisable. "We have wasted too much time on her. Subject, Stephanides, Meriel Aspasia, British passport; daughter of Nikos Stephanides, of Cypriot-Jewish extraction, hotel-keeper, London, known agent Sherut Yediot 1945-48, Mossad 1948 onwards; daughter known agent Mossad 1953

onwards, operating Cambridge and London Metropolitan area, present cover literary agent, Liddell Carver Associates

—"

Christ!

"—active, inform Central Records movements priority urgent, ends."

Christ! thought Roche again numbly. Not Greek or Anglo-Greek, but Greek-Cypriot Jewish. And not just Greek-Cypriot Jewish, but Mossad. And not merely Mossad, but second-generation Mossad, the daughter of a man who'd been an Israeli agent even before Israel had existed. And not just second generation Mossad, but active, inform Central Records movements priority urgent—which meant a top-flight agent whose every movement had to be reported double quick to Central Records so that the Comrades in the field could be warned of trouble before it enveloped them.

He swallowed as much of that as he could. "Well, she's here."

"Where—exactly?"

"I don't know, exactly. She's staying with Miss Baker and Lady Alexandra ... in a cottage owned by a Madame Peyrony, a few kilometres outside Neuville, where I'm phoning from.

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But I haven't been there yet." It was occurring to Roche belatedly that he was the Comrade in this particular field, and nobody had warned him that Meriel Stephanides was already busy ploughing the field up.

"But you're going there now?"

"Yes." His telephone-holding hand was sweating.

"Excellent!"

"What's excellent about it?" It also occurred to him that Genghis Khan had deliberately kept the good news about Meriel Stephanides to last, either in order not to demoralise him, or (more likely) just for the sheer pleasure of it.

"Her presence confirms the importance of whatever it is they want Audley to do—that is obvious." Genghis Khan paused in order to let the obvious sink deep into Roche's stomach. "Do you require assistance?"

Yes—

"No. I haven't even recruited Audley yet."

"Well, I advise you to do that as quickly as possible—for your own sake. Then we'll see about Mademoiselle Stephanides.

Meanwhile, I will make contact with you tomorrow at 0900, by the south gate of Neuville. I will have further information for you by then."

Outside, in the sunlight, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

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The heat which bounced up around him off the cobbles of the little square didn't warm him at all, it was repelled by the great block of ice inside him.

The more he thought about his situation, the worse it became. Because if Meriel Stephanides was . . . what she was . . . then it would be prudent to assume that the American, Michael Bradford, wasn't what he seemed to be, but something much more dangerous.

He didn't want to think about it. He wanted to run away, but there was nowhere to run away to.

Lady Alexandra was standing beside his Volkswagen, waiting for him. She saw him, and waved energetically. He waved back automatically, glad that she couldn't see his face from that distance. He had all of a hundred yards in which to rebuild a happy holiday smile on it.

IX

"On— bugger!! Now Jilly's bloody egg's broken!" Lexy stabbed at the frying pan, as though it had let her down deliberately. "And of course I've got everything wrong—I should have done her bacon first, shouldn't I! Oh well, not to worry—she's probably still in the bath—go and see if she's still in the bath, David darling, and if she is then tell her to stay there—"

Roche blinked at Lady Alexandra, and tried to reconcile what he knew with what he was seeing, and opened his mouth and dummy5

shut it again without speaking.

"And has Steffy come back yet? I think I'll throw this egg away and start again—I think I'll throw the bloody lot away and start again! I hope to God the chips are still hot. . . or at least warm—is she still in the bath?"

Roche swallowed. From the way she moved ... or rather, from the way different parts of her moved under the dress, he could swear that she wasn't wearing anything under it.

"—I don't mean go literally and see whether she's still in the bath—I mean, you can . . . because there isn't any lock on the door, I broke it yesterday—but all you have to do is listen through the wall by your ear, that's all—don't lean too hard, or it'll fall down—"

Roche felt the wall tremble against his ear. It was paper-thin, and he could hear Jilly-washing-sounds distinctly through it.

He nodded speechlessly at Lady Alexandra.

"Well, that's all right! Just tell her to go on soaking—tell her there's no hurry—right?"

Roche observed also that Lady Alexandra's face was dirty again, with a black mark down the side of her nose on to her cheek which was presumably a legacy from when she had stoked the boiler for Jilly's bath, after emerging from her own.

She had stoked the boiler, and she had cooked his supper and her own, and she was cooking Jilly's supper—the Lexy Special—in that exquisite dress, which must surely smell dummy5

more of bacon fat and chips than Chanel by now—

(And the Lexy Special was a horrific greasy memory of hunger stemmed, but not satisfied: broken eggs, frazzled bacon and fried bread exploding into fragments, and limp chips congealed into inseparable lumps— ugh!) He turned to the partition wall. "Jilly?"

"I can hear you. I heard." Jilly shouted. "Tell her just egg-and-bacon, no chips . . . And tell her not to incinerate the bacon."

Lexy was already smiling cheerfully at him when he turned back to her. "I heard too! They're all just unappreciative of my culinary efforts— all except David Audley, he never complains—he's a gentleman, like you, David!"

"He never complains—" Jilly's voice, deadpan as Genghis Khan's, came through the wall beside Roche's ear, faint but clear "—because his taste has been . . . institutionalised ... by public school. . . and the Army . . . and Cambridge ... so he doesn't know any better." Splash, splash. "His stomach. . . is permanently . . . disadvantaged."

" Jealousy—" shouted Lexy "—will get you nowhere!" She grinned her great wide-mouthed happy smile at Roche.

"Would you like some more chips? Steffy'll never finish this lot now."

"Steffy . . . knows . . . better!" Splash, splash.

" Shut-up!" Lexy scraped the frying pan into the bucket beside her. "Would you like seconds, David darling?"

God! Perish the thought!

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"No, I'm fine," said Roche hastily. "But. . . where's Steffy?"

Lexy waved the kitchen spatula, scattering fat over the top of the stove. "Oh, God only knows! She's always going off on her own somewhere or other. We think she's got a boyfriend tucked away—or one of her poor bloody authors she's galvanising into a masterpiece, maybe . . . but she won't say, she just swans off into the blue and that's that . . . Not to be trusted, our Steffy— definitely not to be trusted! And that's Mike's opinion too. He says she's a femme fatale."

That was very true, thought Roche; it was even so true that it hurt. And it wasn't surprising that Bradford, the American, thought so, either; because in this operation, whatever it involved, there was no reason why the Americans and the Israelis should be on the same side.

"Darling—why don't you go out and see if you can spot her en route? If you walk up to the corner you can see for miles—but get yourself another drink first, we've still got bags of duty-free gin in those huge bottles we bought on the boat..."

Roche retired gratefully up the drive from the cottage, ginless but glad to be out of the kitchen, where the air was blue with burnt fat and treachery. Because in this operation . . .

Ever since Suez the Americans had been bad friends with the Israelis, even though more in pique and sorrow than anger . . . and the way things had been going since Suez last dummy5

year, they'd soon be co-operating again—at least so long as the Russians called the tune in Egypt.

Yet the key to everything was still Audley: and if he could find that key before the Americans and the Israelis did—

But in his case it wasn't a case of if: he had to find it, or else—

He stared out over the blue-hazed landscape, across the rolling hills and forests and enclaves of cultivated land, and saw none of it.

The stakes weren't any higher, because for him they had been at the limit from the beginning, from the moment he had decided to defect again if he could see a way to do so.

But now they were inescapable, because the bets were on the table—if he failed, then the Comrades would never forgive him this time. Only now the game was more complicated, with the Americans and the Israelites in it, with stakes of their own, and as yet he didn't even know why they were playing. And not to know that was very frightening. And the CIA, with all its unlimited resources, was even more frightening. And Mossad, with its limited resources but unlimited ruthlessness, was even more frightening still.

It made him feel sick to his stomach, and he couldn't control the sickness, so that before he knew what he was doing he was throwing up the Lexy Special into the stubble of the field at his feet.

For a moment he was bent double, swaying dizzily, his vision blurred with tears. Then he managed to steady himself, his dummy5

hands on his knees, as he vomited again helplessly—he had lost his supper, and now his lunch was coming up.

He focussed on the stubble again, and found that he had instinctively lurched a few yards away from the disgusting mess, to an unfouled piece of ground. Among the dead stalks at his feet there was a fresh green plant growing, its tendrils snaking out from a fissure in the dry earth. He frowned at it, unable to identify the plant—there was another similar one a few yards away, and another beyond that, and another . . .

they were in a line stretching down the hillside towards the road, and there were others dotted over the field, apparently growing haphazardly, but actually in other lines like this one.

They were young vines, of course. This cornfield had once been a vineyard, a little irregularly-shaped vineyard high on the ridge, penned in by woodland on three sides and by the road up from which he had climbed on the fourth; yet although the vines had been grubbed up, their deepest roots had escaped the plough and had endured the temporary conquest of the land by the corn to sprout again, unconquerable.

Well . . . Roche bent down to take the tender shoot at his feet into his hand. . . well, he would beat the bastards yet, somehow; he would use them, and he would play them against each other— Genghis Khan against Clinton, and Clinton against Genghis Khan, and both against the Americans and the Israelis . . . and in the end he would go over to whichever of them looked like winning, whichever of dummy5

them could best offer him safety and amnesty and oblivion, it didn't matter which— only survival mattered!

"David!"

Lexy was striding up the hillside towards him.

"Any sign of her yet?" She paused for a moment, turning to survey the landscape below her, hands on hips, a splendid Amazon of a girl, Hippolyta to the life. "Drat the girl! This is absolutely typical—just typical!"

Roche chose a non-committal grunt as a reply. From their vantage point he could see the road twisting down into the valley, and there was plainly no sign of Mossad on it.

But he ought to pretend he'd been looking at something. "I was looking at these vines, coming up through the stubble ..."

"Oh . . . yes!" Lexy's face was slightly flushed, and the dirty mark had enlarged itself. She looked as though she'd just got out of bed. "Tragedy, isn't it—corn instead of wine! But typical Peyrony avarice, we think . . . though she says she can't get the labour—all her boys have gone off—" she transmuted the words from BBC English into the aristocratic gawn orf "—gawn orf to the army, to get themselves killed in Algeria, she says. But we think it's the price of corn—I say, darling . . . you're as white as a sheet!"

Roche was about to say that it must be something he'd eaten, but realised just in time that he would thereby be condemning the Lexy Special for what it surely was.

"You must have caught a touch of the sun, darling," said Lexy dummy5

solicitously.

"Yes, I think I must have done," agreed Roche, who had never caught a touch of the sun in his life. "Mad dogs and Englishmen, and all that. . ." Maybe he had, though: a little sun and a lot of terror, and a Lexy Special: that was surely enough to turn the strongest stomach.

"Well, then—it doesn't matter about Steffy bedding down with her mysterious boyfriend for extra time! You can't possibly go to the orgy like this, David—" Lexy's solicitude was positively enthusiastic "—Jilly can go on her own, and I'll stay and mop your fevered brow," she beamed at him.

"Ah. . . no—no, I must go," said Roche quickly. Whatever Lexy had in mind—ministering genuinely, or even something much more attractive, he had to go to the orgy. In another life the opportunity would have been irresistible, but this life left no room for self-indulgence. "I have to go. And I'm okay now, anyway."

Lexy appeared crest-fallen. "But, David darling. . . it'll be so boring— if you're feeling a bit fragile ... I mean, David—David Audley—spouting endlessly on—on barbarians and things ...

on history, and Arabs, and Russians, and . . . and on whatever comes into his head . . . and they'll all get drunker and drunker . . . and I shall go to sleep, and my mouth will fall open and I shall snore horribly—and Jilly and Steffy will become even more intelligent . . . and then you'll never speak to me again, and I shall be desolate!"

Lexy had cooked her own goose. In that other life . . . but this dummy5

life belonged to David Audley, and especially David Audley drunk and talkative—that was a particular Audley he needed for his collection, and perhaps even the final one he required to complete the set. Even if he'd been half-dead he couldn't have missed such a chance.

"Lexy, I'm sorry. But I've got to sleep somewhere eventually, remember. And I am okay now, really." He grinned at her. "I don't want to be a bother, either."

"Oh—phooey!" She rejected the grin. "The trouble with nice men is, they always have to be noble and unselfish and brave, damn it!"

"I'm not being any of those. I'm only being logical." And the trouble with women, thought Roche, was that (all except Julie) they were none of those things. "Besides which, Jilly said Madame Peyrony wouldn't like me to hang around you three ladies."

"Huh! That's just where you're wrong! We've just had a message from the old witch about you—La Goutard's already been on the phone and La Peyrony is desperate to meet the young English colonel—"

"I'm not a colonel, for God's sake! I'm only a captain—"

"Well, she made you a colonel, so you jolly well have to stay promoted while you're here . . . And I made you a paratroop colonel too, with a chestful of medals—"

"But—"

"But nothing! Those two old witches have both got nephews dummy5

serving with the paras in Algeria, under some colonel or other who appears to be a cross between Napoleon and Joan of Arc, the way they talk about him ... so she's promoted you and I've—what's the word Father uses?—seconded?— I've given you a parachute, anyway," she shrugged, utterly unabashed. "So you'll have to jump now, when you meet La Peyrony."

Roche regarded her reproachfully. "You didn't have to make me a paratroop colonel—that's overdoing it a bit."

"Not at all! 'Never tell a little fib if you have to lie', Father always says. Tell a whopper and make a proper job of it'—

that's what he says." Lexy brushed at her hair, and then turned the gesture into a vague, unrepentant wave. "You're lucky I didn't make you a general—French para generals jump with their men, Etienne says."

"Etienne?"

"A friend of David's—Etienne d'Auberon—or d'Auberon-Something-Something, terribly aristocratic ... I mean, not like me, but really aristocratic, like from St. Louis and the Crusades, and all that. . ." Lexy turned the vague wave into an even vaguer sweep, as though 'all that' included the ownership of everything in sight, with the appropriate feudal rights and privileges. "A French friend of David's," she added unnecessarily. "Anyway, you'll probably meet him tonight, if you're set on going to the Tower. He often turns up ... mostly to argue with David about the Hundred Years' War, so far as I can make out ..." she trailed off, apparently losing the dummy5

thread of her own butterfly monologue.

Etienne d ' Auberon-Something-Something? That would be another name for Genghis Khan, when he could get Jilly to decode the 'Something-Something' part of the Frenchman's name anyway, thought Roche grimly. Because, as of now, everyone connected with the Tower was under suspicion of being an enemy until proved otherwise, even Frenchmen. It was their country, after all.

Meanwhile mild interest was in order. "Lives round here, does he, this Etienne?"

"He does now. I mean, he always did, after a fashion, in the family chateau—like Mummy and Daddy retire to freeze in the Cotswolds from time to time . . . But he used to live in Paris, in a fearfully smart flat near the Bois, when he was working for the Government there. . . Only then he had this absolutely frightful row over something—Algeria, I expect. . .

they're always having rows over Algeria—but it was one of those awful rows the French have, all about honour and France, and things like that—honestly, you wouldn't credit it!

I mean, can you imagine Jilly rowing about honour! Or Cousin Roland pitching into his Minister about England? But they do—the French—honour and France, and probably Liberty, Equality and whatever the other one is ... Fraternity, that's it! Fraternity my eye! According to David . . . 'Tienne was all set for fraternal pistols at dawn in the Bois over whatever it was—and they were all set to put him up against the wall for a firing squad!" She shook her head in disbelief at dummy5

her own story, cornflower-blue eyes wide. "Which is ridiculous, isn't it—because, I mean, Cousin Roland didn't exactly celebrate over that ghastly Suez business last year, he got so stroppy in the end that they had to pack him off to Scotland to let off steam shooting grouse to get it out of his system . . . But with 'Tienne, it was like they were about to put him in the Tower of London under close arrest."

Etienne d'Auberon Something-Something was becoming very interesting mdeed. But if the scandal had reached such serious proportions, even allowing for Lexy's weakness for hyperbole, why hadn't he heard of it? thought Roche.

"It was all hushed up in the end, of course." The blue eyes narrowed knowingly. "David Audley says de Gaulle spiked their guns somehow, but Jilly thinks it was because Tienne knew too much, and they were scared he'd spill the beans about whatever it was ... I mean, if it was as awful as that, then there must have been an awful lot of beans to spill, wouldn't you think, David?"

"Mmm . . ." agreed Roche cautiously.

"But you must have heard about it, darling, surely?" The vague blue eyes blinked at him.

That was what was beginning to disturb him. Because if Etienne d'Auberon had been involved in a big Government scandal and he hadn't picked up a whisper of it—and Philippe Roux hadn't dropped the slightest hint of it—even the fact that d'Auberon's name rang no bells could mean that he was a well-covered backroom boy . . . then the scandal had dummy5

been very efficiently hushed for once. And that meant it was big—

"I'm just a simple soldier, Lady Alexandra." And, for that matter, how simple was she? For, while her style and vocabulary were debutante, since when did debutantes chatter knowledgeable asides on Suez and Algeria and de Gaulle? Or was all that simply what had rubbed off frorn Audley and Jilly and Cousin Roland?

He had to know. "What makes you think I've heard about it?"

I didn't, darling—Jilly did. Just before I came up here she said I ought to tell you about Tienne, anyway . . . because he might turn up at the orgy. He does sometimes." She shrugged. "And you move in those sort of circles."

"What sort of circles?" So it was a Jilly after-thought!

"Oh—hush-hush ones. You know!"

But that joke had gone far enough. "I told you—I'm just a simple soldier."

"Simple my eye! Simple soldiers don't make friends with our Jilly. . . and they don't make phone-calls either. They make passes at me, is what they do. I'm an expert on simple soldiers, darling—and you don't fit the pattern, believe me!"

Roche realised that he was on a hiding to nothing on Lady Alexandra's own ground so long as he tried to play the game his own way. Jilly had given him better advice than she could imagine, but so far he'd made too little use of it.

"Tell me more about this fellow d'Auberon then—if I'm not dummy5

simple," he challenged her directly.

"Why d'you want to know about him?" Now she couldn't help being suspicious.

"Because I'm not simple. I like to know all about the opposition before I make my pass, Lady Alexandra."

"Oh ..." She was vastly relieved by his frankness. "So that's the way the wind blows! And I've been stupid again, haven't I!"

"A bit. But tell me, anyway."

"There's nothing to tell. He's much too honourable—and high-powered—for me . . . He's just an acquaintance of David Audley's, that's all—high-powered, like David . . . and also weird . . . also like David—"

"Weird?"

"Funny."

"Funny?"

"I don't mean funny ha-ha . . . but sort of ... contradictory."

She nodded into the valley. "Like, he's mad about rugger—

he's gone all the way to Cahors today to talk about rugger with these Frenchmen who are also bonkers about the silly game." She looked at Roche suddenly, and he realised that she'd shifted from the Frenchman to Audley. "And that's pretty weird, isn't it—the way these Frenchmen in the south play rugger—I never knew that until I met David Audley."

"Indeed?" He shrugged. "But I don't quite see how that's . . .

dummy5

contradictory. Lots of people play rugger."

"Ah!" She pointed at him quickly. "But you don't play rugger, do you? Hockey's your game, you said?"

"Yes. But—"

"But you know about it. And you know about cricket and soccer and tennis—who's good, and who's playing who, and all that sort of thing ... I know, because I've got all these cousins—Roland's got a rowing blue, and Jimmie played for the Occasionals, and Jake had a county cricket trial last year

—"

The Perownes come up like mushrooms . . . positively hordes of cousins—

"—I hate sport, personally," continued Lexy vehemently. "It's boring, and they all get drunk and sing dirty songs. And all I get to do is cut sandwiches and serve tea. But I know what they're like—it's all balls—"

Roche fought to hold in position whatever expression was on his face.

"—balls, balls, balls—just so long as they can kick them, or hit them, or throw them—big ones, little ones, white ones, red ones, all shapes and sizes ... it doesn't matter which is their special sport—if they're mad about one sport, they know about the others, what's what, and who's who . . . the British do, anyway . . . Roland does, and Jimmie and Jake—

and you too, David—" she drew a quick breath "— but David Audley doesn't!"

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He couldn't maintain his look of polite interest any longer.

Incredulity and incomprehension had to take over.

She observed his discomfort. "You haven't the faintest idea what I'm getting at, have you, darling?"

"Not a lot—no," admitted Roche.

She nodded. "I'm not surprised. It takes one to spot one."

"One—what?"

She laughed. "You know, when Mike was up at Oxford he played everything. I mean, when he was at Harvard, before that, he played football—American football, where they all dress up in the most extraordinary way and do even more extraordinary things to each other . . . But when he came to England, he played English games—rugger and cricket, and suchlike, and if you give him the chance he'll talk about them non-stop. All about deep square legs, and kicking for touch . . . it's ghastly to hear the way he goes on—it's so boring. But they're all like that, I tell you—all except David Audley."

A surfeit of sporting cousins had clearly scarred Lady Alexandra for life. "I'm still not with you, Lexy."

"No? Well, you just watch David Audley's face when anyone else talks about sport. He gets that glazed look of his."

Lexy herself usually had a slightly glazed look, as though she didn't quite understand what was happening to her, or what had just happened. But also she had already put on record that 'it takes one to spot one', whatever that meant.

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"Darling—he hates sport, just like me—that's what I think.

Even rugger, which is the only game he plays—I honestly think he's bored with that too . . . and as for all the rest... he simply doesn't care to know anything about them. It's all a great big façade."

"Clubbable?"

" Yes and no ... And I rather think I mean 'no' —"

And then Stocker had gone off at a tangent, without trying to answer what he didn't understand, into the equally unsatisfactory labyrinth of Audley's finances.

" Anyway—" Lexy grabbed the word with special emphasis, as if she was using it to haul herself away from her own private experience "— anyway, that's David all over: he just never quite fits... like, he absolutely hates the army, but he's terribly proud of the Wesdragons—the regiment, Father's regiment . . . and he hates the jolly old Establishment even more—that's the only time he swears, when he talks about them—but when Davey— Davey Stein—when Davey pitches into the British Empire, because of Palestine, and all that, David gives him both barrels and waves the flag like my Great-Aunt Maggie, who was in Amritsar when they shot all those Indians, and still swears by General What's-his-name who gave the order to open fire—it's positively hilarious . . .

and yet, at the same time, he likes the Arabs—And then, to dummy5

top it off, he thinks the Israelis are really rather super, the way they give everyone the two-finger sign—including all Mother's State Department friends in Washington. Oh—and he likes the Egyptians—he's terribly unfashionable there—"

"And the Russians?" The sixty-four thousand dollar question.

"Oh . . . they're the New Barbarians, darling—just inside tanks instead of on innumerable little shaggy ponies. You'll hear all about them tonight, I shouldn't wonder," Lexy waved away the whole might of the Red Army with a slender and very dirty hand. She stopped abruptly as she focussed on her own hand. "My God! just look at me . . . I'm absolutely filthy again—I don't know where it comes from, but I seem to attract dirt!" She lifted her face towards him. "Is my face dirty, David?"

Roche pretended to examine her features critically. All that was needed was soap and water, for under the clumsily-applied make-up and the soot from the boiler was a complexion not far short of Steffy's.

"Well?"

"A bit of touching up maybe," he said diplomatically.

Lexy examined her hands again. "God! Just look at the time!"

She stared round in sudden panic. "It's even starting to get dark—and I've been blethering on—and Jilly's supper's still in the oven! We must get back, David."

Roche didn't want the blethering to stop. "But Steffy—"

"Damn Steffy!" She turned away, down the hillside.

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"And you were just getting interesting—"

"About David Audley?" She flung the name over her shoulder as he plunged after her. "Don't waste your time trying to understand David— nobody does! It'd take a lifetime, and I'm certainly not volunteering for the job—" Her voice faded as she drew away from him. "I don't have a lifetime to spare, anyway—"

And neither did poor bloody Roche, thought Roche.

Depending on how much lifetime he had left, of course . . .

X

"WE'RE NOT GOING to wait for Steffy," announced Lady Alexandra. "I'll just get my bag, and then David can escort us through the Wild Wood by the short-cut. With him along we shalln't have to worry about those swarthy rapists."

Roche frowned at her. "What rapists?"

"No rapists," said Jilly. "Honestly, Lexy—you're the limit!"

"Well, they could be rapists for all you know."

"Rapees, more like, if you have anything to do with them!"

Jilly turned with a shake of her head from Lexy to Roche.

"There are these gypsy-types we've spotted in the wood—"

"Saw them again yesterday, too—skulking up behind the old dovecote, down towards David's place," said Lexy firmly.

"And I've seen them further afield, too."

"They won't be the same ones," snapped Jilly.

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"They were the same ones. It was when Steffy and I were collecting the bread. I saw them." Lexy didn't budge.

"And they were following you?"

"That I can't say, they were stationary at the time. But they were the same ones, because they've got an old motor-bike and a couple of battered old pop-pop mopeds they swan around on."

Jilly sighed. "Well, they're a bit slow, getting down to the job then! We've each been on our own here often enough!"

"They're casing the joint," said Lexy airily. "I think we ought to tell La Peyrony—or, better still, David Audley. He'll sort them out!"

"I've no doubt he would! And you're the sort of person who gets innocent youths lynched during the sorting process."

Jilly turned to Roche again. "They look about sixteen years of age, and they're about half Lexy's size put together—and a quarter of David Audley's—and a hundredth as dangerous.

And they're probably from down south, just looking for casual work and living rough meanwhile, poor kids."

Another thing about Jilly, thought Roche, was that she didn't scare easily. Although she hardly came up to Lady Alexandra's shoulder, it wasn't Jilly who needed protection, it was Lexy.

But it was also Lexy for whom he was supposed to be making a play, although he had not done much with his opportunities so far, he remembered.

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He looked around the area of the cottage with a suitably protective air. The steep-pitched dark-grey slate roof of the Peyrony mansion could be seen through the trees to its left, but otherwise it was enclosed by thick woods on either side of the roadway. As a holiday-house it had a Perrault fairy-tale look, with its browny-pink pantiles and tiny windows set in dormers and thick stone walls. But as a refuge for three pretty girls in a foreign country, with strange young males in the woods roundabout, it had its disadvantages: other than the Peyrony place, there didn't seem to be another house in sight.

"You are rather isolated, aren't you?" he said gently, trying not to take sides too obviously.

"Oh no, David darling," said Lexy lightly. "We're within easy screaming distance of Madame Peyrony, who is not a day older than seventy . . . and old Angelique . . . and there's Gaston, who undoubtedly remembers Waterloo, if not the battle of Agincourt—"

"Gaston's as tough as an old boot, and as strong as an ox,"

protested Jilly.

"Gaston?" queried Roche.

"La Peyrony's wrinkled retainer—old Angelique's antique brother," explained Lexy sweetly.

"Younger brother," corrected Jilly. "He's Madame's handyman-gardener—"

"Younger . . . meaning he was a hero of Verdun, or dummy5

somewhere, in the First World War, darling."

"That's right! And with a chestful of medals—David Audley says he was the finest trench-mortar-man in the whole French Army— and the Cross of the Liberation too." Jilly turned to Roche. "Back in 1944 he sat on the ridge above Brivay and held up a German column for six hours with his mortar, David says."

"Yes. And he's still got his private arsenal up in the stable, above his bedroom," Lexy mocked her friend. "But now he's got a gammy leg and he's rather short of breath with his asthma, and you have to shout at him to make him hear . . .

But there's always little Gaston, his grandson—or maybe great grandson—little Gaston can always let him know when we start screaming. So we've got nothing to worry about....

Not that I really care, anyway. What's a fate worse than death between friends?"

"They're just boys, Lexy—"

"Okay—so they're just boys! Innocent little nut-brown boys!"

Lexy shrugged. "At least let David here escort us while we've got him. Just let me get my bag, and we'll go."

"No," said Jilly.

"Why not? I don't see why we should kick our heels until Steffy deigns to put in an appearance, for heaven's sake! Just because she's gone out on the tiles again—"

"It's not Steffy." Jilly shook her head in despair. "You've clean forgotten why I sent you to go and get your new David dummy5

already, haven't you? It's because Madame has summoned him to her boudoir, that's why." Jilly switched apologetically to Roche. "And I'm afraid you must go, David—if only to improve our image with her, to lend us a touch of respectability, let's say—and she will give you a drink, too."

Roche didn't have to pretend to look unwilling. He didn't want to waste any more time before getting to 'The Tower', where the action must be; and he didn't want to jump through any hoops for another version of Madame Goutard, anyway; and he certainly didn't want another drink, of any description.

"I'm afraid you must go," repeated Jilly.

"Well, I'm jolly well not going!" exclaimed Lexy. "Not even to improve my image, darn it!"

"And just as well, Lady Alexandra," said Jilly severely. "What you're going to do is to go to the bathroom and improve your image there. You look like something out of the black-and-white minstrel show pulled backwards through a hedge."

"Oh God! Do I?" Lexy put her hand to her face, and then to her hair, and then studied the hand with dismay.

"David ..." For the umpteenth time Jilly returned to Roche.

". . . she's an old woman, and she's lonely. . . and Lexy and La Goutard have sold you to her as the English d'Artagnan between them .... It would be a kindness just to have one drink with her—just one drink. She loves Englishmen, because of the war; and she's still trying to love them, even dummy5

after Suez, and the way we seem to have let down her nephew in Algeria. So it really would be a kindness."

Put like that it was an order. "Because of the war?"

Jilly nodded. "She was on an escape line. It was Limoges-Brive-la-Gaillarde-Toulouse when things were going well.

But it was Limoges-Château Peyrony-Toulouse when things became difficult. She may be an old witch, but she's an old witch who can wear the MBE alongside her husband's Croix-de-Guerre."

Put like that it wasn't an order, it was an honour.

"Besides which, David—David Audley—won't be back from Cahors yet, so there's no hurry," said Jilly. "And even if Steffy's not back we still don't need to take the short-cut through the woods, over the top of the ridge. We can use your car—and we've got to use your car anyway, to shift your gear to the Tower if you're going to pitch your tent there."

Put like that it was simple common-sense, apart from the honour and Jilly's insistence.

"Silly me!" muttered Lexy. "The gear—of course! And my face!" And fled into the cottage.

Jilly led the way through the trees to a doorway in a wall.

Then she halted and turned back to him.

"Apart from which, David,I did have a male caller while you were rolling in the hay with Lexy. But not one of her teenage would-be rapists—in fact, he was looking for you."

“For me?"

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"Little fat Frenchman named Galles." Jilly watched him. "He has a garage on the Les Eyzies road over the river—petrol and repairs and hire cars. He says he knows you."

Roche returned the stare. "You know him?"

"Uh-huh. Or rather, Lexy knows him—she has a natural affinity for anyone who can help her to get filthy, particularly car mechanics. They met under the bonnet of David Audley's car, to be precise."

A circumstantial coincidence, to be precise. "How did Audley light on him? There must be garages closer to here than Les Eyzies?"

Jilly smiled. "David dear, there's nothing close to here—the Tower's our next-door neighbour, and that's over half a mile by the short-cut. . . But no, David Audley didn't light on him—

he's one of Madame Peyrony's special friends, ex-Resistance.

He was in charge of the transport system from Limoges to Cahors, she was in charge of the midway safe house, that's all. And ever since then he's serviced her car and kept the generator going for the electric light, and because they're both almost as antique as La Peyrony herself—the car and the generator—he's a fairly regular visitor. . . Satisfied?"

Not satisfied, but it would have to do. "What did he want?"

"He'll tell you himself. I told him you'd be back soon, and he said he'd be in the stables at the back of the house, where the car lives. If he isn't, then you're to phone him toute de suite—

there's a phone in the house, amazingly enough." She dummy5

paused. "You'll note that I'm not asking any questions."

Roche nodded, trying to smile back. "You don't want to know

—very sensible!"

" 'What you don't know can't hurt you'." She stopped smiling.

"I just wish I could believe that."

"Have you a reason for not believing it?"

She considered him in silence for a moment. "I've never had anything to do with . . . your side of the business before, David."

"My side of the business is pretty dull most of the time.

Probably duller than yours, Jilly." It was a pity that the truth sounded so unconvincing.

"I hope this is one of the duller times, then."

"I see no reason why it shouldn't be." The thought of Meriel Aspasia Stephanides (active, inform Central Records movements priority urgent) made that a black lie, as Ada Clarke would say. But it sounded no more unconvincing than the truth. "If I could tell you what London wants me to do I think you'd be ... reassured, let's say." More truth. "You might even be rather amused." Half-truth, anyway.

"I can look after my own amusement." She didn't smile. "It's just that . . . Lexy was right—we are rather isolated here. And there's more than one way of being raped." Another moment's pause in which she took him apart piece by piece.

"I wouldn't like anything to happen to Steffy and Lexy . . .

and Madame Peyrony and Gaston—and little Gaston."

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He'd been wrong, she was scared. Or, he hadn't been wrong at all, and she didn't scare easily, she was brave—brave as Julie had been, not scared for herself, but worried to death about other people.

(Julie, Julie— If only you hadn't been so scared— so worried to death, literally worried to your death! If only you had waited, to let things work themselves out. . . then I wouldn't be here— it would be some other poor damn Roche; it might even be Oliver St. John Latimer if there was no Roche to hand— and you wouldn't be there, wherever you are, with bones of coral and pearls for eyes. . .) Roche smiled. "Once I've seen Raymond Galles, I can be at the Tower pretty soon after that—and then you won't have to worry. I shall be David Audley's problem then!"

She gazed at him sadly. "I shall still worry."

"For heaven's sake—why? I'll be off your hands—and Lexy's!"

"I shall be worried for you."

"Why for me?"

She drew a long breath. "Very well. Because you're frightened."

Roche felt his grin sicken. It was his own fault for pushing so hard, but he couldn't let the truth lie there in the open between them, unaccounted for.

"Of course I'm frightened. I have an important job to do, and I'm frightened of failing. I don't want to be the oldest captain in the British Army."

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She half-closed her eyes. "I didn't ask why." When the eyes opened fully they were expressionless. "Let's go and see this man Galles. And after that I'll take you to Madame. And then we'll drive to the Tower."

Roche followed her along a winding path through the trees.

In the half-light the house ahead seemed bigger and gloomier than it had done when he had first glimpsed it as they'd approached the cottage, but perhaps that was only because he felt smaller and his own mood was even more sombre. He felt that Jilly's instinct to get shot of him, to get her small part of the operation over and to extricate herself and her friends from him, was sound and reasonable. It was only a pity, and it disturbed him, that since Steffy was one of those friends she might not find the process of extrication so easy.

And, as for himself, and what was more disturbing still... he had done so much, and learnt so much, and yet he hadn't even started. He hadn't even clapped eyes on David Longsdon Audley.

There was a collection of smaller buildings, mostly single-storey, at the back of the house. As Jilly led the way through an archway in the tallest of them they resolved themselves into a courtyard of stables and gabled hay-lofts and what must have been a coach-house in the days of the horse. The great double-doors of the coach-house stood wide-open and yellow light streamed out of them, illuminating the herring-bone design of the brick-paved yard.

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Jilly pointed towards the light. "I'll wait here," she said. In the opening, half-concealed by one of the doors, stood a tiny corrugated Citroen, bearing the legend Raymond Galles et Fils in flowery white on faded Royal Navy Mediterranean grey, and Garagiste— Location de Voitures, with an indecipherable Les Eyzies-de-Tayrac telephone number beneath it, alongside Route D773. Roche had just started to squint at the telephone number to confirm that it was the same as that which Galles had given him that morning, when his eye was pulled away by the glitter of yellow light on gleaming silver to his right, further inside the coachhouse.

Huge in the centre of the open space—dominating it, even though he was simultaneously aware that it was flanked by a great black coach with brass lamps at its ears—was an enormous car.

Raymond Galles appeared suddenly on the far side of the car

—the distant side, rather—next to a miniature searchlight fixed handy for the driver to manipulate to dazzle anyone outside the beams of the two almost full-size searchlights which sprouted from the sweeping front mudguards.

Galles grinned at Roche, and the grin was repeated in his reflection in the deep polish of the maroon-coloured cellulose of the bonnet. Viewed along the line of the bonnet he appeared to be a long way off, and there wasn't a speck of dust on the gleaming expanse of metal between him and Roche, though the cobwebs trailed from the naked electric bulb above him and festooned the carriage behind him.

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"Ah—M'sieur Roche!" Galles bobbed his head and disappeared again, to reappear eventually at the far—furthest

—end of the car ahead of him, still grinning hugely.

"And well-met, beside my beauty!" Galles touched the bonnet of the car lightly, and then instantly produced a snow-white rag from his back pocket to erase the touch. "Beside your namesake, one might say!"

"My namesake?" Roche goggled from Galles to the Beauty, and back to Galles again.

"You do not know? But Roche is a good French name—and yet also a common one, I grant you . . . But she— she is not common, you will grant me that, eh?"

Roche blinked at him, and then edged sideways to get a sight on the curious chromium-plated (or silver-plated?) object on the top of the radiator. It looked a bit like the iceberg that had ripped open the Titanic, in size as well as shape, with an ornate 'D' imprinted on it for some unfathomable reason by the collision.

"It's not a ... Daimler—" that was obviously a stupid guess, though! ". . . or a Delage, maybe?" he hazarded.

"Delarge— pouf! Daimler— phuttt!" Raymond Galles lifted his right forearm, with two fingers extended on its hand, and struck the crook of the arm a rabbit-punch with his left hand.

"Rolls-Royce!"

It clearly wasn't a Rolls-Royce, from that gesture of ultimate dummy5

contempt as well as the absence of the Rolls-Royce emblem, apart from the iceberg 'D'.

Roche wasn't willing to try again. And Galles was bursting to tell him, anyway.

"A Delaroche—a Delaroche Royale!!" said Galles triumphantly.

And Roche wasn't going to say 'Never heard of it', either.

Galles very nearly touched the Delaroche again, but thought better of it at the last moment.

"Only three Royales were made. The first was for King Zog of Albania, as a gift from an American mining company—that was destroyed by Italian bombers in 1939." Galles' face twisted with the memory of the bomb-bursts. "The second was fragmented by German bombers in 1940—in the factory, while a minor modification was in progress—it was the property of the Prince de Coutrai ..." the twist suggested this time that Galles held the Prince personally responsible for hazarding his Royale unnecessarily in the face of the enemy

". . .I salvaged the remains myself, and transported them to this very place, together with the pilot of a Blenheim bomber

—a flight-lieutenant of the Royal New Zealand Air Force by the name of Robinson, who is now a librarian in the city of Auckland." He nodded at Roche. "I remember that because he was my first allied aviator—it was in 1941—and the first to set foot in the Chateau Peyrony. Flight-Lieutenant Ashiballe Robinson—"

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Ashiballe?

" Arrrchee for short—''

Archibald!

"And here—my beauty—" once more the almost-touch, but not quite "—is the third and last and only Delaroche Royale in the whole world." The little Frenchman beamed at Roche.

"And that is a good omen for us both, m'sieur—a French Delaroche greets an English Roche, eh?"

Oh— shit, thought Roche. Time was ticking away, and he still had to submit to Madame Peyrony, and here he was, snarled up with a monstrous vintage French car and its enthusiastic garagiste and locateur des voitures, for Christ's sake!

But he smiled nevertheless. "She's a beauty, m'sieur." Pause—

one-two-three! "But you have an urgent message for me, I believe?"

"But yes. . ."Galles peered past him. "Mademoiselle?"

"Waiting for me out in the yard."

"Ah! It was permitted that I make contact with you through her, you understand?" Galles's expression became serious, as if to reassure him that he had not approached Jilly casually, and Roche instantly regretted his impatience. Rather than scorn the little man's enthusiasm for the big car, which was in itself possibly no more than a cover for being here now, he ought to remember that Galles had been fighting Nazis—real fascists— when he himself had been working for his grammar school entrance.

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"Of course, M'sieur Galles."

"Very well, m'sieur. You are to telephone Paris as soon as conveniently possible."

"There's a phone in the house, I believe—"

"More urgently, there is an American whom you are likely to meet, by name Bradford—"

"Mike Bradford. He's staying with Audley, yes?" Roche produced a polite frown. "A writer of some sort?"

"You've met him already?"

"No, just heard about him. He's a writer?"

"Of some sort—yes, m'sieur. And, it is thought, an agent of some sort also, of the American CIA."

Roche deepened the frown. "What the devil is a CIA man doing here? He can't be interested in Audley, surely?"

Galles shrugged. "If we are interested in Audley . . .?"

"No." Roche shook his head. But perhaps now was the time to start playing both ends against the middle. "There's also an Israeli staying with him, an old RAF pilot—Stein. Do you know anything about him?"

"No, m'sieur. He was not mentioned. Only Bradford."

So the British didn't know about Meriel Stephanides. If they were on to Bradford, they would not have missed her if they'd known about her, now that they'd finally got round to warning him about the opposition. But there was nothing particularly surprising about their not knowing something dummy5

that the Comrades knew only too well, he reflected sadly; and, to be fair, the Comrades hadn't performed so well either, having 'lost' Steffy until he'd given them her location, and never having properly 'found' Bradford's Category 'A'

status.

But Galles was frowning at him, as though there was something he was in two minds about saying.

"Yes, m'sieur?" he pushed the Frenchman gently.

"I don't know ..." Galles shook his head ". . . but there is one that I have—how shall I say it?—not reservations, not suspicions about. . . but . . . a feeling from the old times."

"About Stein—the Israeli?" Roche pushed harder, and deliberately in the wrong direction. He realised that he wanted the Frenchman to say d'Auberon something-something, to save him from having to do so.

"No, m'sieur. I refer to the beautiful one, that Milady—

Mademoiselle Lexy—speaks of as 'Steffee'."

"Meriel Stephanides?"

Galles nodded. "Mademoiselle Stephanides—yes. But I have no reason . . . except that there is this feeling from the old times, in the war, when no reason was often good reason."

Roche nodded back at him. "I understand." And bully for you, Raymond Galles! "You know she's a Cypriot? Or Anglo-Cypriot, anyway?"

"Ah! And you have troubles in Cyprus—as we have in Algeria?"

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Roche nodded again. "And Israeli intelligence is very strong there . . . You may be right—I'll see what Paris thinks about her. . ." He gave Galles his own version of the in-two-minds frown.

"Yes, m'sieur?" The Frenchman picked up the signal.

"I have a name for you also—and also with no reason. A French name."

"M'sieur?"

Here I go then! "Etienne?"

"Etienne?"

"He's a friend of Audley's, and he comes from an old local family—a distinguished family—"

Galles's eyes widened.

"—and he left the government service recently, I gather. Do you know of such a person?" Roche concentrated his soul into an expression of honest curiosity.

"But yes, m'sieur! The Vicomte Etienne!"

"The Vicomte?"

"Of the Château du Cingle d'Enfer—above the river, on the bend."

Well, at least that made the identification certain: Lexy simply hadn't been able to twist her Anglo-Saxon tongue round Etienne d'Auberon du Cingle d'Enfer, and had reduced him in typical Lexy-fashion to 'Tienne!

"What d'you know about him?"

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Conflicting loyalties strove with each other in Raymond Galles's face, his sixteen-year commitment to the British against what might well be a more ancient identification with the Languedoc, which was older than either England or France, whose armies had each arrived here as foreign occupiers in their day.

"What d'you know of him?" repeated Roche patiently.

Galles shrugged. "He was with the General during the war—

he passed through here once, in the spring of '44. . ." he ran out of steam prematurely at that point in the history of the Lord of Hell's River Bend, so far as Roche could translate Something-Something.

"He was in the Bureau Central de Renseignements—or the Organisation Civile?" prompted Roche.

Galles spread his hands. "I do not know of such things—he was with the General, that I know. But I was going to say ...

he was very young then. And after the war he was of the Quai d'Orsay in Paris for many years, and seldom here."

"But now he's back?" Galles nodded. "Now he is back, yes."

So the older loyalty was the stronger. Or, if that was merely a romantic historical illusion, perhaps Galles was only a garagiste and car-hirer now, and knew no better. But either way he would have to depend on London now, and Thompson in Paris before that.

He grinned and shrugged at the Frenchman. With all the trouble and strife poor France had had since the end of the dummy5

war—with the falling franc and Indo-China, and now Algeria, and most recently Suez and the impotence of the West during the Hungarian rising against the Russians . . . not to mention the endless succession of governments, each as short-lived as it was feeble ... no one could find much comfort in the Fourth Republic, and a one-time follower of the ageing General de Gaulle would be more disillusioned than most.

"He's probably just pissed-off with politics altogether," he confided. "And I can't say I blame him . . . Mollet or Bourges-Maunoury—Eden or Macmillan . . . they're all the same!"

The addition of British prime ministers to French ones appeared to do the trick: the shrug-and-grin came back to him, only more eloquently, as only a true Frenchman could package such a mixture of regret and resignation.

Nevertheless, in view of Galles's equivocal attitude, an over-sudden loss of interest in d'Auberon might be unwise.

"Still, you'd better check up on him, I suppose—why he's here, what he's doing, and so on. Let me know if you turn up anything of interest." He raised his hand in farewell, and then checked himself as though an afterthought had struck him. "Presumably Madame Peyrony knows about him?"

Galles gave him a guarded look. "That is very likely," he agreed. "She knows a great many things."

"The young ladies seem scared of her—"

As Roche spoke Galles turned without warning and began to dummy5

polish an imaginary blemish on the gleaming bonnet of the car.

"What's she like, Madame Peyrony?" persisted Roche.

Galles went on polishing for a few seconds. When he looked up at Roche again his eyes were still on guard, but the ghost of a smile had relaxed his mouth. "She is a great lady, M'sieur Roche. And my advice to you is . . .if you should decide to lie to her about anything, lie very carefully."

Roche left him to his polishing.

XI

IF IT WAS gloomy under the trees which overshadowed the Chateau Peyrony on all sides, it was positively sepulchral inside the house: what little evening light the leaves permitted to approach it was further checked by the heavy drapery at the windows; and the single electric bulb in the chandelier high above Roche's head, inadequately fed by Raymond Galles's ancient generator, did little more than illuminate the crystal droplets around it.

"Christ!" murmured Roche under his breath.

"Yes," whispered Jilly, who could hear him because she was standing very close to him. "Decor by Charles Addams, Lexy says. With additional advice from Boris Karloff. And it's not much different in broad daylight, either."

"I was thinking of Dickens." He could smell her perfume, but dummy5

beyond it smells of dust and unopened rooms. By comparison, The Old House at Steeple Horley had smelt fresh and had been full of light and excitement.

"Dickens?" She felt for his hand.

"Miss Havisham's house." He squeezed her cold fingers.

"With me as Jean Simmons and you as John Mills, you mean?" She squeezed back. "But you're too tall for him . . .

we'll have to recast with Stewart Grainger as Pip—okay?"

Her juvenile film-going must date from the same period as his own. "If there's a choice I'd prefer to be James Mason,"

he hissed down at her.

She shook her head. "Sorry—no resemblance . . . apart from the miscasting."

Somewhere in the bowels of the house a door closed.

"David Audley's got an old house, Lexy says," whispered Jilly.

"Full of ghosts, she says it is. Like this one."

It was on the tip of Roche's tongue to agree, with the only difference being that the most likely ghost in The Old House would be wearing smartly-pressed battle-dress. It also rather suprised him that Lexy, of all people, had picked up such vibrations.

But neither of those thoughts would do. "This isn't a very old house, not really ..." He screwed up his eyes in an attempt to penetrate the gloom ". . . Second Empire, at a guess. The furniture looks like Second Empire—"

"Sssh!" Her fingers tightened, and then let go.

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The crone-in-waiting, well camouflaged in her shapeless black dress, reappeared on the landing halfway up the staircase ahead of them, like one of the Chateau Peyrony's resident spectres.

But, ghost or not, she was beckoning them now.

Their destination, as soon as they'd reached the main landing at the head of the stairs, was clearly marked by the bright strip of light under the door in front of them, even before the duty ghost tapped on it.

"Entrez."

At least the voice was thoroughly unghostlike, with only the slightest quaver of age beneath its feminine strength.

Roche followed Jilly Baker out of the gloom into the light.

The first thing he saw, other than a general impression of a room full of things which only its size prevented from seeming cluttered, was the fire burning in a grate, set in a white marble fireplace surmounted by the inevitable ormolu clock and a huge portrait of what looked like the Empress Eugenie.

"My dear Gillian—" the voice, with its strangely softened 'G', orientated him immediately to the speaker "—how good of you to come!"

Unlike Madame Goutard, the shopkeeper's wife, Madame Peyrony had never been a great beauty—the face was too dummy5

thin, the nose too Roman, even allowing for the depredations of time which had sharpened both. And the eye which settled on Roche, too, did not appraise him with anything like the once-upon-a-time might-have-been Goutard longing: either he was out of her class, too far below it for consideration, or sex had never figured largely in her calculations of worth and need.

" English, Madame? Je crois . . . ici on parle français, n'est-ce pas?" The confidence had come back into Jilly's voice, and into her face.

"One speaks French to those who need to have French spoken to them, my dear—like the incorrigible Alexandra, who has a good ear, but no mind . . . and that young man, David Audley, who has too much mind, but no ear." Her eyes, which had been darting back and forwards from Roche to Jilly, finally settled on Roche. "But there are those who do not need such instruction, so I gather . . . . Introduce me, Gillian, my dear."

There was something wrong with her English. It was idiomatically perfect, but there was something he couldn't pin down in her pronunciation that wasn't right. And yet, even after years of listening to Englishmen murder the French language, he couldn't make out just where Madame Peyrony was wounding the English one.

"Pardonnez-moi, Madame—I mean ..." Gillian looked at Roche desperately. "Madame—Captain David Roche, of Supreme Headquarters NATO, attached OEECD liaison, dummy5

Allied Forces Central Europe, Fontainebleau."

Roche almost smiled, almost wanted to hug her for trying to do her best for him with that mouthful. It was unfortunate that Lexy had already spoilt it, that was all.

"Captain?" The demotion unsettled her momentarily.

"Madame," Roche willed himself forward to take the yellow hand, which was as thin-skinned as the carpet under his feet was thin, equally time-worn. "The incorrigible Lady Alexandra somewhat anticipated my promotion to higher rank, I believe."

She smiled at him then, showing small ivory-white teeth quite unlike Madame Goulard's yellow fangs; and the smile was what he wanted, because what he wanted was what she knew about the Lord of the Devil's River Bend, and betraying Lexy was a small price to pay for that.

"But a para nevertheless? Is that the English?" The smile mixed hope with doubt now. "We never had a ... a parachute soldier through here during the war, so I am unfamiliar with the correct word." Those two old witches have both got nephews with the paras in Algeria, remembered Roche.

Well—he would give her what she wanted, a para or a horse-marine, or a Bengal lancer if she wanted it.

"Paratrooper, Madame." He didn't dare look at Jilly, he just hoped she wouldn't give him away, that she would let him lie carefully And there was Lexy's father's advice on that subject, even on that same lie: Tell a whopper and make a dummy5

proper job of it! "3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment."

That was a big enough one, anyway: the 3rd had dropped at Suez last year, with Massu's 2ième RPC.

She looked at him proudly. "My nephew is a para, Captain Roche—at this moment in Algiers."

"With Massu?" Roche didn't have to pretend to be impressed: the word from Suez had been that Massu and his men had been impressive.

"With Massu, yes." She inclined her head slightly. "And Bigeard." Then she shifted her gaze to Jilly. "And now you may leave us, Gillian my dear."

Jilly blinked at her. "Madame?"

"Sit down, Captain Roche," commanded Madame Peyrony, pointing to the chair opposite her own, beside the fire.

"But Madame—" began Jilly huskily. "Madame—"

Madame Peyrony transfixed her with a look, " I do not need a chaperone, at my age . . . You are going to the Tower tonight—

is that not correct?"

The orgy!

"Yes, but—" Jilly tried to look at Roche.

"Very well!" The Orgy in the Tower didn't appear to worry Madame Peyrony in the least. "Go and superintend Alexandra's toilette, then. Somebody must do it—and the Jewess will not—so it must be you. So ... allez-vous en, my dear, and don't argue the toss with me."

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Roche did a double-take. He had just been watching Jilly's resistance crumble when don't argue the toss was incongruously delivered in a strange nasal tone only a moment after he had puzzled out the Jewess— the Jewess was Meriel Stephanides, of course—it had to be ... and the nuance of anti-semitism (never far away in this class—shades of Captain Dreyfus!) was really no surprise at all. But don't argue the toss—?

"Off you go, then!" Madame Peyrony gestured imperiously to dismiss the super-intelligent female ornament of the British Embassy in Paris.

The super-intelligent ornament went like a lamb, without a second glance at the ersatz paratrooper from Fontainebleau, who sat down like another lamb as he had been told to do.

"Now, Captain Roche—" Captain Roche was a little bit too hot already after having been too cold, Captain Roche decided.

"—what exactly is it that you are doing here?" Much too hot—

"Doing, Madame?" Hotter still. "I'm on leave—"

“On leave, naturally. But why here?"

Hot, to be precise, under the collar: she shouldn't be asking a simple question like that—accusingly, as though she didn't expect the first answer to be truthful, thereby ruling out any conventional response about the beauty of the countryside and the attraction of foie gras and truffles. So all he was left with was Thompson's bloody bastides—

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"I'm by way of being a student of medieval history, Madame."

God! It sounded thin, and how he wished it was Thompson himself who had to spread it! "You have some very fine bastides round here—Beaumont and Monpazier and Domme, for example."

The only thing to say for the bastides was they were so unlikely that she might accept them . . .

"In fact, I was only looking at the church in Neuville this afternoon, with Lady Alexandra—" He paused as something changed in her expression.

"There is wine on the table beside you. Captain. Please pour yourself a glass. Nothing for me, thank you."

The decanter weighed a ton and the long-stemmed glasses were as fragile as eggshells.

He turned back to her finally, after having made heavy weather of pouring, like a peasant unused to such artefacts.

The wine was golden-yellow, and much too sweet for him.

She sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap. "Is it Alexandra, then?"

"Madame?"

"If it had been Gillian she would not have let me send her away." It was almost as though she was talking to herself.

"And you are not a mouse— paras are not mice . . . and it will not be the Jewess."

"I beg your pardon, Madame Peyrony?" It was well enough to relegate the bastides to the nearest wastepaper basket, where dummy5

they belonged, but the repetition of Jewess was beginning to set his teeth on edge.

"The question is, if it is Alexandra, is it with her father's knowledge? The man, David Audley—he would be a mistake, but she is aware of that. . . but at least he would be suitable."

He was just about to say 'What the hell are you talking about?' suitably bowdlerised for the occasion, when he remembered Raymond Galles's advice: he knew exactly what she was talking about, and that would be a stupid lie.

The realisation of how close he had been to such stupidity cooled him down. The age in which she lived had long passed, but she lived in it still. Also, Madame Goutard would have described to her the sheep's eyes Lexy had made at him after the episode in the shop.

Actually, marriage to Lexy wouldn't be so bad, once he had become accustomed to her cooking. Marriage to Jilly would be even better, and certainly more stimulating . . . but with a senior peer of the House of Lords for a father-in-law, and an American heiress for a mother-in-law . . . Champeney-Perowne multiplied by Vanderhorn divided by Roche might still produce a sum total big enough to protect him from the simple addition of all his enemies. It was only a pity that such prospects were altogether Utopian.

But, more immediately, Madame Peyrony's technique of thinking aloud was an interesting one.

"And I'm not suitable, Madame?" His brain shifted into the dummy5

right gear. " A para, but not suitable?"

"I did not say that, Captain."

"But you implied that." It was like crossing swords.

"And you did not answer my question."

"It was ... an insulting question." And he would win, because he had more at stake. "If you will permit me to say so." But as yet he wasn't sure how he was going to win, that was all.

She took stock of him. The lightweight suit was right (expensive, but not too expensive; a little rumpled, but he was on leave); and the tie was only his old hockey club's, but it looked like something better; and the haircut was safely French military, Fontainebleau '57. And she already knew that he spoke Parisian French, and an Englishman who didn't speak the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe couldn't be all bad, especially an English para.

"You are not married, that is certain," she pronounced that judgement with an air of finality, because that was her technique. And although he didn't know how she had arrived at it he knew instinctively that the answer to his question, how to win? lay within reach.

"No, I'm not married." It was a risk, but not a very great risk

—certainly not a very great risk for a para accustomed to risks. And, finally, instinct also made him want to talk, and for once not lie while talking.

"I was engaged once, unofficially, Madame. But never married— definitely not married, Madame." She didn't dummy5

interrupt. Wise woman!

"She was an American girl. I met her during the Korean War, Madame— while I was in Japan, after I'd been posted out of Korea."

Cultural shock: Japan is beautiful, and the people are kind and ordinary . . . just ordinary people, no better and no worse, in spite of the true stories of Changi and the Siamese railway, and Imphal and Kohima—

"She was very beautiful, Madame. Beautiful like ... the Jewess. And intelligent—like Gillian. . . and slim like her, too.

And as full of life as Lady Alexandra." Perhaps all that was a bit too good to be true, after six years of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles—maybe not so beautiful, and not so intelligent and not so full of life. Maybe nervous at times, and highly-strung, and full of doubt about America, and where it was going, and what it was doing in the name of Liberty and 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' and 'the government of the people, by the people, for the people'. But Julie still—Julie always—

' In War it is as it is in Love. . . Whether she be good or bad, one gives one's best once, to one only—'

True! So Madame Peyrony had nothing to worry about—

though this was not quite yet the moment to tell her so.

"She killed herself." There was no way of making it other than brutal: it was brutal. "She told me once, the way to go was to swim out—there was a current on the bay where we dummy5

used to swim, if you went far enough out in the evening it would carry you out to sea, the fishermen said—and swim and swim and swim, until it didn't matter any more, until the sea and the sky joined. And that's what she did. Tout simplement!"

He'd only met Madame Peyrony five minutes before, and never before had he told that to anyone, because there was no one to tell who didn't have someone else to tell it to.

But Madame had no one to tell it to, only the resident ghosts, who couldn't tell it to anyone else, so it was all right to tell it to her.

And, besides, now was the time to tell it anyway, even if she did pass it on. Because now he was breaking faith with Julie—

and because now, in a few days' time anyway, it wouldn't matter either way! Tout simplement!

"Why?"

He hardly heard the question, it was asked so softly. But he had intended to answer it anyway.

"It was a bad time. The bomb . . . MacArthur . . . Senator McCarthy— Senator McCarthy most of all—the senate sub-committee investigation. . . Julie's step-father worked for the government, and he'd subscribed to all sorts of causes, from the Spanish Civil War onwards . . . And she adored him—he was a great chap, a nice man—"

Julie's Harry, who knew all about England, as no other American he had ever met knew about the country, from his dummy5

service there in the war— even knew about the railways there, the very lines over which his own father had driven his engine— the old London North-Eastern—

" You've got a great chance in England, boy, to make real Socialism work— to show the Russians how to do it, so they can get it right. . . they're trying to, and they'll get the hang of it if you can show them the way—"

He was relieved Harry hadn't seen Suez. But he was even more glad he'd missed the East German riots and Poland, and above all the Hungarian massacres; they would have done the job just as surely as McCarthy had done, perhaps even more cruelly—

"He committed suicide. He shot himself with this German pistol he brought back from the war. He wrote a letter—"

Dearest Julie—

"—he wrote her a letter, explaining why."

She waited until she was sure he wasn't going on. He wanted her to ask the question.

"And because of that—because of her step-father—?"

"Also because of me. She wrote me a letter also—"

My own David—

"Because of you?"

"She'd decided I ought to be a teacher. But I was in the Army then . . . she got it all mixed up—she thought, if they found out about her, and then about Harry . . . with the way Senator dummy5

McCarthy was hunting down people with the wrong connections. . . she had this crazy idea that they'd throw me out of the Army, and then they wouldn't let me teach after that. She said I'd be tagged as a 'subversive'—it's funny, really."

"Funny?"

"Harry wouldn't have made that mistake. He would have known that it wouldn't have made any difference to my becoming a teacher. They don't work that way in England, he would have known. They couldn't have cared less—

particularly in the sort of school I wanted to teach in ... not even if I'd been Stalin's stepson-in-law—or Krushchev's . . .

and McCarthy never carried any weight in England—Harry would have known all that. But Julie didn't, that's all."

She stared at him. "And that is ... funny?" She was questioning the word, not the fact.

"Ironic, is what I mean, Madame."

"Ah!" she nodded. " 'A funny sort of cobber' means 'a strange one', not a humorist. And 'funny business' is not comedy, but the exact opposite—I remember." Her wrinkled eyelids closed momentarily.

'Cobber' was purest Australian; and, more than that, she pronounced the word with an authentic Aussie twang. And yet there was no Aussie in her 'funny business', it was drawled in what might almost have been American.

She was staring at him again. "And the army too? They would dummy5

not have cared?"

Roche shrugged. "I was only a National Service officer at the time—a conscript. I was due to be demobbed—demobilised—

pretty soon, anyway. It might have worried them a bit, in some ways. But it wouldn't have worried me, anyway." She frowned suddenly. "That surprises you, Madame?"

"You did not teach ... in this school of yours?" She nodded, still frowning. "You remained in the army . . . Yes, that surprises me."

Roche relaxed. They had prepared him for this one long ago, if his connection with Julie had ever surfaced. It was another in the long succession of ironies that he had never needed their carefully rehearsed explanation until now, for a purpose and an interrogation very different from the one they had envisaged.

"In what way, Madame?" But it would do, just the same, their explanation.

"After such a tragedy . . . such a mockery. . . you must have been a very young man—" the hint of a sad smile crossed her mouth "—you are not an old man even now ... I would have expected bitterness, if not anger, Captain."

Roche constructed his own frown carefully, as Raymond Galles had advised him to do. "Against whom Madame?"

"Against those in power. Against the . . . the brass-hats? The hats of brass, is it?"

Again the strange—funny-strange—pronunciation: it might dummy5

almost be broad Yorkshire this time.

"The Establishment?"

"The Establishment? That is new to me ... But—the Establishment— yes, that has the right sound and the right meaning," she nodded, mimicking him. "The . . .

Establishment—yes!"

She echoed him again exactly. And that, of course, was what she was doing, thought Roche, the mists clearing from his mind. Once upon a time many Allied escapers had passed through this house, and some of them must have stayed for days, until the coast was clear, since it was an emergency hide-out for the times when the normal route was compromised. Australians, Americans, Yorkshiremen—they had all come and gone, leaving nothing behind them but memories and the echoes of their dialects in the vocabulary of this elderly French lady, who had an ear for the music of language!

"Oh . . . the I see—" He felt himself warming to her, with her so beautifully and carefully enunciated mongrel English and all the courageous stories behind it which would never be told, of bomber crews from Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, from Bradford and Brisbane and Boise, Idaho. But there was a cold layer beneath the warm one: if she could hear and remember so much, could she hear and distinguish the untruth also— Raymond Galles had warned him that her ear was razor sharp? "Yes—angry, certainly Madame."

That was the very truth, he was safe there: first the dummy5

paralysing shock of grief and despair . . . then— then anger and bitterness both, which he had been too cowardly to turn into outright rebellion, which had been in a fair way to turn into the lethargic boredom of serving out his time as a messenger-boy in Japan, hauling brief-cases of decoded intercepts from American to British headquarters in a humiliating one-way traffic—

How he had hated the Americans then . . . hated the Americans, and hated the British by simple extension, the servile allies of the hated Americans, who had killed his Julie

— his American— and now received the scraps from their master's table, carried in the brief-case chained to his wrist, the very ball-and-chain of servitude!

—until that evening, that never-to-be-forgotten evening, along the very beach from which Julie had swum out. . .

along which they had walked so many times, to which he had returned. . . all you have to do is swim out until the current takes you, and cherishes you—

"—anger, certainly, Madame." Pain. "Anger—yes."

Nod. "Yet you remained in the Army?"

Smile, bitterly but knowingly. "But anger against whom?"

Against whom?

He had felt, even beyond anger and bitterness and grief—he had felt impotence!

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He could have ripped open the brief-case, and scattered its contents along the way, or made a bonfire of it. But they had copies of it, and other officers to carry it—the uselessness of the gesture, as well as his own cowardice, had baffled him, even though the thought of going back to teach in England without Julie had filled him with despair.

And then, out of the soft blue of the Japanese evening, had come the offer of revenge, unexpected and unlocked for—

revenge, yet at the same time a keeping-faith with Julie and Harry, and a keeping-faith with his own idealism—

Or had it really been idealism?

It was hard to think back now, to remember what he had really thought— how he had really thought, and why he had thought as he had done: it was like trying to capture the thoughts of a stranger, to re-capture his own thoughts from time past.

Anger and bitterness and grief and impotence and . . .

And boredom?

Perhaps if the war had flared up again ... but it was clear at British headquarters, even to the errand-boys, that the Americans and the Chinese had both had enough of Korea—

Perhaps if Julie . . . but without Julie the idea of going back to do what they had planned to do together, always together

—

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Instead, there had been nothing but anger and bitterness and grief and impotence, and boredom and cowardice and irresolution and uncertainty, and maybe plain foolishness too, and maybe also idealism—but at the time he had only recognised the first four of them, and the last one . . . But they had been enough, all of them together, to open the wound through which the parasite had entered his blood-stream, to take him over— Christ! Was that how it had really been?

"Anger against whom, Captain?" Madame Peyrony prompted him gently, watching him with an intentness entirely devoid of gentleness.

The contrast between the voice and the expression was disconcerting, even almost frightening: that intense stare, half-veiled but not concealed by the wrinkled eyelids, was better suited to Genghis Khan's eyes, or Clinton's, than to those of an old lady in her boudoir—better suited to a small room without windows than to a boudoir.

Anger against whom? He must lie well now, and better than well, his own instinct more than Raymond Galles shouted at him: the past he must remember must be the version which the Comrades had so carefully created for him, not the newer and heretical interpretation which had directed his actions over the past few days.

He sighed. "I had a friend once, Madame ... a brother officer in Tokyo ... he was knocked over and killed by a police car."

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Pause. "The police car was badly driven." Pause again. "But it was pursuing a bank robber nevertheless."

She continued to stare at him, giving nothing away.

"I suppose I was angry with the police driver . . . even though the road was slippery at the time, I was angry. But not for long." Final pause, longer than the others. "Without the Communists, Madame ... or without the Russians, if you prefer . . . Joseph McCarthy would have been just another stupid politician."

There had been a lot more, to be used as required, according to the depth of the interrogation. The six-year-old lines came back to Roche with mocking clarity, even to the small amendments he had decided to make on his own account (no patriotic young Englishman would have referred to 'Soviet expansionism' in a month of Sundays when he meant simply

'Russian aggression'...).

But this was not the time and place, and not the interrogator, for a lot more. The lie they had given him would stick here, or not at all, Roche judged.

Madame Peyrony subsided slowly into her chair, becoming somehow smaller and more ancient as she did so. "I will have a little wine now, Captain, if you please."

Perhaps it was not the lie which had stuck, but the truth itself. Because somewhere along the years, and particularly since the bloodbath in Hungary last year, he had realised that the lie was the truth indeed—that the false reasons they had dummy5

given him to give to the British ought always to have been his own true reasons for fighting them—that he had deluded himself, and been deluded; and that, worse still, that Julie and Harry had in some sense been deluded too, and had played an innocent part in deluding him.

But he had to pour the wine.

"And for yourself, Captain."

His hand shook. How incredibly sure the Comrades must have been of him, to feed him the truth to use, confident that he would accept it as untruth!

"I'm all right, thank you, Madame." He watched her sip the Monbazillac.

She inclined her head. "Very well... so I will apologise to you, young man—of course. . . But not unreservedly."

"Not. . . unreservedly?" He was glad she was forcing him to forget the humiliation of his previous thoughts.

She nodded. "You have set one of my fears at rest. You must understand that I have certain responsibilities so far as Alexandra is concerned. Alexandra is—shall we say—

vulnerable?"

Roche smiled. "Or susceptible?"

"Vulnerable, Captain. To be fair to you, since I am apologising for this, I will tell you that last year she formed a liaison with a young man—not such as yourself, but a foreigner, Captain."

That was rather hard on Lexy's CIA boyfriend, thought dummy5

Roche. And doubly hard, since the CIA man was technically not a foreigner so far as Lexy was concerned, as well as being very much like Captain Roche in another way.

"Altogether not suitable, in fact?" he said mischievously.

"Unlike me?"

She sipped her wine.

"But then . . . I'm not in the least interested in Alexandra, of course," added Roche.

She set the glass down carefully. "Just so, Captain. But then what is it that interests you? And I beg you not to tell me anything more about bastides ... I am certain that you know all that there is to know about them. But I am equally convinced that you are not in the least interested in them."

She paused momentarily. "Are you acquainted with 'bum steers', Captain?" This time the pause was even briefer. "I presume you are, so you will understand me when I say that I believe you are endeavouring to sell such an animal to me, and I am not about to purchase it."

Roche managed to close his mouth, but decided that he had better not question this animal's precise pedigree.

"I said that you had. . .allayed—that is the word— allayed. . .

one of my fears. I suppose that an old woman, and a stranger also, might be flattered that you have told me so much ... so much of such a very personal nature . . . in order to reassure me as to Alexandra's safety. But not this old woman, Captain." Madame Peyrony paused yet again, this time for dummy5

effect. "For now this old woman has another fear, which you have not allayed. And I will tell you why, in order to spare us both the waste of time which bastides, and whatever else you have ready, might otherwise . . . otherwise ..." she searched for the appropriate English word, but in vain.

" 'Occasion'?" Roche discovered that his mouth was dry from lack of use.

" 'Occasion'?" She filed the verb away for checking, but without accepting it into her vocabulary, as though it might be another 'bum steer'. "Very well ... so you have given me your confidence, which I do not believe a man such as you gives easily, and least of all after you have been insulted to your face . . . and by 'an old witch', which is Alexandra's favoured word for me, yes?"

But Roche was back to tight-lipped silence. If she knew that then she probably knew the maker's tag on his underpants, and she certainly knew too much for comfort.

But how? And, just as important—or more important— why?

"So . . . there will be a reason for that, because no young man from Fontainebleau, who is interested in bastides, but not in Alexandra, wastes his time with 'an old witch'—to tell her that he is a para. . . and also in some sort maybe a policeman too—"

She cut off there, at 'policeman', quite deliberately, to let him react. But of course she had known that all along, probably even without the scattered groundbait of Fontainebleau and what he had deliberately told her.

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"Policeman, Madame?" If she wanted him to react then he would do so. But he kept denial out of his voice.

"Of a particular type. Does it surprise you that an old witch should know about policemen?"

No, it didn't surprise him—not this old witch . . . of all old witches. If she had run escaping aircrew through her backyard, the men who had left their vernacular in her vocabulary, and lived to tell the tale, then she would know about policemen indeed; and not just the village gendarme, who was probably in her pocket, but other more particular and deadly types, from Darnand's original Vichy bully-boys and their Milice française successors to the professionals of the Abwehr and the Gestapo, who had decimated the resistance movement between them.

So—no lies now, except life-and-death ones. Because if she had passed herself off to all those in-some-sort policemen as an innocent old lady, then an innocent old lady she most certainly wasn't. "No, Madame. It doesn't surprise me."

She stared at him in silence for a moment. "But naturally,"

she said drily. "I am . . . like the bastides of course."

Madame?"

"You have done your homework on me."

Well. . . here was a necessary lie, if not a life-and-death one: she would surely find the truth of the combined incompetence of the British and the Russians unflattering, if not unbelievable.

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"Not quite like the bastides, Madame." Roche decided to outflank the lie with a compliment. "Your defences are in better order."

She accepted the statement with the ghost of a smile, but in silence. She wanted more than that.

"But I would be fascinated to know . . ." he let himself trail off deliberately. "That is to say, I've never thought that I looked like a policeman— of any type." He gave her a wry smile, as boyish as he could make it, backing his instinct that if she had a weakness it might be for a young ex-para, albeit an English ex-para and an in-some-sort policeman, who could take defeat like a gentleman, with good grace.

Again, the moment's stare in silence. "On the face of it you don't, Captain. But also you remind me of someone, and in part it is because I see him in you, I think." The ghost-smile remained, but now it haunted a sad memory. "I think also . . .

perhaps I should not tell you."

"Tell me." Roche knew, with self-revealing eagerness, that if she told him this then she would withhold nothing. "Please."

"He was an enemy." She weakened.

"A Frenchman?"

"No. A German, I think."

"You . . . think?"

"He claimed to be a Surf Efrican. Perhaps he was, though he was not the Surf Efrican whose identity discs he had."

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Roche frowned. "A Surf—?"

"From Trekkersburg in the province of Natal. Pete—Pi-et—

Prinsloo was his name. Or not his name."

South African! Her impeccable ear had picked up the original sound, and had retained it across the years.

"He was very young and very brave—to do what he was doing needed courage, even though he was our enemy. And handsome . . ." Her eyes glazed for an instant, then focussed sharply on Roche. "You understand, Captain, that we ran an escape route through this place during the war?"

Roche nodded wordlessly.

"Of course—you know!" She nodded back. "But what you do not know is how a good escape route works—not as a continuous road, but a series of independent links which do not touch each other, so that if one link is broken the others are still safe. And . . . and so the way to destroy the route is not to break it, but to introduce one of your men into it, to pass along it from link to link until the last one—and then ..."

She blinked at Roche. "But perhaps you know all this?"

Roche said nothing.

"No matter. We were on our guard against such men—we had our methods too. And we could not afford to have any mercy on them, for the sake of our own lives as well as our work." She gazed at Roche sadly. "But he was beautiful, was Pi-et. He helped me cut—" she frowned "—no, prune is the word—prune the roses in the garden, by the wall near the dummy5

stables where the sun shines all the afternoon. And that is where he lies now, Captain—under the roses in the sunshine, whoever he is—whoever he was—under my beautiful roses.

Which is a good place for a brave man, do you not think—

even an enemy?"

Roche's backbone was made of ice. The Château Peyrony, with its garden planted so, was no place for double agents.

"You are shocked?" Madame Peyrony shook her head slowly.

"I should not have told you, do you see?"

He licked his lips. "Only—" the word came out as a croak "—

only because I remind you of him, Madame. I wouldn't like you to think that I'm brave enough to qualify for your rose garden—I'm much too frightened for that honour."

For an instant he was afraid that his nervousness had made him too flippant, but then she smiled—not a ghost-smile, but a genuine old-witch-smile of pleasure edged with a touch of malice.

"He was frightened also, Captain—courage without fear is a counterfeit louis d'or made of lead, with heads on both sides.

That is how you are both alike: you are both hunters who are also hunted, I think. That is what I see in you."

God! thought Roche—after what Jilly had said that was more than disquieting, it was positively macabre! If she could see his fear in his face—if both of them could see it, or smell it, or somehow sense it with some sixth sense—then what had Genghis Khan and Clinton seen?

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The malice became triumphant, and then abruptly vanished, leaving only a pure smile. "But do not despair, Captain—you are the true hunter, the honourable hunter, not like my late husband and his friends with their shotguns in the forest—

you are the original hunter."

The original hunter? For once her strange but impeccable English must have deserted her, decided Roche.

She observed his confusion. "You are going to the Tower tonight, to the orgy?"

The original hunter's confusion only became greater. "To stay with David Audley?" The original hunter managed to nod to that.

"Good. So there you will meet another Jew—Professor Stein of Cambridge University—"

The nuance of contempt in her voice snapped the hunter's confusion. "Colonel Stein, you mean, Madame?"

Colonel Stein?"

"Late of the Israeli Air Force." Roche heard his own voice sharpen with outrage. "And late of the Royal Air Force, DFC—

Distinguished Flying Cross, Madame. Professor Colonel Stein

—yes?" He wasn't going to put up with that any longer, and she wouldn't help him if she despised him.

Her lips compressed into a thin line, puckering the wrinkled skin round her mouth with lines of displeasure. "He is a friend of yours?"

He gave her the wry-boyish-English-gentleman's smile, as dummy5

near as he could resurrect it, instinct encouraging him to stake all he had left on it. "I shalln't know that until I've met him. Maybe he is—maybe he isn't." He shrugged. "Does he know about original hunters, this . . . Colonel Professor Stein?"

The frown disappeared, and the displeasure too. She gazed at him sardonically. "As a matter of fact, he does. He is an authority on them."

The penny dropped inside Roche's memory. Stein was an expert on paleolithic art and this region was famous for its prehistoric remains. "Ah— the cave painters."

She shook her head. "The cave painters were not hunters, they were priests—their pictures were hunting-magic, to help the hunters."

"Indeed?" Roche was mightily relieved to be out of recent history and safely in prehistory.

"So I am told." The old-witch malice flashed. "Obviously you are not an expert in such matters, but only in bastides!”

"Among other things." He bowed. "But you see me as an ancient hunter, nevertheless?"

"Ancient—of course! How foolish of me, Captain!"

"Original will do. It's the 'true and honourable' I don't quite understand, Madame."

"It is simple. The hunters of today in these parts kill small game with big guns—my late husband's gun room is still full of them. But ten thousand, twenty thousand years ago in dummy5

these same parts . . . along this ridge and in the valleys below . . . they hunted big game with spears tipped with flint

— and the lions and tigers hunted them at the same time."

Yes, thought Roche grimly, and being human, or nearly, they probably hunted each other too! Though, being poor savages, they only killed each other for the pot, not to keep the red flag flying or the world safe for democracy . . .

"I see." But she was still playing with him, and she had been doing that for long enough. "So I am the hunter and the hunted. And you have concluded that simply by looking at me?"

"And listening to you, Captain. It seems to me that so far we have both been agreeably open with each other, up to a point.

From which we may further conclude that we each want something from the other, would you not say?"

The old—witch! But what could she possibly want?

"Fair enough, Madame." And what had he to offer? "I won't. . . how shall we say? . . . trifle with Lady Alexandra's affections?"

" 'Trifle'?" She savoured the word. "You think you could?"

"I don't see why not. They'd be worth trifling with."

"You would do better with Gillian."

"She wouldn't have me."

She nodded. "Yes—she's a clever child. But you are not here for that."

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"How do you know that?"

"Because I have been expecting you. Or someone like you."

What? Someone . . . like me?"

"Of course. This is my territory, Captain—my ridge, my valleys, my villages. Since a child—my territory . . . child, young girl, young woman, wife, mother, old woman—old witch, as Alexandra would say. So the spells here are my spells, not yours—not David Audley's, not the Jewess's, not any stranger's, but mine. You are a hunter, Captain, but now you are hunting in my territory. You are not the first of your kind, remember?" Roche remembered the rose garden, and the young German. "But I do not know everything any more—

there was a time when I did, but times change—"

And on whose side was Madame Peyrony, for God's sake?

"—yet I still feel the pulse—I know when there is something there in the dark which should not be there, that something is loose out there." She pointed towards the window.

The light in the room turned the late evening outside into inky blackness. But that 'something loose' was nothing so innocent as any sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear out of the original hunter's deepest memory: it was the modern horror of man stalking man, the unknown enemy which Wimpy would have identified as negotium perambulans in tenebris—

something wicked, to make the thumbs prick . . . something hunting out of human conviction, not out of honest hunger . . .

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Christ! If he continued along this road he would reduce himself to a quivering jelly of fear, out of pure imagination!

There were only men and women out there, like himself; and Madame Peyrony was only a frightened old woman, by herself in a frightening old house in the dark; and she was only on her side, and he was only on his side; and all each of them wanted to do was to survive, and not go into the dark.