The Old Vengeful

—are you going to join us?"

"Of course not—not when you're talking business—and do make it 'Faith', Paul, please . . . Elizabeth, are you all right?

Are you absolutely famished?"

Faith Audley at the best of times, on neutral ground, would have demoralised Elizabeth. Maybe she was all Paul Mitchell had said— and, to be hatefully fair, from the gentle and sympathetic putting-at-ease with which she'd greeted her dishevelled guest, she probably was a nice woman. But that slender, elegant blondeness, and the equally stylish cut of the working-clothes, jeans-and-shirt, not to mention the expert make-up and hint of very expensive scent, was positively debilitating.

"No, I'm fine, Faith." She was, to be accurate, absolutely famished. But there was also another hunger inside her now, which required more urgent satisfaction. "Really I am."

"I'm sure you're not . . . I've had to feed Cathy to stop her falling apart . . . But it won't be long—" she switched her attention back to Paul "—the office phoned again, Paul, to say dummy3

they're en route . . . But meanwhile you are instructed to spill the beans to Elizabeth, David says—whatever the beans are . . . But I'm sure that means more to you than me—

entendu?"

" Entendu, madame—Faith," Paul Mitchell bowed. " Bien entendu."

"Ye-ess." She gave him a slightly jaundiced look. "You and my David are two of a kind, I've always suspected. Which means . . . for Miss Loftus—for you, Elizabeth, beanz meanz troublez."

"Not at all!" Paul protested. "It means that your David reposes confidence in Elizabeth's superlative loyalty and common sense— beanz meanz secretz."

"Hmmm ..." Faith had the height to look down her nose at the world, and the right shape of nose for looking down. "It sounds very much like the same thing to me. As long as you don't repose the same confidence in them, Elizabeth, that's all."

Paul watched her depart, frowning slightly at that final, left-handed, half-affectionate insult.

None of that mattered, though—it was those names which mattered.

"One of them lived to tell the tale, Paul—you said that just as we arrived." And a very curious tale, too; and it was irritating also—it was more than that, it was infuriating—how the effect of arriving at the manor house, and being met by dummy3

Faith Audley immediately, had abated her curiosity until now.

"The tale?" His mind seemed to be elsewhere.

She pointed at the type-script. "In Father's chapter—except for Lieutenant Chipperfield he never had the names of any of the survivors. He only had what that one sailor who reached Verdun told the senior naval officer there—that Chipperfield's party had escaped the fortress at Lautenbourg, in Alsace—and the conflicting stories the French put out . . .

it's all in there, darn it, Paul—" the abstracted expression on his face irritated her further "—but he had nothing on the midshipman, and the gunner's mate or anyone else."

"Oh yes." He surfaced from his thoughts. "But I've got a much more curious tale for you now. And one that'll interest you much more, too . . . Number Thirteen, you might say."

"Number—Thirteen? But there wasn't a thirteenth Vengeful

—"

"Not a British one. But there is a Russian one." He studied her, no longer smiling, as though the thoughts from which he had surfaced had sobered him.

"A Russian ship, Paul?" For a moment the jolly boat's crew became insignificant.

"No, not exactly. Not a ship, that is." He stopped, and Elizabeth sensed an unwillingness in him which hadn't been there before.

"Not a ship? What's the matter, Paul?"

dummy3

"Nothing." He shook his head. "If David wants you to know, then I must assume it's all right. . . But it's a big secret, Elizabeth. And big secrets are heavy burdens to carry—and dangerous too."

"But not here, you said." The change in him made her feel uneasy.

"No—not here—of course!" He smiled suddenly, shrugging off his own doubts. " Not a ship . . . more like an idea. The Russians have these ideas, you know—bright ideas or nasty ideas, according to taste, and it's our job to see them off...

like in that verse of the National Anthem that we never sing:

'Frustrate their knavish tricks—Confound their po-li-tics'."

"The Russians, you mean?"

"The Russians among others. But them at this moment, for you and me, trying to do us down." The last of the momentary cloud had lifted from him. "It's too easy, really—

we're too easy—there are a million ways of taking us to the cleaners . . . even you can think of examples, Elizabeth—from Klaus Fuchs and the Burgess and Maclean lot—all the bad boys and poor fools from Cambridge . . . before my time, naturally . . . right down to the professionals of today, with all their gadgets—and the Judas goats leading what they call 'the useful fools' up the garden path to the knackers' yard—the brave sons of Ireland in the IRA and the honest pacifists in CND . . . Christ! I sometimes wish I was working for the KGB

—we make it so easy for them . . . But no matter! The point is that their knavish tricks don't happen by accident and dummy3

haphazardly—obviously. They're planned, you see.

Obviously."

"Paul—"

"But bear with me, Elizabeth, because there's a point behind that point. . . Which is how they're planned—and I don't mean the routine stuff, like updating the NATO order-of-battle and so on, which has to go on all the time, but the really clever stuff—I mean the one-off high-grade operations." He paused. "Because they have these experts—

dozens of them—who make a special study of us, and receive all the intelligence digests appropriate to their specialisations. And they're expected to come up with ideas for development, most of which get turned down, but some of which go on to the expert-experts—top brass with brains and field experience. And they pick and choose from the short list, and run feasibility studies on their preferences.

And if an idea comes up alpha-plus in their book it gets what they call 'Project Status', and then it goes on up to the real top brass—the KGB politicals, who reckon to know which way the wind is blowing in the Kremlin as well as in the West. And they put a tick or a cross beside each project. . .

and the crosses are sent back down the line marked 'Must do better', or something . . . But the ticked ones—they cease to be projects and become operations. And once a project is given 'Operational Status' it gets a code-name and goes off to the operational planners—and finally to the poor bastards who have to do the work, like our friend Novikov. Are you dummy3

still with me so far, Elizabeth?"

"Yes."

"It isn't difficult, I agree. And I suppose we do much the same thing, only on a much smaller scale due to our poverty."

She frowned at him. "And this is what you do?"

"Lord, no! I'm in Crime Prevention, not Burglary—I'm in the Knavish Tricks Frustration Department, Elizabeth. It's their projects which are my operations."

Elizabeth realised that she had once more been slow on the uptake, like any tiro, and Paul Mitchell was treating her more gently than she deserved. "Yes . . . I'm sorry, Paul. . . And now what you're going to tell me is that there's a Russian operation which is codenamed 'Vengeful'—is that it?"

His face was a picture. "No . . . no, that's not quite it. Because if that was the case we wouldn't be interested in any Vengeful, from Number One to infinity—and you'd be sitting safe at home in front of the telly now, Elizabeth."

She had been slow again somehow—slow to the point of stupidity, although she couldn't see where this time. And he was smiling at her again too; but not his insincere smile, which always revealed a hint of teeth between his lips, but a genuine closed-mouth smile which creased his cheeks.

"This one's the pay-off, Elizabeth—the difference between Project Status and Operational Status . . . All you have to do is imagine Winston Churchill writing to Franklin Roosevelt dummy3

in 1942 or '43 . . . Dear FDR— About the invasion of Europe, we think the Normandy Project is the one we should go for, and henceforth we'll call it Operation Overlord. Yours ever, Winston . . . Don't look so sad just because you can't run before you can walk, dear Elizabeth—it's simply that operational code-names by definition don't mean a thing, it's only project names which spill the beans. Just think what Hitler would have done if he'd picked up 'Normandy' rather than 'Overlord'—okay?"

Elizabeth could only nod, still ashamed, because getting anywhere too late was still just as bad as not getting there at all, and not boring him with lack of intelligence was all she had to offer him.

"Getting a Project Name is a very rare occurrence, like winning the pools. What's much more usual—in fact, what I've been doing the last year or two in my own specialisation

—is trying to work out in advance what the most likely projects could be, so that we can set about frustrating them."

"How do you do that?"

He shrugged. "How indeed! It's a bit like forecasting the future from the entrails of a sheep ... we try to identify their project planners first, and then what they specialise in. And then we postulate the information they're likely to get, and so on."

"But this time . . . you got 'Vengeful'." Elizabeth hadn't concentrated so hard since her viva at Oxford, when she knew she was on the borderline. "But this time it hasn't dummy3

helped you."

"What makes you think that, now?" He put the question casually, but she could sense the change from boredom to curiosity.

"Practically everything that's happened to me. Coming to see me was supposed to be just routine, for a start."

"Everything is routine to start with." He parried the truth neatly. "Ask any policeman."

"Researching single-ship actions of the Napoleonic War is routine? That's what policemen usually do?"

"I've done more unlikely things." This time the teeth showed in the smile.

"I've said something that amuses you?" She didn't like that smile.

"No. I was just remembering that I once said much the same thing to David Audley, years ago—that what I was doing was an unlikely thing to do."

"And how did he reply?"

"Oh ... he said that the past always lies in ambush for the present, waiting to get even." The smile vanished. "But you are right: I didn't think your Vengeful—or any of your Vengefuls—could possibly have anything to do with their

'Project Vengeful'."

"But you do now?"

He looked at her, but not quite inscrutably. "Now ... I also dummy3

think of everything that's happened—to both of us. And I think of Novikov . . . because Novikov is real—he's not a Napoleonic single-ship action, or a crew-member from a jolly boat—Novikov is KGB, and the KGB isn't a registered charity, or a funny set of initials to frighten the children with when they won't settle down, or any other sort of imaginary bugbear that doesn't really matter—" he caught himself as though he could hear the change in his own voice. "You have to understand what the KGB is, Elizabeth: it's the militant arm of the Soviet State outside Soviet territory—and inside it as well, but inside doesn't concern us— here concerns us ...

and I've seen it kill here— plan to kill, and then kill someone who got in the way of the killing, without a second thought—

and that was a bloody 'project' too, which became an operation . . ." Again he caught himself, this time scrubbing his face clean before he continued. "So you've got to watch out for yourself now. Don't depend on Audley—don't even trust me . . . Faith is quite right, we're not really trustworthy, and we're not safe to know."

Something had changed about him. The garden, and the quiet of evening, with the smells of honeysuckle and lavender, were the same. But he was different.

"Why are you telling me this, Paul?"

"Orders, Elizabeth. 'Spill the beans', David said."

She shook her head. "No—why are you warning me?"

He looked at her curiously for a second, and then grimaced.

"You know too much now, Elizabeth."

dummy3

"But you said . . . David Audley trusts me now—?"

He nodded. "That's right. And in my experience that's a damn good reason for not trusting him, I'm sorry to say."

VII

"'HE SHOT AN arrow in the air'—or, to be exact, in the correspondence columns of The Times, which for his purposes was very much better—and it came to earth in the remarkable memory of Miss Irene Cookridge. Which was not at all what he expected, but much more rewarding," said Audley. "So you just read her reply for yourself, Elizabeth."

He reached down the table towards Elizabeth, and she took the letter from him. But although she also caught Paul's eye between the silver candlesticks, with the flames sparkling on the glitter of the cutlery and glass between them—and Del Andrew's eyes too (less cautioning, more frankly curious) in passing—she still felt like the little girl who had found the answers in the back of her book, but still couldn't make her sums add up right—

"Elizabeth—Detective Chief Inspector Andrew, Special Branch— 'Del' to us, apparently, according to my husband . . . Chief Inspector—Miss Elizabeth Loftus—

Elizabeth to us."

First, he was too young—or not first, since she had never met a Chief Inspector of any sort, let alone of the Special dummy3

Branch ... So first, was this the type—more like the young gipsy who'd come up the drive last month, trying to sell a load of asphalt "left over from a job"?

"Hullo, Miss Loftus." The sharp gipsy look was there too, sizing her up unashamedly.

"Chief Inspector." She couldn't quite expel the surprise from her acknowledgement, and was embarrassed to observe the flicker of amusement in his dark eyes.

"And I'm Mitchell." Paul drew the eyes away from her. "I don't believe we've met before, Chief Inspector. But I've heard about you from Colonel Butler."

"No." There was the merest suggestion of an East London naow there, just as there had been the slightest hesitation in the aspirate of hullo, and the eyes were frankly appraising now, with a hint of wariness. "And I've heard about you too, Dr Mitchell."

"Nothing derogatory, I hope?" Under the light tone Paul also sounded just a touch wary.

The Chief Inspector smiled. "You've just given two of my sergeants a lot of paper-work."

"I think I'd better see to the ruins of dinner," murmured Faith. "Are you staying the night, Del?"

"I don't know, madam." The Chief Inspector glanced towards Audley, while Elizabeth envied Faith's ability to handle eccentric situations gracefully.

"I think he is, love." Audley waited until his wife had dummy3

departed before continuing. "To be exact, Paul . . . they've been tidying up your depredations of yesterday to make them fit for any god-fearing coroner."

"I wouldn't call them 'depredations'." The Chief Inspector cocked his head at Paul. "In fact, I got some mates down my old nick who'd buy the first round for you, Dr Mitchell—and all the other rounds, and see you safe home when you couldn't stand up straight. They'd reckon you done them a favour."

"Which reminds me—" Audley moved towards an array of bottles in the corner of the room "—it's Irish whiskey, isn't it, Del?"

"Thank you." The Chief Inspector wasn't overawed by Audley. "All the same, you chanced your arm with Steve Donaghue, Dr Mitchell. Very quick on his feet was old Steve—

for a man his size."

"Steve Donaghue—" Paul swallowed. " Was?"

"Patrick Lawrence Donaghue—'Steve' to his friends, of whom there can't have been very many, because he had a nasty temper . . . yes, we've lost him, Dr Mitchell—to your second bullet though, so we'll count that as self-defence, because he'd 'ave broken your back if he'd reached you. But he doesn't matter—he was just a thick heavy, and somebody would have done 'im sooner or later . . . And much the same goes for little Willie Fullick—someone would have done him sooner, rather than later, because he wasn't nearly as good as he thought he was—lots of talk, but no bottle . . . He reckoned dummy3

he was Steve's brains—and God knows, Steve needed some brains . . . but he wasn't."

"Willie . . . Fullick?" Paul repeated the name softly.

"Thank you—" the Chief Inspector took his glass from Audley, and sipped, and nodded "—very nice . . . yes . . . of course, there was no time for introductions—William Harold Fullick was the look-out man you put down yesterday in the garden . . . But at least he gave you the shooter, and that makes things easier for us to prove self-defence, like it made it easier for you with Steve." Another sip, and a cold smile to go with it. "Funny really—Willie was warned not to carry firearms, that it'd be the death of'im . . . and it was . . . but it'd 'ave been the death of you, Dr Mitchell, if he hadn't—if old Steve 'ad got 'is hands on you." He shook his head at Paul. "Very careless, you were."

Paul said nothing.

"But they don't matter—no one'll cry over those two . . .

though no one'll buy you a drink for them, either." The Chief Inspector stared at Paul for a moment, and then turned towards Elizabeth. "But Julian Oakenshaw—Julian Alexander Carrell Oakenshaw—Bachelor of Arts . . . You are a very lucky lady, Miss Loftus, if I may say so—a very lucky lady."

For the first time ever, Elizabeth wished she had a strong drink in her hand, like yesterday.

"But I think you probably know that—I shouldn't be at all dummy3

surprised—"

"She knows it," snapped Paul. "So what?"

"So I shouldn't explain to her how lucky she is?"

"If she knows it—no."

"Ah! You're worried because he didn't have a shooter—"

"I don't give a damn what he had—"

"He didn't need a shooter." Suddenly Chief Inspector Andrew was all chief inspector, and a thousand years older than Paul Mitchell. "Steve Donaghue maybe killed a couple of men in his time—he certainly crippled a few . . . and Willie Fullick never killed anyone most likely, because he couldn't break the skin on a rice pudding— though it wasn't for lack of trying, and 'e'd 'ave managed it sooner or later . . . with some poor old nightwatchman, or a sub-postmistress maybe . . .

But Julian Oakenshaw killed seven people—six men and one woman—and he killed them slowly, and he enjoyed every minute of it ... And each time we couldn't even prove he was in the same county when he did it, because he was a Bachelor of Arts and he was smart—and that's why my two sergeants are going to fix that report so you'll come up smelling sweeter than the biggest bank of roses you ever saw at Kew Gardens, Dr Mitchell—okay?"

The fact that it was all delivered unemotionally, like a traffic report on a Bank Holiday, served to silence Paul.

"I'm sorry, Miss Loftus—" Del Andrew's dark eyes clouded sympathetically as he saw that, where Paul was merely dummy3

silenced, Elizabeth was actively terrified "—but Dr Audley here wants me to make this plain, so you don't misunderstand anything: this . . . this man Oakenshaw was a real bad bastard—a psychopath of the most dangerous kind—

not just hard, but bad, and crafty with it... Not just your ordinary villain, like I was brought up with, but one of your maximum security throw-away-the-key swine, if we could ever have got our hands on him. So you were lucky, Miss Loftus."

She nodded. "Yes ... I think I do understand that, Chief Inspector."

The eyes—the darkest brown eyes she had ever seen—almost black-brown—darted towards Audley, and then back to her.

"Ye-ess ... he said you would ... So what you want to know now is that for his daily bread Julian Oakenshaw specialised in getting information— like, sometimes, where the really tricky burglar alarms were, an' the electronic gear . . . and industrial espionage, that was up his street too—he had a good analytical brain, and when he was briefed right he always knew what to look for ... The only thing wrong with

'im was that, when the moon was full like last night, he preferred people to be difficult, so he could burn a pretty pattern on them first, before they told him what he wanted to know, before he cut their throats—" Del tensed suddenly "—

sorry, dear—but that's what he would have done, when you'd sung for him. And you would have sung, believe me—that was his stock-in-trade, gettin' results for carriage clients who dummy3

weren't fussy about how he got them, just so they weren't involved: information was his business, an' that always came first. But inflicting pain was his pleasure, an' he liked to mix pleasure with business when the opportunity presented itself and the moon was full, an' he had a clear run."

"And was that well known?" asked Paul.

"In the trade it was—we knew about it. But he was too fly to let anyone pin so much as a charity flag on him . . . like he never used the same talent twice to watch his back, and do his heavy work for him. That pair he had yesterday, that you sorted out. . . that was their first time as well as their last—

an' the first time he picked two dud 'uns too, thank God!"

Mitchell looked at Audley. "Then that doesn't fit, David."

"You don't think so?" Audley seemed to know what didn't fit, but it evidently didn't worry him.

"I know so." Paul caught Elizabeth's eye, but almost without seeming to see her. "The KGB would never sub-contract an important job to a psycho—not in a thousand years." He focussed on her suddcnly, "It's just not their style, damn it!"

He swung back to Audlcy. "And with Novikov sitting in his car, trailing Elizabeth? It never did fit, David—Novikov careless is bad enough, but Novikov there at all cancels his connection with Oakenshaw."

Audley shrugged. "Maybe he was watching over his investment to check on the dividend. Who knows?"

Mitchell frowned at him, then at Chief Inspector Andrew. "Is dummy3

that what you think?"

"What do I think?" Del Andrew finished his drink. "About this Novikov I don't think, because I don't know 'im well enough . . . an' the same goes for 'style', 'cause I haven't been playin' this game long enough to suss it out. But Oakenshaw would have put his grannie through it if the money was right

—that was his style . . . Only, having said all that, it wasn't Comrade Novikov who put the money up for is—you're spot on there, Dr Mitchell."

"Then who was it?" Mitchell brightened.

"It was a right little villain named Danny Kahn—"

"Dinner's on the table," said Faith Audley through the doorway. And you still haven't opened the wine, David—"

Danny Kahn?

The meal, whatever it was like—over-cooked or not—was purgatory for Elizabeth.

Danny Kahn?

HM Frigate Vengeful, 36 guns, 975 tons—

A right little villain, Danny Kahn?

Lieutenant Chipperfield, Mr Midshipman Paget, Gunner's Mate Chard . . . Danny Kahn—?

It was purgatory because, by apparent convention, they dummy3

didn't talk shop in front of Faith Audley during the meal—

that was plain from the start, from the way Faith controlled the conversations at both ends of the table—

Why should a man she had never met hire another man she had also never met to ransack her home and threaten to do such unthinkable things to her—?

"Peckham, Mrs Audley—" Del Andrew obstinately refused to call Faith anything but "Mrs Audley"; Elizabeth had become Elizabeth, and although Drs Audley and Mitchell remained Drs Audley and Mitchell Chief Inspector Andrew plainly wasn't overawed by either of them; but Faith he kept at arm's-length "—Peckham's the real world, all the rest is just a figment of my imagination—'pound note' country—"

Purgatory.

But in the end it came to an end, although not at all the way she expected.

"Very well." Faith gathered them all. "Now I'm going to stack the things, and then I'm going to bed. And Elizabeth ought to go to bed too."

"I'll help you," said Elizabeth dutifully, not wanting to help her, but only wanting to hear about Danny Kahn.

"I'm only going to fill the dish-washer, Elizabeth dear. Mrs Clarke will sort things out in the morning—"

dummy3

"We need Elizabeth," said Audley. "And in the morning you're both going to be busy—you too, love."

"Oh yes?" Faith looked at her husband suspiciously. "How busy, exactly?"

"You're going to Guildford—or wherever you go to waste my substance—and kit her out for travelling from top to ... ah ...

bottom—clothes, shoes, baggage to put 'em in, what she's not wearing—hair—everything, love." Audley peered at his wife over his spectacles and the candles. "Start at dawn, and Paul will meet you at twelve."

"He will?" Paul sounded mutinous. "Will he?"

"I can't possibly do that, David."

"Cancel your engagements."

"It's the time, not the engagements, David. And I go to London for my clothes, anyway."

"There's a smart place in Guildford. I've seen the bills, by God!" Audley gave a snort. "But don't worry about the money

—Her Majesty will pay—"

" I can pay," snapped Elizabeth.

"Hold on, Elizabeth!" exclaimed Paul Mitchell. "With Novikov on the loose—never mind . . . never mind anyone else . . . you'd better think twice about going anywhere, damn it!" He swung towards Audley. "And where is she going? And come to that—where am I going?"

Elizabeth looked at Audley. "Where am I going?"

dummy3

"You're not going anywhere," said Paul. "Because nowhere outside this house is safe."

Audley looked at Elizabeth. "She'll go where she wants to go

— right, Elizabeth?"

"Now you're being devious, darling," said his wife disparagingly.

"I hope so, love—that's what I'm paid to be ... But I know if I say there isn't the slightest danger that will only offend you, even though it's true ... so Aske and Bannen will accompany you tomorrow for the sake of reassurance, if for no other useful purpose, while you make your purchases, until Mitchell arrives to take her from you."

"And then?" Paul sounded unreassured.

"Then, all being well, you shall both go Vengeful- researching somewhere even safer, in so far as that is possible. And you can still keep Aske, if not for protection then as a chaperone."

Audley came back to Elizabeth. "Well, Elizabeth—are you game?"

"Don't agree," advised Paul. "He put the same question to me once—"

"And look at you now!" murmured Audley. "But I'm not going to argue with you, Elizabeth. You have a mind of your own, and can make it up for yourself."

And that was true, thought Elizabeth—true now as it had never been before, even though she was still her father's daughter . . . And, in any case, the incentives hadn't changed.

dummy3

But that, of course, was what David Audley was relying on: he knew his mark better than Faith or Paul did.

She looked from one to the other of them apologetically. "I can't stay here for ever, can I?" she said. "And I do need some new clothes."

"No, it doesn't start with Danny Kahn," said Del. "It only finishes with him. It starts with our doing-over your place, Elizabeth—what we sniffed out as maybe of interest, after Dr Mitchell had finished with it ... which was mostly a lot of junk and dead ends that wasted our time . . . But there was this quarterly account from this taxi firm in London for journeys right across town—Victoria all the way to Whitechapel, north of the river—regular journeys, costing a small fortune . . . an'

that was when I first thought 'aye-aye—something not quite right here' ... so I got on to the firm, an' they remembered your dad—good customer an' all that—an' routed out his regular driver. And after I'd talked to him I dropped everything else, because I'd got this lucky feeling then." He sipped his port and almost winked at her, she thought.

"Whitechapel tube station, that's where he was let off, an'

picked up an hour later each time. And there's only three directions you can go from there—like, back where you came from, or on into deepest Essex . . . Barking, Upminster, Ongar ... or you take the line through to New Cross Gate, under the river—which is the oldest tunnel under the Thames, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunei—Rother'ithe, dummy3

Surrey Docks ... all my old stamping grounds when I was a kid, but not the sort of place your dad'd go to, except maybe further on to Greenwich and the Royal Naval College . . . But he wouldn't go that way, see?"

"But that's where he went?" said Paul.

"Sssh!" said Audley.

"An' that's where I really started to get lucky—lucky it was me, an' not someone who didn't know the area—but lucky first because his driver used to worry about him . . . nice old gentleman limping along alone, with his stick, down into that tube station, with his little brief-case—"

"Heavy little brief-case," murmured Paul, looking at Elizabeth.

"So one evening he was late back, an' the driver went and inquired in the station . . . and he was told that there'd been a breakdown at Shadwell, which is the back-end of the East End, just before Wapping, where the tube dives under the river, an' comes up in South London at Rother'ithe. Which meant, of course, that he was doubling back across the river, just as a routine precaution, because he didn't want anyone to know where he was going—clever, but amateur, like you'd expect. But I knew I was on to him then, an' not wasting my time . . . Apart from being lucky, that is."

Elizabeth observed the rapt expression on David Audley's face, half admiring, half smug, and knew that Chief Inspector Andrew hadn't been lucky at all; or, if he had been lucky, it dummy3

had been the deserved luck of the clever man who takes the right path at each intersection out of that rare blend of intelligence and experience and instinct which passed for luck among lesser mortals.

"So ... to cut a long story short... I ended up at the Jolly Caulkers pub right opposite Surrey Docks station, on the edge of all that rundown docks area, where there's a bloke behind the bar I used to be at school with. An' they know I'm a dick, of course, though I've been mostly up Bermondsey, Peckham way, out of Catford divisional nick . . . but I'm still nearly one of them, all the same. An' because this is a rush job, I flashed your father's picture around. An' someone says for old times' sake 'Yeah—I saw 'im with Lippy once', an' I said 'Lippy who?', and he says 'Harry Lippman, what used to fence gear out of Redriff Road—but 'e's dead now'. . . Which was the only reason why he'd even said that much, of course—

Redriff Road's just nearby, little 1920s council flats, just square boxes with iron railings in front— because Lippy was where I couldn't touch him."

Sip. "So because it's still a rush job I went straight to Deptford nick, where I'm known, an' up to my old mates on the first floor. An' they knew Lippy all right—'Harry Lippman, fence'—but they say the guys who really knew him are at Tower Bridge nick ... So I went all the way back to Tower Bridge nick, on the edge of the bridge. And there's a guy there ... he says Harry Lippman was the kind of fence they never really wanted to catch. They knew what he was dummy3

doing— jewellery was his speciality, an' the more antique the better, but he'd handle any gear that wasn't too hot. . .only he wasn't tough or rough, he didn't upset people or hurt people—

he was of the old school... If he'd have been an obvious nick, they'd have nicked him, but as he was careful an' they had a lot of worse villains, they didn't bother with him." Del smiled suddenly, and looked round the table. "Besides which there was his war service, anyway, in his favour."

"His war service?" Mitchell leaned sideways towards Del.

"That's right. Leading Radar Mechanic Lippman, RNVR, with a Mention in Despatches too." Del turned to Elizabeth.

"And that was in the same despatch your father figured in for his medal—Leading Radar Mechanic Lippman of HMS

Vengeful, that's who Lippy was . . . before he went back into the family business and became Harry Lippman— disposer of stolen property. Or 'Retired general dealer', as his death certificate puts it."

"What did he die of?" said Paul quickly.

"Arterio-sclerosis. In hospital—as natural as you like." Del shook his head. "It was the next thing I checked—got half the staff out of bed . . . Nothing for us there. And it was about five, six months gone by." Back to Elizabeth. "Lippy handled your father's business right enough—would have been honoured to, by all accounts . . . very proud of his war service he was—British Legion treasurer, Old Comrades' Association

—picture of his ship and his captain in the sitting room, above his medals in their case . . . Doing your dad a favour or dummy3

two would have been right up his street—he had all the contacts, for money or gear, and he was recognised as an honest crook, so no one double-crossed him. In fact, right to the end, if anyone got done down or hurt in Rother'ithe, Lippy had a way of dealing with it . . . 'Fact, I reckon they miss him in Tower Bridge nick, the way things are down there now."

Paul turned to Audley. "Not the man to give Novikov the time of day, David."

"Too right!" Del gave a snort. "Maybe now they've got some weirdos on that patch today—young Trotskyites and Revolutionary Workers from outside, where it always used to be dockers who were rock-solid Labour—Ernie-Bevin-Labour . . . But Novikov would have stood about as much chance as a snowball in hell in the Jolly Caulkers in Lippy's heyday—he'd have ended up under a barge in the river, most likely. Lippy was on the Murmansk run in '44, and he didn't take a shine to what he saw at the other end, from all accounts."

"So where does Danny Kahn come in?" said Elizabeth.

"Ah . . . now Danny Kahn doesn't come in with Lippy," Del shook his head. "Lippy wouldn't have given Danny the time of day on a wet Sunday afternoon, not if he'd have come to him on bended knees . . Danny wasn't family, either in the general sense or the specific one, an' Lippy was a great family man—you can still see that in the street markets, and on a Saturday night, they say, when his daughters go out."

dummy3

"His daughters?"

"Yeah—three of 'em . . . They like to see their kids looked after, Lippy's sort . . . and some of the things he fenced, if they weren't hot—like if someone from pound-note country wanted to get rid of the family heirlooms on the quiet—he couldn't bear to get rid of some things so they ended up on his daughters . . . You go into any South London market, an'

look at the women, an' you'll see they've got rings on all five fingers of both hands. They don't really trust banks, those people—they prefer to have their riches about them, on their wives and daughters ... It's one way of looking good, and it's another way of investing your money away from the bleeding tax-man—mother to daughter, an' no questions asked . . . But Danny doesn't come into any of that. . . Although, funnily enough, it's through the family that Danny has got his dirty little hoof into the door—"

"Through the daughters?"

"Naow . . . Lippy's daughters wouldn't look twice at Danny's sort—they're married to accountants and solicitors and schoolteachers, all strictly legitimate an' respectable, even if they are still South London—but he had these two brothers, see . . . an' one of them's okay, in Hatton Gardens, in precious metals—"

"Gold?" inquired Mitchell, almost innocently. "Coins?"

"Yeah. He could handle gold coins easy enough . . . But the other married a gentile, that's got this no-account step-son, dummy3

Ray Tuck— Raymond Darren Tuck, who's been sucking up to Lippy ever since he found he couldn't do nothing else, because it was too much like hard work . . . An' Ray Tuck's been running Lippy's errands—or was, until Lippy snuffed it

—an' now he's tried to take over Lippy's operation."

"Tried?" echoed Paul.

"Yes . . . well, of course, all he's got is the bad end, because the good ends don't want to know. Because Lippy's nearest and dearest criminal colleagues and clients have quickly sussed Ray Tuck out as a johnnie-cum-lately, an' they don't trust 'im. So they've decided to go elsewhere, an' all Ray Tuck's ended up with is the rough end of the business, that Lippy himself didn't want, but had to be polite to so as to afford the little niceties of life—I don't mean the really rough end, like Oakenshaw wanting to dispose of something—Lippy wouldn't have touched that. . . but . . . the dodgy end, where the risks are. So . . . the word is ... sure as eggs is eggs, Ray Tuck is going to get himself nicked—or worse—"

"Worse?"

"Right. Because what Tower Bridge nick thinks, it's only a question whether we get him—or Danny Kahn does." Del smiled at Elizabeth. "And, finally to answer your reiterated question, Miss Loftus . . . Danny Kahn's a bright kid who could have gone far, but he decided to make his pile the easy way . . . 'Fact, I knew his dad, who was a runner before the Betting and Gaming Act came in ... and as a result of his running he got this betting shop . . . an' Danny, who's got a dummy3

few brains—which Ray Tuck hasn't—has managed to increase the empire, with a few snooker halls an' a bit of the other on the side, that can't be mentioned in polite company, an' even a bit of protection with his present West Indian partner, who is apparently just about due for a nasty accident owing to a sudden rush of ambition to the head . . . because Danny's real hard, and got a certain amount of bottle—again, which Ray Tuck hasn't got ... So all Ray Tuck's got now is debts and an expensive girl-friend, both of which also belong to Danny, who doesn't care much about the girl, but does care about his money."

"So Danny could take out a contract with Novikov?" said Audley.

"Danny could . . . and Danny would, if the price was right, and if Novikov undertook to get any stray reforming middle class Trots off his back, sure—Danny wasn't on the Murmansk run—"

"But Novikov wouldn't," said Paul. "Not if there was a sub-contract involved—that would be ... too dodgy?" He looked at Del.

"It's a mistake to think in certainties," said Audley mildly.

"Novikov would do whatever he thought would work."

"But it didn't work," said Paul. "The infallible David Audley messed it up."

Audley's spectacles glinted in the candlelight. "Now you're being what my dear wife would call 'devious', Paul. And in dummy3

the sense that she undoubtedly means, I would advise against that. Just keep an open mind, that's all." He turned to Del Andrew. "And what is your interpretation of all this?"

Del stared at Audley thoughtfully for a moment. "Well, as long as you allow that it is only an interpretation . . . because this is as far as I've got, even under starter's orders—"

"An interpretation only, Chief Inspector."

"Okay." Del switched to Elizabeth first. "Your dad shifted gear, not cash—"

"Gear?"

"Valuables. Objets d'art—anything from the Crown Jewels to a pretty picture of a Stubbs gee-gee, or the family silver.

Because Lippy could handle that, and divvy up untraceable money for it, over a reasonable period. And he wouldn't have gypped your dad, his old captain. Point One."

Audley pushed the port decanter towards him.

"Thank you . . . Point Two: Ray Tuck would gyp anyone. But he doesn't have the resources to do it, or the bottle to do it if it was tough, or the time—and most of all the time, because time is what he hasn't got . . . Even though I reckon he'd like fine to take over the late Commander Hugh Loftus's custom . . . And Lippy would have advised your dad against that, in any case. But. . . Ray Tuck has got big ears—"

"You haven't talked to Ray Tuck?" cut in Mitchell.

"If I had, then I wouldn't be guessing, I can tell you," said Del grimly. "But no ... Ray Tuck is 'unavailable' at the moment.

dummy3

And we've got a three-line whip out on him ... so my only fear is that he's drifting on the tide somewhere around Wapping Stairs, after what you did yesterday, Dr Mitchell. Because I'm pretty sure it was Danny Kahn who contracted Oakenshaw to do this job—no proof, just m.o. and past history . . . Because I think that just recently Ray Tuck sold everything he knew about Commander Loftus, lock, stock and barrel, to Danny Kahn on a payment-by-results basis."

"Why just recently?" said Mitchell.

"Because I don't think Ray Tuck knew who his Uncle's valued old friend was until just very recently," said Del. "To be exact

—until his old friend died."

"You're not telling us that he read The Times obituary, man

—" Mitchell began incredulously.

Del grinned at him. "Your trouble, Dr Mitchell, is that you read the wrong newspaper. Because, while The Times had a boring obituary, the Sun has a luscious nude on page three—

and a bloody marvellous picture of young naval officers and old ex- Vengeful heroes on page five, with a sorrowing veiled daughter, and her address, near enough . . . and a nice picture of Loftus of the Vengeful himself for good measure—

a very neat piece of nostalgia on a day when there wasn't much hard news . . . Apart from which, the same touching scene was picked up on both BBC and ITN local news, partly because it was photogenic, and partly because of the row he made about the Vengeful's, renaming a year or two back—"

"So what do you deduce from all that?" said Mitchell sharply.

dummy3

"I deduce, Dr Mitchell, that Ray Tuck saw it—or read it ...

doesn't matter which . . . and then he knew at last who the golden goose was—that's what I deduce. And because he hadn't time to suck the eggs, because of the way Danny's leaning on him for his money, he sold the whole goose—beak, feathers, gizzard, daughter and all. An' Danny reacted predictably, by not wanting to go on from wherever Lippy left off, just taking his cut like any honest villain, but going for the whole goose too. Because he's a greedy sod, an' because he's got his own troubles, with the recession, like any other businessman, and he's in need of capital just now."

"Why did he call in Oakenshaw, though?" asked Paul. "Why didn't he do the job himself?"

"Ah . . . now that's where the real guesswork comes in—

though to my mind it also strengthens the rest of it." Del paused for a moment, first considering Mitchell, then Elizabeth. "Now, I don't know what your dad was up to, dear

—it was dodgy, but I don't know what it was anywhere near, or how it fits in with what Dr Audley there wants . . . except that the name Vengeful comes into it somewhere . . . But I suspect it's not going to be easy to suss out, either way, an' I reckon Danny came to the same conclusion. Because, as I say, Danny's not stupid ... an' after he'd thought about what Ray Tuck gave him I think he decided that he needed real brains—trained, analytical brains ... a scholar, if you like. An'

that. . . apart from being a nasty-little murdering, torturing swine . . . was what Master Julian Oakenshaw was. An'

dummy3

Danny knew it, because he'd used Oakenshaw before, according to the skipper at Tower Bridge nick."

"So where's Danny Kahn now?"

"That's the next piece that fits in," Del nodded. "Because Danny's gone to ground too, like Ray Tuck. 'Off on holiday in foreign parts', his Number Two says. An' no forwarding address because he doesn't want to be disturbed, 'cause he's been working so hard, an' needs a complete rest." Del's lip curled. "But he was still around yesterday, and he hasn't taken his latest girl-friend with him. So my next guess is that, with Julian Oakenshaw not surfacing—and Steve Donahue and Willie Fullick also absent without leave . . . and me going through the Jolly Caulkers like the fear of God . . . Danny's running scared too. Because he'll not only know the Old Bill is asking about Lippy and Ray Tuck, but with his contacts he may even know that I'm no longer the same Old Bill he knows and loves, but one of the funnies from the Special Branch who can be a whole lot meaner."

"And what are the chances of finding him?"

"Of finding Danny, Dr Mitchell? Slim . . . Danny's the sort that's smart enough to plan for a rainy day, is the Tower Bridge opinion. But with Ray Tuck, we've got a better chance

—assuming that he hasn't already gone to the great dole queue in the sky—because no one's scared of him, like of Danny . . . and there's still one or two of Lippy's old mates that'd like to see 'im cut down to size for takin' Lippy's name in vain—Ray Tuck don't count as family any more, that's dummy3

going to be his epitaph if Danny Kahn hasn't carved it on 'im already."

Paul Mitchell drew a deep breath, almost a sigh. "I don't see how we're going to get anywhere without one of them." He looked towards Audley. "And if Danny Kahn is in with Novikov by any remote chance . . . which I still frankly doubt . . . then they both know more than we do, David. So whatever you're planning for Elizabeth—I don't like it. Our best bet is to keep her under wraps, and let Del here have his head, and give him all the manpower he needs."

That was one score to Paul's credit, thought Elizabeth, observing both men through the candlelight across the table.

Because Del Andrew and Paul Mitchell were chalk and cheese, and sculptured by their backgrounds to be competitors even though they were on the same side; and also, doing nothing would be as much against Paul's nature as against Del's—in that they were brothers, because doing nothing was boring, and because no one could shine while doing nothing. But here was Paul, nevertheless, conceding the short corner to Del. ...

"Wrong," said David Audley, almost insultingly, pouring more port into his glass, and then offering the decanter to Elizabeth.

"No thank you, David. But why is Paul wrong?" She felt an absurd loyalty for Paul Mitchell now, in spite of his arrogance.

"Not wholly wrong, Elizabeth." Audley pushed the decanter dummy3

towards Mitchell. "Del must have his head—a free hand to scour everything south of the river—I agree . . . But we still have the edge on Kahn and Novikov, my dear."

"How?" said Elizabeth quickly, before Paul could ask the same question. Because it was her turn to fight now, even if she didn't know why.

"Because we have what Oakenshaw was going to take from you—" Audley's hand had already been reaching inside his coat pocket "—and most particularly we have this—" he slid a piece of folded paper across the table to her.

It was a letter. Pale blue paper, shakily hand-written—

Dear Commander Loftus—

Elizabeth looked at the address—it was nowhere she had ever heard of: somewhere in Kent, near Tenterden . . . and, on the other side, was a name she had never heard of— Irene Cookridge (Miss)—

Dear Commander Loftus,

I saw your letter in "The Times" today, regarding your wish to make contact with surviving members of the crews of the warship which bore the name "Vengeful" during the first world war, or with any of their next-of-kin having material relating to their service, in connection with a book which dummy3

you are writing.

While I do not have any connection with such persons, or any such material, I have in my—

Possession? The writing was small and spiky—elderly, guessed Elizabeth—and the pen had spluttered over the second double-s successively; but extensive experience with juvenile hands, and bitter experience with Father's own scrawl, made that possession, beyond reasonable doubt—

— in my possession a slender volume relating in part to another vessel of that name, dating from a much earlier period in history; and while this does not answer your appeal it may provide you with a curious footnote to your researches.

Elderly, also beyond reasonable doubt. No modern education could have produced that semi-colon, never mind the particular words and the style itself: Miss Irene Cookridge was someone's great-aunt, or great-great-aunt, since she could not be anyone's grandmother.

This volume, which is hand-written, records conversations between my maternal ancestor, the Revd Arthur Cecil Ward, and the squire of his parish, Sir Alexander Gower, and it was among my mother's possessions which came to dummy3

me on her death in 1952.

She couldn't help looking up as she turned the page, and catching Audley's eye twinkling at her.

"Gold, genuine gold," said Audley. "The stuff that dreams are made of—and the best is yet to come, Elizabeth."

These conversations relate chiefly to the memories of my ancestor, who in his younger days had been a Chaplain to the House of Commons, and Sir Alexander, who was an ensign with the Foot Guards at Waterloo. But there are also some twenty pages of the recollections of one Thomas (Tom) Chard, head gamekeeper on Sir Alexander's estate, formerly a gunner's mate on a ship named "Vengeful" during the Napoleonic War. This relates briefly to a desperate battle with a French warship, a subsequent shipwreck off the French coast, Tom Chard's experiences in captivity, his escape therefrom, and his adventures on the long journey home in company with other members of the crew.

All this, I appreciate, does not fall within the terms of reference, as laid down in your letter. Yet I venture to think that, since it has never to my knowledge been revealed before, it may be of historical interest in such a book as yours. And, needless to say, I would be only too pleased to make it available to you—

dummy3

Elizabeth stared at Paul. "You've read this?"

"Not read it. David told me about it ... and he's talked to her—

Miss—?"

"Miss Irene Cookridge." Audley nodded between them. "And I lave seen her book—half-leather, with a brass lock—but pure gold, both of them . . . Miss Cookridge and her book!"

"Pure gold, I'm sure—if I was finishing off the Vengeful book for Elizabeth." Paul's face creased with irritation. "But where does Danny Kahn come in? And where does Josef Ivanovitch Novikov figure? Come on, David—whatever pure gold Danny Kahn and Loftus may have found there, it's fool's gold when you mix Novikov into it—it's a con—it's a bloody classic con, in fact—"

"A con?" Del studied Mitchell sideways. "Why a con, Dr Mitchell?"

"Because it's exactly the sort of thing that David would fall for

—it's just sufficiently too bloody outlandish for anyone else . . . but it isn't too outlandish for him . . . And, David, we know that's the next likely ploy—to shoot us off at a tangent. . . I'm not saying we're not close, with Loftus . . . But frigate actions off Ushant in 1812—and PoW escapes after that—it's simply not on. It's just too predictable, if they suspect you're on the job."

"You're giving them too much credit, my dear fellow." Audley waved a hand dismissively. "They couldn't possibly have set up Miss Cookridge months ago, and written out her dummy3

ancestor's memoirs in longhand, and aged the ink, and all that. . . just in case we came up with Vengeful out of Washington—it's quite beyond their capabilities, apart from the timing, even if they do have my number."

Elizabeth could almost feel Paul struggle against this negative argument, and find nowhere to go.

"But, right or wrong, you're under orders now." Audley came down to earth abruptly. "So you'll do what you're told tomorrow, like everyone else."

VIII

THERE WERE BELLS ringing somewhere out in the warm darkness of Laon.

" In the Champagne district of northern France, between Craonne in the east and Soissons in the west, lies the Chemin des Dames—' the Ladies' Highway'. This name originally applied to a road built along the crest of a ridge by Louis XV for the diversion of his sisters, but has since come to refer to the ridge itself, some 75 miles long and for the most part nearly 450 feet high, and with numerous hog's-back spurs and deep ravines running south to the valley of the Aisne . . ."

Elizabeth's eyelids fluttered, but her brain again refused to dummy3

stop working, feverishly and confusedly trying to assimilate her experienccs, and to codify and file them for future recollection.

"No, madame—Madame has quite a high colour, so she thinks a blusher will add to her difficulty . . . But no! It is only that the flushed checks are always in the wrong place ... so we need to relocate the colour—so!"

" It was here, on this fatal ridge, and by a matter of no more than a couple of hours only, that the German retreat from the Marne ended on September 14th, 1914: although neither side knew it, in the thick weather and bitter close-quarter fighting between isolated units of the British 1st Corps and the German 7th Reserve Corps on those formidable muddy slopes, the trench warfare of the next four years was born

—"

It was no good—it was just too much . . . Louis XV and his sisters and their maids-in-waiting . . . and Paul Mitchell's Northamptons and Coldstreamers, and their comrades of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and the Royal Sussex . . . they all mingled together with Lieutenant Chipperfield's exhausted escape party in the mist and the rain on the Chemin des Dames under a hail of machine-gun fire and a deluge of 8-inch howitzer shells from von Billow's Germans—

dummy3

And . . .

"The eyes are not difficult—Madame has good eyes—the important area is not over, but under . . . and there one does not cover the whole area—that is vital—but simply touches out the dark bits, which make the baggy look . . . like so—I will do this eye, and then Madame will do the other, eh?"

"A private aeroplane?"

"Not a private one, Elizabeth. Private planes are for millionaires and oil sheikhs. Just a business plane for a business trip—saves hassle, saves time ..."

There were bells ringing somewhere, out in the warm darkness—

"Where's Humphrey Aske, Paul? Didn't David say he was coming with us?"

"That little bastard? That's one of David's bad ideas—a chaperone! Do you want a chaperone, Elizabeth?"

Wishful thinking! But hers, not his, obviously—sadly!

"But he'll meet us over there, anyway—more's the pity!"

dummy3

Over there had been the first clue—

" All the British could do was to dig, as they had never dug before. Fortunately, the soil was good— at least before the rain began to drain off the crests— and the sides of trenches and 'funk-holes' held up without revetment—"

"Madame's hair must be cut, and it must not be put up—

no . . .up may seem sensible, but it is a great consumer of time, and Madame's hair is naturally fuller, and hair is getting fuller now ... So Monsieur Pierre will shorten perhaps a trifle, and will add the highlights—the colour is good, but the highlights will accentuate—yes?"

"— which was just as well, since the enemy's artillery observers dominated the valley, while the British guns were still south of the river, firing blind. Here too, was the shape of things to come: this was to be an artillery war, and the man who could see could kill— "

"Christ! Elizabeth . . . what have they done to you?"

Dust and ashes: she had thought they'd made her presentable, and the cost of this summer suit would have started turning Father in his grave if she'd paid for it with his money. "Don't you like it? Faith chose it, Paul—"

dummy3

"Oh—the clothes are okay—trust Faith to go for the county look . . . But you've turned into your younger sister, and I've become a baby-snatcher—"

The man who could see, could kill—

"Isn't that the Channel, Paul—?"

"On Madame's account?" This was to Madame Faith Audley, not to the nameless madame who had arrived with her, pressed neatly, but obviously not credit-worthy.

"I must settle up with you, Faith—"

"Settle up? Not bloody likely! David will pay—or Jack Butler will pay, don't you worry! You can't know what pleasure this gives me. Elizabeth—soaking them, for what they've done to you . . . Take the money and run, Elizabeth—"

Expensive luggage, already packed with her new clothes, from the skin upwards—

Polite cough. "Madame's cosmetics are all in the vanity case.

And I have included both the Rimmel and the Clinique—the Clinique is not cheap, for the eye make-up, but it lasts very well—"

"All that?" Paul goggled at the cases, having already goggled dummy3

at Elizabeth. "It looks like, we're not going away—we're running away! Is that what you've got in mind, Elizabeth?"

"I don't even know where we're going, Paul."

"Isn't that the Channel, Paul—?"

He craned his neck round her. "Looks very much like that, yes."

"But I haven't got my passport." Panic. "I haven't even got a passport, Paul!"

He felt inside his breast-pocket. "One passport. Though whether they'll recognise you from the picture we rustled up is another matter—"

The Frenchman in the funny little office on the even funnier little airfield regarded Madame— Miss Elizabeth Jane Loftus

— Occupation— Secretary— Place of birth— Portsmouth—

Residence— England—with the honest doubt any functionary should have had when faced with an enlarged press photograph of E. Loftus, as she had appeared in the Amazons

'A' Hockey Team (captain), and E. Loftus's younger sister, as processed by Madame Hortense and Monsieur Pierre, of Guildford, and dressed by Style, also of Guildford, and Madame Audley, of The Old House, Steeple Horley.

"Miss Loftus is my secretary," said Paul, deadpan and confident, observing the Frenchman's incredulity and offering his own passport in explanation, alongside hers.

dummy3

The Frenchman looked at Paul, and then at his passport, and then at Paul again.

"Dr—Mitchell—"

Paul Lefevre Mitchell, Elizabeth read upside down—before the Frenchman turned the page. But then she decided that, however much she wanted to know the official description of Paul's occupation, it might seem inappropriate for his secretary to be interested in such detail.

"A business trip, Dr Mitchell?"

The false insouciance of the question first surprised Elizabeth, since she didn't think they bothered with such formalities any more. Then she felt insulted by it, in the guise of Dr Mitchell's secretary, and started to bristle.

"Yes," said Paul. "That is to say . . ."

The Frenchman caught Elizabeth's frown and quailed slightly.

"Historical research," said Paul.

"Ah—yes!" The Frenchman studied Paul's passport again, almost gratefully, as though to confirm something he had known all along but had now skilfully established by interrogation. "But of course!"

It occurred to Elizabeth that she might also feel flattered—or that Madame Hortense and Faith Audley between them deserved the credit for whatever insulting thoughts had passed through the man's mind—and then she felt a wave of dummy3

contempt for herself at such silly imaginings.

"Un moment!" The man looked around for something, and didn't find it, and vanished quickly through a door behind him with both passports still in his hand.

"Either they've had some trouble here—" murmured Paul out of the corner of his mouth "—or we're the first English to land on this field since 1940, and they've forgotten what to do."

The sound of scurrying came through the open door.

"And either they're going to arrest us on suspicion of being escaping criminals, or they've lost their bloody stamp." There was a hint of savagery in the murmur. "But either way they'll remember us now, blast it!"

"Does that matter?"

"I had a bit of trouble in France . . . once upon a time." Paul drew a deep reminiscent breath. "So they'll have my name and number written up somewhere for sure . . . Not here, but somewhere . . ."

"What sort of trouble?" She knew he wasn't going to tell her, but having some first-hand experience of the sort of troubles he had she didn't really want to know anyway. And that unfledged thought itself was enough to make her feel what she realised she ought to have felt all along: not surprised, and neither angry with the Frenchman nor herself, but just plain scared.

Two thumps sounded from the inner office, saving Paul the dummy3

trouble of not replying, and to her intense relief the Frenchman reappeared with a smile on his face and the passports in his hand—

"What kept you?" Aske smiled at her in his usual half-shy, half-friendly way, but eyed her appraisingly at the same time as he held open the door of a big blue Renault. "Mmm! I like your new scent, Miss Loftus—very chic and expensive!"

"That's probably what kept us," said Paul irritably. "Let's get out of here. We should have come by the hovercraft, like I wanted to do."

"Another three hours on the journey—if you're in such a hurry," said Aske mildly. "Where to now?"

"But no awkward questions." Paul sat back. "To the hotel."

"They were inquisitive? Well ... I suppose you're a bit out of the ordinary. This isn't exactly a tourist spot—it's just a stop-over to and from the coast, though the old city's very fine . . ."

Aske looked over his shoulder at Elizabeth "... I got us into a place in the old city, I thought you'd like that . . . medieval walls more or less intact, and a nice little 17th-18th century citadel—not a Napoleonic PoW depot, of course—too small for that . . . the nearest one of them is Sedan, then maybe Longwy. Then Givet to the north, on the frontier, and the three to the north-west—Arras, Valenciennes and Cambrai.

And the big one to the east, naturally—Verdun. I wonder you didn't prefer Verdun for your base, Mitchell, even if the dummy3

escape party didn't break out of there. It was the main British prisoners' depot, after all."

Paul merely grunted, but Elizabeth sat up.

"Oh yes—I'm an expert too, now—an instant expert!" Aske appeared to have eyes in the back of his head. "I'm your man on British PoWs in France, and French PoWs in England, circa 1812— and on the year 1812 too ... a very interesting year seemingly, as years go. 'The 1941 of the Napoleonic War', no less."

"I didn't know you were a historian, Mr Aske," said Elizabeth.

"I'm not. Politics and Economics were my student theatres of activity—and cookery at night school ... I must not deceive you, Miss Loftus—I did say 'instant' expert." Aske snuffled to himself. "In the division of labour yesterday, after you were removed from my charge I drew one of Dr Audley's old dons, Professor—now Emeritus Professor—Basil Wilson Wilder . . .

once the terror of generations of idle Cambridge undergraduates, but now retired from the fray on Portsdown Hill, above Portsmouth."

"Professor Wilder!"

"You've heard of him? You know him?"

"Yes—I mean . . . that is, Father had a frightful row with him a year or two ago."

"Did he, now? I find that a little surprising. He seemed to me to be a really darling old gentleman, and he's certainly a dummy3

positive goldmine of information on the period . . . What did they row about?"

"Oh ... it was about a letter he wrote." The memory of Father's explosive rages during the Vengeful renaming correspondence still made her wince. "What did he tell you about the prisoners? Did he know about the Vengeful survivors?"

"Not specifically. But he did agree with your father's conclusion about them—that they weren't included in the Decrés propaganda letter to Napoleon in the Moniteur Universel with the allegedly full list of successful British escapers down to September, but they were in the Lautenbourg Fortress in early August—and they didn't turn up anywhere else thereafter, and weren't listed anywhere else as having been recaptured or died of natural causes . . . He reckoned the French killed them right enough—he said that, apart from the conflicting stories the French told, sending them to Lautenbourg was suspicious in itself. Because no one had ever been sent there before, and no one ever was again.

'Something fishy, but I don't know what' was his conclusion—

and here's our hotel—" he swung the car under a narrow archway, through a passage, and into a tiny courtyard "—

then we can have a proper session, once we've installed you—

it's all quite fascinating, Miss Loftus—I haven't been involved in anything so absolutely fascinating in ages!" He turned to Elizabeth with an expression of disarmingly innocent enthusiasm. "There's a sweet little café in the square—"

dummy3

"We're not going to sit in any cafe." There was anything but an expression of innocent enthusiasm on Paul Mitchell's face. "For any 'proper session'."

"No?" Aske took his disappointment philosophically. "Then what are we going to do?"

"I've got phone calls to make. You deal with the bags. And I want to be on the road in twenty minutes." Paul sounded a bit like Father on one of his off days.

"And then where?" Aske's obedience didn't include total abasement.

"Wait and see," said Paul rudely.

Twenty minutes later he seemed happier; or maybe he was beginning to regret being such a bear, decided Elizabeth.

"I'm sorry to push you like this, Elizabeth." He tried to smile, and then looked past her and gave up the attempt. "Where's that obnoxious fellow, for God's sake?"

"Mr Aske is trying to get me a better room. He thinks the one I've got will be too noisy." Enough was enough. "Why must you be so beastly to him? Has he ever done you any harm?"

"Not so far as I know—and he's not going to get the chance, either." He shrugged. "I hardly know him, actually."

"You just dislike him on principle?"

"On several principles. I don't fancy queers, for a start."

"Queers?'

dummy3

"God, Elizabeth! You're not that innocent, surely?"

She flushed—she could feel the blood in her cheeks, pumping at treble pressure because she was that innocent, but also because that explained her own unformulated doubts, and finally because such naked prejudice embarrassed her.

"It isn't a crime any more," she said stiffly.

"No." More's the pity was implicit there. "I can see you've never been propositioned! But then you wouldn't be, would you . . ." He sniffed derisively. "You're safe."

That was more hurtful than he intended. "No. I have never been propositioned."

"I didn't mean that, and you know it." The hardness in his face broke up. "Damn it—if you want to be propositioned, just keep your door on the latch tonight—"

"No, thank you!" snapped Elizabeth.

He ran his hand through his hair, suddenly not at all the Paul Mitchell she knew and didn't understand. "Shit! I always get this wrong, don't I! Frances, you are avenged!"

"Frances?"

"Doesn't matter." His face came together again. "I also dislike him because I don't know him . . . and in this game, if you have someone there to cover your back, that's not a comforting feeling. And I also dislike him because I associate him with someone I don't trust— someone I do know. And birds of a feather—" He stopped abruptly.

"Hullo there—sorry I'm late," said Humphrey Aske. "I've got dummy3

you an absolutely super room, Miss Loftus—quiet and comfortable—and a wonderful view across the old city."

"Thank you, Mr Aske," said Elizabeth, split disconcertingly down the middle between them. "I hope it wasn't too difficult?"

He smiled at her. "Not at all, actually. I just got them to swop Dr Mitchell's bag for yours. Nothing could be easier!" He turned to Paul. "Now, Dr Mitchell—which way?"

"South, across the N2 as best you can, on to the D967, Aske."

Paul embraced Aske's enmity like a lover.

"You've been there before, then?"

Paul looked through him. "To the Chemin des Dames? Yes, I've been there before, Aske."

Getting out and down from the old city of Laon, through the narrow streets, and down the winding hairpin road to the plain beneath, wasn't so easy in the rush-hour; and crossing the N2 ring road was hair-raising, even though Humphrey Aske drove with relaxed excellence and courtesy; so the question on the tip of her tongue delayed itself until Aske repeated the first name on the road signs.

"Bruyeres-et-Montberault?"

"About twelve miles, straight on," said Paul. "Then we cross the Chemin des Dames, and go down half a mile, to the British War Cemetery at Vendresse."

dummy3

"Why, Paul?" asked Elizabeth.

"Why what?" He was staring straight ahead. "Why the Chemin? Or why Vendresse?"

"Why. . .all of this?"

He stared ahead for a moment, without replying. "I like the cemetery at Vendresse. It's only a little one, but it's one of my favourites."

"What a perfectly macabre thought—to have a favourite cemetery!" exclaimed Humphrey Aske. "You normally prefer the bigger ones?"

"And an interesting one, too." Paul seemed not to have heard him. "Late summer 1914—and then late summer 1918—the two turning points. I'll show you, Elizabeth."

"But that simply can't be the reason, Mitchell—just to show us something . . . of interest?" said Aske.

Elizabeth found herself wishing that he wouldn't ask the questions which were uppermost in her own mind, instead of leaving the answers to the due process of Paul's own reasoning.

"You ought to know the reason, damn it!" snapped Paul. "The only good cover is what's true. I don't usually fly to France—

that was a mistake. We should have taken the hovercraft and the autoroute. But when I do come to the Aisne, this is what I do—and this is what I'm doing."

"And what makes you think we need a cover?"

"That's right, Paul," Elizabeth agreed with Aske uneasily.

dummy3

"David Audley said we'd be safe over here."

"And we are safe, Miss Loftus," Aske reassured her. "Nobody can possibly know where we are, except those who need to know. So unless Dr Mitchell left your flight plan lying around

—"

"The flight plan was doctored," said Mitchell testily.

"Then no one knows. Because no one followed me, I assure you." Aske giggled. "No one follows me when I don't want to be followed, I promise you—not without my knowing, anyway . . . And, for the record, no one's following me now."

"The French know," said Paul.

"Two or three dim fonctionnaires on a tin-pot air-strip half the size of my pocket-handkerchief? Oh, come on!"

"Don't underestimate the French."

"I don't. I know they've got a smart computerised system for checking up on mauvais sujets who intrude into their privacy. But the great and good Dr Mitchell surely isn't lumped in with visiting Libyan assassins, is he?" Aske paused. "Or is he?"

Paul said nothing.

"You don't mean to say you've got a record here?" Aske appeared more amused than frightened. "In the line of duty, naturally—?"

"I am known here," Paul came dangerously close to pomposity. "Both in the line of duty, as you put it, and in the dummy3

line of military history. And that's why we're going to Vendresse—because if they do by any chance pick me up on their radar I want to be well dug-into that second line."

"Ah . . . well now I'm with you!" Aske nodded. "So what are you doing in Champagne? I rather thought Picardy was your stamping ground—the Somme and the Hindenburg Line, and all those awful places?"

"This is where trench warfare started for the British—in September 1914, at the end of the battle of the Marne."

"Indeed? And so what are we doing, then? We're strictly 1812

experts . . . we don't know anything that happened after the battle of Waterloo."

"In my case I've got a typescript of unpublished material on the origins of trench warfare—it was the basis of the opening chapters in the Hindenburg Line book. If you both read that you'll know enough."

"How very jolly! All about lice and phosgene?" murmured Aske. "Well, that's awfully clever of you—and we shall become experts on lice and phosgene, and gas gangrene and mud, Miss Loftus . . . did you hear that?"

It was six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, thought Elizabeth. The truth was that when men weren't comrades they were children— and not-very-nice, potentially savage children too.

"Very clever . . . that ridge ahead must be your 'Ladies'

highway', Mitchell," continued Aske, still mock-admiringly.

dummy3

"Except that we're not actually here to study all those charming 1914 facts, we're here to sort out something which occurred in 1812, or thereabouts. So ... even allowing that you're scared of the French ... on account of heaven only knows what past misdeeds ... we are rather going out of our way now, aren't we? Or are we?"

"Just drive, Aske," said Paul.

" 'Just drive'?" This time the mildness in Aske's voice was paper-thin. "No ... I know I said 1812 was fascinating . . . but don't you think it's about time you explained to me why it's so important?"

At the best of times that would have been a bad question to put to Paul Mitchell, reflected Elizabeth. But just now, and coming from Aske, it was like a spark in the powder-magazine.

"Paul—"

"I know I'm only one of the lesser breeds, Mitchell—I know that I don't have the confidence of the legendary Dr Audley . . . I'm only here to do for you ... or die for you, as required, like a one-man Light Brigade, and you just point me towards the Russian guns." Aske peered ahead. "And if this is your famous Chemin des Dames I must say that it's rather a non-event. . . But I would prefer to be pointed at the right guns in the right century—even if it is the nineteenth century—"

"For Christ's sake—shut up and drive!" spat Paul.

dummy3

"There's no call to be offensive—"

"Oh yes there is." Cold rage almost choked Paul. "You are now driving, Aske—" he spoke slowly and clearly "—across ground over which real men charged real guns . . . Germans and Frenchmen and British . . . and . . . if you make one more silly crack then that will be the end of this fascinating trip for you. Understood?"

This time Humphrey Aske said nothing, and Elizabeth cringed in her seat, all her own questions equally stifled not only by the order and the threat, but also by the suppressed passion with which both had been delivered, for all that they were camouflaged under clarity.

"Straight over the cross-roads," said Paul tightly.

The road continued for a little way, then dropped and twisted down the southern slope of the ridge, affording her glimpses of a river valley, of fields and trees and distant roofs below.

"On the right there—you can pull in under the bank." His voice was conversational again. "You come with me, Elizabeth

—you stay with the car, Aske."

It was, as he had said, quite a small cemetery, cut into the hillside out of the sloping fields: in size it was more like the little village churchyard in which Father lay, than the hecatombs of the war dead which she had seen in photographs; but there was no church, and the lines of identical tombstones were ordered with military precision, rank on rank up the slope, as in a well-kept garden.

dummy3

Elizabeth followed Paul up the centre aisle, towards a small kiosk-like building which was open on the side facing them, having to trot to keep at his heels. When they reached it Paul opened a tiny metal door and drew out a book wrapped in a plastic envelope from the niche behind it. She watched him in silence as he pulled a biro from his inside pocket and signed the book, then offered both to her. "Name and date please, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth studied the list, and was surprised to see how many names from this summer there were on the open pages—

even from this same month, and several from this very day—

who had found this place in the middle of nowhere, and this book.

And there was space for comment, too—

" My grandpa brought me here, and told me about it" —

" I was here in 1918, and I remember" —

But Paul had written nothing except the date and his name—

plain Paul Mitchell—so Elizabeth had no stomach to do more than the same—plain Elizabeth Loftus.

"What about me, then?" said Humphrey Aske, from behind her.

Elizabeth looked towards Paul, quickly and fearfully. "Paul

—"

"Yes, of course—" he blinked just once, as though the late afternoon light was too strong for his eyes "—you are here, I suppose, so you must sign. You're right."

dummy3

Humphrey Aske signed the book—just name and date—and meekly gave it back to Paul, who wrapped it up carefully and replaced it in its niche.

"Sometimes I get to be rather a pain," said Aske simply.

"Yes." Paul addressed the ranks below them. "And sometimes I fly off the handle, and particularly in places like this . . . Because everyone's obsessive about something—" he caught Elizabeth's eye "—with your father it was the Vengeful. . . but with me . . . someone once said to me, she said . . . 'one minute it's a field of cabbages, but with a machine-gun you can turn it into a field of honour with a single burst'."

They walked down the aisle together, and it was only at the end of it that Paul spoke again.

"The stories are all here, but we haven't time for them—the regiments and the names . . . they were older in 1914 than 1918— there's even a general here, from 1918, who was younger then than I am now . . . two great British armies, so alike and yet so different—one so small, and the other huge—

separated by four years of war, that's all." He shook his head.

"But we've got to get on—"

He led them back to the car in silence, and she couldn't take her eyes off him.

"Turn round and get back to the cross-roads, and then turn left, along the crest." It was hardly an order, more an instruction, and almost a courteous one.

dummy3

"And then where to?" Vendresse had also taken the sting out of Humphrey Aske.

"To a place called Coucy-le-Château. About twenty miles, mostly on side-roads. I'll direct you."

"What is there to see at Coucy-le-Château?" asked Elizabeth.

"There's a village . . . and a ruined castle."

"A medieval castle, you mean?"

"Yes. But the ruins are more modern—ancient and modern, like the hymns in the hymn-book."

"What d'you mean, Paul?"

"I mean, there was once the greatest medieval tower in Europe there—there still was in 1812, anyway . . . the great tower of Enguerrand III of Coucy, who was a contemporary of our King John—he was also excommunicated by the Pope, like King John, I believe . . . But General Ludendorff blew up Enguerrand's tower in 1918, before he retreated, to remind the French he'd been there."

They had turned on to the crest road, the fabled Chemin des Dames itself. Elizabeth's eye was drawn to a huge French war cemetery, with a sign to a German one nearby.

"Not that he hadn't been reminding them already,"

continued Paul. "He'd had the Paris Gun—the one that's always wrongly called 'Big Bertha'—stashed in a wood just below the castle. Paris is only about seventy miles down the road, as the shell flies ... I could take you to see the gun position in the wood, it's still there. But it's rather overgrown dummy3

and depressing, so I won't."

"So it's another of your 1914-18 places, where they've got to remember us—just in case?" If it hadn't been for Vendresse she would have spoken more sharply.

"It can be." He nodded thoughtfully, then stopped nodding.

"But as a matter of fact it isn't."

Elizabeth couldn't add up this reply to make a sensible answer of it, and Paul appeared to be in no mood to elaborate on it, but withdrew into himself. It was as though their passage across one of his old battlefields, on which every fold and feature had its significance for him, was inhibiting him.

Finally Humphrey Aske roused himself behind the wheel.

"You said . . . the tower—the Frenchman's tower—was still there in 1812. Was that meant to mean something, or could it have been 1912, or 1712?"

"No." Paul shook his head. "No."

"No . . . what?"

"You'll be coming to the Laon Soissons road in a moment.

You turn left, towards Soissons, and then almost immediately right, down a side-road." Paul stirred. "I meant 1812."

Aske peered ahead. "What have medieval towers got to do with 1812?"

Mitchell twisted in his seat, pulling his safety-belt away from his shoulder, and stared past Elizabeth out of the rear window, as though to get a last look at his old battlefield on dummy3

the ridge.

Then he caught Elizabeth's eye. "Your father came this way, our people think, from his rough notes."

"My father?" She frowned at him.

"Or, if he didn't, Tom Chard certainly did—'along the high road above the river to the greatest tower I ever saw'—he must have seen a few great towers along the road from the Lautenbourg, but this was the greatest. . . size and time and distance, that's how they worked it out . . . with a few other clues beside, from Miss Irene Cookridge's book, Elizabeth."

"To—?" But she had forgotten the name of the place.

"Coucy-le-Château." He nodded. "Because Coucy-le-Château is where Lieutenant Chipperfield died, they reckon."

IX

"You SEE, ELIZABETH, this is a research project with a difference— or a whole lot of differences . . . like time, for a start, obviously."

"You mean, we don't have much of it?"

"Maybe we don't have any of it. I don't know. I only know that I've taken years to reconstruct days . . . and your father, Elizabeth—he bumbled along after the Vengeful escapers for months and months, enjoying himself in the best hotels and the Michelin restaurants, picking up the odd fact here and there, but mostly useless information. But he wasn't worried dummy3

about time, anyway."

That was Father to the life in his later days, thought Elizabeth: in spite of the doctor's advice he had been convinced that the whisper of his heart in his ear was only a false rumour.

"But we have other things that he didn't have." Paul half-smilfcd at her. "Because, when you think about it, an intelligence department is well-equipped for this sort of enterprise: we have the manpower— trained researchers, who know how to ask questions, and how to interpret the answers—and we have the resources—"

"Huh!" Aske snuffled to himself. "If the tax-payers could see us now! Or are we going to publish this time? A Festschrift for Dr David Audley— 1812: Defeat into Victory? Will that balance the books?"

"And the contacts—manpower, and resources, and contacts

—"

"Professor Emeritus Basil Wilson Wilder, no less!"

"Aske—"

"Sorry, old boy! A moment's weakness . . . But Wilder is a contact—at least, if this is what your Dr Audley wants to know, he is ... And that's still ultra-secret, is it?"

Looking from one to the other, Elizabeth almost smiled; because they were Lucan and Cardigan at Balaclava, re-enacting history, with the one hating the other so much that he'd never let himself be stung into admitting that he too dummy3

didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. But since she was in this particular Light Brigade charge it was no real smiling matter.

"So you're not interested in the Vengeful any more, Paul? It's only the escapers now?"

He nodded. "That's what your father was concerned with, Elizabeth. You were right."

"After Miss . . . Miss Cookridge's letter?" Here, coming down off the Chemin des Dames ridge, Miss Irene Cookridge was no more incongruous than Julian Oakenshaw and Danny Kahn in the roll-call of names.

"Not just her letter, but the Conversations book as well.

David had people working on it half the night, and me working on what they came up with this morning."

"Doing what, Paul?"

"Plotting the route they took after they broke out of the Lautenbourg Fortress."

Aske half-turned, then his mouth closed on his unasked question and his eyes returned to the road ahead. But Elizabeth knew what was still plaguing him, because it plagued her equally; the only difference being that she knew that Paul himself didn't know the answer to it, and Aske thought he was being frozen out from the truth.

Why?

"And that was a minor epic in itself—a classic Colditz-style job," continued Paul. "Because they were shut up tight in an dummy3

old barracks between the town and the citadel, and there was no way they could get through the barracks' perimeter into the town."

Why?

"So what did they do?"

He smiled. "They climbed up into the citadel. They made ropes out of their bedding, and grapnels somehow—they were sailors, of course, and sailors are ingenious . . . And then they climbed down the other side, where the sentries weren't expecting anything. But it still must have been pretty hairy, because their ropes weren't long enough, and they had to make the descent in stages—that's the steep side of the Lautenbourg, which is alleged to be unclimbable. But they had these two ropes, which were just strong enough to bear one man's weight, and a thin one to pull the ropes back up for the next man. And the last man down fixed the knot so it would bear his weight, but then two of them could pull it free

—risky, but ingenious, as I said." He shook his head admiringly. "Tom Chard—he made it sound easy. But that's one hell of a cliff, with the wall on top of it."

"You know the Lautenbourg Fortress, Paul?"

"Uh-huh. I was down that way a few years back, when the French started restoring the battlefield of Le Linge, above Colmar." He smiled at her again. "It's a 1915 battlefield, you see, Elizabeth, Le Linge is ... I just visited the Lautenbourg in passing, as it were. But then, oddly enough, I've visited most of the Napoleonic prison fortresses they used for our chaps in dummy3

1812—a happy coincidence, you may think."

"No coincidence," said Aske. "Just an historical progression, really."

"Historical, Mr Aske?"

"Or Napoleonic, Miss Loftus. Napoleon was luckier than the British: he had all his PoW camps ready-built for him—all the old frontier fortresses that he didn't need any more, having advanced the frontier far beyond them, and beaten everyone in sight. But, of course, when he was beaten in his turn, the frontier went back to where it had started—and all the PoW camps became fortresses again . . . Arras, Cambrai, Verdun . . . Do you recognise the names, Miss Loftus?"

To a historian those were names to conjure with from older wars, but Elizabeth knew what he meant: they were the great names of Paul's war, the sepulchres of three great European armies. And because Lautenbourg itself had been just such another fortress along that long-disputed frontier, it too had its 1914-18 battlefield.

And yet Lautenbourg didn't fit, nevertheless: of all Napoleon's British captives, only the handful of Vengefuls had been sent there, she remembered.

"Why were they sent to Lautenbourg, Paul? Did Tom Chard know that?"

Paul shook his head. "He never even asked himself the question— and why should he? But what he does say is that they were marched towards Verdun at first, by easy stages.

dummy3

And then one morning a new escort took over, under a full colonel of the Gendarmerie—a hard man by the name of 'Soo-Shay'—and they went off in a different direction, and under close arrest, as though they were criminals."

"To Lautenbourg?"

"Yes. And Lieutenant Chipperfield protested about it, because he'd given his parole in the usual way, and he expected to be treated according to the rules of war—like a gentleman."

Aske gave a snort. "Nothing unusual about that. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great man, but he wasn't a gentleman—he was always breaking the old gentlemanly rules, Professor Wilder says. Like encouraging his officers to break their comfortable paroles, and then complaining if a British officer he'd locked up broke out of prison . . . where they shouldn't have been put in the first place, once they'd given their word-of-honour. . . Because, the way the British worked it out, an officer could only escape after they'd shut him up in jail. If they didn't, then he couldn't escape. It's funny really: if Napoleon had played the game there wouldn't have been any escapes at all, not of officers and gentlemen. But he did—so there were lots of them."

Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember Father's original brief paragraph on the fate of the prisoners. "But it was unusual—

the way they were treated—surely?"

"It was, yes," Paul agreed. "What Tom Chard says is that they asked him a lot of silly questions . . . What it amounts to is dummy3

that 'Colonel Soo-shay' interrogated them, and didn't get the right answers. And then Chipperfield decided that, since they weren't being treated properly, and sent to the main depot at Verdun, they had a legal right to escape."

"So they did!" said Aske triumphantly. "It's exactly as I said.

Or what Wilder said . . . he said . . . there's this famous quote, by some officer—PoW, about his word-of-honour being stronger than any French locks-and-bolts. Meaning, that if they broke the rules he was honour-bound to teach them a lesson. But you're right about Lautenbourg, all the same

—'fishy', was how Wilder described that. But. . . so shouldn't we be digging there first—at Lautenbourg, where they started

—rather than here?"

Aske's voice was gentle now, and his question was innocently put, to conceal the suggestion in it that he still doubted the sense of Paul's actions. Yet there was also more to it than that, thought Elizabeth: having been repulsed once in his attempt to obtain a straight answer to the central question, he was manoeuvring to repeat it indirectly and obliquely.

"Here will do well enough." Paul found it harder to maintain his politeness, but he managed it.

Was it simply because Aske was homosexual, and a stranger associated with someone Paul distrusted? Perhaps all that was good enough for him, the irrational confirming the rational, and yet there was surely an edge of something else which she couldn't place ... If she'd been beautiful and desirable, and Aske had been heterosexual . . . then it might dummy3

have been sheer masculine irritation—three was a crowd, and she hadn't concealed her sympathy for Humphrey Aske, in spite of everything . . . But she wasn't, and he wasn't, so it couldn't be that, whatever it was.

"There—up ahead," said Paul. "I've brought you this way so you can get a proper view of it. The first time I came here I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. This is a great country for mist and fog, summer and winter. Both sides found that out in 1918."

Elizabeth craned her neck to see.

"Coucy," said Paul. "Once upon a time it was better to be the Lord of Coucy than a Prince of the Blood, they used to say."

A great castle . . . walls, with their massive interval towers, stretching for half a mile—or more, disappearing into the trees—crowning a high ridge above the plain.

"I'd much rather take you on to see the Paris Gun site, of course—that's why I came here first, back in '73 . . . castles don't mean a bloody thing to me. Battlefields are the places to see, they're where it's all at."

"Battlefields—" Aske caught his tongue again, before it could betray him "—it's an impressive ruin, I must say . . . Where do we go?"

"Follow the road up, through the gateway. Then I'll direct you," said Paul, in his Aske-clipped voice.

The road meandered up the ridge, twisting with its own logic until it turned finally under the walls and towers to skirt dummy3

their circuit. Elizabeth felt herself pressed into silence by the very weight of history, with Lieutenant Chipperfield of the Vengeful sandwiched between medieval Enguerrand III and twentieth-century General Ludendorff.

"Park here," commanded Paul. "From here we walk."

Elizabeth looked round, to get her bearings. They had passed through Paul's great gateway, but into a little town, not a castle—a walled town, which must be what she had glimpsed from below. And now they were in one corner of the town, approaching another gateway, which must belong to the castle itself.

No . . . the whole thing was on a bigger scale than that: this second entrance was only an outer gate, opening on to an immense grassy space dotted with trees—an outer ward much bigger than at her own Portchester, near home.

But Paul seemed to know what he was doing, turning away into the custodian's office with a curt "Stay here", leaving them to kick their heels on an empty square of gravel.

"I've never heard of this place." Aske blinked, and stared around as Elizabeth had done. "But then, judging by the lack of enthusiastic sightseers, I'm not alone in that... or maybe this is aperitif time . . ." He kicked his way across the gravel like a bored schoolboy, to a curious collection of rusty iron.

"This is never medieval—more like industrial revolution . . .

that iron trolley . . . and those look like I don't know what—

railway lines? Except they're curved—?"

dummy3

The gravel crunched behind them. "Slightly curved, for a circle with a ninety-foot diameter. But your dating is about right, Aske. Say, mid-1860s. Vintage Napoleon III."

Another period, and from the wrong Napoleon. They both looked questioningly at Paul Mitchell.

"And also significant. Cardinal Mazarin tried to blow up the great tower in the seventeenth century, only he hadn't got anything powerful enough to do the job. But there was an earthquake in these parts in 1692 that cracked it from top to bottom . . . didn't bring it down, but cracked it—which is one of our main clues, as it happens ... so when Viollet-le-Duc came to do his rescue job on the cheap for Napoleon III he fixed a couple of iron hoops round it, to hold it together. And these are bits of hoop—you can see more of them among the wreckage inside . . . Ludendorff 's explosive was powerful enough . . . Although it took twenty-eight tons of even what he'd got. Something like ammonal, I suppose."

"What d'you mean 'one of our clues', Paul?" She stared at the bits of old railway line.

"Not the hoops. The great crack—that's what fixed our chaps on Coucy here: ' A wondrous great tower, the like of which I never saw for its breadth and height, but very ancient; which yet stood, though split sadly by a fierce tremor of the earth in the days of the Great King, so it is said.' Tom Chard wasn't a great one for French names, but he was interested in everything he saw on his travels, and he had a good memory, thank God! So he left us enough clues—an earthquake in the dummy3

reign of Louis XIV, because no one ever called Louis XV or Louis XVI 'great' . . . and a 'wondrous' tower split by an earthquake can only be Enguerrand's— wondrous is exactly what it was, which was why Ludendorff blew it up, the bastard."

Aske caught Elizabeth's eye a little despairingly, as if to share his conviction that they were even further from any sort of useful answer.

"And . . . that's why we're here?" he prodded Paul cautiously.

"Partly, yes . . ." Paul scanned the landscape ahead, as though he was looking for something in it. "We're here to re-write a chapter in Elizabeth's father's book, as a result of Miss Irene Cookridge's recent revelations, actually . . . Ah! There he is!"

He pointed up the pathway.

Elizabeth frowned along the line of his finger. "Who?

Where?"

Why?

"On the seat there. My old friend Bernard Bourienne. He made it!" Paul sounded childishly delighted. "Come on—"

"Who's . . . Bernard Bourienne?" panted Elizabeth.

"He's a veterinary surgeon from Château-Thierry—"

"A what?" exclaimed Aske.

"He's also an enthusiastic amateur historian. In fact, there aren't many professionals who know more than he does about American operations in France in 1918—all the best American bits in my Hindenburg Line book are thanks to dummy3

him . . . and he's pretty good on the Chemin des Dames too."

"Dear God!" whispered Aske. "Into the trenches again—with a vet!"

Mercifully, Paul didn't hear him, he was already striding towards the man on the seat. "I didn't think he'd make it—

Bernard! Well met, mon vieux!"

"Paul!" Bernard Bourienne unwound himself—all six-foot . . .

six-foot-two—six-foot-four—and, with the shock of dark hair on the top of it, matching the bushy eye-brows, finally more like six-foot-six. "Well met, also, old friend!"

They embraced, in the continental manner which left Elizabeth slightly embarrassed. And then the Frenchman's dark eyes zeroed in on her, stripping her down and reassembling her in a fraction of a second, and yet somehow achieving this without the offence she would have felt in England.

"Bertrand— M'sieur Bourienne—allow me to introduce Mamselle Elizabeth Loftus, daughter of the late Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—"

The shock of hair came down to Elizabeth's level.

"—and my. . . my colleague and fellow historian, Humphrey Aske, of London University."

"M'sieur." Bertrand Bourienne gave Humphrey Aske a very brief glance, and then a second and more searching one, as though the first had quivered some sensitive antenna hidden in the tangle of hair.

dummy3

"Now, Bertrand—" Paul pre-empted any return civilities "—I hope you've got something good for me, because we're pushed for time, as I told you on the phone last night." He looked around. "In fact, it must be almost closing time here, to start with . . . and I'd like my friends to see what's left of Enguerrand's tower before we get chivvied out."

"Chivvied out?" Bourienne waved the threat away. "My dear Paul, they do not chivvy me." He drew himself up to his full height, adding the elongated length of one arm to it in a signal directed towards the gate-house. " So!"

Elizabeth followed the signal, but could see no sign of movement. Then she looked at the Frenchman and he smiled at her, lifting a finger to silence her as he did so. "Listen, Miss Loftus."

For a moment there was total silence, no voices, no sounds, not even any bird-song, which she might have expected in England. Then, out of nowhere—out of the air around her—

there was music . . . not music she could place in any origin of time instantly—not the Musak of the twentieth century . . .

but the sweeter sounds of a distant past, made by unfamiliar instruments and clear in the stillness of the evening.

"Oh—clever stuff, Bertrand," murmured Paul irreverently.

"One day you'll have to do a Son et Lumière here—ending with a bloody great 28-ton bang, maybe?"

"Fourteenth century," said Aske. "Lute and hautboy—

Enguerrand's background music, perhaps?"

dummy3

Influence, thought Elizabeth, putting it all together just as suddenly as the haunting music had filled the open space between the trees and the towers all around her. Paul had said contacts, but that had been what he meant—and that had been Father's complaint in the latter days: I haven't any influence any more— I can't make people do things for me— I don't know the right people . . . This was what Paul had, which he had boasted of—

"Enguerrand's music, c'est vrai," Bourienne acknowledged Aske's guess. "Although I should have had them play La Marseillaise for you this time, Paul. . . if not the rataplan of the drummers of the Guard." They were moving now, as though by concensus, still lapped by Enguerrand's music, towards an inner gateway, much more ruined and overgrown, but also greater.

Paul turned towards his friend. "So you have got something?"

"That ... I don't know . . ." Bertrand Bourienne mused on the question. "I know that I have worked very hard for you, these last hours . . . and in a period unfamiliar to me—and also with material and people unfamiliar to me—yes!"

"Ha . . . hmmm!" Paul grunted unintelligibly, and Elizabeth sensed that he was trying to control his impatience.

"We're very grateful to you for taking such trouble to help us, M'sieur Bourienne," she said carefully. "And at such short notice."

dummy3

"No trouble, Miss Loftus. Assisting fellow-labourers in the vineyard is always a pleasure. And I understand the importance of checking new material when it arrives so inconveniently, with a book almost finished . . ." Bourienne nodded sympathetically ". . . though that is the mark of a true scholar, but naturally—and nothing less than what I would expect of my friend, Dr Mitchell . . . No, my only reservation—

my only regret, even—is that this concerns an era of history with which I am not conversant in sufficient depth to be of real help, so that . . . with so little time at my disposal ... I have been dependent on the charity of others. And to no great effect I fear."

"You mean that Dr Mitchell has sent you on a wild goose chase?" said Aske.

"No . . . that I do not mean." Bourienne pursed his lips, and looked sidelong at Paul. "I know him of old, and he has the historian's gift—the instinct for the one fact out of the many ... the one fact which cannot safely be left behind—the nose for the deep dug-out in the captured trench which is not empty, but full of Germans waiting to issue forth to take you in the rear as you move on."

They were passing through the gateway now, with a labyrinth of ruined guardhouses, and steps descending into darkness, on one side, and a jumble of stones on a hillside on the other.

"And this is one of those dug-outs—those facts, I think," said Bourienne. "Even though I do not know this period, my nose tells me so." He looked at Elizabeth suddenly, nodding again, dummy3

but this time thoughtfully. "I think . . . you are wise not to leave this chapter behind you, Miss Loftus."

"Why, M'sicur Bourienne?" She had come to the question at last.

He pointed to the stone-covered hillside. "Do you not wish to see Enguerrand's tower?"

"I want to know why, first, if you please." Once out, the why took precedence over everything else.

"Very well. If I have understood Paul correctly, you are concerned with the fate of a party of escaped British sailors who concealed themselves here, in one of the towers of this castle? Deserters—yes?"

"Yes." If that was what Paul had said, then yes. "Prisoners-of-war, though, not deserters."

"No." It was Aske who spoke. " 'Deserter' was the official name for all escaped PoWs, on both sides of the Channel.

Once they broke out they were regarded in law as criminals, the officers as well as the men. over here, if they were recaptured they went straight to the dungeons in the punishment fortresses."

"And in England they went to the hulks—the old wooden battleships rotting on the mud-flats, m'sieur. Which was worse, I have been told—is that not so?"

Aske shook his head slowly. "Not worse than the hell-hole at Bitche—'the house of tears'. And they reckoned Sarrelibre was worse than Bitche. Or so I have been told, m'sieur."

dummy3

The tall Frenchman looked down at the little Englishman for a moment, then turned back to Elizabeth. "Let us say . . . it was a cruel age, Miss Loftus. Any man who escaped in those days risked more than mere recapture. But then any man who wore his country's uniform . . . that was also a cruel fate.

And especially here in France, After twenty years of war, and the Law of Conscription, which was hated so much."

"Like the Press Gang?"

"That I cannot say. But here. . . by 1812 the countryside was full of refractaires—the evaders of conscription who were on the run ... as well as deserters from the army. And, for the most part, the peasants and the poor people pitied them, and helped them. Or at least did not inform on them—" he swung towards Paul "—and that, Paul, is how these men of yours survived here for so long without discovery: they passed themselves off as conscripts—as fishermen from the west coast trying to return to their homes . . . Would that be right?"

"Exactly right, Bertrand, by God!" Paul nodded first to the Frenchman, then to Elizabeth. "Tom Chard said that Chipperfield and the midshipman both spoke enough French to get by, but they passed off their accents as Breton—like pretending to be Scotsmen in Kent. By God! Bertrand—

you've found them! That's brilliant of you!"

" Moment, Paul." Bourienne cautioned Paul with a hand. "It may be that I have not got them. None of the peasants who were interrogated admitted that these were Englishmen—"

dummy3

"But the place and the time is right, Bertrand—"

"But not the numbers, my friend. You said four men, and these were not four men—they were three men and a girl."

"And a girl?" Elizabeth's heart sank.

"A young girl. The sister of one of them, who was travelling with her brother, Miss Loftus."

Elizabeth turned to Paul. "Paul—?"

"Bloody marvellous!" Paul beamed at her, and then at Bouriennt. "You're a magician, Bertrand. I never thought you'd find them, not in the time. But you have!"

"But. . . the girl, Paul?"

"Tom Chard mentioned a girl—obviously," said Aske.

"Everything comes back to Tom Chard."

"Not quite everything." Paul cut back to the Frenchman, dismissing Aske. "What happened, Bertrand?"

"Ah . . . now I am going to disappoint you! What happened is not at all clear... I have this friend in our society—a local history society, you understand, Miss Loftus—and he has a colleague who is an authority on the times hereabouts of the First Empire ... on the local administration under the Emperor Napoleon, and so on ... a man who knows his way round the records and documents of the period—"

"Bertrand—"

"All right. You are in a hurry, I know . . . The fact is, for security purposes the country was divided into small dummy3

districts, each with a police commandant, and the presence of this party was eventually reported to the officer at Chauny

—I say 'eventually', for it seems that they had lodged in one of the smaller towers here for ten days or more . . . the château as a whole had been derelict since the revolution, you understand . . . Yes, well... it was assumed that they were refractaires, and a party of police was sent to arrest them.

But when they searched the château they found that the birds had flown. Possibly they had been warned by the peasants ...

or perhaps they had a look-out. All that the gendarmes found was—a grave. A fresh grave."

Elizabeth looked to Paul. "Lieutenant Chipperfield, Paul?"

"Shh! Go on, Bertrand."

Bourienne frowned at Paul. "This was all routine so far, you must understand. Hunting deserters was one of their main tasks— French deserters . . . All through that previous winter, and into the spring, there had been a special drive to bring the conscripts to the colours as never before—every man or boy they could lay their hands on, the class of 1813 even. The whole of France was on the move, they said—the whole of Western Europe even. This was 1812, remember—"

"Russia," said Aske. "The great invasion! The dress rehearsal for 1941." He nodded to Elizabeth. "You remember what I said? This was the big year—1812!"

"The year of Salamanca," said Paul. "One of David Audley's maternal ancestors was killed at Salamanca, charging with Le Marchant's cavalry in Wellington's greatest victory, as he dummy3

never tires of telling us."

"Greatest victory—phooey!" Aske sniffed derisively.

"Napoleon withdrew forty of his best battalions from Spain for Russia. Spain was a side-show, compared with Russia—

like Greece and North Africa were side-shows in 1941

compared with Russia. Once they'd dealt with Russia—

Napoleon and Hitler both—the rest was chicken-feed . . .

they'd have taken England next after that. In fact. . . in fact, the only difference between the year 1812 and the year 1941

is that at the very end of 1941 the Americans came in on our side . . . Whereas, in 1812 the Americans declared war on us, old boy!"

"This is Professor Wilder talking, presumably?" Outside his 1914 -18 War Paul wasn't so sure of himself.

"Professor Wilder and the facts." Aske picked up Paul's uncertainty like a £5 note in the gutter. "Wilder says the trouble with us is that we've been brought up on Arthur Bryant and Nelson—we reckon we're winning the war from Trafalgar in 1805 onwards. But the fact is that by the summer of 1812 we were losing it. Bad harvests . . . riots in the cities—the Luddites breaking up the factories and burning the corn-ricks . . . the pound falling against the franc. . . and war with the United States . . . and then Napoleon leading the greatest army of the age against the Russians." He shook his head. "In 1812, when poor old Chipperfield was being planted here, we were losing, believe me, Mitchell."

dummy3

"Hmmm. . ." Paul cut his losses at a stroke. "So they found a grave, Bertrand. And did they dig it up?"

"They dug it up, yes." Bourienne didn't quite know what to make of the Mitchell-Aske byplay. "And that is when it started to cease to become routine, my friend."

"How so? He died of natural causes, surely? Blood-poisoning or gangrene, or whatever?"

Bourienne waved a hand. "What he died of, I do not know.

But there was a British naval officer's uniform coat buried with him—that is when the trouble started . . . en effet, that is when the records start. Because until then it was no more than a police matter."

"So what happened then?"

"Oh ... it did not happen immediately. I do not know all the dates, but it was late summer, early autumn, when the coat is ... is ... disinterred. And then the commandant's report goes through the official channels, and eventually to Paris.

And then—and then . . ."

"The shit is in the fan?" Paul grimaced at Elizabeth. "Sorry, Elizabeth—and then, Bertrand?"

"And then . . . Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet, bringing the fear of God and the Emperor with him, and two squadrons of

gendarmes d'élite from the Young Guard battalions in Paris

—"

"Suchet!" exclaimed Aske, "Meaning 'Soo-shay', Colonel of the Gendarmerie?"

dummy3

"Not the Gendarmerie, m'sieur—" Bourienne shook his head

"—this Suchet was a colonel of the Marines of the Guard, and also a special aide of the Emperor himself . . . What you would call 'top brass'—and not so much a policeman, I think, as—as—as, maybe a colonel of the general staff—or of intelligence, perhaps?"

Now they were really in deep, thought Elizabeth, looking quickly from Paul to Humphrey Aske. Because, with that one flight of comparative fancy, Bertrand Bourienne had lifted up Lieutenant Chipperfield of the Vengeful out of the category of escaped PoW into the realm of cloak-and-dagger.

"Indeed?" Paul seemed disappointingly unmoved. "So just what did this fellow . . . Suchet do, to put the fear of God up everyone?"

"Ah . . . well, he dismissed the commandant at Chauny—for incompetence, one supposes . . . And he summoned the adjoints from Compiegne and Soissons and Laon, and drafted both the local police and the soldiers from the garrisons to conduct house-to-house searches . . . Also, it would seem that he despatched messengers to St Quentin and Arras and Amiens, and even as far as Rouen—"

"What messages?"

Bourienne shook his head. "Messengers . . . what messages, I do not know . . . And he interrogated many local people—

peasants and farmers from Coucy here, and also from Folembray and Guny and Pont-St Mard—after he left there dummy3

were complaints from several mayors to the Prefect, both about his behaviour, and the behaviour of his men . . . chiefly his men, for damage to property . . . and there were two assaults, and the rape of a respectable woman. After the troubles of the winter and the spring, when the conscripts had been combed out, there was much disaffection—even after he left—even with the news of great victories in Russia—

false news, as it turned out."

Bourienne shrugged. "But after that there is little more to tell

— little more that the records here contain, at least. This is the worm's-eye view of what you seek. If you wish for the eagle's-eye view, you must go to Paris, that is what my friend's colleague advises. There are many other records there, and it was from Paris that Colonel Suchet came."

"Suchet does sound like our best bet," agreed Aske. "If he was top brass, someone must know about him. And now that we know he turned up here as well as at Lautenbourg—"

"Lautenbourg?" Bourienne frowned. "In the Vosges?"

"That's where they escaped from," said Aske.

"And Colonel Suchet pursued them all the way here?" The Frenchman's bushy eyebrows rose. "But then that fits well enough—well enough . . ."

"Well enough how, m'sieur?" asked Elizabeth.

Bourienne considered her for a moment. "I said ... a worm's-eye view, Mamselle . . . and that is the truth . . . And there is little enough that I have been able to give you, beyond what dummy3

you already appear to know . . . the more so, as I myself know so little of this period. But there is one thing I do know, which every worm knows . . . and every student of history must learn to identify from the worms' memories—" he paused for dramatic effect "—and that is the heavy tread of authority. . . the tread of history itself crushing down on the worms."

Elizabeth looked at him blankly.

"I do not know what messages Colonel Suchet sent—I do not even know why he pursued these prisoners. But it is clear that he wanted them very badly . . . enough to turn this whole region upside down . . . and it was not merely because they were escapers—of that I am sure." He shook his head. "They were not ordinary escapers."

"What makes you think that?" asked Aske quickly.

"Partly because he was no ordinary policeman—and an imperial aide does not chase ordinary escapers." Bourienne looked at Paul, and smiled. "And partly because he has a nose for the dug-out full of Boches." He came back to Aske and Elizabeth. "And partly because I also feel the heavy tread above me—perhaps that most of all."

"Hmm . . ." Aske wrinkled his nose doubtfully. "A bit of circumstantial evidence, in fact. Plus a lot of mere instinct."

Bourienne gestured towards the hill of rubble. "This is Enguerrand's tower, Miss Loftus."

Elizabeth blinked in surprise. "Oh ... yes ... It was built on a dummy3

hill, was it?"

"On a hill? But no! Here—where we stand—was the edge of a great ditch. The ruin of the tower fills the ditch and also makes your hill, Mamselle. And what we see is but the edge of a huge crater where the tower stood. The greatest single ruin in France is what you see here—am I right, Paul?"

"What?" Paul frowned abstractedly.

The Frenchman nodded. "They were not ordinary prisoners?

Am I right?"

"No, they weren't. I suppose I owe you that, Bertrand." Paul grinned. "But I don't yet know why."

"But you knew before, nevertheless?" Bourienne nodded.

Elizabeth stared at Paul. "How did you know, Paul?"

"I don't know—I'm guessing, like Bertrand."

"They were sent to Lautenbourg, that's why," said Aske.

"Sent there—and then interrogated about something. And then, when they escaped, the French pretended to the British that they didn't exist. And if they'd been caught I'll bet that would have been the truth. 'Shot while escaping' is the standard formula."

"Timing is the giveaway, Elizabeth," said Paul, ignoring Aske.

"They met the Fortuné by accident—the Vengeful was wrecked—they came ashore ... By the ordinary rules they would have been marched to somewhere like Verdun, and Lieutenant Chipperfield and the midshipman would have been semi-paroled there, and perhaps the warrant officers dummy3

with them. That must be what Chipperfield reckoned on."

"So what?" said Aske.

"So he didn't need to escape. Once he reached Verdun he'd be among friends, with a Senior British Officer to advise him what to do next... Or at least he'd be safe, anyway."

"Where does timing come into this?" persisted Aske.

"At first they did march towards Verdun—they nearly got there, in fact. But then they were diverted to the Lautenbourg, and Colonel Suchet turned up. And then they were in trouble." Paul looked at Elizabeth. " Timing, Elizabeth."

He expected something of her—and since he could hardly expect her to be brighter than Aske it must relate to something he expected her to know, and to be able to put together as he had done.

"Timing . . ." Her mind stretched into Father's Vengeful Number Seven chapter, but to no avail. And Bertrand Bourienne, who knew nothing about the Vengeful's last voyage, was looking frankly bemused. And Humphrey Aske—

The Vengeful's last voyage?

"The French couldn't possibly have known that she'd be off Ushant—" But now she was echoing her own answer to the question she'd put to her in the garden at the Old House "—

but she was at Gibraltar for re-fitting and stores before that. . . and then she called at Lisbon on the way home . . . ?"

"Come on," Elizabeth!" Paul encouraged her.

dummy3

"Well ... I suppose the French could have received news of her sailing from Lisbon, if they had spies there ... if she didn't sail immediately—but meeting the Fortuné. . . that was still accidental, Paul."

"You're just guessing—clutching at straws," murmured Aske.

"Of course I'm bloody guessing!" snapped Paul. "But our people say the time factor just about fits—allowing for the length of time it took to transfer information to Paris from Spain."

"But that would take weeks—" Aske stopped suddenly, and his expression changed. "Ah!"

Elizabeth stared at Aske.

"That's what he means, Miss Loftus," Aske nodded. "The Fortuné doesn't come into the reckoning at all. But once the Vengeful survivors came ashore the news would have gone to Paris in a matter of hours, by semaphore. They always celebrated whenever one of our ships came to grief—the Moniteur would publish it, we can check that even ... But . . .

they didn't do anything about it. They just started the prisoners off towards Verdun, like always . . . and that also took weeks—don't you see?"

Belatedly, Elizabeth saw—saw the two additions of time, and what they might mean: on the one hand the days the Vengeful had been in Gibraltar, or Lisbon, and at sea, plus the time from the sea-fight with the Fortuné, through the shipwreck and the survivors' landfall, and the long trek dummy3

thereafter across France towards the prison depot. . . and on the other, the odyssey of the information about the Vengeful from Lisbon to Paris, first from behind the British lines, from some French spy, and even through French-occupied Spain . . . which, with guerrilla bands watching every road, would have been hardly less slow and dangerous. And together those two additions of time and distance turned into snails creeping across the map, but converging on each other just short of Verdun and safety, when Colonel Suchet finally caught up with Lieutenant Chipperfield.

"So Suchet's our man now—'Colonel Soo-shay' who asked the silly questions— goodbye Tom Chard, hullo Mon Colonel,"

said Aske to Paul. "Because whatever it was the old Vengeful had on board, Mon Colonel wanted it, that's for certain—"

Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet—

The night-bells of Laon had stopped long since, but sleep still eluded Elizabeth as the roll-call of the living and the dead—

the newly dead and the long dead—continued to echo inside her brain—

Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet and Lieutenant Horace Chipperfield . . . and Danny Kahn and Julian Oakenshaw—

and Harry Lippman and Ray Tuck . . . and Harry Lippman and Father . . . and Father and Lieutenant Chipperfield—and Tom Chard and Abraham Timms and the little midshipman . . . and Colonel Suchet and Bertrand Bourienne . . . and Paul—and Paul ...

dummy3

And Humphrey Aske, and Chief Inspector Del Andrew—and Danny Kahn . . . and David Audley, and Faith Audley, and Cathy Audley—and David Audley and Josef Ivanovitch Novikov, and Paul—Dr Paul Mitchell of the King's College, Oxford— Paul. . .

And all the dead Tommies, lying so neatly, row on row, on their hillside in Champagne, below the road on which the king's sisters had chattered their way so long ago . . . and yet not so long ago as Enguerrand had built his tower . . .

Friends and enemies, heroes and villains . . . heroes and villains at the same time, according to whose side they were on—Suchet and Novikov and Audley and Paul . . . and whose side had Tom Chard been on, who had somehow beaten all the impossible odds to break free, and to live to tell the tale?

Whose side? And why?

The questions crowded behind the ghosts closing round her bed in the silence—whatever it was the old Vengeful had on board—what had Father been doing—what had he done—

Then, dissolving the ghosts and the questions both, and startling Elizabeth out of her mind as they vanished, there wasn't quite silence any more: there was the sound of a discreet tap-tap on her door— discreet, but insistent.

X

"ELIZABETH—"

dummy3

But whatever Dr Paul Mitchell, of the King's College, Oxford, whispered after that was lost to her as she scuttled back into bed, conscious more of Madame Hortense's taste in night-attire than of Dr Mitchell's post-midnight opening gambit.

The door closed out the light from the passage, and darkness sprang back into the bedroom.

"Christ, Elizabeth—I can't see a bloody thing!" Dr Mitchell blundered unromantically against the table by the door. "Put the light on, for heaven's sake!"

Elizabeth drew the sheet up to her neck. "What d'you want, Paul?" The silly question asked itself before she could stifle it.

"For God's sake—I want to talk to you!" hissed Paul. "What did you think I wanted?"

Dust and ashes filled Elizabeth, turning to shame and then anger in quick succession. She let go of the sheet—what did it matter what he saw or didn't see?—and leaned across to switch on the bedside lamp.

"What d'you want?" She glared at him in the knowledge that it hadn't been a silly question at all. "I was trying to get some sleep."

"I'm sorry." He blinked at her in the light.

"So am I." Disgust with herself hardened her voice. "Well, what is it?"

His face set to match her tone. "First... as of now, when someone knocks on your door in the night, you don't just dummy3

open up, like Juliet for Romeo. You ask who the hell it is—

okay?"

"Juliet for Romeo" was too close for comfort—too humiliatingly and pathetically close, thought Elizabeth miserably.

"Second ... I am sorry to disturb you, Elizabeth. But I have some news for you."

"News?" It was on the tip of her tongue to reject the offer until morning, but that would be merely petty, and she was awake now anyway. And there was also something in that voice which didn't match the set expression. "What news?"

"I've been on the phone to England. I've spoken to David Audley . . . and to Del Andrew, Elizabeth."

It was sympathy—the news must be bad news. But what bad news could either Dr Audley or Chief Inspector Andrew have for her, who had no next-of-kin, no hostages to fortune?

"Yes?" She couldn't help him, he had to bite on his own bullet.

He stared at her. "They think they know where—how—how your father got all that money."

She had been wrong about not having hostages to fortune: she had a hundred thousand of them, and they were going to take them all away from her. She had been briefly rich, but now she was poor again.

"In, fact, they're pretty damn certain. That Del Andrew—he's a fast worker. . ." He continued to stare at her, rolling the dummy3

bullet around, unwilling to clench his teeth on it.

So it was worse than that: they were going to send her to prison . . . or was it Father, who was beyond their reach, who had committed some disgraceful act—even some treasonable act—?

No—not some treasonable act . . . not Father— never Father!

But . . . disgraceful? Dishonest?

"It wasn't his money?" Was that what the Vengeful had been carrying? The thought of some great treasure had been in the back of her mind all along, even though she had scorned the possibility of it—even though she knew that the Vengeful was a long-lost wreck, and that the survivors could hardly have got away with anything of value—

Or could they?

"It wasn't his, no."

Or could they? But if they had . . . of what possible importance could it have been to the French, who had plundered most of Europe, from the horses of St Mark's to the hard cash in the treasuries of whole kingdoms? And . . .

and even more—even if Colonel Suchet had coveted it... there was no conceivable way that it could interest Josef Ivanovitch Novikov of the KGB—

"It was yours, Elizabeth," said Paul.

She hadn't heard him properly. "What?"

"It was yours." Paul sat down on the edge of the bed, and started to reach for her hand, but then thought better of it.

dummy3

"He stole it from you."

She had heard him properly, she just didn't understand what ne was saying. "From . . . me?"

"Del Andrew took Ray Tuck—lifted him out of somewhere in the Essex marshes this morning, bright and early. And then made him sing by the simple expedient of letting him choose between singing and being turned loose on the street for Danny Kahn's boys to pick up ... So Ray Tuck sang like a canary."

That was the authentic voice of Del Andrew, thought Elizabeth irrelevantly, while thinking at the same time from me?

"The funny thing is ... Ray Tuck sang true, and yet it was all a pack of lies, the song he sang, Del Andrew thinks—Harry Lippman's lies. Or maybe your father's lies, but we can't check on that now."

"What lies, Paul?" All Elizabeth could think was From me?

How could Father have stolen from her, who had nothing to steal?

"Oh ... a cock-and-bull story about hidden treasure from the old Vengeful—how your father was picking it up bit by bit from somewhere in France, and Lippy was fencing it for him.

Which was a whole pack of lies, because there's no Vengeful treasure—or not this treasure, Elizabeth."

She had to listen to what he was saying. "How do you—how does . . . Del. . . know that?"

dummy3

"At first he didn't. But Ray Tuck gave him the name of one of the buyers—a dead-respectable jeweller who'd never handle

'dodgy' goods . . . apart from the fact that Lippy wouldn't have sold any to one of his 'straight' clients, Del says, and the jeweller himself wouldn't have bought this jewellery anyway, without proper provenance for the record."

"Jewellery? What jewellery? What . . . ?"

"Provenance? 'Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—family heirlooms—item, one emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, very fine—£12,000 . . . item, one diamond tiara set in gold, central stone umpteen carats, very fine—

£15,000 . . . those are two we've been able to check. And also some small trinkets Lippy couldn't bear to part with, because he loved good antique jewellery, which he passed on to his daughter to wear on Saturday, down the market. . . having paid the full market price himself, of course."

Listening was one thing, but grasping the sense of it was still another. "Why couldn't it have come from the Vengeful, Paul? How can you be so sure?" She grasped at the word

'antique'. "If it was old—"

"It was old, but not old enough." He gazed at her sadly.

"About 150 years old to be exact—between 150 and 130, that is."

Elizabeth made the subtraction dumbly, hopelessly.

"Early Victorian. Made by a jeweller named Savage who opened up shop in Bond Street in 1832, which his son sold in dummy3

1883—they made the necklace and the tiara, anyway: their work is apparently quite distinctive . . . Lippy's buyer recognised it straight off, because Savage pieces are highly regarded in the trade—real craftsman's work ... So naturally Lippy would have recognised it too, it was right up his street.

Some of the rings and brooches he gave his daughter aren't Savage work—they're late Victorian and Edwardian, which is equally distinctive. So there's no possible doubt about it, Elizabeth." He paused. "And no doubt that it's yours, either."

Elizabeth waited, oddly aware that her feet, which had been warm, were cold now.'

"You see, Elizabeth, our Chief Inspector Andrew is an observant fellow, and he's done his time on the robbery squad, or whatever they call it. So when a certain Lebanese tycoon showed him a certain emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, late yesterday afternoon ...

he remembered that he'd seen it all before, in a picture on the wall of a house in Hampshire he'd searched two days earlier ... as worn by Mary, Lady Varney, wife of Admiral Sir Alfred Collingwood Varney—necklace and earrings, and a lot of other jewellery, tiara and rings and suchlike. 'Got up like a Christmas tree', is how he remembered her . . . your great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth—or would she be great-great-great?"

Great-great-grandmother, dripping with jewels, thought Elizabeth, the cold at her back now.

"The way Del sees it, the jewels very often pass straight down dummy3

the female line, mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter, great-aunt to great-niece, with no publicity.

Even before death duties came into the picture they were passed as gifts on the quiet, with no fuss and bother. Which is how they must have come to your mother, Del thinks. But she died when you were a baby, so . . ." he trailed off diplomatically ". . . so that's how we think it was, Elizabeth."

That was how they thought it had been. And that was how she thought it had been, too.

Paul shrugged. "Del thinks . . . maybe Lippy tried to make it all sound difficult—or at least too difficult for a little wanker like Ray Tuck to try and get his hands on, anyway—"

" 'Wanker'?" For a moment Del's vernacular flummoxed her.

Paul waved one hand vaguely. "Small-timer. . . The idea of hiding it in France, and historical research, and all that... It never occurred to him that Ray would sell the whole idea to Danny Kahn—"

"Who's got a lot of bottle?" She tried to hold on to the absurdity of the dialogue because she didn't want to think of Father quibbling about the house-keeping bills.

" 'Bottle'? Oh . . . yes . . . Danny Kahn's a whole lot smarter, yes—" Paul rallied "—smarter and even greedier, unfortunately. Not that he matters now . . ."

Not that anything mattered much—now, thought Elizabeth.

It was an odd feeling, to be a rich woman again, so quickly, with Madame Hortense and M'sieur Pierre at her elbow to dummy3

advise her, and yet to be so poor and lonely at the same time, in the traditional way in which unloved and unbeautiful rich women were supposed to be poor and lonely.

"We'll never know which of them made up the story for Ray Tuck." Paul drew a deep breath. "But anyway . . . that's the size of it, Elizabeth. And I'm sorry for disturbing your rest, but I wasn't going to tell you all this in front of that—that fellow Aske—"

"That 'wanker' Aske?" It was better to smile than to cry: that was the lesson she must learn from his charade, for the future. "He can't help being what he is, Paul."

He stood up, carefully adjusting his dressing-gown. "Just leave me my irrational prejudices intact, Miss Loftus dear. I have problems enough without that."

"What are you going to do about it?" The cold was in her voice

—she could hear it.

"Why—nothing, of course." He stared at her. "I mean, Del Andrew will put in his report to Jack Butler. But it isn't any of our business . . . and Jack Butler's not that sort of chap, I mean . . . And we had a deal, I seem to recall, eh?"

Prize-money, remembered Elizabeth. Father had lived in the wrong century for that, just as he had missed out on the battle-squadrons of dreadnoughts. But he had managed the next best thing with the Varney jewellery which should have been hers.

"You shouldn't think too badly of him, Elizabeth," said Paul.

dummy3

"He may have spent a fair bit of it, but he also put plenty away for you—tax-free, remember."

But Elizabeth was remembering other things—the penny-pinching on the laundry, and the unpaid secretarial work.

And what had nearly happened to her—

She sat up straighter in bed. "Why did he tell that story about the Vengeful?"

"Maybe he didn't." Paul shook his head. "Maybe he just talked about the Vengeful research to Lippy, and Lippy spun the yarn on his own initiative."

"Why should he do that?"

"Well . . . Del Andrew thinks Ray Tuck's eyes—and ears—

were bigger than his stomach. He could have heard something, or seen something—Lippy was getting sicker, so Ray Tuck was doing more of the leg-work around his place, and he could have heard something one day . . . And as Lippy didn't trust him he wouldn't have wanted him to believe that the Captain was sitting right on top of a lot of loot here in England... there in England—he made up this yarn about treasure to put him off the scent."

Elizabeth almost smiled through her heart-ache: it was strange to hear Del Andrew speaking out of Paul's mouth, word for word.

"Don't go, Paul!" She had tried to throw her bonnet over the windmill, only to have it blown back into her face. But now she was desperately awake—and even more desperately dummy3

lonely. "Sit down, please— please!"

He sat down unwillingly. "What can I do for you?"

What indeed! The rich woman had to think—and that was another lesson, to be learnt as she went along.

"You said . . . Danny Kahn doesn't matter—?"

"Oh. . . Del Andrew will get Danny Kahn—don't you worry about him!"

"So what does matter?" Desperation honed up her wits to a razor edge. "What—what on earth was there on board the Vengeful, that Colonel Suchet wanted so badly?"

For a moment he didn't reply—he was staring fixedly at the low frills on Madame Hortense's nightie. Then he shook his head and concentrated on her.

"Ah . . . well, that may not prove such an overwhelming mystery, Bertrand thinks—he was the first one I phoned after dinner." He smiled at her a little ruefully. "Contacts again, Elizabeth: it seems that Bertrand put his friend's colleague on his mettle—the one who knows all about Napoleon's times. Experts like demonstrating their expertise, I know the feeling all too well, it's quite irresistible . . . Apart from which, Bertrand shrewdly suspects, the mysterious Colonel Suchet sounds interesting in his own right— and I know that feeling, too."

But if he knew it he wasn't demonstrating it now, as he had done at Coucy le Château, Elizabeth observed: if anything, he looked tired and rather worried, and somehow younger dummy3

because of that, not older.

"The long and short of which is that we have a name and an address in Paris—and an appointment for 11 o'clock: Professor Louis Belperron, of the Sorbonne, editor of the Annales historiques de l'Empire, and author of books too numerous to mention—not to add innumerable contributions to the Revue des études napoleoniénnes, and so on and so forth.''

"Paul, that's wonderful—" Only his lugubrious expression cautioned her. "—isn't it?"

"Yes. It's wonderful." Whatever it was, said his face, it wasn't wonderful.

"Then . . . what's the matter?"

"The matter, Elizabeth ... is that I spoke to David Audley last of all, after Bertrand and Del Andrew . . . that's the matter."

Elizabeth frowned. "But why . . . ? Doesn't he want us to see ... Professor Belperron?" A spark of anger kindled suddenly on Paul's behalf. "Isn't he pleased with you—with us?"

"Pleased? No, he's not pleased—he's bloody delighted!! He's so damn pleased he's busy galvanising his Professor Wilder on the Vengeful back in England . . . and probably half the research section as well, for all I know." He drew a deep breath. "He's so pleased that I've got to send Aske to Charles de Gaulle Airport tomorrow afternoon to collect him, so he can tell us in person how pleased he is ... among other dummy3

things."

"He's coming to France?"

"And then we're all going on a jaunt to Lautenbourg—'Tell Aske to book rooms in a Michelin-recommended hotel—

somewhere where the food's good' . . . sweet Jesus Christ!

Where the food's good!"

In any other circumstances the prospect of actually visiting the scene of the great escape would have overjoyed her, but Paul's misery was infectious. "That's bad, is it?"

"Yes, it's bad." He fell silent for a moment. "You don't know David Audley as I do."

He made the prospect of Audley daunting. And yet at the same time the memory of that big man, with his strange handsome-ugly face and rough-gentle manner, excited her intensely: wherever Audley was, that would be the centre of things and the answers would be there.

"I know he likes you, Paul." She tried to reassure him and to make amends for her treachery. "In fact, I think he's fond of you, even."

For an instant he stared at her incredulously, and then his expression blanked out; and she knew, but too late, that she'd said exactly the wrong thing.

"If I may say so, Elizabeth . . . that's a damn silly remark—"

"I mean—I meant, he respects you—"

"I don't care if he worships the ground I tread on." He bulldozed over her. "What I mean is what I said last night, dummy3

only more so: I think the Russians are making a fool of him.

The difference is that now I'm not just guessing. Because now the evidence points that way."

"What evidence?"

"What evidence . . ." He got up, and walked round the end of the bed towards the open window. And then stopped suddenly. "Put the light out, Elizabeth."

She fumbled for the switch. "What is it, Paul?"

"Nothing. Just a precaution." He waited, and she guessed that he was accustoming his eyes to the darkness. "In the field you take precautions, that's all. And this is the field, Elizabeth—'some foreign field' . . . but that's not what I intend it to be, for either of us . . . so, as of now, we take the proper precautions—okay? I should have done it before . . .

I'm getting careless, like Novikov ... or maybe not like Novikov ..."

"Yes, Paul." Excitement was only a thin skin on top of fear, she realised: "the field" was no more than an abbreviation of

"the battlefield", where men died.

"What evidence." He was a silhouette against a skyline faintly lightened by the illumination of the old city. "It was always on the cards that they'd stage a diversion of some kind. What I don't know is whether you were planned to be that diversion, or whether they're bright enough—and quick enough—to take advantage of you when you turned up out of the blue . . . I just don't know . . ."

dummy3

He was speaking as much to himself as to her, and she didn't dare disturb his line of thought. Because this was something she'd never seen before—never heard, never even remotely imagined: this was a man struggling with a problem which involved not only his comfort, or his business—his job, his livelihood, his income . . . even the security of his country, which he was paid to safeguard—but his life—

And her life too?

"If there was a Russian Audley running the operation I'd guess this is pure opportunism—that they didn't know about you, but you fitted the bill so perfectly that they dropped everything else in preference for you—in preference for the old Vengeful."

It was strange, but she wasn't cold any more. The thought of Father, and what he had done, had chilled her; but now she was aware of the warm darkness all around her, and of the slightest prickle of sweat at her throat.

The silhouette changed, and she was aware that he had turned back inwards, to face her. "Guessing isn't evidence—if that's what you are about to say—I'm aware of that. But I'm not guessing when I say they have Audley-watchers over there, on the other side. I could even give you a name—the name of one of them whom we know about, if it would mean anything to you. And he's a scholar, like Audley ... an archaeologist, not an historian, but a Russian Audley, all the same." He nodded at her. "He'd know very well how obsessed David is with the past. And if he knows Audley's in charge on dummy3

this side . . . and that's a reasonable assumption by now . . .

then the evidence starts to pile up."

She wanted to say What evidence? again, but instinct ruled against it.

"Contemporaneity, Elizabeth—that's the first piece: unconnected things which happen at the same time, and then influence each other. Your father died . . . and Lippy died

—and they were both old men, so that wasn't out of the ordinary . . . And Ray Tuck was in trouble, and Danny Kahn was greedy—that's nothing special, either. But all those were their contemporaneous events, not ours, do you see?"

Instinct still silenced her.

"Your Vengeful, let's say . . . But there was also our Vengeful

—or what David Audley made of our 'Vengeful'—really their

'Project Vengeful', which I'm inclined to think now has nothing to do with yours, Elizabeth. Nothing whatsoever."

Instinct snapped. "But, Paul, if—"

"He made a mistake—" he overrode her "—or, not quite a mistake ... He wanted this job for himself so badly ... or he didn't want someone else to get it ... that he used your Vengeful to get it." The silhouette nodded at her again. "And maybe it was that someone else who put out the word that the great David Audley was at work—" shrug"—or maybe I'm doing him an injustice . . . maybe the Russians spotted me sniffing about—that's probably more like it. Because if I've added up two and two correctly I'm the one who hasn't been dummy3

so clever. And that's what worries me, Elizabeth dear—if this is going wrong, then I'm to blame too. And I've got enough on my conscience already . . . like, sometimes I feel too much like the Angel of Death flying over the battlefield—"

" Paul!" His voice had become too elaborately casual for conviction when she could sense the mixture of fear and guilt emanating from him. "If what you say is true—what about that Russian who was watching me?"

"Novikov?" The voice cracked. "Elizabeth—Novikov is the best bit of evidence of all! Novikov is a pro—a top-flight pro!"

"Yes? So what, Paul? You spotted him—"

"I spotted him? Damn it, Elizabeth—even you spotted him!

Doesn't that tell you anything? Christ! Do you remember when that little bugger Aske said 'No one follows me when I don't want him to', or something like? Do you think anyone spots Aske on his tail when he doesn't want him to?" Paul momentarily lost his cool. "Christ, Elizabeth! Novikov's ten times the man Aske will ever be—if he didn't want to be seen, neither of us would have seen him, don't you understand?"

This time it was the mixture of his anger and his self-contempt which silenced her.

"He followed me, Elizabeth—and I didn't see him, because he's better than me. But then he let me see him—and from that moment the old Vengeful was afloat again, with a vengeance—can you at least understand that? David Audley may have baited the hook himself, but it was Novikov who dummy3

made the sinker bob up and down—and we all swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. And now it's stuck in my throat, and I can't bloody well dislodge it—that's what I'm saying!"

She could see most of it at last; part of it darkly, or indistinctly, because it was out of her experience; but she could see the loom of it through the half-light and the mist, like some great three-decker bearing down on her with its gun-ports open and its guns run out and double-shotted, ready to blow her out of the water with one broadside.

"But. . . But haven't you told David Audley all this, Paul?"

"Oh . . . I've told him, Elizabeth—I've told him!" He paused.

"I told him last night, when I was guessing—remember?—

and he told me to obey orders—remember?" Another pause.

"And I told him tonight, too . . . And he pulled rank on me—

he told me to do my fff ing duty—and David only swears like that when he intends to, when he doesn't want any argument, and there isn't going to be any argument. . . But what I ought to be doing is pulling you out of here tonight, and running like hell for safety—that's what I ought to be doing! Because there's been something wrong with this operation from the start. And I don't like it."

His vehemence frightened her into silence.

"Because if I'm right the Russians will be doing something pretty soon—something to make us believe we're on the right track, to confirm what Novikov did—anything to keep us from looking in the right direction . . . That's why you must keep your door locked, Elizabeth—do you see?"

dummy3

Now she wasn't merely warm, with that delicate trickle at her throat: she was clammy with his fear, which was more infectious than his unhappiness.

"Have you told this to Humphrey Aske, Paul?"

He drew in a breath. "I haven't told him that I think David Audley's making a fool of himself—and us ... if that's what you mean. But I've put him on second watch, keeping an eye on your door and mine from three-thirty onwards. And it's

'Stand-to' for both of us at seven—" his voice rearranged itself as he spoke, as though he had belatedly realised the effect he was having on her "—don't worry, dear—we'll watch over you between us. You can sleep soundly tonight."

That was one thing she wouldn't be doing. But now everything was unreal, and the prospect of what sleep might bring was as scary as not-sleeping.

"I'll go, then." The silhouette moved from the frame of the window into darkness.

"No!" The thought of being alone panicked her.

"You'll be quite safe. We'll be watching—I told you."

"No." She could see the outline of him clearly, dark against almost-dark, at the end of the bed. "Don't go."

Silence.

"Very well. I'll stay here . . . there's a chair here somewhere

—" the darker outline moved as he felt around blindly "—you go to sleep, Elizabeth."

dummy3

"No—I didn't mean that—" But what did she mean? And if he did stay she would snore, and he would hear her snore "—I mean . . . couldn't you be wrong, Paul?" But that wasn't what she meant, either: the truth was that she didn't know what she meant. "I mean . . . David Audley said there wouldn't be any danger—that we would be safe over here, in France—?"

"Yes." He bumped the end of the bed, and the tremor ran through her. "Yes, he said that, Elizabeth."

She simply didn't want him to go, that was it: she was lonely, more than afraid, and she didn't want to be alone, as she had always been. That was it.

"So you could be wrong." She didn't want him to go, and she didn't want him to sit down in the darkness in the corner of the room, and she didn't want him to stand up like Death at the end of her bed.

"Yes, I could be wrong." He sounded far away. "I've been wrong before—yes ..."

He had been wrong before—but that wasn't what he meant now, his voice said.

"I was wrong once before, Elizabeth." Just in time he saved her from saying something pointless. "There was this girl I knew— woman, rather . . . colleague, rather—Frances was her name, and she was damn good ... in fact, she was better than Novikov and Aske and me rolled into one—she was good . . . and pretty as a picture with it, and I adored her, Elizabeth."

dummy3

The darkness shivered between them.

"Which is dead against the rules—and against all commonsense as well, which is what rules are all about:

'gladiator, make no friends of gladiators' is the rule—and it's a good rule."

She saw now why he had reacted against what she had said about David Audley's feeling for him.

"She didn't know, of course. Nobody knew . . . She didn't know, and they didn't know . . . because everything I ever said to her was the wrong thing to say—and it was . . . like, I was always trying to jump into bed with her . . . and I was, too—I couldn't think of anything cleverer to do, I suppose—

and she couldn't stand the sight of me."

Silence.

"But I could stand the sight of her—any time."

Silence.

"So one day I looked at her. It was raining—and I was glad to see her... So I looked at her, Elizabeth, when I should have been looking somewhere else."

Silence.

"And that was a mistake, Elizabeth. And she died of my mistake . . . in the rain, in my arms, Elizabeth."

It was very strange, but only for one fraction of a second was she sorry for poor dead Frances. Because poor dead pretty Frances was still her enemy, and if ever there was a moment for defeating her enemy it was now—when the dark was her dummy3

ally.

"Paul—please come in with me," she whispered. "I'm so frightened."

XI

EVERYTHING WAS JUST fine until Humphrey Aske turned on the car radio for no apparent reason, and then refused to turn it off, and finally started to talk nonsense. And—

"Yes," he said finally. "I think the great Dr Audley may have been careless somewhere along the line."

"What do you mean, Mr Aske?" asked Elizabeth.

"I mean, Miss Loftus, that we're being followed," said Humphrey Aske.

Actually everything hadn't been altogether fine even before, not really. But everything had been different; or, if not exactly recognisably different, at least not quite the same because she felt it had no right to be as it had been before.

Although actually . . . but then it might just have been the presence of Humphrey Aske at the breakfast table with them which had spoilt everything—and an unbearably bright and talkative Humphrey Aske, not in the least blear-eyed from night-watch—even, it was Aske who behaved as she so desperately wanted Paul to behave, noticing and complimenting her on the second of her elegant summer dummy3

travelling suits, which Paul had studiously ignored in preference for one quick glance, which had almost been a stranger's frown, at her face.

And there, she had had to admit to the mirror already, the wear and tear of the last almost-24-hours had done Monsieur Pierre's original work of art no good at all, which she had lacked the expertise to restore as it had been: what she had seen in the mirror was the truth of the fairy story, she had realised now—that Prince Charming simply hadn't recognised Cinderella the morning after, it had only been the size of her foot for the glass slipper which had identified that happy ending.

"Paris—no problem," said Aske to Mitchell. "There's hardly any mist this morning. I filled the car up last night, before I went to bed. Straight down the N2, through Soissons—the last bit's motorway, and we can whip round the peripherique and come off at the Pointe d'Asnieres for the Avenue de Wagram—no trouble at all." He smiled at Elizabeth. "Be there in time for coffee, then M'sieur Bourienne's professor . . . then a nice elongated lunch at a little place I wot of... then the airport and the great Dr Audley himself. . .

Then another motorway, with the foot down on the pedal, and supper in Alsace, Miss Loftus. No Problem! "

On Paul Mitchell's face, Elizabeth observed out of the most oblique corner of her eye, there was a look of the purest hatred.

"What one would like to know—" either Aske couldn't or dummy3

wouldn't observe the same storm warning "— is ... if the great Dr Audley is coming to take the reins from your capable hands, Mitchell... which means that we are on to something highly promising . . . is—what is it? Isn't it time now that one was told why one may be required to do and die?"

It occurred to Elizabeth that, after the events of the last three days since the church fête, and more particularly after the events of last night which were already beginning to become unreal, she had some rights. So, just as Paul's mouth opened in a snarl, she kicked him hard on the ankle.

"Fff-aargh!" exclaimed Paul.

Aske looked at him curiously. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm not sure that Dr Mitchell knows any more than we do, Mr Aske," said Elizabeth.

Humphrey Aske transferred his curiosity to her. "Ah . . . now that hadn't occurred to me, you know—"

Paul grunted explosively. "The fact is, Aske . . . I'm not permitted to tell either you or Miss Loftus everything that's going on—for obvious reasons, which you should understand better than she does."

What Miss Loftus understood, thought Elizabeth, was that Paul Mitchell was never going to admit to Humphrey Aske that he didn't know what he was really doing, and didn't like it either.

"But if David Audley wants you to do and die . . ." Paul reached down to rub his ankle ". . . I'm sure he'll tell you." He dummy3

straightened up. "If it suits him."

"Which it probably won't—I know!" Aske shook his head ruefully at Elizabeth. "The occupational temptation of our profession, Miss Loftus, is to confuse essential secrecy with inessential secretiveness . . . with the predictable result that the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing. But a trip to Paris is better than nothing, I suppose." He smiled suddenly and disarmingly at her again. "We must just hope that the great Dr Audley is right, and we aren't simply wasting our time, however agreeably!"

She couldn't kick Paul again—she had kicked him a bit too hard the first time. All she could do was smile and nod, and hope for the best.

And the best was that Paul drank his coffee, and pushed back from the table. "If you're packed up, Elizabeth, then let's go,"

he said. "Get the car, Aske."

But Aske, once he had manoeuvred them through the narrow streets of the old city, and round its descending hairpin bends, was still hell-bent oh needling Paul into talking, even if his undeterred approach to the problem was as tortuous as their departure from Laon—

"I'll book the hotel when we get to Paris," he began innocently.

Paul grunted.

"In Lautenbourg? Or will nearby do?"

dummy3

"Suit yourself."

"There's a place about ten kilometres away that does glâce au miel de sapin, according to the Michelin."

No reply.

"How many rooms shall I reserve?"

"What?" The question caught Paul unguarded. "What the hell d'you mean—how many rooms?"

"Don't take on so! Is Audley coming alone?"

Paul subsided. "Yes . . . alone."

"Four rooms then. And for how long?" Aske probed gently.

"And where after that?"

Again Paul didn't reply, and Elizabeth knew that this approach wasn't going to work either. All it would produce was another explosion.

"We are retracing the escape route between Lautenbourg and Coucy-le-Château, I take it?" persisted Aske.

There was only one way to defuse Paul, and she had to risk it.

"We do actually know the route then, Paul? Would that be from Father's notes or from Tom Chard's story?"

He drew a breath. "A bit of both, actually. We've traced three places where he stayed, and they fit in well enough with Chard's account."

"Yes, but—" began Aske.

"Father got it right, did he?" Elizabeth blotted out Aske deliberately.

dummy3

"Oh yes . . ." Paul gave her an uncharacteristically shy look

". . . he got it right. He was slow . . . and he let himself be side-tracked into investigating Abraham Timms, the quartermaster's mate, when he should have been concentrating on Colonel Suchet. But he was right." He paused. "And, to be fair, Abraham Timms sounds an interesting character."

"Yes?" She didn't want Aske to break in.

"But then they were all interesting characters—"

"Hold on a moment," said Aske. "I want to pull in here."

The signs of a garage came into view suddenly.

"You said you'd filled up last night," accused Paul.

"Yes." Aske unstrapped himself. "Won't be a moment."

The bonnet went up, and Paul fumed silently until Aske came back.

"All interesting characters, you were saying?" Elizabeth stepped between them again as the car pulled on to the road.

"Chipperfield was a natural born escaper—he thought one jump ahead all the time, it looks like, reading between the lines."

"How—one jump ahead?"

"Well . . . first, he reckoned there'd be a big search, with all the stops pulled out—this is drawing conclusions from what Tom Chard remembered. And he did exactly the right thing, so our experts say."

dummy3

"What was that?"

"He had four or five hours' start, until daylight. They could have made five or ten miles before they had to go to ground.

So if Suchet knew his business, he'd draw a ring round the fortress, maybe ten to fifteen miles out, and move in from there. Can't you go faster than this, Aske?"

"This is fast enough. So what did Chipperfield do?"

Paul sniffed. "He went to ground in a vineyard half a mile from the fortress. They had scraps of food they'd hoarded, and four bottles of water, and they stayed put there for three days and two nights, not moving."

"Ah! I like that," murmured Aske. "So the ring moved in for the first day—but after that it would move out, on the assumption they'd broken through? Is that it? And then, of course, he'd keep inside the ring, never trying to break through it as it expanded? That's good thinking." He half-turned towards Paul. "And then what?"

"He moved in the least expected direction—southwards."

"And why was that unexpected?"

"The obvious direction was east—across the Rhine into Germany. That was the way many of the escapers went from the other fortresses, because they reckoned the Germans wouldn't give them up so easily. And the most direct route to England was north-west—or they could have headed due north, and then turned west when they reached the Low Countries."

dummy3

"So they went southwards. And you think that was deliberate?" Aske sounded unconvinced.

"They were sailors, Mr Aske," Elizabeth could see that Paul chafed under Aske's interruptions. "They would always have known the points of the compass, with the sun or the stars overhead."

Paul nodded. "That's exactly right, Elizabeth. Chipperfield and Timms were both professional navigators. And all Tom Chard's recollections of their route are full of bearings and distances, as well as descriptions . . . like 'we bore southward that day five leagues, which, for nature of that country, was very wearisome by reason of the steepness of its many hills and valleys'."

Aske considered the evidence briefly. "So that would mean they were in the Vosges, would it?"

"The Upper Vosges. 'Great trees, tall and straight, enough to spar mighty navies' is how Tom Chard remembered it—and the humming of the insects up above in the tree-tops, and the crickets in the high pastures . . . and the goats with bells round their necks—Chard was country-bred, and he noticed all the differences between Sussex and Alsace. Although in fact he was much more surprised by the presence of familiar things from home—the jays and the magpies and the robins, and the cranesbill and harebells and foxgloves . . . and the rose-bay willow herb, which tipped off your father about Abraham Timms, Elizabeth."

"Tipped him off. . . to what?"

dummy3

"That Abraham Timms was country-bred like Tom Chard, only much better educated—Chard said he knew the name of everything that lived, and what was edible and what wasn't. . . It's even possible that Chipperfield took Timms along because he knew how to live off the country. But most of all that he was an American."

"An American?" Aske pursed his lips, and then nodded.

"Yes . . . well, there were a lot of Americans pressed into the Royal Navy—that was why they went to war with us. But where does the willow herb come in?"

"Which in his country was called by the savages 'Fire-weed', according to Chard. 'His country' and 'savages' and 'fire-weed' was what tipped Loftus off—not only that Timms was country-bred, but it was a different country. And the clincher that he was an American was when the waggon wheel broke, and Timms had to find wood to repair it—"

"What waggon wheel?" Elizabeth frowned.

"What waggon?" echoed Aske.

"The waggon in which they crossed half of France," said Paul.

"They came down out of the Vosges somewhere near Gerardmer, so far as we can estimate. And first they bought a horse—Chipperfield had money. Tom Chard doesn't say how, but he had it—"

"PoWs always have money," murmured Aske. "And they often let the officers keep their personal possessions. Go on."

"Then, a bit further on, they bought a farm cart. And a day dummy3

later they filled the cart with hay, and Chard and Timms hid under the hay whenever they came near a village, because they couldn't speak a word of French."

"Nice—very nice!" said Aske admiringly. "Nothing stolen—so no hue and cry . . . and nobody suspects a couple of farm labourers with a hay cart when the word's out for four desperate characters! I like it."

"Not even a couple of farm labourers," said Paul.

"Chipperfield was smarter than that, Aske."

"Yes? I'm going to stop again soon—at that garage in the distance. So just sit tight." Aske slowed the car. "A man and a boy, of course, I'd forgotten the little mid-ship-mite—"

"What?" Paul sat up irritably. "For Christ's sake, Aske—what are you playing at?"

"It's like yesterday, old boy. You are doing the talking and I'm doing the driving—okay?"

The previous halt was repeated, with the additional detail of a few litres of petrol to top up the tank.

"Off we go again—just let me do up my seat-belt," said Aske.

"So . . . the little mid-ship-mite, and the waggon, and the mysterious Timms . . . who was an American cousin far from home, eh?"

"What the hell's wrong with the car?"

"Nothing that need worry you, Dr Mitchell ... A man and a boy, you were saying?"

The air, which had warmed up during their five-minute dummy3

delay, crackled between them in the ensuing silence, and Elizabeth looked at Paul unhappily. "A man and a boy, Paul?"

With an effort Paul tore himself away from Aske. "Not a man and a boy, Elizabeth," he addressed her deliberately. "Don't you remember?"

It came to her then, suddenly but quite easily, out of nowhere . . . no, not out of nowhere—out of the far distant memory of an owl flapping noiselessly across a college garden unreasonably disturbed by strange lights and stranger noises, disappearing into the darkness.

It had been a weird open-air production, by some smart undergraduate who had gone on from Oxford to great things in television— A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Titania and Hippolyta and Hermia and Helena all cast from the sixth form of a local prep school—

"The girl, of course." It was simple when you knew the answer. "They dressed the midshipman as a girl."

"Of course!" Humphrey Aske chided himself. "Thirteen years of age, so the childish treble ... or that delicious half-broken husky alto—no wonder no one spotted them! Clever Miss Loftus!"

"Clever Lieutenant Chipperfield, rather." She could see that Paul was pleased with her, so this was the moment for becoming modesty. "But he died at Coucy, Paul—how?"

"Just damned bad luck, that's how, Elizabeth." His pleasure turned instantly to Chipperfield—identifying regret. "The dummy3

cart broke down at Coucy, and they tried to repair it with what they could scrounge. But while they were working on it there was an accident of some kind . . . Tom Chard's a bit vague about what actually happened, but it looks as though something gave way, and Chipperfield was crushed underneath . . ." he trailed off for a moment ". . . not killed, but very badly injured. Fatally injured, as it turned out . . .

which is ... rather sad, when you think about it."

He was no longer looking at her, but just staring into space as though he could see pictures inside his head.

And that, thought Elizabeth, was what he was seeing: rather sad concealed the same insight which had informed his account of the last efforts of the British and German soldiers locked in mud and exhaustion on the muddy slopes above the Aisne—he had been there with them in their embryonic trenches, just as he was there now, dying by inches under the cart at Coucy-le-Château.

All those years ago, and long forgotten, it had been first relegated to one old man's memories, and to a few pages in a commonplace book which had become an old lady's family heirloom until Father's letter in The Times had re-animated it. But once it had been a Great Adventure until rather sad—

she could almost love Paul for that understatement of the unendurable truth it concealed: that this almost anonymous third lieutenant of the Vengeful had brought his comrades so far, in safety against all the odds, with pursuit long out-distanced, only to die slowly and painfully by cruel accident dummy3

almost within sight of home.

"So what did Chard actually say, then?" Aske was quite oblivious to rather sad.

"Oh ... he was still angry after all those years about the cart breaking down that second time." Paul snapped himself back to reality. "He said, if they'd used seasoned ash instead of green elm it would have been okay, and Abraham Timms said that in his country there'd have been plenty of hickory-wood for the taking, which would have been even better—

that was what Chard thought was interesting, because that was what he remembered all those years after." He looked at Elizabeth, seeing her again. "Which was all quite meaningless until your father saw it, and after 'fire-weed', hickory was the clincher—and our experts zeroed in on it too . . . because hickory is the American equivalent for ash

—' Carya ovata, or Carya cordiformis, which is frequently confused with walnut, was rare in Europe in the early nineteenth century, but common in North America, from New York State to Florida'." He smiled lop-sidedly at her.

"When you spend most of your time interpreting security tip-offs and Russian tit-bits a query about the origin of hickory-wood is like a breath of fresh air... But that's where your father picked up his final American clue—and why he went off at half-cock, following Abraham Timms for so long, instead of Colonel Suchet . . . not that Timms isn't a fascinating character, as I said."

"What's so fascinating about him?" inquired Aske.

dummy3

Paul shook his head. "He doesn't really matter. It's Suchet who matters ... all that matters about Timms—and Tom Chard—is that they had to bodge up the cart with inferior material, and it broke again while Chipperfield was underneath. And that was still bugging Tom Chard twenty-five years after—I think he felt that somehow he'd been responsible for his officer's death. He was a good man, was Tom Chard."

"But not quite good enough," murmured Aske, reaching down towards the dashboard. “Let's have some music."

Elizabeth had just started to think but what happened next?

Because if Tom Chard came safe home, what happened to—

and then a sudden burst of pop music drowned her thoughts.

"For God's sake, man—" Mitchell leaned forward towards the radio.

"No!" Aske restrained him. "Leave it on, Mitchell—not quite good enough—and we're not quite good enough either, it seems, old boy. Because we've got a tail."

"What—"

"Don't turn round! Yes ... I think the great Dr Audley may have been careless somewhere along the line."

"What do you mean, Mr Aske?" asked Elizabeth.

"I mean, Miss Loftus, that we're being followed," said Aske calmly. "And don't you look round, either—and don't shout—

I can see behind us perfectly well, and I can hear you well enough . . . The music's just in case they've got us bugged as dummy3

well as bracketed . . . and there is still just a chance, with that and all the rigmarole I've been through, that they may not be quite sure I'm on to them—just a chance." He looked at Paul.

"Well, Mitchell? What is your pleasure, then?"

Paul thought for a moment. "What sort of a tail?"

"Ah . . . now as to origin, I cannot tell you, except that it is undoubtedly professional, as one would expect—never right behind us, in clear view . . . But as to content, that's easier, because they had to turn off after passing us when I stopped, and pick us up again when we continued . . . and then one had to overtake us—he's in front now—just to make sure we hadn't switched cars, or anything tricky like that." He paused, and then half-turned towards Elizabeth. "I had this feeling, you see, Miss Loftus, not long after we left Laon . . .

this pricking in the back of the neck . . . that we were not altogether alone. But I couldn't be sure, not until now."

"What sort of tail?" repeated Paul. "What vehicles?"

"One Renault 20 saloon, blue, with driver and passenger.

And one unmarked Citroen van, grey, with driver only.

Though what's behind the driver—what wealth of ingenious gadgetry—I also cannot tell, of course . . . Hence the disgusting French equivalent of the Top of the Pops, Miss Loftus—just in case."

Paul leaned closer to Elizabeth. "He means we could be bugged— with a voice pick-up as well as a directional indicator . . . Damn!" He turned back to Aske. "Didn't you check out the bloody car?"

dummy3

Aske sighed. "Don't be silly, old boy. If these are pros I could strip it down, and still not find anything—you know that."

"Damn!" murmured Paul. "Damn, damn, damn!"

"I admit I maybe didn't take things quite seriously enough,"

conceded Aske. ''But then we haven't been doing anything terribly serious, have we?"

"Damn!" said Paul again.

"Don't fret, old boy. This is what I'm here for—to keep you safe and sound. So long as they don't try anything crude we're in no danger . . . and with all this traffic around us I can't think that they have that in mind. And I'm sure I'm a much better driver than either of them . . . There's a passenger seat-belt in the back, Miss Loftus—put it on, please . . . Just in case . . . though one should always wear one's belt, in any case, of course."

"Can you lose them?" asked Paul.

"Yes." Askc leaned forward again. "I think we'll have a leetle more background noise . . . Yes . . . But not here."

"Where then?"

"Oh, Paris is the place. Lots of nice fast traffic, lots of different lanes . . . They have us boxed in, so I shall lose them on the périphérique—the one in front at the Saint Ouen intersection, or at Clignancourt. . . and then I'll get the one behind into the wrong lane just before Clichy, and I'll slip out there. We'll need a little luck, but not a lot."

dummy3

Elizabeth began to feel almost reassured.

"I can only give you a few minutes, though," went on Aske smoothly. "Because if they know their business—if there's a directional bug on this car, which I assume there is—they'll be on to us again quick enough . . . and if they've got more back-up waiting for us, that could be awkward . . . You can never be absolutely sure of losing a well-organised tail—I know, because I've outsmarted my Bulgarian friends more than once . . . But I can put you down round a corner near the Avenue de Wagram, and then I can ditch the car further on ...

So not to worry, eh?" Aske checked his mirror. "Here he comes now, tucking himself nicely behind that Saab . . ."

Elizabeth fought the desire to look over her shoulder. "Who are they, Paul?"

"Ah . . . now that's the interesting question, Miss Loftus,"

said Aske. "But it can hardly be the French just watching over us, I'm afraid."

"Why not?"

"What have we done to annoy them?" Aske's shoulders lifted.

"Nothing, so far as I am aware—certainly nothing to justify this VIP treatment . . . even if our Dr Mitchell has something of a record . . . No—if they didn't like us they'd simply pick us up and boot us out, without much ceremony. That's more their style, you see."

"It could be the French, Elizabeth," said Paul.

Aske snuffled. "You're making pretty pictures, Mitchell.

dummy3

Pretty pictures to suit yourself—what they tell us never to do!"

"Pretty pictures, Mr Aske?"

"That's right." Aske nodded at the road. "To be spotted by the French—that's just bad luck . . . But to be picked up by the KGB . . ." He shook his head sadly ". . . that's both good and bad, I suppose."

Elizabeth couldn't for the life of her see how being pursued by the KGB could be good.

"Shut up, Aske!" snapped Paul.

"She has a right to know, old boy. It's bad, Miss Loftus, because it means our security is bad—or because theirs is too damn good, alternatively . . . But it's also good, because it means that we've got the swine worried enough to take all this trouble—which means that Audley knows what he's doing, however odd it may seem to us." He turned to Paul.

"So do tell us what happened next in 1812, Dr Mitchell—do tell us more about the old Vengeful and All That—"

XII

THE WEIGHT OF scholarship surrounding them in the ante-room to Professor Louis Belperron's study was at once reassuring and oppressive: the room was high-ceilinged, almost a square box, and every inch of it not taken by its two doors and single window consisted of shelving crammed with dummy3

old books. And from these, in the absence of the slightest breath of fresh air, there emanated a dry smell of old paper, ancient leather and glue, and of the dust of ages which had gathered on that combination.

"Well, if Professor Belperron doesn't know about Colonel Suchet, then no one does," concluded Paul from his reconnaissance of the shelves.

Elizabeth stared out of the window, down into the bustling avenue below. The contrast of that bustle, after their dodge'em car drive through the maelstrom of the peripheral motorway, and their final rush from the car into this old apartment building, with this sudden peace and quiet . . .

that contrast ought, she felt, to be calming, but somehow it wasn't—it was more like the uncalm stillness of an examination room before the exam.

"Can you see Aske?" asked Paul.

"No." It didn't seem likely to her that she would be able to spot Humphrey Aske in that throng, but the unlikely gave her the lie even as she spoke. "Yes."

"Where?" He craned his neck over her shoulder.

"Down by the corner of that side-street." Perhaps it was because, in all that movement, that one slender figure was unmoving at the apex of a corner-shop window—unmoving except for his head, as he switched his attention through the points of the compass.

"Well, at least he's keeping his wits about him," said Paul dummy3

ungraciously, turning away again.

Aske completed his survey, but instead of crossing towards the entrance into the building he then walked quickly a few yards up the street, to disappear under the awning of a cafe.

"He seems to do his job rather well," said Elizabeth.

"Adequately, yes." Paul was studying the shelves again.

"Even though you're horrible to him."

"Hmmm . . ." He seemed more interested in the books. "I cannot bring myself to love Mr Aske, certainly ... or trust him either, come to that." He lifted a volume out carefully, and blew the dust from it. "And the prospect of travelling with him to Alsace, which could have been a pleasure . . . that frankly appals me, Elizabeth. And not least because he brings out the worst in me . . ." He opened the book. "Which I would prefer you not to see."

This, Elizabeth realised suddenly, was the first time they had been completely alone since last night—since last night a thousand years ago. And Aske hadn't reappeared yet.

"You mean . . . going to Alsace with me ... you wouldn't have minded that?"

"Yes." He closed the book, put it back, and selected another, not looking at her. "I'd enjoy showing you the Lautenbourg.

And I'd show you the battlefield at Le Linge, that's fascinating . . . And we could come back via Verdun, and the ossuary at Douaumont, and the woods at Mort Homme . . .

and then I'd show you the Somme, and the canal at dummy3

Bellenglise, where my grandfather was killed in 1918, with the glorious 46th Division—he commanded his battalion that day, September 29th . . . and Vimy Ridge, and Loos . . . you'd enjoy all of that, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth looked at him in a state of emotion beyond surprise, almost into shock, at the prospect of being dragged from one hideous battlefield to the next—"ossuary", if she had it right, was only one degree short of "charnel house", or

"bone-yard" even . . . But he was quite oblivious of that; rather, he was probably doing her the greatest compliment he could think of in offering to share his obsession with her—

where my grandfather was killed in 1918 even . . . and Loos, so far as she could recall, was a miserable flat landscape of ugly mining villages pock-marked with old overgrown coal-tips, which he was offering to her like some fabulous beauty spot, the Lake District combined with Salzburg.

"I'd like that very much, Paul." As she pronounced the lie, another shock hit her, crumbling her preconceptions into rubble: that it wasn't a lie—that she would willingly and happily tag along in his wake, learning why the 46th Division was so glorious, and admiring the dreariness of Loos—that if that was what turned him on, then it would damn well turn her on too. "I'd like that."

"Yes . . . well—" He pushed the second book back in its slot "—

another time, maybe . . ." He selected another book.

"Yes—" She mustn't sound too eager—not even when her instinct was to grasp that offer before it could blow away.

dummy3

"Another time, of course." But her desperation increased as she felt another time, maybe already receding into forgettable platitude.

He looked up from his book. "But when David arrives maybe we can pack Aske back home . . . David is a different kettle of fish—he's even trickier, but he's family, in a way." He grinned at her, half shyly. "And. . . with David we wouldn't have to—"

he caught the next word before it could escape as one of the doors rattled and opened.

Aske's head came through the opening, followed by Aske himself. "Pooh!" He sniffed the air critically.

Now she'd never know what we wouldn't have to . . . what?

thought Elizabeth, swearing silent words she'd never spoken aloud. Explain? Worry about? Pretend? Sleep in separate rooms? It wasn't fair to blame Aske, but the not-knowing was painful.

"Where the hell have you been?" snapped Paul, as though he too had left out some unspoken oaths.

"I'm not late—it isn't eleven yet," protested Aske, looking from one to the other of them. "And, anyway . . . apart from tucking the car out of sight . . . I've been looking around, just in case. Watching your back, in fact."

"Hmmm . . ." Paul controlled the worst in himself. "Well?"

"We seem to have slipped our followers, at least for the time being. And no one's going to steal our baggage, that's for sure." Aske smiled at Elizabeth.

dummy3

"Why not?" asked Paul.

"Because it's parked behind a police car. Of which there are three in this vicinity. Perhaps they're expecting a smash-and-grab . . . Plain clothes, of course. But I can always smell a copper, they have an air of bored possession all of their own . . . But they'll serve to inhibit the opposition, if they do find the car."

Paul regarded him with distaste. "You still don't believe it could have been the French behind us?"

"More than ever, old boy." Aske cocked an ear at faint sounds coming from behind the other door. "If this stake-out is for us, then they already knew we were coming here, so there'd be no point in following us. Whereas those fellows who followed us so enthusiastically didn't know where—" this time it was the click of the door handle which cut him off finally.

The gaunt woman who had shown them into the ante-room reappeared, opened her mouth to address Paul, but then saw Aske.

"M'sieur—?" She looked from Aske to Paul.

"M'sieur is my . . ." Paul strangled on the admission ". . . my colleague."

From the frigidity of their own welcome Elizabeth had already decided that the gaunt woman was the sort of secretary who regarded all strangers as intruders on her employer's privacy, and Humphrey Aske's standard nervous dummy3

smile had no melting effect on her suspicious expression. But she held the door open for them nevertheless.

Elizabeth led the way, only to find herself in another ante-room, identically book-lined, but with a table and chairs. On the far side of the table, framed in another doorway, stood a small plump man, almost a miniature man, whose high bald head rose out of puffs of white hair above his ears.

"Professor Belperron—it's very good of you to give us your time," said Paul deferentially.

"Dr Mitchell?" The Professor glanced down at the card Paul had given to the secretary.

"Yes. And this is Miss Elizabeth Loftus, daughter of the late Commander Loftus VC . . . and . . . Mr Humphrey Aske, of London University."

The little man acknowledged them one by one. "Come this way, please."

The study was twice the size of the ante-rooms, and had twice as many books, together with all the paraphernalia of learning overflowing an immense desk on to the floor: papers and periodicals and books full of marking slips and box-files

—Father's desk, in the high days of his writing, had been not unlike this, though on a much smaller scale. Behind the desk there was a high-backed chair, and in front of it were three ordinary chairs like those in the second ante-room, set precisely in a semi-circle as though waiting for them.

The little man walked round the desk, stepped on something dummy3

which increased his height by several inches, and climbed into his chair. Although she couldn't see them, Elizabeth imagined his little legs swinging in mid-air.

He indicated the three chairs. "Please . . ."

They sat down.

"The King's College, Oxford." He put Paul's card on his blotter. "I knew the late Master."

"Sir Geoffrey Hobson?"

"It was during the war, in Normandy in 1944." The little man picked out one of several pairs of spectacles from a small tray on his desk. "He was in command of an armoured regiment."

He peered at Elizabeth through the spectacles, then selected another pair. "Tilly-le-Bocage was the place, and he was Colonel Hobson then." The second pair seemed to suit him better. "But it is Colonel Suchet in whom we arc interested now."

"Yes." Paul leaned forward. "Perhaps I should explain—"

"Please! The circumstances have been explained to me: there is a book almost completed, but now there is fresh material—

yes? And it is this material which has led you to Jean-Baptiste Suchet?"

"Yes." Paul sat back. "Or, to be more exact, our material concerns a party of British PoW escapers. Suchet interrogated them before they escaped, and he was still chasing them two months later, so it seems."

Aske stirred. "Which would make him either a superior dummy3

variety of policeman or an intelligence officer of some sort, we think."

"No." The Professor shook his head. "At least, not in the Abwehr or Gestapo sense . . . He was a gallant soldier—

indeed, he was an escaped prisoner himself, and a most daring one. Twice he escaped, once from Chel-ten-ham, but unsuccessfully—"

"Cheltenham?" Paul looked at Aske.

"He broke his parole, that means," murmured Aske. "French officer prisoners were always paroled." He gazed intently at the Professor. "And the second time?"

"From Portsmouth—"

"The hulks!" Aske nodded. "That's where they sent the bad boys . . . and the hulks were no joke. I'll bet he didn't love the British after that."

"That is true." The professor returned this intelligence with interest. "It was a terrible punishment—some might say inhumane."

"No worse than the souterrains in the French fortresses. In fact, better a ship on the Portsmouth mudflats than below ground at Bitche or Sarrelibre," said Aske coolly. "Some might say that, Professor."

Men! thought Elizabeth critically, as she felt the temperature drop: unless she came between these unlikely adversaries they would be into the ancient Anglo-French argument next, as to which nation was the more wicked.

dummy3

"If Colonel Suchet had a score to settle—" she tried to include both of them, and Paul too, in her silly question "—could that be why he wanted so badly to recapture them. Professor?"

"Ah ..." The Professor turned politely towards her "... no, Mademoiselle . . . That is to say, whatever Colonel Suchet may have felt personally, he was far too busy to pursue them for personal reasons. He had other duties, you see."

"What other duties?" asked Aske.

"You are a student of this period? An expert?" The little man studied Aske intently.

"A student," admitted Aske cautiously.

"Of naval history." For once Paul came to Aske's rescue.

"British naval history."

Professor Belperron almost smiled. "Then you will perhaps be acquainted with the name de la Rousselière?"

"No." Aske had guessed he was about to be put in his place, but had evidently decided to cut his losses quickly. "I've never heard of him."

"I'm surprised." Surprised and gratified. " Berthois de la Rousselière, chef de bataillon du corps de Génie—major, Royal Engineers, as Colonel Hobson would have translated it." The Professor cocked his head at Aske inquiringly, with false innocence. "Or perhaps Lieutenant Robert Hamilton?"

He smiled. "Captain Hamilton, as he became?"

"Naval history is Mr Aske's field, Professor," said Paul.

"Oh, but Robert Hamilton was a naval officer, Dr Mitchell,"

dummy3

said the Professor, his good humour thoroughly restored.

"He was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy of His Britannic Majesty King George III ... and then a captain in the Royal Navy of His Most Christian Majesty King Louis XVI—he was doubly a naval officer . . . But, to be fair, perhaps a little before . . . before your period, Mr Aske? And yours, Dr Mitchell?"

But neither of them were falling for anything this time, observed Elizabeth: each face bore the same expression of obsequious interest of students at the feet of the master, even if those little feet might be swinging in mid-air.

But that was not necessarily appropriate to the daughter of Commander Loftus VC, she decided: heroes' daughters could take narrower attitudes.

"He was a traitor, you mean?"

"A traitor? Ah . . ." He gazed at her, then raised his favourite hand expressively, to indicate a finer balance. "In those days loyalties were not so simply defined. He was a Scotsman, and the English—the English—they did not appreciate his excellence as a navigator and a map-maker—they did not promote him ... So he promoted himself into another king's more grateful service, to make maps, not of Cherbourg and Brest, but of the Medway and Portsmouth."

"That still sounds like treason," said Elizabeth.

"Perhaps. But the frontiers of treason are rarely so clearly defined." He smiled at her. "I remember Portsmouth in 1944, dummy3

Mademoiselle. I was in a tank landing-craft of His Britannic Majesty King George VI, waiting to invade France, and not far from the mud-bank on which Jean-Baptiste Suchet was held captive in one of Mr Aske's hulks . . . And I remember thinking, as I looked up towards the forts on the hills above—

the forts which the Lord Palmerston built to protect the naval base from his French enemies in the reign of Queen Victoria ... I remember thinking that if I fell into the hands of my own countrymen in France . . . that I had already been sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy Government."

He spread both hands. "Traitor—renegade—patriot... we take the side that we must take, and do what we must do, which seems best to us. And it is the winning and the losing which decides what we were."

"Yes—very true. And most interesting," said Aske. "But if Hamilton served King Louis XVI, what has he got to do with Major de la Rousselière and Colonel Suchet, who served Napoleon Bonaparte?"

"Major de la Rousselière served the King, Mr Aske, not the Emperor. And the King invested him with the Cross of St Louis for his distinguished and daring services—in 1779."

The Professor sat back and regarded them benignly.

"What services?"

"He was a spy, Mr Aske, who specialised in British naval bases. And in 1779, having closely examined all the dispositions of your defences in and around Portsmouth, and working also with the detailed maps supplied by Captain dummy3